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Thinking this through, what I say here may not make 100% sense...

The third layer of interpersonal discourse is deeply personal. That sounds fascinating to me. I like that discourse.

Carrying that over to the news... Can the third layer of news be considered to be deeply personal? When I hear the word "propaganda," I think of extremely non-personal communications. So then, can we assume the third layer of news cannot be deeply personal?

If the third layer of interpersonal discourse is deeply personal, why can't the third layer of news be more deeply personal? Is it the nature of the medium itself? You said for interpersonal discourse, the third layer is people talking to one another about serious matters.

The news on the third layer cannot be about the deeply personal because that would require talking to one another. At a certain point, the news becomes more broadcast than interaction. Without that interaction, then the news becomes propaganda. Because it is deeply personal, but it lacks interaction. It's just shouting. So much shouting and no interaction that the facts start to not matter because who cares if something's not right? There's no interaction. No accountability. Then the facts start to fade in favor of the deeply personal viewpoint. Accountability keeps the discourse to have true facts.

Although with Twitter, as you said, it's news on all three layers. Because the nature of Twitter itself is a back-and-forth communications platform. Of course, not always used that way, but it can be back-and-forth. We have all the noise that comes along with it being so open.

What you said about Facebook existing on the first and third layers of interpersonal communication really rings true. You see lots of everyday life photos. And then you'll also see some propaganda sharing. But how much on Facebook do you really see that second layer? Not too much. Fascinating how that happens. Facebook is wide open for any discourse. People could be talking about all the gray layers of meaning. But in reality, it doesn't really happen on Facebook.

Are people afraid to go beyond a certain point in the comment box? A couple years ago, I wrote <a href="https://www.mattmaldre.com/2021/11/11/does-a-tiny-box-yield-tiny-thoughts/">Does a tiny box yield tiny thoughts?</a>. It focused more on the 280-character limit of the tweet box. So, you'd think there would be less third-level discourse on Twitter, and more on Facebook. Facebook's status posts have a limit of 63,206 characters. (I don't know how many in the comment box.) You'd think people would have the open space to type long responses. So why not? Is it a UI thing? The initial size of the Facebook comment is only 40 characters! FORTY! Granted, when you go beyond forty, the box does expand to 154 characters. And then every 56 characters you type, you get another 56 characters.

Anyhow, the point is that the comment box VISUALLY gives you the impression of just a little bit of room to type. Thus, people might be likely to type only a small amount.

To compare, the initial size of the Substack comment box is 358 characters--6.3× the size of Facebook's!

Although most likely, it's just that Facebook is not the place to type out longer-form responses to people. It's the social expectation.

Side-note. It's a bit like how people use Instagram as THE photo-sharing app even though the service sucks regarding features. The search ability is almost non-existent. Try doing a two-word search. You can't! Instagram doesn't offer feeds for users, so forget about trying to view the photos in anything other than the deadly scroll. The ads and suggested posts are annoying. Ok, I can go on and on. But yet, it's the place where people view photos? Why? Because that's the socially acceptable place to do it. Flickr doesn't have any of those problems that Instagram has. Flickr is the superior service. Yet, Flickr is not the place to be. Why? Social norms. Just like Facebook. It has its social norms.

I'm trying to crack why Facebook doesn't have that second layer of personal discourse.

(I tried fixing my hyperlink in the comment, but then Substack deleted half my comment, so I deleted the original comment, and repasted it in as a new comment. So this was my original comment with the funky hyperlink in the middle. I'm glad I first draft longer comments in an outside text program before submitting onto an online form)

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That was a lot

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