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Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation

• daveheq 10y ago
  Define misinformation, because certain groups will call certain facts misinformation.
• mrle 10y ago
  what is misinformation? what is false today can be true tomorrow.
• randomgyatwork 10y ago
  What is the difference between 'fake' news and true news thats inconsistent with prevailing narratives? By letting 'the people' choose what trends, at least you are being honest. Most real news is fake anyways.
• 6d6b73 10y ago
  So they admit they want to censorship FB.
  • Afforess 10y ago
    Censorship of libel and intentional mischief is no vice.
    • istorical 10y ago
      It's up to courts to decide whether something is libel or slander, not an algorithm or an engineer at Facebook. Private communication / media organizations like Facebook deciding what's acceptable and what's not would only be censorship.
      • rhizome 10y ago
        Are you saying that Facebook is a government? By the same token as libelslander, censorship is a government task. Everything else is just business rules.
      • Afforess 10y ago
        No, it's not. Courts are a last resort, when private mediation has failed, not the first line of action. If I publish news articles claiming "the sky is the color red, and only evil people disagree", courts do not need to be involved for Facebook to bury my articles. Most mischief is obviously classifiable without outside mediation.
      • mikestew 10y ago
        You think the New York Times doesn't decide whether something is libel or slander before they print it in order to avoid having the "courts...decide whether something is libel or slander"? It's not a direct comparison, but close enough for me to dismantle the idea that only courts get a say on this.
    • tomjen3 10y ago
      I just had a picture in my head of 60s white policeman in a southern state saying the last part, as he locked a way some civil rights protesters. One mans mischief and the causing of trouble is another persons fight for freedom.
  • rhizome 10y ago
    One person trying to censorship is another person's editorial policy.
    • vetinari 10y ago
      Why the communist regimes newer used such a great excuse for their media... /s Seriously, that's slippery slope.
  • legodt 10y ago
    "waahhh somebody told me Breitbart is racist and now I'm being CENSORED"
    • EdiX 10y ago
      Facebook is located in the USA, if Facebook institutes its own ministry of truth do you think its more likely that they will antagonize the government or work with it like they have done thus far and comply with the requests of Trump Administration?
  • cityandtech 10y ago
    It makes sense to reduce the effect of "cottage industries" getting paid to misrepresent the popularity of certain topics. I wouldn't call that censorship.
  • matt4077 10y ago
    No, they admit that it may not be the best idea after all to allow people who use 'censorship' as as verb equal footing with serious journalists.
• ihsw 10y ago
  The moderation of Facebook is outsourced to a select group of organizations, not unlike Twitter with their Trust and Safety Council. https://about.twitter.com/safety/council https://about.twitter.com/safety/council https://blog.twitter.com/2016/announcing-the-twitter-trust-safety-council https://blog.twitter.com/2016/announcing-the-twitter-trust-s... Unsurprisingly, Twitter's Safety Council members are predominantly left-leaning with ties to the (now defunct) Clinton campaign. I would presume there are plenty of seats to be filled now.
  • kevingadd 10y ago
    Ah yes, Twitter, the left-leaning echo chamber where alt-right types and racists don't bombard jews and black people constantly with death threats and gas chamber jokes. Free speech has been suppressed so vigorously by the Safety Council :( (Spoiler alert: Twitter basically doesn't moderate anything and their department responsible for handling abuse reports doesn't do anything)
    • nickysielicki 10y ago
      Okay but to be fair, there are something like 6000 tweets every second. Are they not moderating because they believe in the principle of free speech, or because it would be impractical? I do think that they manually curate their trending sidebar. After Comey announced that the emails on the Wiener laptop were cleared by the FBI, the sidebar looked like this: http://i.imgur.com/9LW0iaU.png http://i.imgur.com/9LW0iaU.png Now, since when do hashtags get an explanation underneath them? Who wrote that explanation and why? Why doesn't it show the amount of tweets below it like every other trend? I had never seen that before. And in this particular case, if they did manually put that there, I think they're vindicated in the sense that they're actively trying to not spread misinformation. Because if I had gone on twitter and saw "Comey" trending, and I hadn't read about the announcement that she'd been cleared, I'd simply think that a lot of Americans were talking about it within the context of an ongoing investigation, and I'd get the sense that twitter users were collectively rallying against Clinton, rather than for her. And that, in essence, is the real problem that I have with manual curation by FB/Google/Twitter/etc. People are underestimating how much trust the general population puts into algorithmically produced content, and how much of a betrayal of trust it is for them to inject something into that. They're underestimating just how quickly we've learned to interpret algorithmically produced content and infer certain things about it. And in spite of the fact that the sidebar could have mislead you to think something else was being expressed by those tweeting about Comey than was actually taking place, I also think the public is more aware of the shortcomings of algorithmically produced content than we give them credit for. If I watch Fox/MSNBC/CNN/etc, I know that there's an implicit bias to the pundits and the guests and the networks themselves. I factor that into whatever content I receive from them. But when you have Twitter trends that are organically produced 95% of the time, and you silently inject something into that, you've done something much more sinister than a news network leaning towards a particular angle. You've taken a metric that a lot of Americans trust entirely to be reflective of the whole country, and you've elevated a certain few or silenced a few others. That's significantly more powerful. You can provide the illusion that millions of people do or don't feel a certain way. It's the most dangerous thing to happen this election cycle.
• mtgx 10y ago
  So who's going to be Head of Truth at Facebook?
  • dredmorbius 10y ago
    Someone very good at it, I hope.
• anonymous42380 10y ago
  Deleted.
  • dwiel 10y ago
    video has been removed the user
  • rhizome 10y ago
    What should we do to you for posting it? Let's start there.
    • anonymous42380 10y ago
      Good point. I've deleted it.
      • rhizome 10y ago
        The question remains.
• btilly 10y ago
  This article criticizes Facebook for firing the human editors that had been keeping things sane. However they were pushed to that by accusations of bias in the right-wing media. Accusations that looked likely to lead to a Congressional investigation. See, for example, http://thehill.com/policy/technology/279361-top-republican-demands-answers-over-alleged-facebook-political-bias http://thehill.com/policy/technology/279361-top-republican-d.... Now they are in a situation where they are damned if they do, damned if they don't. And people immersed in echo chambers will accuse them of bias no matter what. But the entire system is fundamentally broken. Pay per ad incentives lead to rewarding viral content. And content that induces outrage is far more likely to go viral than pretty much anything else. Plus it goes viral before people do pesky things like fact checks. And the more of this that you have been exposed to, the more reasonable you find outrageous claims. Even if you know that the ones that you have seen were all wrong. For an in depth treatment of the underlying issues, I highly recommend Trust Me, I'm Lying.
  • rhizome 10y ago
    Now they are in a situation where they are damned if they do, damned if they don't On the topic of "don't," an unspoken option is that Facebook simply not try to do news. But the entire system is fundamentally broken... Why would they persist in the face of this? Hamartia?
    • btilly 10y ago
      Why would they persist in the face of this? Hamartia? "If you're not a part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem." See https://despair.com/products/consulting https://despair.com/products/consulting for the poster that I stole that from.
    • ethbro 10y ago
      Facebook consumes too many eyeball hours not to do news.
  • agildehaus 10y ago
    I think the solution to "damned if you do, damned if you don't" here is to just remove the stupid news sidebar.
• youdounderstand 10y ago
  Just stop using aggregators. Pay for real news sources that hire actual investigative journalists.
  • vetinari 10y ago
    Real news sources are dead and actual investigative journalists do not exist anymore.
    • paublyrne 10y ago
      Well that's patently not a true statement. The Guardian, the NY Times, and Der Spiegel are the first three publications that do important investigations that come to mind but they are not alone. There are a lot of PR plants even in the more reputable newspapers, which is unfortunate, but there are still regular thorough investigations, which I assume are getting harder to do as money and resources continue to shrink.
      • doomlaser 10y ago
        The blind NYTimes bias has been readily apparent in this election cycle. WaPo as well. The entire media system missed this election. A staffer in the Obama White House remarked on the quality of reporting now, as of a few months ago: "All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus. Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing." https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2016/05/05/white-house-official-on-some-reporters-overseas-expertise-they-literally-know-nothing/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2016/05/...
        • vetinari 10y ago
          On this side of the pond, The Guardian is also so biased, that it is not worth reading anymore.
• Kenji 10y ago
  Let's be frank here: Free speech and facebook never go together. They want to present as a respectable forum where prominent people like politicians can have their platform (same with Twitter). That needs some kind of filtering. And, as we saw with pretty much the entire American press, as soon as you start filtering and selecting, you start to induce gross biases and distortions of the truth. The truth only comes out in a clutter of contradicting opinions, engaging discussions, pieces of evidence and leaked materials. Of course, that is an ugly mess not many people want to put up with.
  • matt4077 10y ago
    > The truth only comes out in a clutter of contradicting opinions, engaging discussions, pieces of evidence and leaked materials It feels like we're way beyond that. It's degenerated to the point of two tribes who no longer have any "shared truth" from which to argue. If I see a post of Facebook saying that Obama has instituted martial law in New York, how can I convince the 4364 people liking it that it's a lie? If I point out that the New York Times would probably write about it, I'll just get laughed at. The truth seriously fared a lot better in times where newspapers and a few TV stations acted as completely undemocratic arbitrators.
    • Kenji 10y ago
      I disagree. I think things like Wikileaks and independent, small blogs and feeds contributed a vast amount to this election - knowledge about Clinton that we would have never had otherwise. (And I say this as someone who supported neither candidate, and if I was an US citizen I would have probably thrown my vote away)
    • gibrown 10y ago
      I think it may be worse than two tribes. Its a million tribes with limited overlap in what they consider the truth, but all having a large megaphone that cuts across tribal lines while still building bubbles. My analogy is breaking down. I don't think we understand how the complete removal of barriers to publishing are changing society. Nor do we understand how to cope with it. A bunch of folks just elected an authoritarian to "guide" the way.
• malchow 10y ago
  It seems abundantly clear that the problem isn't low-quality content in the feed. That's unavoidable. It's the very small trickle of high-quality content in the feed – content from actual people who want to contribute to Facebook. There isn't much of it. And Facebook wants to show a fresh feed every refresh.
  • andoma 10y ago
    Having uninstalled Facebook from my phone and being too lazy to login on it from my primary computer (2fa) I only look at the feed maybe once every other day. Amazing how much better it is. Relevant and interesting stuff from real friend I care about, no junk. I can recommend that to everyone.
• trynumber9 10y ago
  You think the users are too stupid to fact check. But what makes you think the users care about the truth anyway? More often than not they double down with "well it's emblematic of the greater problem" or something to that effect. They then look for new evidence to support their views. Like it or not, some sites are designed to build echo chambers and are not for general discourse.
  • travmatt 10y ago
    When playing identity politics, agreeing with a blatant lie is expected when you need to affirm the narrative of your tribe. If you don't, you're a heretic and not a true believer.
  • faet 10y ago
    A lot of people don't care. They believe an image on facebook that reaffirms their belief. You try to counter with statistics from the FBI, DOJ, BLS, DOL, or any other organization and the numbers are 'made up'. And studies have been done that when presented with counter arguments it strengthens the original misperceptions. Corrections also don't get much traction. I've seen many conspiracy theories pop up for a week, then die down. While the correct gets no traction at all. >As a result, the corrections fail to reduce misperceptions for the most committed participants. Even worse, they actually strengthen misperceptions among ideological subgroups in several cases. http://www.dartmouth.edu/~nyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf http://www.dartmouth.edu/~nyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf People don't want news, they want to hear what they already 'know'.
    • tomjen3 10y ago
      The problem is that there are no organizations that can give out unbiased facts. This includes the FBI, DOJ, etc. If you have grown up in a household that were in opposition to either of these organizations (and that could be either democract or republican, I can't imagine a poor black person in the Ghetto likes the FBI more than a Montana rancher), why should you trust their statistics? Heck even if you do trust them, don't forget the old saying: lies, damned lies and statistics.
• stevendhansen 10y ago
  Except it isn't just the spread of misinformation. Even more important (IMHO) is the insulating effect of showing people only like-minded opinions, effectively trapping everyone in a bubble. I can't think of any way Facebook can solve this problem without drastically decreasing their reliance on ad revenue. What are they going to do, force people to view opinions they disagree with?
  • gdulli 10y ago
    Everyone should be responsible for the curation of their own timeline. I barely use Facebook but hate the idea that I didn't get a straight chronological feed. I was a huge fan of Twitter but was driven away when they followed suit. My reasons had more to do with my own preference of how I enjoy using the service, but having algorithms manipulate the information I see so as to maximize engagement metrics is even more troubling.
    • lotharbot 10y ago
      There is a "chronological" option on facebook.
      • gdulli 10y ago
        It's illusory. They may or may not, based on their algorithms, bump something old to the top of your feed after it gets a like or a new comment. They call it "most recent" and they can define "recent" the way they want to.
  • tomjen3 10y ago
    It wouldn't even work. Reread the news you found that you agreed with - how much of it is simply restating the same basic things and calling the other side evil, stupid, etc, at least indirectly? If somebody with different believes than you were forced to read those, do you think the resulting society was more or less polarized? The kind of content you need to do that is already disadvantaged since it has to be toned way down, and that makes it less much less likely to be shared in the first place.
  • 10y ago
• Zikes 10y ago
  Good luck with that. Reddit's failed at it. Twitter's failed at it. It's almost always bundled with some sort of hate speech or political rhetoric that triggers swaths of people when they feel like they're being silenced. There probably is no right way to do it.
  • duaneb 10y ago
    I tend to agree—I think that the more we get upset by these sorts of behaviors, the more it encourages them. "Don't feed the trolls" is really the only thing that works, and it's a pretty miserable experience to have nothing you can do about harassment. Which isn't to say I disapprove of reddit, twitter et al removing hate speech; just that it's a very late and reactive solution to a problem that seems inherent in social media. Really, all we can do is improve filtering, and facebook seems almost ideologically opposed to increasing user control over the content they see. So I don't see facebook being a pleasant place to visit in the near future.
    • piotrjurkiewicz 10y ago
      > hate speech On many subreddits, being in opposition to illegal massive immigration is being considered as a 'hate speech' and is a reason for ban.
      • duaneb 10y ago
        Err, citation needed. Preferably by someone employed by Reddit. If it's just the subreddit.... I don't know what to tell you beyond "find better ones".
        • piotrjurkiewicz 10y ago
          I was talking about /r/europe for example. > find better ones It's not that simple, having in mind that: 1. Current moderators clique holds the most adequate name for pan-Europe subreddit. 2. Everyone registering account from Europe-located IP address is being automatically subscribed to this subreddit.
• SeanDav 10y ago
  It is a temporary aberration. In due course, people will come to realize that they can't believe everything they read on the internet (duh), especially where provenance is not clear, and Facebook will improve their algorithms. Some kind of reasonable balance will be found. People blaming Facebook for Trump is far more a reflection of themselves than of FB news algorithms.
  • mtberatwork 10y ago
    I certainly do not blame Facebook for Trump, but I don't see any balance happening anytime soon. It's not just an issue of the Internet, but also with traditional forms of media like cable TV, talk radio and print. Distrust and misinformation are shoveled out daily. Even the local pastor is in on the action these days.
• DINKDINK 10y ago
  Ministry of Truth
• kirykl 10y ago
  Wouldn't Facebook have the perverse incentive to define 'misinformation' to be any information which offends the most people, regardless of truth, in order to keep users from leaving
  • mucker 10y ago
    Of course. Worse, they actually have two different strategic factors that play poorly together: 1.) Retain users 2.) Have a personal bias about what will offend users These two items can magnify each other in a false direction as they attempt to retain users that they perceive they have.
• flipcoder 10y ago
  Censorship
• thrden 10y ago
  The timing of this announcement does not seem to help assuage fears that facebook was using its platform to push an agenda. It was this accusation that initially forced them to switch from human editors to an algorithm for trending news. I suspect that we as a country are going to have a conversation regarding the nature of privately held nearly public spaces on the internet and what their obligation to us is, if any.
• arprocter 10y ago
  If it's such a problem why not just disable the Newsfeed? No one needs to get their news from Facebook
• marze 10y ago
  If the goal is not to bias, total transparency is the answer.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• dsugarman 10y ago
  this is what I would propose. Attach a very visible rating on each story shared from all news sources, the rating says how much the news source holds to it's journalistic integrity. There should be a very clear criteria that facebook holds it's news content providers to. If you click on the rating of a low rated news source, you should be shown exactly what extremely misleading articles they have published in the past, these reviews should also be tagged so you can view it directly if someone is spreading misinformation on the news feed.
  • kmtrowbr 10y ago
    I agree with you. I would keep it simple and as transparent as possible.
• mstade 10y ago
  I read somewhere that Facebook isn't liable for information posted there, that the user's posting the information is the liable party. Here in Sweden, that's not how news organizations work. Here, whatever they publish they are liable for, regardless of who originally wrote it. I know Facebook isn't a news organization, but it's treading a fine line isn't it? At some point one might argue that by being an aggregator and driving a large portion of its engagement in the sharing of stories is akin to being a publisher, and thus should be held liable for the things it publishes – regardless of who pulled the trigger. Of course, this would be a huge liability for Facebook, and a growth inhibitor because all of a sudden, a story going viral isn't exactly a good thing if it means they can easily be sued for libel. I'm not a lawyer (probably obvious given the above) but I think it's a bit strange that given Facebook's position they can so easily get away with a "wasn't me!" kind of attitude to misinformation and straight up lies being spread around presented as though the stories were in fact news.
  • tedunangst 10y ago
    And the same for Hacker News?
  • acbabis 10y ago
    I'm not a lawyer either, but I don't think what worked in Sweden will work for the US. Not only is it hard to sue people for libel, but content sites like YouTube fought pretty to hard to make sure they couldn't be responsible for things other people post on their sites (as long as they promptly respond to DCMA notices).
  • sosuke 10y ago
    I think what you're miss is the safe harbor parts of the DMCA in the USA. They offer protection for any user generated content on the web provided the operators respond to DMCA requests within a certain time (24h?). Without these safe harbor provisions the idea is that the web would crumble under the weight of liability. Think about shared hosting companies, AWS, a public forum like this and then consider how much effort it would take to police the amount of content being created by users.
• StanislavPetrov 10y ago
  In corporate speak "misinformation" is defined as "any information that doesn't support our narrative". Certainly it is the goal of Facebook, the government, and every other large media corporation to control the flow of information. You need look no farther then Obama's recent statement that news needs to be "curated" by government appointed gatekeepers, to filter out all that pesky information that doesn't jive with government propaganda.
  • nickodell 10y ago
    Do you mind linking to where Obama said that? The closest I can find is this: https://www.yahoo.com/news/obama-decries-wild-west-media-landscape-214642552.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/obama-decries-wild-west-media-lan... >"We are going to have to rebuild within this wild-wild-west-of-information flow some sort of curating function that people agree to," Obama said at an innovation conference in Pittsburgh. Why do you think that the curation is going to be done by the government or by government appointed gatekeepers?
    • marknutter 10y ago
      It's implied by the use of the word "we" and the fact that he is a government employee.
      • rat87 10y ago
        > It's implied by the use of the word "we" and the fact that he is a government employee. I think it's clear that's he's asking for a rebuilt mainstream media so that people can at agree on facts.
      • nickodell 10y ago
        I can see that interpretation, but I don't think that's what he meant. To me, he's saying that those platforms should develop their own systems in a way that's acceptable to them.
  • seertaak 10y ago
    Same noises coming from Europe -- today, it was Schäuble proffering this "lesson" from the US election. The degree to which the news in this country is censored or distorted is frankly maddening, and to my mind, ultimately self-defeating. For example, until half a year ago, important details in articles about terrorism were left out, but you could still sort of fill in the blanks yourself. Now, every single article about an incident has the same stock phrase: "Hintergrund und Motiv der Tat sind noch völlig unklar", and nothing else. The elision of all details is supported by the flimsiest of justifications, namely that the terrorists relish and are spurned by the media attention (as if their religious fanaticism doesn't play the major role). There is, of course, not a shred of evidence for this contention, except for the opinion of a handful of "experts". It seems to me that a terrorist attack is newsworthy. That newspapers refuse to report details (say, by interviewing a witness) is an awful abrogation of their duty. Sometimes reading the news here feels like living in Soviet Russia.
• alexc05 10y ago
  I think it would be relatively easy to have an "auto-snopes" feature which detects a URL being shared and immediately attaches a post that says "this has been debunked by X" For example - I've seen dozens of links to Michael Moore's trumpland speech which strategically ends with the phrase "America will elect Trump and it will feel great" Sample: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-25/michael-moore-trumps-election-will-be-biggest-fuck-you-ever-recorded-human-history http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-25/michael-moore-trump... He concludes: Yes, on November 8, you Joe Blow, Steve Blow, Bob Blow, Billy Blow, all the Blows get to go and blow up the whole goddamn system because it's your right. Trump's election is going to be the biggest fuck ever recorded in human history and it will feel good. but the truth is that is not what he CONCLUDED He continues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVLTQIUMq18&t=30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVLTQIUMq18&t=30 [sic] ... and now you're fucked. EDIT - I feel like I should clarify I mean "auto-snopes" figuratively. Auto fair-balance might be a better descriptor. Something that links to an opposing opinion automatically, in cases of absolute falsehood the debunking, or even a CSS CLASS where there is a bright red "FALSE" wrapper. Snopes doesn't have to be the automatic choice. Breaking filter-bubbles & ensuring truth would be my goal on an idea like this. Not strictly "promoting liberal media"
  • Spellman 10y ago
    I have personally asked an individual why they don't trust snopes. Their claim is that it's a Democrat rag towel and shill. I then ask, then what fact-checker would you trust? Their response: None of them. Congratulations. We've reached a point, for this individual, where "facts" as decided in the common forum are suspect and the only thing they trust is themselves (and whatever non-Mainstream Media they listen to). We have reached a point where the only truth is what they decide is the truth. That is a non-trivial problem to resolve. If we can't even agree what basic facts are, there is no way to even have a discussion.
    • grzm 10y ago
      This is something that concerns me a lot as well. How do we rebuild this?
• Hydraulix989 10y ago
  I don't understand how this is different than any other communication medium. Telegraph operators shouldn't feel any onus to ensure that they stop the spread of misinformation, right? In fact, I think it is VERY detrimental for them to step in and started editing posts, bringing back the human editors. Humans have biases, ML less so. If an algorithm decides that something is trending, even if it is "incorrect" to some interpretation of the word, then it should be treated the same. It's just a matter of principles.
• ausjke 10y ago
  the elite mainstream media and the supposed-to-be-independent reporters are the biggest losers in this election, as they took sides so strongly that the other 50% will never bother to have anything to do with them. facebook needs improvement? sure, but more important, those biased media outlets will be irrelevant for most of the people due to not only technology advancement, but also what the news industry has been doing over the last few decades, i.e. they're all so biased, that you always know what they're going to say, why bother reading there. anyone can tell me one true independent news source in US today? there is _none_.
  • exabrial 10y ago
    Wikileaks? Oh wait...
  • dmode 10y ago
    What about the non-elite supposedly non-mainstream media ? Like Fox News ? Who perpetrated a false story days before the election and came back to apologize for it ? They are real winners right ?
    • ausjke 10y ago
      for the record I don't read fox-news and don't know what you're talking about. I read Reuters but its US news is limited, I did some study and was educated it is probably the closest to be called as a neutral source.
      • kanwisher 10y ago
        oddly enough the two financial news wires, Reuters and Bloomberg were the least bias. Cause they give sterile news about markets, their customers want to know how markets will go, not hear what they want.
  • rat87 10y ago
    That's because there was only one valid candidate if anything they're to blame by treating him seriously.
• alva 10y ago
  Can't wait for the Facebook Department of Truth™ to inform me!
• sandworm101 10y ago
  Facebook isn't the problem. It's a function of its users. It is as much responsible for misinformation as a city park is responsible for the crazy guy shouting about the lizard people. The problem is all the users who actually believe anything they read via facebook.
  • xs 10y ago
    Suppose you were the person to relay the message though. Imagine one friend tells you "Can you please tell Adam X", but you know X is a flat out lie and is actually horrible and offensive. So do you agree to spread the lie? Oh and you're doing this free, and it's not your friend it's 2 strangers.
    • sandworm101 10y ago
      "Can you please tell Adam X" is a hair away from spreading rumor, hearsay. I would ask, at least in the context of facebook, why the speaker cannot talk to Adam himself. If he cannot, if he doesn't have the connections required to speak to Adam, then his message probably isn't worth forwarding.
      • xs 10y ago
        I was trying to paint the picture that Facebook is the one passing along messages from one person to another. So yes, people could turn their computer off and go directly to someone elses house and tell them the message, but I think we've grown accustom to sending messages to each other over social media.
  • dredmorbius 10y ago
    Systems are functions of nodes, and edges, and the biases and characteristics among them. Facebook's users, absent Facebook, weren't influencing world events without Facebook. Now they are. What changed wasn't the nodes. It was how the edges (Facebook) connected them.
• rahrahrah 10y ago
  Admiting to fight misinformation amounts to the same as admiting that they will pursue a left-wing bias.
• lujim 10y ago
  *some misinformation
• triplesec 10y ago
  Very relevant to understanding today's media and politics is Adam Curtis' new documentary film Hypernormalisation. It's long but very worth it http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04b183c http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04b183c If anyone has links to the BBC iplayer for the US, if there is one, or another legit source for outside the UK, please do reply with it. I strongly encourage you to watch it, and if you can only find it from a dodgy source, buy someone a classic BBC DVD of something for Festivus so support their making more. (lots of things, Dr Who, Jeeves and Wooster, the Century of the Self...)
  • justin_ 10y ago
    Seconding this recommendation. American viewers can watch the film here: https://thoughtmaybe.com/hypernormalisation/ https://thoughtmaybe.com/hypernormalisation/
• webwanderings 10y ago
  http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/11/the-forces-that-drove-this-elections-media-failure-are-likely-to-get-worse/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/11/the-forces-that-drove-this-...
• nickjamespdx 10y ago
  Oh really? You think?
• cpncrunch 10y ago
  What if they added a flag button labelled "This post contains misinformation"? Then, if sufficient people click it, it is reviewed by a human editor.
  • linkregister 10y ago
    Great, I can expect every New York Times and Fox News article to be flagged by people who didn't like it.
    • cpncrunch 10y ago
      You'll notice I said that such articles would be reviewed by a human editor, which would prevent this type of abuse.
• psyc 10y ago
  "Stop the spread of misinformation" is a subset of "stop the spread of information", which is yet one more way of saying that some people can't stand the freedom of speech.
  • alexc05 10y ago
    That is fair - however it does not have to be implemented by stopping the information from spreading. An alternative could be to refuse to distribute the false information without a disclaimer reading "DEBUNKED / FALSE / see here for fair balance" Or include a DIV to one side with a bulleted list of false claims. Consider the TRUMP quote image: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CRxEt7pU8AAzekC.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CRxEt7pU8AAzekC.jpg People Magazine 1998 - I'd run as a republican because they are the dumbest. I'd lie my face off and they'd love me [paraphrase] A Facebook-fact-checker wouldn't have to suppress the sharing of the image. Id could create an overlay or add a subtitle or tag which reads "FALSE QUOTE - this isn't real" Rather than relying on the hundred million individual conversations being maybe fact checked - an algorithm / ai / editorial squad could apply fact checking automatically. The IMAGE thumbprint / URL flagged in the facebook database as proven false, it gets the extra-content on its own.
• Zenst 10y ago
  How do they define misinformation as many grey area's, for example religion. So in such grey area's one persons information is another's misinformation and that gets messy for anybody, let alone AI.
• gr_thrwy 10y ago
  Another place where Facebook's failure to detect fakeness has proved costly is in their social graph. A lot of sites moved away from comments platforms like Disqus to Facebook in the hope that the quality of discourse would improve and trolling would decrease. Instead, clicking on some of the most vehement commentators' names would invariably lead to suspiciously bare accounts (and often suspiciously fake names) with a handful of friends themselves, all with similar characteristics. Unfortunately the people who are influenced by this sort of thing are not tech savvy enough to do even this basic level of checking. There is a a sort of "uncanny valley" that a technically savvy and experienced person can detect when looking at a fake profile, that I daresay Facebook's algorithms just can't. Then there is also the problem that Facebook really doesn't care about blatantly fake accounts until they are reported. The sorts of people who are trapped in some filter bubbles are unlikely to be savvy enough to know how to report these profiles (I've reported many-dozens at least-ranging from community noticeboards to cupcake businesses, all pretending to be people and missed by FB's much vaunted ML) Of course, there is a certain irony in using a throwaway account to discuss fake accounts, but without a patina of "realness", it triggers a greater level of skepticism, which is a good thing. When the history of 2016 is written, a large part will be filter bubbles and trolls expertly manipulating huge swathes of electorates enabled by the hubris and greed of Social Media networks.
• cm3 10y ago
  I'm still waiting for the day that there's a responsible entity that only ever publishes things when they're 100% certain and is willing to bet their freedom (going to prison) on it. But given how information and influencing of opinions is a market and means control of the population, I'm afraid this won't happen with official support, and only be seen as the crazy lunatics news agency that publishes stuff a week or month later after having vetted things. I'd like to say leave speed reporting to the Twittersphere and mandate a clear label on unvetted news reports on any network, but I doubt politics can have such influence on the media. I would love it if the news reports had a watermark that says fresh-and-unvetted just like "preliminary results" or "consult your doctor before taking". First we have to encourage and support critical thinking, but too much of it may lead to some influencers misusing it to support causes which deny past and current crimes of humanity on itself and the planet.
  • robbrown451 10y ago
    That's scary. 100% certain? Nothing is 100% certain. So they can't even say "it's likely to rain tomorrow"? This doesn't seem thought through.
    • cm3 10y ago
      Not all topics warrant certainty, but given the power of news outlets forming opinion and thereby influencing the population's behavior, I do think certain topics demand responsible reporting which doesn't report anything at all if uncertain. It's the same as a good police detective not disclosing speculations to the media because they pursue many leads but only conclude one, and you don't want a mob go lynch people. The same logic applies to news outlets forming people's opinions. That's why I think there's a need for, admittedly few, certain-report-only news agencies. That way, if you read posts on TheSun or E!Online, you get accustomed to not taking it seriously, forming doubt that this is most likely speculation. Once something gets confirmed unquestionably, it can migrate to one of the few vetted-only news outlets, if that's something they cover. That said, our weather models are pretty good but not good enough to make certain predictions that far away into the future, but they can for the next few hours. It's like a software company's model of code branches. The Apple/Google/whatever filesystem team works on something, it gets pushed into their level of production branch, then it percolates up to the shared production kernel branch, and after a couple more layers it hits the common branch, which is what public production binaries are made from and consists of kernel, userland, foobar modules all merged together. Not all software shops operate this way, but it's what size of a project can demand after it hits certain amount. The linux kernel works this way too, to name a successful non-commercial project. You can argue this doesn't prevent regressions, and that's true, but it's hard to deny there would be more regressions (aka false reporting) with unfiltered (aka unvetted) reporting.
• rwhitman 10y ago
  If you do a root cause analysis of this election's result, much of it points back to Silicon Valley in one way or another. Workforce automation created millions of unemployed people in places far away from economic hubs, with no hope of employment in their hometowns or re-skilling for the new roles, leaving them desperate. Proliferation of mobile apps lead to an explosion in use of social media. The wild popularity of this democratic social media encouraged a culture that allowed misinformation to flourish without a lot of consequences. Bad actors took advantage of this, and reinforced distorted false narratives. Desperate people latched onto the messages presented to them, that gave them solutions repeatedly reinforced by social media, and many took an enormous risk - they voted against their best interests in order to solve their problems with the information they had available. And that is how we got here today.
  • cjjuice 10y ago
    Yes, Federal jobs should have been moved from cities to fill those lost. Norway did something similar.
    • rwhitman 10y ago
      Agreed. Though personally I believe Silicon Valley shares a responsibility - tech companies should encourage more remote work and smaller hub offices in less dense urban areas. It would save them money and help distribute economic gains outside of just the major urban centers. This was a root cause of Brexit in my opinion as well - all of the UK's best jobs are stuffed into London and London only.
    • reubenmorais 10y ago
      That sounds like an interesting story, how can I find more about it?
      • cjjuice 10y ago
        Here is one article on the subject. I am sure there are more out there. http://www.lifeinnorway.net/2013/03/have-the-norwegians-got-it-right/ http://www.lifeinnorway.net/2013/03/have-the-norwegians-got-...
• belorn 10y ago
  How are we to ever prevent misinformation when news papers are happy to publish that "political candidate did crime X! anonymous john/jane doe said". If news papers were held to ethical requirements that prevented mere accusations from being news, I could see how Facebook should also be held liable for not following the same rules. As it is now, someone could just append "john doe said" at the end of any conspiracy theory and by news standard, its fact checked and ethical.
• overcast 10y ago
  This is seriously hilarious. Now that's he's won, against seemingly all odds, we have to find some other reason for why EVERYONE ELSE, was completely WRONG. Every media outlet, everyone in politics, all the polls, completely shit on Trump. Now look who is the most powerful person in the entire world. The Democrats, and the rest, did it to themselves. Overconfidence, smear campaigns, and all of the morons doing the polls. We are all sick of politicians, and the people have spoken, let's just see what happens. Get over it already.
  • lightbyte 10y ago
    >we have to find some other reason for why EVERYONE ELSE, was completely WRONG >and the people have spoken Trump lost the popular vote, so this isn't true. He got about 25% of the total voting population overall.
    • overcast 10y ago
      Irrelevant. This is a republic, not a democracy. If you want to cherry pick small percentages by comparing to the voting age population. Clinton got 25.5% and Trump got 25.4% Voting population 235,248,000 99% reporting per Google Polls. Trump 47% 59,821,874 Clinton 48% 60,122,876
    • rawdoc 10y ago
      I agree that just because Trump won the election doesn't mean the people gave him a mandate, or have spoken, but looking at popular vote in a system that doesn't even focus on popular vote is incorrect IMO. If the rules were to get popular vote then campaigning would be done totally differently. The candidates are doing everything they can to win states, not win popular vote.
      • qb45 10y ago
        Regarding popular election, "mandate" and "only 25% voted for him", it seems that all people who are now dissatisfied have voted for Clinton. Which suggests that the 50% who didn't vote maybe don't oppose Trump that much. I observed that leftists have a tendency to systematically overestimate their numbers, influence and the amount of agreement or even familiarity with their ideas among the public.
• ixtli 10y ago
  I don't mean to be all doom-and-gloom but it seems too little, too late. Someone else in this thread put it well: > people immersed in echo chambers will accuse them of bias no matter what.
• squozzer 10y ago
  A humble question -- Had Hillary won, would this post even be on HN?
  • xs 10y ago
    Probably not. What's probably happened is that people of Facebook looked internally and realized they had the power to sway this election and didn't act on it. It's weird because we want Facebook to not sway us and let us build our own belief structure, yet in this case maybe I would want Facebook to do something, and help not spread lies and misinformation may be something everyone can get behind (except snopes).
  • nix0n 10y ago
    Yes, because it's an interesting technical and social problem. I do admit the discussion here would have a different tone if the result had gone the other way, but not necessarily a better tone as there's plenty of vitriol on both sides.
  • return0 10y ago
    No. And facebook does not pretend it 's not pro-Hillary (its CEO endorsed her). That doesn't mean the discussion is not warranted. In fact it's long overdue. Facebook is now a medium like the rest, it needs to be regulated like the press imho.
    • emodendroket 10y ago
      "Regulated like the press?" What the hell does that mean?
      • return0 10y ago
        Freedom from censorship, enforcement of defamation laws.
        • emodendroket 10y ago
          Those things already apply to Facebook users. Facebook is actually proposing active censorship here.
• masmullin 10y ago
  > Last week Buzzfeed reported on an entire cottage industry of web users in Macedonia generating fake news stories related to Trump vs Clinton in order to inject them into Facebook’s Newsfeed as a way to drive viral views and generate ad revenue from lucrative US eyeballs. Does anyone else find this incredibly ironic? Buzzfeed ratting out others doing clickbait?
  • ktRolster 10y ago
    Buzzfeed lately has been trying to 'outgrow' their reputation as clickbait, and actually do traditional investigative reporting. With moderate success. I agree with you though, it's hard to take them seriously.
    • Nadya 10y ago
      "Actual journalism" Buzzfeed articles are of surprisingly great quality. They fund that quality through clickbait, which is their primary monetization strategy if I recall correctly. It does make the right hand difficult to believe when the left hand is off being silly - but I'm actually impressed by the level of works produced by their journalism department.
      • madenine 10y ago
        Their monetezation strategy is advertorial content posts. People are so used to clickbait as a way to get impressions and clicks from display ads that many don't realize there isn't a single 'traditional' display ad on BuzzFeed's entire site. They make their money by charging for references to 'advertisers' products and services throughout BuzzFeed content - something they do really well. Doesn't come cheap either - big cash outlays iirc.
• nurettin 10y ago
  How hard is it to write a bot that googles the facts and checks if they contradict the story?
  • dredmorbius 10y ago
    See Google's Knowledge Engine. The problem is challenging. Perfection is impossible (for deeply philosophical reasons), but a reasonably tractable system strikes me as possible. https://www.google.com/intl/es419/insidesearch/features/search/knowledge.html https://www.google.com/intl/es419/insidesearch/features/sear...
• guycook 10y ago
  "As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
  • ern 10y ago
    AI curated feeds are, of course, not the free flow of information, rather they are blind algorithms looking at what one's "friends" like and what you've previously liked and then feeding you more of the same, creating filter bubbles and fracturing society, while allowing nefarious actors opportunities to game their inherent naïveté. Closer to the free-flow of information was USENET, and even though it was eventually overrun by trolls and spammers, filtering was largely human driven and unsophisticated, via their news clients, and one had little choice but to look at contrary opinions, and even to debunk some of the totally false junk, which is now hidden from view or buried at the bottom of long threads, left for the "true-believers". I've been reading parts of the "alt-right" (deliberately breaking my own filter bubble) for many years, and although I despise what they stand for, I do agree with them on one thing..human ability is not evenly distributed. Of course they use this point to advance a racist agenda, but the fact remains that many people of all backgrounds are just not smart enough to deal with the "free" flow of information. They lack the intelligence to deeply introspect on their own biases and to understand that what they are being fed is garbage aimed at manipulating them. The sooner geeks (and those with a "small l libertarian" streak) accept that reality, the safer[1] the world will be. [1] in a literal sense, now.
• joggery 10y ago
  You can't prevent false ideas spreading by censorship; quite the contrary. The idea that one can create an AI or censor or committee to separate truth from falsehood and then put it in charge is plainly authoritarian.
  • ben010783 10y ago
    What about just keeping out stories that are patently false? If I did an image search for cars, I wouldn't want a boat in there. If I did a search for news, I wouldn't want a fabricated story.
    • joggery 10y ago
      Such stories would not go viral.
      • kmtrowbr 10y ago
        That's not true: false, viral stories were the very lifeblood of this election.
        • joggery 10y ago
          I'm sure that it so. However, for a story to spread it has to seem like it might be true to a significant fraction of the readers. So it can't be 'patently false'.
    • kmtrowbr 10y ago
      I agree with you. I wouldn't completely remove them, but I would mark the ones from certain sources as having a questionable origin.
    • muad 10y ago
      You just want to be spoon fed the "truth" without having to think about it.
• exabrial 10y ago
  If Facebook wants to be a "source of truth" they're going to need to hire moderators outside of Silicon Valley that represent a wide array of values, traditions, and backgrounds, in a ratio that represents the actual population, and have them peer review each other without fear of repercussion from their employer. I think it's hard for the Silicon Valley types to surrender this type of control... For instance, would this article even be on HN if Hillary had won the election? If we're talking about neutrality, that's an important point to consider. Actually, the lack of multiculturism is true for quite a few Silicon Valley companies. Try to find a station that has 'Today's Metal' on Google Music, good luck ...there are a couple hundred different indie channels to listen to that are very meticulously organized into genre, sub-genre, and sub-sub-genres. I'm not complaining, I simply use different products, but I think it points back to the source of where the lack of multiculturism stems from.
• GBond 10y ago
  Zuck seems to be crafting and curating his persona & reputation for a future life of public office. Changing up facebook's bad content reputation will be important for this path.
• cakeface 10y ago
  This is sort of starting to remind me of the Reticulum in Neal Stephenson's book Anathem. He talks about how they are constantly checking the reputation of data and only valuing high reputation sources. It's certainly hand wavy but interesting. Life imitating art imitating life.
• brentm 10y ago
  This is a tough position for FB. No matter what they do, half of the the world will think the actions they take are wrong. Most humans are intelligent enough to know that stories like Hillary Clinton running a child sex ring (or whatever) are false. People choose to share these because they want to believe it or think it's funny. As they say in their mission statement "Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected." it is a commendable mission but it's also a messy one. I think inevitably they will have to do something. Maybe some kind of "truth barometer" on stories that attain a certain volume of engagement. At least then they can say "look! we're trying" without taking away the people's right to troll. In this particular election though I doubt anything would have helped. The winner has been openly trolling for years, his direct actions set the standard for truthfulness much lower than ever before.
• awesomerobot 10y ago
  [Citation needed]?
• mucker 10y ago
  Or Facebook can take their thumbs off the scale on what is supposed to be friends sharing information. Do you realize how Orwellian it is for a big company to say friends Bobby and Sally have to be monitored in what they share? How does this not bother people? I don't care if Bobby and Sally believe that we never made it to the moon and wear tin foil hats. It is _none of FB's damn business_. They are a _platform_ not the editors of all things true. They should not issue us all with truth detectors.
• japhyr 10y ago
  It's also on us to resist the temptation to build social media bubbles around ourselves, and to poke into each other's bubbles. Every time I've wanted to block a friend or relative on facebook, I've put my phone down and come back to it later. Looking away from people we disagree with isn't working. My cousin shared a post this morning asking why people on the left aren't celebrating the fact that a female campaign manager helped put someone in the white house for the first time. I wasn't sure what to say as his friends piled on to say things like "Yeah, I thought they were for women's rights?!" Here's the response I finally came up with: I'm not celebrating her "success" because I imagine my facebook and twitter feeds look a lot different than yours. My feeds are filled with first-hand stories from women around the country who are being more openly harassed than they were last week. It's happening often enough that's it's really dismissive to say "Oh those are just a few assholes." People are openly harassing women in the name of Trump. I think when we act as consumers of social media we need to stop building our own bubbles, and reach out into other's bubbles. And when we help build social networks, we need to intentionally structure them in a way that maintains connections, rather than isolating individuals and groups.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • withdavidli 10y ago
    There was a comment that just got deleted wondering about if people are just roaming around for liberals to hate on. The answer to that is yes. This just posted on my feed [1]. Driving around Wellesley (also where Clinton graduated from) taunting people. [1] https://m.facebook.com/?_rdr#!/story.php?story_fbid=10210780785293367&id=1162383912 https://m.facebook.com/?_rdr#!/story.php?story_fbid=10210780...
  • killwhitey 10y ago
    There used to be a feature on Twitter for viewing other people's feeds[1], but was removed[2]. I made something to replicate that via Twitter Lists[3][4], but it seems like making one for Facebook is much more important. [1] https://twitter.com/twitter/status/73833309163110400 https://twitter.com/twitter/status/73833309163110400 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12117218 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12117218 [3] https://otherside.site/ https://otherside.site/ [4] https://gist.github.com/0x263b/7b391a1617fcbbabc57fb1e705884a11 https://gist.github.com/0x263b/7b391a1617fcbbabc57fb1e705884...
• goshx 10y ago
  They could start by including "misinformation" as a reason when you report a post.
• michaelbuckbee 10y ago
  An interesting contextual point is that Amazon (or perhaps more precisely Jeff Bezos) has an outstanding and tremendously well respected journalism feature whereby the publish original, factual, well-researched articles every day at the Washington Post.
• leurfete 10y ago
  So Facebook will be openly committed to censoring certain information for the public good. What could go wrong?
  • ern 10y ago
    Their algorithms are already doing this. It's not like it's a pure chronological feed.
• muad 10y ago
  This is not the role of FB in our society. FB attempted to sway public opinion through censoring and media manipulation. Now that it has failed they want to police misinformation better. If you are working at FB now you need to take a long look at yourself and your role in this. FB is a communication platform, not a political tool. Reddit and Twitter are equal guilty in this regard.
• std_throwaway 10y ago
  Misinformation is any information that does not follow the official guidelines laid out by the ministry of truth.
• readhn 10y ago
  Facebook needs a censorship department! Get a list of prohibited topis from white house and block those posts on facebook. Better yet, ask Trump what topics to block :)
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• millettjon 10y ago
  I deleted my Facebook account and suggest others do the same.
  • dredmorbius 10y ago
    Are you going to suggest this solution to every mass media channel which turns out to have perverse or pathological dynamics? Do you realise your personal actions in this case don't have any impact (at the margin) on the whole? Are you willing to entertain that perhaps there's something in the function of Facebook (and other online sites) that leads to information flows with strongly negative social welfare outcomes? (I don't have, and have never had, a personal Facebook account.)
• roughly27 10y ago
  Determining what is, and what is not, misinformation seems: 1. Intractable. How exactly do you propose to accurately vet every bit of information posted to facebook? 2. Dangerous. Who does the vetting? If it's an algorithm, who writes the algorithm? No matter which way you slice it, "doing more to stop the spread of misinformation" imposes someone's 'one true view' of reality and stifles the engine of western civilization: the open, competitive marketplace of ideas. This is clearly an emotionally driven sentiment caused by the moral outcry of a person considered 'bigoted' being elected to office. Stifling political expression will only make Trump/next trump/next next trump's populist appeal stronger.
• shiftoutbox 10y ago
  sign off ,tune out , and relax people . If you think Facebook or twitter has some secret knowledge others don't have , or don't have yet . You are sheep being lead to the slaughter .
• nogbit 10y ago
  LOL, whats it going to do run as a NPO and take donations from its users and no ads? Cmon Zuck, I dare ya because you know that is the only way to "fix" this...fix your bottom line.
• jondubois 10y ago
  I don't think this is only Facebook's fault. I watched several extremely biased Youtube videos on both sides. I guess it's just how decentralized media works; it only tells people what they want to hear. Not so long ago, the media used to be relatively trustworthy, now everything has become propaganda. It started online mostly but now even major TV channels and newspapers which used to pride themselves on journalistic integrity have become propaganda machines. There is no truth in the media anymore; the only way to approximate the truth is by watching opposing media channels and then 'averaging them out' in your mind. All the news I was reading online was so obviously biased in Hillary's favor that I was compelled to watch Fox news (which I used to think was complete garbage) just to try to get the other side of the argument.
  • miles7 10y ago
    This assumes Fox is as biased in one direction as, say, NPR is in the other. But you can tell the quality of reporting from the content itself and the way it is presented. For example, while cable news channels will go to the same non-expert pundits for every story, NPR will actually call a different specific expert who is knowledgable to comment on each story.
    • jondubois 10y ago
      Sure, that's something you have to account for as well (they're not equally biased). That said, you'd be surprised how well media organizations can bend hard facts (and so-called 'experts') to match their opinions. People who've worked in quantitative market research will tell you that you can find pretty much any pattern you want in any data if you present it (and label it) carefully. Just because they've put in extra work to get an 'expert' and did some research doesn't mean that they're unbiased; it just gives you extra confidence - But you still have to fact-check yourself.
  • daenz 10y ago
    > There is no truth in the media anymore; the only way to approximate the truth is by watching opposing media channels and then 'averaging them out' in your mind. Nailed it. I force myself to deliberately read viewpoints I disagree with, to listen to what they're saying, to hear what is important to them. Sometimes I see their points, sometimes I don't, but I always learn something new. It's really quite shocking and scary how many people aren't even familiar with the arguments of "the other side." The only know "their side's" caricature of the other side, which is simply not enough.
• mbostleman 10y ago
  It would be nice if this were approached more as a user experience enhancement as opposed to a content editorial function. I would love to see the former as my feed is so overwhelmed with garbage. The latter, however, would almost inevitably turn sinister - the leftist, PC, Silicon Valley influence would have no ability to check itself - even if it's not on purpose, the isolated bubble think could not be overcome. I can't imagine that it would hard to automate away teenagers purposely creating fake content.
• spinlock 10y ago
  Call me old fashioned but I blame people for being stupid rather than technology.
• makecheck 10y ago
  There are two big problems shown by this. First, that any one service like Facebook could become so large and unopposed that we need to care how it handles something like this. And second, that people seem fine with the idea of living only inside Facebook, unfriending or muting anyone who disagrees with them, until nothing else matters. This is an utterly unhealthy way for people to be. If you want to combat misinformation, you must also encourage (teach?) people to stop being spoon-fed and start being more curious and more critical.
  • kmtrowbr 10y ago
    Facebook could deliberately inject a certain amount of contrarian content into people's feeds.
• omegaworks 10y ago
  I think it would be better to provide something like the opposite of "friends you'd get along with" If we could switch the facebook algorithm to different modes - "people you agree with" "people who'd challenge you" That would be better than straight up blocking false things. Let the conversations happen.
• OliverJones 10y ago
  Here's what to do about Facebook. (1) permanently close your account. https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account (2) if you're like me and you can't do that, "unfriend" everybody except the people you work with. Delete all your affiliations and locations. If enough people did this FB would have to do a little struggling to retain membership. That's the kind of incentive they need. Altruism demonstrably doesn't work, especially Sand Hill Road altruism. (I help a couple of little nonprofits so it happens that I need a fb account.)
  • antocv 10y ago
    Alternative, lightweight solution, * Do not visit facebook often, do so only in incognito mode, delete other existing facebook cookies on all your browsers. * Do not use facebook app, inform people that it is a battery hog and steals everything it can on your phone. * Do not accept new friend requests, or send new ones. * Do not post status updates or any other kind of content * Do not "Like" things, do not comment. Do not produce anything for facebook actively. * Keep it only as a place to check if other people upload pictures of you by scrolling the feed a little, to tell them to stop if they post information about you, use the web interface for messaging any friends who dont know any other means of digital communication. * Sometimes Like things you dont, spread some misinformation, devalue what content/profile they already have about you. * Ofcourse set all your posts to private, and all other "settings" to maximum privacy, allow noone to write on your "wall" and so on.
    • amelius 10y ago
      Also a good tip: unfollow all your friends by default, except for a select few.
  • baby 10y ago
    No. I find facebook actually useful to talk to my friends and keep in touch with them.
    • amelius 10y ago
• tooFastFuckYou 10y ago
  It's a little late. The U.S. is already screwed by morons.
• piotrjurkiewicz 10y ago
  So what do they propose? To hire more human editors/moderators to evaluate/censor links and stories? FB already has too much power and its moderators affects 'politically undesirable' content too much. One week ago, FB blocked an event page of Independence March, which traditionally takes place on November 11th (Polish Independence Day) in Warsaw. This is the biggest mass event of Independence Day, having more than 100k participants each year. FB also blocked or removed pages of NGOs and political parties, which are organizing or support the march (some of them had 80k or 170k followers) and personal accounts of people involved in these organizations. Then FB went full rage and started to block personal accounts of everyone who invited or even positively mentioned the Independence March, including for example the personal account of editor-in-chief of the second largest daily newspaper in Poland (https://twitter.com/sjastrzebowski/status/793001362070052864 https://twitter.com/sjastrzebowski/status/793001362070052864). The most extreme case was the personal account of a MP, who wrote on his timeline: "I will be [on the Independence March] along with my family, whether FB likes that or not." (https://twitter.com/jakubiak_marek/status/793497135954202625... https://twitter.com/jakubiak_marek/status/793497135954202625...) His profile was blocked for 24 hours after that. Another case was a personal profile of a retired Intelligence Agency officer, who revealed in a FB post, that a local coordinator of an anti-government liberal-left protest movement during the communist period was a colonel of Soviet-dependent military intelligence agency. All of this happened just within the last month. FB actions generated a huge pushback and hit the headlines. Deputy Minister of Justice qualified FB actions as "censorship". Minister of Digitization tweeted that she "asked FB management for a talk". Many people started deleting their FB accounts in protest. FB got frightened and reactivated the event page of Independence March, but many nationalist/conservative organizations profiles still remain blocked.
• fiatjaf 10y ago
  It must stop its operations. That is too much.
• alexmingoia 10y ago
  The problem is that the Facebook feed shouldn't be about news in the first place, or anything that isn't original content from the people I follow. I miss the days when the news feed was photos of my friends, notices about new their new job, what they ate, etc. instead of a stream of tabloid junk and recycled news articles. Unfortunately Facebook gives no tools to limit the posts to only original content and profile updates. Curating your followed list is pointless since reposted crap and original content are mixed together.
  • kmtrowbr 10y ago
    I agree. I think there could be a limit on the amount of links and of images containing text that you can post in a day, as well as warning messages next to content that comes from questionable sources.
• eggy 10y ago
  My elders always taught me believe half of what you read, and believe is not such a good word here. People need to use their wetware and common sense. Tabloids were printing alien invasions with photos, or that certain celebrities were aliens, during the 70s and 80s, and most rational people did not believe them. The papers were allowed to continue printing. How about multiple sources, and not just being tuned into FB for your entire world view? I'm glad I taught my children how to live without their smart phones, and now they use them wisely. They can even coordinate meeting up when out in the city if their phone's battery or phone fails. Common sense is a waning resource.
• surferbayarea 10y ago
  Also to all the people here who are ok with selling their privacy to facebook, google - how do you now feel that a Trump-led government will have 100% access to all your data! It is time that we fix the internet from the menace of the advertising business model - that has not only destroyed the internet but society itself...
• munificent 10y ago
  Facebook relatively recently reaction buttons. Would a "This is untrue" reaction button help?
  • dredmorbius 10y ago
    That's an option. You've got the fundamental problem that many people treat truth as a popularity contest or majority opinion. It's not. You'd need at some level a source of trusted truths against which to compare or rate statements. Though user-based flagging could work. There's both a wisdom and a madness of crowds to contend with.
• jondubois 10y ago
  The biggest source of bias in the media is not related to feeding people false information, it's about misdirection. If you have two articles A and B, where A is more important than B, sometimes the media outlet will deliberately choose to publish B instead of A if it matches their philosophy better (even though it's less important). If the news outlet shows each reader 5 articles of type B for every 1 article of type A - Then they are manipulating the reader's opinion to become biased towards type B thinking (by focusing their attention on less important stuff). It doesn't matter if all articles are 100% accurate, your perception is being affected through the exposure imbalance; through priming. I think that's what happened with the Clinton/Trump fiasco; "Hillary media" was publishing more articles about Trump's "sexual deviance and unstable character" while "Trump media" was publishing more articles about Hillary's "deception and murky financial schemes".
• MaysonL 10y ago
  "Rhetorical Fever" is entirely too contagious. Recovery from it can provide immunity, but is fairly rare. (See Shikasta by Nobel-Prize winner Doris Lessing for more).
• naveen99 10y ago
  Knock knock. Who's there Hillary Clinton Hillary Clinton who ? Hey guys I found the trump supporter. Let's out him on facebook ! Edit: flagged ? Haha! Let's out him on hacker news too!
• reustle 10y ago
  Not long ago I saw a post about the oil pipeline protests. It was a photo of a huge crowd, and stated that the media was not covering the protests properly and that people are taking a stand. The photo was of tens of thousands of people, and had over 230,000 shares. 230k.... A quick image lookup showed that it was in fact a photo from Woodstock 1969, but since the comments on the photo were restricted, nobody had been able to point it out. I went to report it, but facebook seems to have removed the "misinformation" option when reporting content (thought there was one before?)
• colllectorof 10y ago
  "OMG, Trump has won through lies and deception! We failed to stop him. How on Earth did that happen? We must out-manipulate our opponents next time." If you read between the lines, this is what the article condenses to. The discussion here is mostly creepy groupthink shit. Social networks fact-checking their content? What's next? Should AT&T stop the spread of misinformation over its phone lines? Should USPS fact-check your mail? Facebook is not a real news source and never going to be one. At best it's a communication medium. At worst it's a giant propaganda machine. Any moves to get it further away from the former and closer to the latter are just machinations to change who benefits from the propaganda and nothing else. We don't need an "improved" Facebook. We need a working replacement for old-school newspapers, TV stations and radio channels. The "new media" eroded all of those, but failed (so far, at least) to provide anything of equal utility and value. Hence all the issues involved in the coverage of these elections.
  • erdevs 10y ago
    > "OMG, Trump has won through lies and deception! We failed to stop him. How on Earth did that happen? We must out-manipulate our opponents next time." This is a ridiculous oversimplification of a complex and important set of issues. The issue is the spread of facts vs misinformation, not liberalism vs conservativism, nor Democrats vs Republicans, nor Trump vs anti-Trump. Facts can work on both sides, as can misinformation. It's kind of fucked up to assume facts somehow only go one way. > Social networks fact-checking their content? What's next? Should AT&T stop the spread of misinformation over its phone lines? Should USPS fact-check your mail? Well, gee... Let's think carefully. Are your private phone calls on AT&T a public discourse? Is your mail? Do either AT&T or USPS signal boost some of your discussions during public transmittal? Is your analogy even logical? Facebook is a communication medium, as you said. Moreover, it has a set of rules and policies governing what can be shared, which shared content gets shown to a given user, and how the content is further propagated and boosted. The entire discussion, which your post is completely sidestepping, is what content should or shouldn't be propagated and boosted. One can make arguments for more rules or fewer on this, for different rules or keeping the same rules. But asserting that it is a non-issue or drawing false equivalences are non-arguments irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
  • 10y ago
• will_pseudonym 10y ago
  We obviously need a commission that determines what things are facts and which things are fiction. It will be comprised of experts who know more than the populace, so it will be much better. It will be called the Ministry of Truth.
  • kmtrowbr 10y ago
    The radio, print, and television media have laws concerning what they can publish. I don't think it's so incredibly impossible to imagine that the new technology which is replacing those old forms, might also have something in the spirit of those older laws. Also consider: Facebook is already censoring what you see, it's just censoring to show you things you will like.
• avivo 10y ago
  We are developing systems to identify and check the impact of misinformation at scale (triage + human in the loop). If you're interested in potentially joining or funding us, let us know https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSclhq7zrUKI3nxJFiYwJ-NvyW4xAeLbSF7cWxst6GKBON9Y7Q/viewform https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSclhq7zrUKI3nxJFiYw... ----------------------------- Also relevant — my comment 43 days ago to the new "Request for Startups": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12594955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12594955 "I'm really happy to see YC putting attention toward the (increasing) market failure around media quality. It's a serious problem, with IMHO imperils governance and stability worldwide. I'm exploring a way to improve this dramatically, and fairly rapidly; essentially creating a stronger market for trust & quality, with resulting ranking rewards from FB, Google et al. If you are interested in learning more and perhaps being involved, let me know (yc@aviv.me). Experience with news organizations, partnerships, platform companies, pr, moderation systems, or machine learning are all especially helpful."
• agumonkey 10y ago
  What if Facebook found a way to turn it's billion into tiny wikipedia fact checker.
• Osiris30 10y ago
  "It’s totally forgotten now, but for the 100 years after the American Revolution, the U.S. government made it free or almost free to send newspapers anywhere by mail. It was available to papers of all political perspectives, with no government censorship. The rationale was straightforward: This was necessary for people to participate in governing themselves." https://theintercept.com/2016/11/09/donald-trump-will-be-president-this-is-what-we-do-next/ https://theintercept.com/2016/11/09/donald-trump-will-be-pre...
• hunvreus 10y ago
  The same way parents are responsible for the education of their kids, not schools, individuals are responsible for feeding their brain and developing opinions. Facebook isn't promising more than cat gifs, Buzzfeed click bait and rants. It is not more an echo chamber than your group of friends.
• bobsgame 10y ago
  I would like to see less headlines frame every statement made by a company as "admits." Facebook is not admitting to wrongdoing or confessing to a secret crime they tried to cover up, they are acknowledging there is an issue that they have to improve on.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• ddingus 10y ago
  Facebook isn't the right venue for this. Of course it's filled with garbage! While it's noble to seek better, the reality is people are using poor tools because the good ones are failing them. Ask where did journalism go and that's the start on real solutions. If we had that as we used to, the garbage on FB would be much less of a worry. The laughable would fit laughed at as it should.
• kmtrowbr 10y ago
  I have had a lot of similar thoughts recently. If you think of this historically -- soon after mass-communication technologies were first invented, they were eventually abused, the radio propaganda of WWII being one of the best examples. Laws were introduced, and corporations grew up around these technologies, the producers of the content became professionalized, and by doing it full time, some of them even developed ethics and standards of behavior. Now, that old media has been destroyed by new technology. The new technology is fundamentally superior in terms of the volume of information that can be transmitted, and it is both push and pull. However, the old media's "checks and balances" were also destroyed, and that is having incredibly negative consequences. I think there are some concrete, simple, technical steps that Facebook & browser vendors can do: * Before allowing you to share an article from a source that is of questionable trustworthiness, it should show you a warning message: "This site is known to contain untrue content." They might also consider adding an alert next to links from these sites when they are being displayed in the news feed. I think technically, this problem is not that different from the way that email systems deal with spam. * Similarly, the way that browser vendors show you an alert before allowing you to navigate to sites that contain viruses, etc, the browser can show you an alert message before taking you to a site that is known to have untrue content. And just like you see a red error message when visiting a site that doesn't have a proper SSL setup, this could appear for sites that are untrustworthy. Don't underestimate the psychological power of strategically placed small red warning messages over time. Obviously making the decisions of what goes on the list will be a highly political affair, but what is nice to realize is that, unlike the government, all these technologies are developed by private companies and given to their users for free. If you keep the bar for what is considered "lying" pretty high, most educated professional people (who are the employees of these companies) would be able to agree on which things to warn about. Additionally, the "social media" space has greatly matured and consolidated. There is no longer really a direct competitor to Facebook. Facebook & browser vendors now have the opportunity and, the responsibility to innovate in this area. I think they can do a lot without really impacting their bottom line. Don't allow yourself to get sucked into the problem of how computers might be able to determine "truth" -- that, is absolutely unsolvable. We will not be able to censor the CNN, the NYTimes or even Fox News (in general). However, there are many dark corners of the internet that are actually pretty influential, that could be toned down with this approach.
• white-flame 10y ago
  I really enjoy the dynamic of large forums, where varying ideas can pitch in, and I appreciate that much more in comparison to family members who are steeped in facebook. Global forums can end up with a fairly civil discourse, because everybody knows and acknowledges that there are differences in opinion. If you want your thoughts to be respected, you need to make them level headed, even if it is an emotional argument. The broader the forum, the better it tends to be. Of course, it also depends on good moderation, but even the self-moderation of HN and /. tend to end up being level headed and fairly moderate. But there are no alternative opinions or moderators in facebook. People subscribe to small echo chamber radicals, which laser focus on some hyper exaggerated version of their outlook and there's no counterpoints in sight. Disagreements with what other people post ends up in unfriending, because it's too personally dissonant. This whole blurting out of one's impassioned political, religious, and social ideologies is simply not appropriate public discussion! You don't go out to social gatherings and start yelling stuff like this. Yet, on facebook, people share such content on their walls for all their acquaintances to see, which ends up being incendiary. These are subjects reserved for those you have enough rapport with to warrant deep controversial dives, not your personally public web presence. The very nature of the mechanics of social media tends to stoke and reward this behavior.
• tmptmp 10y ago
  I am not a Trump supporter, as far as his anti-Muslim stance is concerned. But I do support some of his economic stances which are labeled as "protectionist" by mainstream media. I may be wrong as I am not an economic expert also his take on immigration is certainly a thing of significance. A related note regarding Facebook here: AFAIK, Facebook's curators were very biased and were always removing anything to do support what "mainstream vocal leftists" find objectionable. e.g. Be it to do with the shameless suppression of news related to people like Geert Wilders or Pamella Geller who are not by any means right wing fanatics. Geert Wilders is a staunch supporter of homosexuals. Just because he criticizes the barbaric ideology of Islam he is labeled as a "right-wing nut" by leftists with covert/overt Islam-apologetic stances. It is well known that Saudi kingdom has large investments in mainstream US media, that's what Trump drew people's attention to. Who knows how much of Facebook is controlled by Saudi and the likes. [1] It's no surprise that mainstream media got the prediction about Trump wrong. I guess, there predictions and poll-results were in fact propaganda against Trump. I felt it that way, many people I know felt it and I am sure many more people must also have felt it. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ex9ldUHSgjs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ex9ldUHSgjs
• known 10y ago
  Unlike traditional media, social media spreads free opinion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_West https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_West
• known 10y ago
  FB is supposed to promote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd
  • dredmorbius 10y ago
    Mackay had some thoughts on that topic. https://archive.org/details/memoirsextraord05mackgoog https://archive.org/details/memoirsextraord05mackgoog https://archive.org/details/memoirsextraord01mackgoog https://archive.org/details/memoirsextraord01mackgoog
• danblick 10y ago
  Neil Postman argued in "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business" (1985) that entertainment had become the "supra-ideology of all discourse on television". Good television is entertaining while bad television is not, so we learn to judge all content on television based on its entertainment value. "Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images." I think Postman's comments are extremely relevant today (30 years after 1985) except that now they would apply to the Facebook news feed. (The quote about 'exchanging images' is now literally true.) The role of "news as entertainment" does a lot to explain the Trump's emergence as a candidate in the first place (he got a lot of coverage early on because of his outlandishness).
• andrewclunn 10y ago
  Let people develop critical thinking skills and determine their trusted sources. Keep censorship out of this!
  • dredmorbius 10y ago
    That's been tried. It scaled poorly.
• emodendroket 10y ago
  I mean it seems a little dystopian if Facebook is going to become the arbiter of what information is accurate and start culling stuff.
• zxcvvcxz 10y ago
  Something I haven't seen mentioned yet is the voting system. I think the voting system ruins online discourse. Let me explain. Within my own social media and online forum bubbles, there are a certain set of norms and beliefs that are easy to express. But should I express the 'wrong' beliefs in the 'wrong' forum, I simply get downvoted to oblivion. And then people don't see what I have to say. Look what happens here on Hacker News, my comments will literally start faaaaading awaaaaaay!
  • dredmorbius 10y ago
    Truth isn't a majority opinion. It's correspondence to an external Universe. Voting systems _may_ help get you there, but not if the voting-group tendency rewards values other than truth. Related: Celine's 2nd law. The problem is complex: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/
• Animats 10y ago
  Here's a tool someone could write. Write a browser add-on which modifies Facebook pages so that the news links are changed to Google, Bing, and Wikipedia searches for the news headline. Connect to Google/Bing in a mode with no signin or cookie info, so you don't get "search personalization". This will get you out of Facebook's filter bubble quickly. Google and Bing have problems, too, but they are somewhat better at blocking spam, having been at it longer and being in the business of forcing spammers to buy their ads instead.
  • majani 10y ago
    Better and easier to do a Google News search for the link itself. If the link doesn't show up in news search, it can be considered a less credible source. If the link shows up, it'll be accompanied by follow up sources
    • jwm4 10y ago
      Google as the arbitrator of what's good or bad? Please!
      • majani 10y ago
        well are you going to suggest a better solution?
• _audakel 10y ago
  why not just add a "spam flag" on all posts and let the users clean it up? Or something like a downvote.
• ern 10y ago
  Zuckerberg seems to be denying that its a problem: http://money.cnn.com/2016/11/10/technology/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-fake-news/ http://money.cnn.com/2016/11/10/technology/facebook-mark-zuc...
• dvh 10y ago
  I was thinking something similar about gmail. Once a year or so someone send me powerpoint with "the Mars would be as big as moon" and other obvious nonsense. Gmail should notify them before sending that it is indeed bullshit, if they really want to send it.
  • deleted 10y ago
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• deleted 10y ago
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• TrumpVoter12345 10y ago
  Throwaway for obvious reasons. It's dangerous to support reform against the reactionary left. I'm a Trump voter. I consider myself pretty well educated (M.Sc. CS/EE, honors), and I work in a research lab. I'm not your typical Trump voter. Full disclosure: I'm also an immigrant (legal one, nearly 20 years), naturalized US citizen, I make several hundred thousand dollars a year, and pay a ton in taxes. I'm liberal on social issues. I support LGBT and gay marriage. I'm an atheist. I have a wife and a kid. I'm also pro-gun, pro marijuana, and pro letting people do whatever they want with their lives. I'm also extremely fiscally conservative, and against illegal immigration. My FB feed was so skewed against Trump I had to close my account. Bombshell stories on Clinton wouldn't trend, while the most inane BS about Trump would immediately reach the top and stay there. It is strange for me to hear FB being accused of being "too conservative". I certainly saw nothing like that "red" feed on WSJ. BTW, I could elaborate why I voted for Trump if anyone is interested. I don't agree with him on everything, but on the balance he seemed like the lesser of two evils to me.
  • spiritofenter 10y ago
    I would like to hear you elaborate on your reasons for voting Trump, particularly what kinds of changes you are expecting/looking forward to.
    • TrumpVoter12345 10y ago
      Happy to oblige. Let's get the big one out of the way: I disagree with Trump on climate change. That said, the current president did jack sh#t about it, and so would Clinton (who is owned by her wealthy donors). Combined with the fact that the President can't enact policy unilaterally, and there's broad consensus around climate change in the legislative branch, I don't think too much damage will be done if any at all. I voted for Trump for several primary reasons: 1. I'm very much against war, and Clinton has shown herself as a war hawk again, and again, and again, and basically wrecked much of the Middle East as a secretary of state. Enough is enough. This alone would have been a sufficient reason for me to vote for Trump. 2. I do not believe in government handouts. I believe that for prosperity, and especially to improve the lives of the working poor, it is necessary to create jobs. To do this, you need to reduce supply of unskilled, below-minimum-wage labor flowing across the border, and make keeping jobs in the country the low energy state into which corporations will naturally arrive, if they want to have US markets at their disposal. Trump promised both of those things. 3. I do not believe that free flow of military age males from the countries with which we're de-facto at war is a wise thing to have. Refugee needs would be much better served by their neighbors, not by people whose military blew up their relatives. 4. It is becoming blindingly obvious that Obamacare is a trillion-dollar handout to the Big Pharma and medical insurance companies. The healthcare is SIGNIFICANTLY more expensive now than it was before, and coverage is worse as well. And the cost is growing double digit percentages every year. Donald Trump promised to improve competition by allowing import of drugs and letting people shop for medical insurance across state lines. Not sufficient, IMO, but we just can't afford to pay 10x for the same drugs anymore. 5. The vast majority of Donald Trump's contributions comes from his small scale supporters, not from Wall St and megacorps. As such, he's not beholden to their interests, unlike certain other candidate. Thiel being the only notable exception I can name off the top of my head. 6. I've found what the press did in this cycle completely disgusting. So TL;DR: anti-war, pro-jobs, anti-sjw/pc, pro-LGBT, not owned by Wall St or the establishment. That sounds pretty good to me, loose tongue and personal antics notwithstanding. I don't agree with him on some things, but by and large there's more overlap than with Clinton.
• hedonistbot 10y ago
  I love it when engineers try to fix social problems. When the constructs of the solutions are human-made then they are gameable and therefore not a solution. And also why is this suddenly a problem? I would wager that if Hillary won there would be much less talk of "bias" and "misinformation".
• tomohawk 10y ago
  They have it backwards. Its not about blocking misinformation. That just puts you in the role of the Inquisition. It's about seeking the truth.
  • dredmorbius 10y ago
    Both matter. Blocking fuckwits (or misinformation) is a very useful heuristic to promoting truths. (Google "Block fuckwits" for my earlier discussion(s))
• jondubois 10y ago
  I think that news and advertising is too powerful to be in private hands. All major news and advertising sources should be nationalized or turned into non-profits.
• tmat 10y ago
  ministry of truth'd
• SixSigma 10y ago
  Itt: people who think the world is dominated by unequivocal ideas and information.
• amelius 10y ago
  Can't proper moderation be crowdsourced somehow? E.g.: a group of fact-checkers, with reputation based on previous performance and a page-rank like system, and perhaps a meta-level above that (people checking the fact-checkers), so that gaming the system becomes difficult.
• thr0waway1239 10y ago
  The linked article from NiemanLab [1] is a really odd read. It ends like this: "It’s been said that we get the media we deserve: that the journalism we see is a reflection of business structures and audience decisions, not the result of an elite’s decisions to shape public opinion. There’s a lot of truth to that. But the information we produce and consume is generated by human beings, not systems, and those human beings have just gotten the shock of their professional lives." So he starts by saying that the journalism we see is not the result of an elite's decisions to shape public opinion as if it is a good thing (which you would probably agree with). Then the next line says that the result of the opposite - the unwashed masses? - is (some bad thing will occur). At this point, you are probably expecting something neutral to follow. I mean, after all, the author talks about the journalism profession, which is supposed to provide both sides of the picture. What actually follows is this: "If we’re going to build a better environment for news, we need to think about these issues in a much bigger context than one election night. And it’ll take everyone — journalists, readers, tech companies, and more — to make it happen." Great, so the author has just defined himself, Facebook, the general media and the people who agree with his views as the "elite" who wants to "fix" the problem by shaping public opinion in a way which is more palatable to him. Maybe this attitude is what caused this "systemic shock"? [1] http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/11/the-forces-that-drove-this-elections-media-failure-are-likely-to-get-worse/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/11/the-forces-that-drove-this-...
• swiftisthebest 10y ago
  All they need to do is have a skeptical reaction along with their other emotive reactions.
• grandalf 10y ago
  Trump's strategy worked brilliantly on social media. Here's the strategy in a nutshell: 1) Say something outrageous that news orgs will grab for a quick, clickbait story that will generate tons of ad revenue. 2) Let outraged people share via social media. 3) Benefit as some of the people seeing the content will not disagree and will take the candidacy seriously. 4) Win. It doesn't matter what Facebook does with its trending section, the real value of Trump's strategy came with the way it exploits the basic sharing / newsfeed mechanism's intended behavior. Even today, many Trump opposers think that they were helping by posting their outrage at every rude comment Trump said.
  • talmand 10y ago
    I agree, I place a great deal of responsibility on the news media for popularizing the circus mentality of the election cycle for profit. Trump saw it for what it was near the beginning and took advantage. Every time the news media focused on his antics, true or not, and not on the issues pushed him closer to the Presidency. Well, that and the fact they apparently had problems with admitting Clinton was a flawed candidate.
  • fullshark 10y ago
    Except he closed the gap in the last few weeks of the race when he stopped saying outrageous shit.
    • debacle 10y ago
      People still want to believe that Trump couldn't have won except by exploiting stupid people.
      • grandalf 10y ago
        His message resonated with a lot of people. His tactics exploited social media patterns and mass media patterns effectively. He also ran against a candidate plagued by scandal and widely disliked.
• grandalf 10y ago
  This headline could be retitled: "Silicon Valley calls upon Facebook to use more aggressive censorship"
• gdubs 10y ago
  Look folks, I get that this is a libertarian crowd but hear me out: If someone says the earth is flat, it's not dystopian for editors to minimize those claims, or even point out how incorrect they are. Instead, in today's media world, the response would be, "two sides disagree on contour of the planet", and would present two talking heads to chatter about their opinions. Facts are facts, and we're losing the battle online to disinformation. Beware of slippery slope arguments about how editorializing leads to propaganda.