8 ms·

At this point I think the hate from journalists toward social media and tech more broadly is better described as "cultural" than literal economic self-interest.

At this point I think the hate from journalists toward social media and tech more broadly is better described as "cultural" than literal economic self-interest. If you're a journalist, most of your colleagues believe everything they read in the news and therefore sincerely think FB is somewhere between "at least as evil as its size alone would predict given the typical progressive perception of large companies" and "just cartoonishly evil", so unless you're unusually indepedent-minded that's probably what you'll believe too.

bryan_w 5y ago
It's like people forgot the war that old media waged on blogs in the early 2000's. It's never been a secret that old media hasn't been able to deal with the implications of a internet connected world would bring.
- ghaff 5y ago
  >old media waged on blogs in the early 2000's That seems overblown. I can remember individual writers doing opinion pieces that, especially in retrospect, had a certain "Kids need to get off my lawn" quality to them. Various online traditional news pubs also tried to plug into the "blogosphere" in various ways. But none of this really rose to the level of a war.
afavour 5y ago
“Hate” feels like a strange word to employ here. Is the reporting false? You seem to be suggesting that it is (“they sincerely believe”) but I’m yet to see a rebuttal to the revelations in the Facebook papers. There’s a trove of leaked internal documents. Are they faked? I think there’s a reflexive kind of “independent” mindedness that’s actually very collective: the assumption that everything the mass media publishes is false. The correct independent minded approach is to examine the evidence provided. From my analysis I’m not sure what’s fake here.
- convexfunction 5y ago
  As usual, the reporting I've seen hasn't involved any provably false claims that I've noticed, but it's been framed and selectively reported in such a way (again, probably mostly-sincerely) that most readers end up very misled. e.g., I think the internal study that found that a small fraction of teenagers reporting suicidal ideation said that the first trigger that came to mind was stuff they saw on Instagram on a survey was just insanely over-interpreted to mean that a world without Instagram would have less misery in teenagers, and I think that FB's decision to decline to publish a finding of an internal study that'll be predictably over-interepted in the media isn't really described well as a "cover up". "Hate" in the sense of "ideologues being haters as usual", not like "KKK members".

bryan_w 5y ago

It's like people forgot the war that old media waged on blogs in the early 2000's. It's never been a secret that old media hasn't been able to deal with the implications of a internet connected world would bring.

ghaff 5y ago
>old media waged on blogs in the early 2000's That seems overblown. I can remember individual writers doing opinion pieces that, especially in retrospect, had a certain "Kids need to get off my lawn" quality to them. Various online traditional news pubs also tried to plug into the "blogosphere" in various ways. But none of this really rose to the level of a war.

afavour 5y ago

“Hate” feels like a strange word to employ here. Is the reporting false? You seem to be suggesting that it is (“they sincerely believe”) but I’m yet to see a rebuttal to the revelations in the Facebook papers. There’s a trove of leaked internal documents. Are they faked? I think there’s a reflexive kind of “independent” mindedness that’s actually very collective: the assumption that everything the mass media publishes is false. The correct independent minded approach is to examine the evidence provided. From my analysis I’m not sure what’s fake here.

convexfunction 5y ago
As usual, the reporting I've seen hasn't involved any provably false claims that I've noticed, but it's been framed and selectively reported in such a way (again, probably mostly-sincerely) that most readers end up very misled. e.g., I think the internal study that found that a small fraction of teenagers reporting suicidal ideation said that the first trigger that came to mind was stuff they saw on Instagram on a survey was just insanely over-interpreted to mean that a world without Instagram would have less misery in teenagers, and I think that FB's decision to decline to publish a finding of an internal study that'll be predictably over-interepted in the media isn't really described well as a "cover up". "Hate" in the sense of "ideologues being haters as usual", not like "KKK members".