<story><title>Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes</title><url>https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/facebook-algorithms-are-making-it-harder/588931/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>leshokunin</author><text>The problem is that we&amp;#x27;ve equated some platforms with a certain kind of media. Youtube is video, Twitter is news, Facebook is.. reality tv, I dunno. It&amp;#x27;s pretty debatable whether those platforms are the right place for the coverage of war crimes.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not going to start an argument about the media not doing their job right. However, this discussion would be moot if there was a news platform on par with the above, and I don&amp;#x27;t mean Twitter. I&amp;#x27;d love to see someone build or modernize a news outlet that isn&amp;#x27;t driven by attention or clicks as a currency.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>andrepew</author><text>These platforms aren’t being used to cover war crimes by an entity consciously trying to deliver news.&lt;p&gt;These posts are first hand accounts of individuals currently living an event. It is as raw as it gets. I don’t think you can very easily direct where content like that gets created. People will use the platform they’re already using for the other parts of their life.&lt;p&gt;I understand the desire to not traumatize people by causing them to accidentally view horrible events. But at the same time I think deleting the content is a disservice to humanity in the long run for a lot of reasons this article highlights.</text></comment>
<story><title>Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes</title><url>https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/facebook-algorithms-are-making-it-harder/588931/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>leshokunin</author><text>The problem is that we&amp;#x27;ve equated some platforms with a certain kind of media. Youtube is video, Twitter is news, Facebook is.. reality tv, I dunno. It&amp;#x27;s pretty debatable whether those platforms are the right place for the coverage of war crimes.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not going to start an argument about the media not doing their job right. However, this discussion would be moot if there was a news platform on par with the above, and I don&amp;#x27;t mean Twitter. I&amp;#x27;d love to see someone build or modernize a news outlet that isn&amp;#x27;t driven by attention or clicks as a currency.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>intended</author><text>We would all love to see that but it is - within the context of the current economy - impossible for the majority of people.&lt;p&gt;This is a scenario where the regular incentives of the market result in perverse outcomes.&lt;p&gt;Firstly - it’s not tech which did this. Tech mutated and accelerated a pre existing trend for the worse.&lt;p&gt;The news cycle effect was well known, driving more and more sensational news reporting till at the cost of reason.&lt;p&gt;At the same time newspapers were constantly going under or being bought up.&lt;p&gt;With information distribution at scale, describing reality increasingly became the playground of nations (BBC, and lately various government owned news channels) or major firms (the Murdoch emptier.)&lt;p&gt;There’s a deep problem at the nexus of human behavior, factual reporting and income.&lt;p&gt;Attention and fear are easier and more reliable levers to pull in the human consumer.&lt;p&gt;Humans are easily distracted by sex, violence, gossip and easy to consume content - our brains are wired that way for some of those things, and it’s always pleasing to consume mental sugar than mental vegetables.&lt;p&gt;The only model which survives this is paying lots of money for specific information - usually linked to your profession.&lt;p&gt;However general news reporting It is unlikely to recover because of the news cycle effect which creates a tendency to compete on attention, a race to the bottom.</text></comment>