But the web enabled that sort of gutter journalism and echo chambers for profit before FB even came along. I get hardly any news from Facebook itself; most of the crap I see is stuff that my friends share or that is reposted in groups.
Crap takes a few different forms. I have friends that post an excessive number of cooking videos and cute animal gifs, which has close to zero informational value, but on the other hand I enjoy the simple things in life too. More worrying crap come sin the form of poorly-written news or analysis articles that are shared and often written in good faith, but which are misleading and require either time and effort to debunk, or an acceptance that some of your friends are credulous fools. This is aggravating but it's also unavoidable in a free society with a free press - people are going to disagree in good faith and some of the time and arguments are inevitable.
The third kind of crap is the most worrying, where people deliberately troll and spread rumors for either quick profit or to injure others. This can often tip over into hate speech, and unlike most people I think the first amendment saw that the solution to unwanted speech is more speech fails in this domain, because many of the participants are not acting in good faith, and leverage the idea of unlimited speech as a means to curtail the liberties of others rather than in pursuit of any equitable outcome.
This interview might provide an interesting insight into the (pre-facebook) psychology of deliberately slanted news. I apologize for the source and the annotations; the original interview is from a media career site called Journalism Jobs (where I first came across it) but it's from 2003 and the original page has vanished off the website: http://zfacts.com/metaPage/lib/Weekly_Standard_Matt-Labash_c...
If you don't want to read it's basically a really cynical industry conversation where Labash, a conservative writer, opines that finding a cohort of angry people and pandering to them is a really easy way to make money. This could just as easily be applied to other political fringes.
Crap takes a few different forms. I have friends that post an excessive number of cooking videos and cute animal gifs, which has close to zero informational value, but on the other hand I enjoy the simple things in life too. More worrying crap come sin the form of poorly-written news or analysis articles that are shared and often written in good faith, but which are misleading and require either time and effort to debunk, or an acceptance that some of your friends are credulous fools. This is aggravating but it's also unavoidable in a free society with a free press - people are going to disagree in good faith and some of the time and arguments are inevitable.
The third kind of crap is the most worrying, where people deliberately troll and spread rumors for either quick profit or to injure others. This can often tip over into hate speech, and unlike most people I think the first amendment saw that the solution to unwanted speech is more speech fails in this domain, because many of the participants are not acting in good faith, and leverage the idea of unlimited speech as a means to curtail the liberties of others rather than in pursuit of any equitable outcome.
This interview might provide an interesting insight into the (pre-facebook) psychology of deliberately slanted news. I apologize for the source and the annotations; the original interview is from a media career site called Journalism Jobs (where I first came across it) but it's from 2003 and the original page has vanished off the website: http://zfacts.com/metaPage/lib/Weekly_Standard_Matt-Labash_c...
If you don't want to read it's basically a really cynical industry conversation where Labash, a conservative writer, opines that finding a cohort of angry people and pandering to them is a really easy way to make money. This could just as easily be applied to other political fringes.