Non-State Actors

By Péter MARTON Here's a short story. ------------- A man came to the village one day. A mysterious figure. No one could quite make out his face under the wide-brimmed hat he wore. He even kept his head tilted constantly downward as if reading patterns from the ground to be covered by his steps. The people of the village came out to greet him and to learn who he is. They were a curious folk -- not the kind that would bunker in and hunker down if once in a while a stranger comes by. "I am the Truthteller," announced the unknown person, speaking with the confidence of someone accustomed to winning over audiences immediately. "No, you're not," replied one of the village elders. "You're a teller of lies, that's what you are." Now the man was ready to look people in the eye! A frantic gaze, challenging everyone -- how dare they! "That is a lie concocted by my enemies, the powers-that-be in this land," he shouted. "...

By Péter MARTON All that concern about Facebook's impact on democracy in the wake of the 2016 US presidential elections (mainly, along with some other developments elsewhere) has now apparently caused the company to react . So speculate some. This is a picture of me hearing about this. Trying to figure out an alternative to setting up sophisticated filters, to try to weed out fake news and other kinds of crap from the Newsfeed, it seems they came up with the idea to turn the Newsfeed into... just Feed. Because that filtering shit is hard. To remain: friend feed + junk feed. "The experiment, which began 19 October and is still ongoing, involves limiting the core element of Facebook’s social network to only personal posts and paid adverts. So-called public posts, such as those from media organisation Facebook pages, are being moved to a separate “explore” feed timeline." The declared aim of this is to see if people want personal posts and posts from pag...