There is an interesting article in the Boston Globe by Hiawatha Bray about the difference between Facebook featuring all-transgender-all-the-time and the New York Times doing the same thing:
Pot, meet kettle. Traditional media have always been edited by humans. Pick up the Globe, and you’re getting a view of the world that is, inevitably, colored by our personal tastes, interests, and biases.
But traditional media companies have checks and balances to keep us reasonably honest. Some have full-time ombudsmen to call out bias. Nearly all welcome letters to the editor. The names, e-mails, and phone numbers of staff members are easy to find. Most effective is the reporter’s byline. My name is attached to everything I write, so there’s a price to pay when I blunder.
But Facebook’s curators have no bylines. The software engineers who created the algorithms are equally anonymous. The entire system is relentlessly opaque, and likely to remain so.
As Facebook grinds down every other Web publisher, except perhaps for Google, this is plainly the future so we might as well get used to it. If we don’t all think like 25-year-old hipsters in Menlo Park we soon will! (Remember that folks in Silicon Valley expect to earn most of their money via capital gains so, like Eisenhower circa 1948, they aren’t too worried about headline tax rates!)
(A former Soviet comrade told me that the U.S. has a more effective system of thought and opinion control than the Soviet Union ever did: “Nobody took the regime seriously so you could laugh about everything the Party said when you were home with friends. In the U.S., though, if you don’t accept the official dogma you won’t have a job and you’ll be ostracized socially.” Maybe Facebook is just part of this. You have to agree that Donald Trump is the new Hitler (and North Carolina would be Bavaria?) or you’ll be unfriended.)
“But traditional media companies have checks and balances to keep us reasonably honest. ”
Oh, BS. Some overwhelming percentage of reporters at traditional media companies are already liberal Democrats and there are no checks and balances on espousing a conventional left-liberal POV. All you get for doing that is praise and Pulitzers all around. If OTOH, you display the slightest bit of politically incorrect sensibility, you are jettisoned faster than you can say James Watson.
A difference in opinions always tests a friendship. Many of your Facebook friendships have clearly survived the test that your expressed opinions continuously subject them to. In the USSR, not everyone’s friendships survived the harsher and more expensive test of laughing at the Party in the kitchen (harsher, because if you don’t tell the authorities about it, someone else might beat you to it, and more expensive, because you stood to lose more than the friendship.) As to not having a job – I think the American system of having more than a single employer leaves someone with unconventional views with better chances at finding employment.
So while I get former comrade’s point, the American dissident is still better off than the Soviet Russian dissident ever was (and probably better off than modern Russian dissident is – though Snowden traveling from the US to Russia, previously the opposite of the sensible direction, certainly makes one wonder about the long-term trend!)
“You have to agree that Donald Trump is the new Hitler (and North Carolina would be Bavaria?) or you’ll be unfriended.)”
There’s plenty of people on FB who’ll unfriend you if you don’t agree that Trump is the only person who can save the US from going down the drain that it’s supposedly circling.
All my liberal friends think Trump is a Mussolini, not a Hitler.
The Soviet Union could send dissidents to work camps in Siberia. This is not an option that US elites have, so propaganda is more important. Though your Russian friend is mistaken about being the danger of being ostracized if people don’t accept the official dogma, unless he or she is referring to the official dogma of an individual’s circle of friends. However, it’s possible that that’s true all over the world.
Also, your Facebook friends give you a distorted view of America. Even the MSM admits that millions of Americans support and admire Donald Trump. Clearly expressing support for Mr. Trump will not cause all Facebook users to lose their online friends.
I grew up in Franco’s Spain and I can relate to the “Soviet” comment. In many ways we are now living in a more restrictive society than some dictatorships. The social pressure to conform with “prevalent ideas” is very strong in the US.
Just as an example, I few days ago at dinner party I mentioned that I did not believe the the “income gap” was a big problem, arguing that there are lots of “gaps” in society that are not the direct result of discrimination (many more men are incarcerated than women, for example). The general reaction was that I needed “re-education.”
Arrea: You do need re-education, which will be free thanks to Facebook. All that you need to do is look at the perspectives of the articles in the “Trending” box as your guide to what is acceptable in polite American company.
The book of face has become such a stream of garbage, ads for solar panels the power company absolutely hates, reasons not to upgrade your computer, & brilliant ways to pay off your mortgage, it’s hard to get anything out of it, including all the Trump hatred. 1 certainty is there are absolutely no Clinton 2.0 supporters & no ads for either party. Trending internet stories have become so preposterous & vaporous in the name of click bait, there’s no meaning to them anymore. A roller coaster is now considered a test run of the Hyperloop, the economy is always on the verge of collapse, & there’s another scientific study you won’t believe. Though we’re still waiting for “What Philip Greenspun looks like now is jaw dropping!”
Oh, no! from the Guardian: tragic news for a geezer who just remembers Boston…
“Anthony’s Pier 4 will fall to wrecking ball”
The pressure to conform exists in many domains. Just look at cars on the street. Over a century after Henry Ford, most cars are some shade of black & white, with very few splashes of color.