4 ms·

1) There's an irony that Vox of all companies is complaining that Facebook rewards click bait and punishes thoughtful pieces that require time to read and diges

by scarmig 10y ago

1) There's an irony that Vox of all companies is complaining that Facebook rewards click bait and punishes thoughtful pieces that require time to read and digest. 2) The article takes an interesting attempt at being even-handed: "it's not just right-wing Trump supporters who are being evil, but also left-wing Bernie supporters!" 3) The solution that Vox is suggesting is for Facebook to appoint a high council of editors who approve which stories are worthy of being allowed to be shared, and which are evil and duplicitous. For some reason I strongly suspect that the set of stories they want deemed good are those that align with Vox's editorial philosophy. 4) I'm curious how they would handle something like the Iraq war, where the two legitimate sides promoted by serious, responsible folks like Ezra Klein and the NYTimes were liberals who supported a humanitarian war and conservatives who supported a pre-emptive defensive war. How likely is it that the people who should have been banned from public Facebook discourse are those conspiracy nuts who thought the USA should stay out of Iraq?

comex 10y ago
> and which are evil and duplicitous. For some reason I strongly suspect that the set of stories they want deemed good are those that align with Vox's editorial philosophy. Not "evil and duplicitous", but false and sensationalistic. I expect that Vox's opinion of what counts as both is biased, and you might think that Vox's own articles tend to fall into those categories. Certainly it is not always possible to assess truth in politics in a completely objective manner; I frequently read PolitiFact, and while I think they're decent, their fact checks often boil down to judging how accurately a short and necessarily imprecise statement describes a complex reality, leading to subjective rulings I sometimes disagree with. But some stories are just complete nonsense, like the "oversampling" example from the Vox article, and any reasonable observer really ought to agree on that...
- scarmig 10y ago
  So my question is what kind of thread model we're trying to design against. Vox here seems to think that right-wingers generating click-baity bullshit is the big threat to democracy to design against. I agree that Breitbart et al. generate plenty more than their fair share of transparent bullshit. But I need strong evidence that that's actually a significant threat to the world. What I see as the real threat is a cabal of the powerful defining strict limits on discourse to help generate consent around decisions that are toxic to most of the public and beneficial only to a small segment of it. We've seen the latter happen recently: the Iraq War. You can get me to agree that the extreme nutty right believes lots of nutty, false things, but I don't see evidence that it has killed nearly as many people. Maybe if somehow Trump wins, and can attribute his win to false right wing bullshit, and he's actually as bad as the MSM says, it would work as evidence that that's a realistic threat model. Then again, half a million dead bodies is a hard mountain to climb.
scarmig 10y ago
Though, a thought: it's possible in principle for Facebook to design an algorithm that is able to predict whether Vox editors will like or promote a particular story with high accuracy. What if FB did that, instead of using an engagement-driven metric of story quality? Would that be better or worse in their minds? I'd be happier with it than human editors promoting Vox-approved stories, because 1) at least it'd be transparent what FB was going for and 2) it would be more fault-tolerant to an individual editor going off the reservation, by hook or by crook.
- comex 10y ago
  First of all, there's a difference between "Vox-approved" and what this article envisions Facebook's editorial standards would be. The article suggests "ensuring that conservatives are well represented among the people making editorial decisions" at Facebook; this is certainly not true at Vox itself. But regarding your main point, about using algorithms rather than humans: it might work to some extent against clickbait or low-quality articles, which is part of what the Vox article is complaining about, but another part is false information, which isn't always possible for a human to distinguish at first glance, let alone a computer. It often requires a bit of research or context. 'Real' news organizations often rely on asking experts in the subject at hand, who can contextualize the information much better than any computer; Facebook's hypothetical editors might not be expected to do that, but they could at least do some cursory Googling, which it's still pretty unlikely a computer could do effectively.
  - norikki 10y ago
    some cursory googling would yield 'reputable' mainstream media sources calling Donald Trump the next incarnation of Adolf Hitler. So I really don't want my fb posts being censored by fb because a wapo article disagrees with me.
remarkEon 10y ago
> 1) There's an irony that Vox of all companies is complaining that Facebook rewards click bait and punishes thoughtful pieces that require time to read and digest. Yeah I had the same reaction. It was also somewhat rich that they cited a BuzzFeed article as evidence people are gaming our predilections for clickbait. Though, now that I think about it since it is clickbait, BuzzFeed would certainly be an expert there. And in a way, Vox also takes advantage of it. Here's a short selection of my favorite "Vox [explains x] in [<=500 words]" pieces. http://www.vox.com/2016/8/29/12692546/obamacare-whats-wrong http://www.vox.com/2016/8/29/12692546/obamacare-whats-wrong http://www.vox.com/2016/7/15/12204172/turkey-coup-erdogan-military http://www.vox.com/2016/7/15/12204172/turkey-coup-erdogan-mi... http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/10/4/13155916/2016-nobel-prize-physics http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/10/4/13155916/201... http://www.vox.com/2016/9/7/12817566/donald-trump-immigration-position http://www.vox.com/2016/9/7/12817566/donald-trump-immigratio... Last one for kicks. To be fair to Vox, they do produce some long-form stuff and often link it at the bottom of these shorter pieces, but these explainers are not helpful and, I think, produce a rather shallow understanding of extremely complex issues.
- scarmig 10y ago
  The ideal article for Vox to write on these lines would actually be something like "don't expect to get any meaningful understanding of issues from articles that go viral through Facebook or other social media, and wait at least a couple months or years until a current event has played out so you have enough context and expert analysis on it to come to an informed opinion." Unfortunately, that'd sort of undermine their entire business model.
  - majewsky 10y ago
    You don't have to wait months or years. I've moved most of my media consumption from daily news broadcasts to a single weekly newspaper, which to me provides the most adequate balance between currentness and classification/interpretation.
    - bogomipz 10y ago
makomk 10y ago
Yeah. It's not as though supporters of the other major presidential candidate haven't been spreading false stories on social media regularly. Some of them even spread to HN. Remember the non-existent dating service which claimed to be a UN member and accused Assange of pedophilia and the UN of conspiring with him? Remember the server sending out emails promoting Trump hotels that was mistaken for a secret communications channel with Russia? (That claim got tens of thousands of retweets; the debunkings got much less.)
- norikki 10y ago
  Nope. I dutifully sent that debunking right down the memory hole.
- whybroke 10y ago
  >Remember the server sending out emails Interesting 'fact' to cite. How many emails did that server send again?
  - norikki 10y ago
    The fact that two reasonable people like you can argue about it proves his point that Facebook shouldn't censor people's posts because they don't fit the mainstream narrative.
    - whybroke 10y ago
      Do reasonable people argue that Clinton is a satanist who enjoys spirit cooking? But they should not censor posts under any circumstances, even that one. The problem is the way stories trend and the order in which the feed is presented. The current algorithms and 'like' counting maximize shocking statements that confirm world views exactly because that will maximize user retention. Accuracy is completely deprecated. Facebook knows this and is well aware that nudity (let alone porn) would overwhelm their site because it would be overwhelmingly favored by their systemic selection process. So rather than fix the process they censor that. This leaves things like accusing people of satanism or other false inciting statements to bubble up instead. Unfortunately, facebook has no fiscal incentive to fix this. And it may not be a coincidence that UKIP, Trump, AfD, Le Pen expanded greatly after the emergence of facebook.

by scarmig 10y ago

comex 10y ago

> and which are evil and duplicitous. For some reason I strongly suspect that the set of stories they want deemed good are those that align with Vox's editorial philosophy. Not "evil and duplicitous", but false and sensationalistic. I expect that Vox's opinion of what counts as both is biased, and you might think that Vox's own articles tend to fall into those categories. Certainly it is not always possible to assess truth in politics in a completely objective manner; I frequently read PolitiFact, and while I think they're decent, their fact checks often boil down to judging how accurately a short and necessarily imprecise statement describes a complex reality, leading to subjective rulings I sometimes disagree with. But some stories are just complete nonsense, like the "oversampling" example from the Vox article, and any reasonable observer really ought to agree on that...

scarmig 10y ago
So my question is what kind of thread model we're trying to design against. Vox here seems to think that right-wingers generating click-baity bullshit is the big threat to democracy to design against. I agree that Breitbart et al. generate plenty more than their fair share of transparent bullshit. But I need strong evidence that that's actually a significant threat to the world. What I see as the real threat is a cabal of the powerful defining strict limits on discourse to help generate consent around decisions that are toxic to most of the public and beneficial only to a small segment of it. We've seen the latter happen recently: the Iraq War. You can get me to agree that the extreme nutty right believes lots of nutty, false things, but I don't see evidence that it has killed nearly as many people. Maybe if somehow Trump wins, and can attribute his win to false right wing bullshit, and he's actually as bad as the MSM says, it would work as evidence that that's a realistic threat model. Then again, half a million dead bodies is a hard mountain to climb.

scarmig 10y ago

Though, a thought: it's possible in principle for Facebook to design an algorithm that is able to predict whether Vox editors will like or promote a particular story with high accuracy. What if FB did that, instead of using an engagement-driven metric of story quality? Would that be better or worse in their minds? I'd be happier with it than human editors promoting Vox-approved stories, because 1) at least it'd be transparent what FB was going for and 2) it would be more fault-tolerant to an individual editor going off the reservation, by hook or by crook.

comex 10y ago
First of all, there's a difference between "Vox-approved" and what this article envisions Facebook's editorial standards would be. The article suggests "ensuring that conservatives are well represented among the people making editorial decisions" at Facebook; this is certainly not true at Vox itself. But regarding your main point, about using algorithms rather than humans: it might work to some extent against clickbait or low-quality articles, which is part of what the Vox article is complaining about, but another part is false information, which isn't always possible for a human to distinguish at first glance, let alone a computer. It often requires a bit of research or context. 'Real' news organizations often rely on asking experts in the subject at hand, who can contextualize the information much better than any computer; Facebook's hypothetical editors might not be expected to do that, but they could at least do some cursory Googling, which it's still pretty unlikely a computer could do effectively.
- norikki 10y ago
  some cursory googling would yield 'reputable' mainstream media sources calling Donald Trump the next incarnation of Adolf Hitler. So I really don't want my fb posts being censored by fb because a wapo article disagrees with me.

remarkEon 10y ago

> 1) There's an irony that Vox of all companies is complaining that Facebook rewards click bait and punishes thoughtful pieces that require time to read and digest. Yeah I had the same reaction. It was also somewhat rich that they cited a BuzzFeed article as evidence people are gaming our predilections for clickbait. Though, now that I think about it since it is clickbait, BuzzFeed would certainly be an expert there. And in a way, Vox also takes advantage of it. Here's a short selection of my favorite "Vox [explains x] in [<=500 words]" pieces. http://www.vox.com/2016/8/29/12692546/obamacare-whats-wrong http://www.vox.com/2016/8/29/12692546/obamacare-whats-wrong http://www.vox.com/2016/7/15/12204172/turkey-coup-erdogan-military http://www.vox.com/2016/7/15/12204172/turkey-coup-erdogan-mi... http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/10/4/13155916/2016-nobel-prize-physics http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/10/4/13155916/201... http://www.vox.com/2016/9/7/12817566/donald-trump-immigration-position http://www.vox.com/2016/9/7/12817566/donald-trump-immigratio... Last one for kicks. To be fair to Vox, they do produce some long-form stuff and often link it at the bottom of these shorter pieces, but these explainers are not helpful and, I think, produce a rather shallow understanding of extremely complex issues.

scarmig 10y ago
The ideal article for Vox to write on these lines would actually be something like "don't expect to get any meaningful understanding of issues from articles that go viral through Facebook or other social media, and wait at least a couple months or years until a current event has played out so you have enough context and expert analysis on it to come to an informed opinion." Unfortunately, that'd sort of undermine their entire business model.
- majewsky 10y ago
  You don't have to wait months or years. I've moved most of my media consumption from daily news broadcasts to a single weekly newspaper, which to me provides the most adequate balance between currentness and classification/interpretation.
  - bogomipz 10y ago

makomk 10y ago

Yeah. It's not as though supporters of the other major presidential candidate haven't been spreading false stories on social media regularly. Some of them even spread to HN. Remember the non-existent dating service which claimed to be a UN member and accused Assange of pedophilia and the UN of conspiring with him? Remember the server sending out emails promoting Trump hotels that was mistaken for a secret communications channel with Russia? (That claim got tens of thousands of retweets; the debunkings got much less.)

norikki 10y ago
Nope. I dutifully sent that debunking right down the memory hole.
whybroke 10y ago
>Remember the server sending out emails Interesting 'fact' to cite. How many emails did that server send again?
- norikki 10y ago
  The fact that two reasonable people like you can argue about it proves his point that Facebook shouldn't censor people's posts because they don't fit the mainstream narrative.
  - whybroke 10y ago
    Do reasonable people argue that Clinton is a satanist who enjoys spirit cooking? But they should not censor posts under any circumstances, even that one. The problem is the way stories trend and the order in which the feed is presented. The current algorithms and 'like' counting maximize shocking statements that confirm world views exactly because that will maximize user retention. Accuracy is completely deprecated. Facebook knows this and is well aware that nudity (let alone porn) would overwhelm their site because it would be overwhelmingly favored by their systemic selection process. So rather than fix the process they censor that. This leaves things like accusing people of satanism or other false inciting statements to bubble up instead. Unfortunately, facebook has no fiscal incentive to fix this. And it may not be a coincidence that UKIP, Trump, AfD, Le Pen expanded greatly after the emergence of facebook.