"In one recent instance, Zelalem saw an inflammatory Facebook post from a media outlet that falsely blamed members of an ethnic minority group for carrying out murders and kidnappings that took place on Sept. 27.
The post quickly got hundreds of shares and likes."
So once again, the problem here isn't Facebook itself at all, but the people using Facebook. It's true that posts which gain traction will get shown to more users, but that's not a good or bad thing in and of itself. That's how any social network functions with any post, be it about the latest ethnic civil war news or cute cat videos.
At worst, you could say that Facebook's problem here is their inaction in deciding what sort of local opinions about an ethnic civil war are approved or not.
I know the zeitgeist on HN is to hate all things Facebook and Facebook related, but surely I cannot be the only one who thinks that it's unrealistic to expect engineers sitting in Mountain View to know whether or not it was ethnic group A or ethnic group B that conducted a given kidnapping in rural Ethiopia a few weeks ago and then moderate the conversation based on their own views.
The post quickly got hundreds of shares and likes."
So once again, the problem here isn't Facebook itself at all, but the people using Facebook. It's true that posts which gain traction will get shown to more users, but that's not a good or bad thing in and of itself. That's how any social network functions with any post, be it about the latest ethnic civil war news or cute cat videos.
At worst, you could say that Facebook's problem here is their inaction in deciding what sort of local opinions about an ethnic civil war are approved or not.
I know the zeitgeist on HN is to hate all things Facebook and Facebook related, but surely I cannot be the only one who thinks that it's unrealistic to expect engineers sitting in Mountain View to know whether or not it was ethnic group A or ethnic group B that conducted a given kidnapping in rural Ethiopia a few weeks ago and then moderate the conversation based on their own views.