Triangle Tactical Podcast and Blog on Guns, Gear, and Competition Shooting
Late last week we received information that Facebook had completed an experiment to determine if showing users more happy or sad stories in their news feed would have an impact on their mood.
If you’ve been using Facebook for any length of time, you certainly know that Facebook only shows certain things to you on your news feed. They limit the amount of posts that you see from business/brand pages, and you generally only see updates from who they have determined to be your closest friends.
The Triangle Tactical Facebook Page has a bit over 1000 likes currently:
You would think that since we worked hard to get those 1000 people to like the page (even paid Facebook to get some of them to like the page) that when we posted something onto the page, all of those people would see the post.
Wrong.
A few times over the past year Facebook has made changes to their algorithm to limit the reach of posts from business/brand pages (unless you pay them to show your posts to the audience that you may have already paid them for.
If we can pay Facebook to show our posts to more people, is it too much of a stretch to think that they may make it so that businesses (or politicians) may be able to pay Facebook to exclude certain content from groups of people?
The infrastructure seems to already be in place. Sometimes when I click a link from Facebook I get the above page that makes me confirm that I want to leave Facebook before taking me to the website. That little page may seem harmless enough but if you know anything about websites, you know that about half of the people that see that page don’t go any further.
In a hypothetical world, if we had a billionaire anti-gun former politician, and a Facebook that would allow someone to pay to exclude certain content from other people, that hypothetical billionaire investor could potentially invest money to sway some public opinion on the issue by saturating them with hand picked stories.
Maybe my tin-foil hat is on a little tight today, but I think we need to be aware that when we get our news through sites like Facebook, were only getting the news that Facebook wants us to see. Be careful where you get your news, and if you want to make sure you get everything we post here at Triangle Tactical, sign up for the email list below.
I pretty much refuse to use facebook anyway. The site is purely there to make one person money and they do it hand over fist. First off a business “pays” to have a page and get the “likes” on top of that the paying business will have advertisements from other companies who also “pay” to advertise. They also mine the information of the users searches, likes, web history when involving pages where a facebook link or API is in place among other things and sell that information to companies.
Now I have no problem with someone coming up with a good idea and using it to make money, my problem comes in when I have to pay for something and then on top of that they make more money off of my paying. If I pay for a page’s existence out of my pocket there is no reason why they should be placing advertisements or using other information in conjunction with my paid page to make more money.
I don’t use myspace, twitter, facebook or any of the other social sites either. I have more than enough stuff to do without wasting my time to see what star said what to someone else or read about a relative’s dog’s bowel movement and have no interest in sharing that type of stuff with anyone else about me either.
I agree that Facebook can do these things if they apply the logic across all pages and users. SO, why would MDA/Everytown be allowed to have their pages shown? This hate group has no socially redeeming value.