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Facebook is to our political culture as lung cancer is to lungs. https://twitter.com/robwdavis/status/1304964015483957253
To be more precise, FB can't control what happens on its site now because the right wing bullshit replication system has metastasized. There are now thousands of individuals who will keep pumping poison into our system. Block them, & there are thousands more to take their place.
I'm sure there are things FB could do if they wanted to, but they don't. They just want to be seen as doing something. But as probably anyone in OR can testify, the RW BS is being amplified by all sorts of people who are just credulous, not cynical chaos agents.
I saw fake Antifa/arson posts in the feeds of people whose kids played soccer with my kid 6 years ago, and people I know from the gym, etc. When you create a space for disseminating news with no quality filter, it's just going to get repeatedly played by bad faith propagandists.
Asking individual citizens to vet the information they recirculate is just asking for the impossible. There are people who are trained to vet information. They're called editors and journalists. FB is doing their best to destroy those professions.
Democracy depends upon deliberation. Deliberation only works when the people deliberating inhabit the same basic universe of facts and evidence, and follow the same basic rules of argumentation.
You couldn't invent a machine more perfectly suited to destroying a deliberative, democratic political culture than what Facebook has become. It wasn't always that way. It didn't have to become this way.
Here's a story from my own life on FB that marks the moment in 2016 when what had been a sustainable space for communication across difference became completely toxic and horrible, destroying old friendships. https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1075046754209423364?s=20
If you read the responses to that thread, it appears that my FB experience was shared by many many others. I also received numerous private messages with people describing similar experiences. FB enabled people to build community with each other, and then they set it on fire.
