Yaël Eisenstat : Dear Facebook, this is how you're breaking democracy

 Yaël Eisenstat·TED2020

Dear Facebook, this is how you're breaking democracy

Summary

In the title, the word "you" meant Facebook. I was really shocked because I thought that people who were using Facebook were breaking democracy, they didn't know how to use SNS well, and democracy couldn't adapt to our life from many years ago. 

Didn’t political polarization of the US happen if there is no Facebook?

Was the reason Facebook?

Is it necessary to have a law or to involve the government?

There are lots of great stories of positive things happening on your platform around the globe.

However, the algorithm mechanism of social media is to keep feeding us the poison that plays to our worst instinct and human weaknesses. We are being manipulated by the current information. It’s because people become absolutists, and compromise has become a dirty word. It can say that this is an important point, social media companies like Facebook get benefits from segmenting us and feeding us personalized content. By provoking a strong emotion, incentivizing inflammatory, and completely polarizing, it’s impossible to find our common ground. Anger, mistrust, the culture of fear, hatred are dramatically scaling up. It’s getting worse. Still, it must be ineffective to talk face to face.

The speaker worked to stop those, she couldn’t do, thus she suggests that it’s awful for companies to get benefits from platforms that create hatred, division, and distrust and it needs the law.

P.S. In Japan, Young Japanese people don't use Facebook. They use other SNS. It might show an aging society. In fact, the reason why elderly people can’t change their thoughts is that they have been reading newspapers for a long time and now, the newspaper becomes evil like this story that Facebook is evil in the story. Actually, a suicidal accident occurred by internet slander and defamation among young Japanese users.