{"id":34835,"date":"2016-05-30T01:00:29","date_gmt":"2016-05-30T05:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=34835"},"modified":"2016-05-24T22:01:26","modified_gmt":"2016-05-25T02:01:26","slug":"qotd-facebooks-orwell-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/05\/30\/qotd-facebooks-orwell-problem\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Facebook’s Orwell problem"},"content":{"rendered":"

As Orwell noted in 1984<\/em>: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” He was speaking, of course, about control of written history, of what we know to have happened — and thereby how we allocate our political support. It is not a small matter if the company that is coming to be the nation\u2019s most significant source of news skews that news toward its own political preferences. In fact, it\u2019s just a tiny bit chilling. Government censorship is, of course, terrible. But censorship by a small group of unelected young people is not all that much more appealing.<\/p>\n

This problem existed already on another scale. The socioeconomic, racial and political homogeneity of the media is a problem, one that I have written about before<\/a>. That said, those media were operating in a competitive landscape, and no one outlet really had all that much market power. In each medium there were outlets of different sorts of political leanings, and more of them with the rise of the Internet.<\/p>\n

Facebook, on the other hand, dominates all other social media outlets for news to an extent that no print outlet ever dominated the American landscape. The only arguable parallel is the big television networks from the 1950s to the 1980s, and at least there were three of them, rather than one. Besides, for most of that time they operated under the Fairness Doctrine — in other words, under heavy-handed government interference to limit their power to shape the national debate.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

The greater danger is that liberals will end up falling back on an argument that is gaining more and more currency on the left: that this biasing of information is not merely an unfortunately insoluble problem, or so minor that it doesn\u2019t make much difference in our politics, but that it is actually an affirmative good. These are the people who embrace Orwell\u2019s dictum and say: \u201cYes, absolutely, the left should have control over what people are allowed to hear and know, because that\u2019s how we\u2019re going to build a better future.\u201d The first argument may be unsatisfying. But the second is \u2026 downright Orwellian.<\/p>\n

Megan McArdle, “Facebook Dislikes Conservatives, and That’s OK”, Bloomberg View<\/em><\/a>, 2016-05-11.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As Orwell noted in 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” He was speaking, of course, about control of written history, of what we know to have happened — and thereby how we allocate our political support. It is not a small matter if the company that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,28,41,13],"tags":[459,391,186,354],"class_list":["post-34835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","category-media","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-censorship","tag-facebook","tag-freedomofspeech","tag-georgeorwell"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-93R","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34835"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34835\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34836,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34835\/revisions\/34836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}