The chief executive says Facebook should become a ‘social infrastructure’ for users
“Today’s threats are increasingly global, but the infrastructure to protect us is not,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote. “Humanity’s current systems are insufficient to address these issues.”
.. Facebook, which faced criticism for, among other things, the design of its news feed, which put legitimate news sites on equal footing with those peddling misinformation during the U.S. presidential campaign. The company also drew fire for failing to catch violent live videos and for inconsistently applying its content standards, such as when it deleted posts containing a famous Vietnam War photo of a naked girl fleeing napalm bombs last fall. After considerable public uproar, Facebook reversed that decision.
.. This didn’t go over well with many employees who argued that the social network should be doing more to confront fake news as well as the “filter bubble” in which many users see few ideas or information different from their own, current and former employees said at the time.
.. Thursday, Mr. Zuckerberg said fake news and filter bubbles worried him, but a greater concern is “polarization.”
.. Facebook wants to show users a wider range of perspectives and demote sensationalized news, but has to be careful to do so without deepening divisions, Mr. Zuckerberg wrote, citing research showing that people hold tighter to their beliefs when confronted with an opposing view. “Our goal must be to help people see a more complete picture, not just alternate perspectives,” he wrote.
.. Longer term, Mr. Zuckerberg wants to build artificial intelligence that can detect violent content and terror-recruiting networks. Some of that work can be done now, he said, but major advances are still needed to build effective systems that can catch hate speech, graphic violence or sex.
How Facebook Warps Our Worlds
THOSE who’ve been raising alarms about Facebook are right: Almost every minute that we spend on our smartphones and tablets and laptops, thumbing through favorite websites and scrolling through personalized feeds, we’re pointed toward foregone conclusions. We’re pressured to conform.
.. “And one of the things we want is to spend more time with people who think like us and less with people who are different,” Haidt added
.. this information is utterly contingent on choices we ourselves make. If we seek out, “like” and comment on angry missives from Bernie Sanders supporters, we’ll be confronted with more angry missives from more Sanders supporters. If we banish such outbursts, those dispatches disappear.
.. The Internet isn’t rigged to give us right or left, conservative or liberal — at least not until we rig it that way. It’s designed to give us more of the same
.. We construct precisely contoured echo chambers of affirmation that turn conviction into zeal, passion into fury, disagreements with the other side into the demonization of it.
.. We question their wisdom and substitute it with the groupthink of micro-communities
.. Haidt noted that it often discourages dissent within a cluster of friends by accelerating shaming. He pointed to the enforced political correctness among students at many colleges
.. “Facebook allows people to react to each other so quickly that they are really afraid to step out of line,” he said.