Originally Posted by
antaeus
Haugen's testimony, and the internal research papers she has presented aren't just about political ideas and censorship. It isn't just about censoring content that challenges established thinking, it's about the way Facebook and it's products present extreme ideas in general as normal and inescapable, without context or counterviews. And they do this to profit. There is a clear difference. It isn't about how it offends "liberal mainstream", although the mainstream certainly has jumped at the opportunity to put the boot in. But it affects conservatives, Christians, Muslims, liberals, whatever etc alike. All of their worldviews are exaggerated. Including ironically, the conservative fear of censorship itself.
But this isn't just about politics. It is about how their platforms shape people from their vulnerable childhood years upwards, they tap into peer pressure on a global scale and deliberately feed content that instils fear, that heightens body issues, self esteem, that exaggerates dislike and distaste. They feed us anything that will make us click more - and often that isn't the stuff that helps us feel good about ourselves. One of the often quoted papers on Instagram that Haugen has presented illustrates this point - that teenage girls come away from Instagram sessions feeling worse, and more likely to have suicidal ideation, but they can't stop using it because of how pervasive the product is in their society and the addictive nature of the material the product serves. And that Facebook knows this, and thinks it is acceptable to continue because it promotes engagement/profit. This means that thanks to the way Instagram's algorithm's process recommendations for teens, all it takes for pro-anorexia content to appear, for example, is for someone in that demographic to search for food: because what teen with poor self-esteem isn't going to click on that feed that claims to have all the answers?
In this forum, we get fixated on the political elements of free speech and free expression, but it stretches father than this. And the difficulty is that exposing people to the content that is fed to us isn't inherently bad - in fact it could even be good. Teens have been sharing ideas on weight loss for generations. But it is how the platform takes the extreme views - on anything - not just politics, and presents them as normal without context or counter-balance, and doesn't tell us it is doing this. It does it over and over and over until it starts to shape our ability to think rationally about any issue. This denies us freedom of belief, expression, thought, what ever.
I don't think forcing them to censor material that they already censor for us via algorithm is logical. I think removing the algorithm would solve the issue for us. But that's not going to happen without laws. So for a start as I said, transparency would be a good first step.