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> decrease the spread of misinformation This rings very "Ministry of Truth" to me. Scary stuff that companies even consider policing this when it's completely

> decrease the spread of misinformation This rings very "Ministry of Truth" to me. Scary stuff that companies even consider policing this when it's completely not their job. Our social networks should not be deciding what's true and what isn't for us.

fisherjeff 10y ago
Just out of curiosity - who do you think should be deciding that? Certainly not the individual, given the immense resource advantage of the organizations putting out false information.
- problems 10y ago
  Certainly the individual, assisted by the extreme ease of finding fairly accurate information from reputable organizations. It's extremely worrying that anyone would propose anything else - how some refuse to think for themselves or vet information properly in this day and age I'll never understand.
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    >the extreme ease of finding fairly accurate information from reputable organizations. The what now? Doesn't "finding fairly accurate information from reputable organizations" just mean handing your thinking over to the definition of "reputable"?
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - problems 10y ago
      You can pretty much drop any fake news item into Google and immediately get back results from more reputable sites saying it's fake. Yes, you might have to do a little research into what's reputable, what their biases are, etc, but it's really not that hard and only has to be done about once or twice per major source. If you can't be assed to do that, yeah, you get fake news, enjoy it. I don't think a sizeable portion of the population is changing their political opinions over it, more that the bases are using it to confirm pre-existing biases.
      - akisej 10y ago
        How many do you discover via google.com vs social networking sites like Facebook? The logistics of switching between discovering an article on Facebook and verifying it on google.com is cumbersome enough with short attention spans on web. If you consume content passively on mobile (as an increasing number of people do), there's no reasonable expectation you can be held to, to switch between Safari/ Chrome and Facebook every time you read something. Of all the articles you read in a day, how many do you yourself verify by looking them up? How many do you consider "plausible enough", hence never bother checking on their factuality? If something does conform to your pre-existing biases, you have zero incentive to actively look for something that challenges your opinion, but if a disclaimer was "right there", it might be harder for you to ignore.
  - captain_crabs 10y ago
    When the ideal is more work than the default, most people won't behave ideally. So while I agree with you in spirit, who defines the reputable organizations? Individuals have an asymmetric losing fight here since the effort it takes to put out crap is far less than to deal with it. How can we make the process of finding & consuming news humane in that it works ideally for the average/below-average user? That's the hard question, and I think it still remains.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - problems 10y ago
      It's not a hard question, it's an easy one - We can't fix it. If you want accurate news you have to think, you have to be willing to know a site's history, who pays for it, what their usual bias is, how they compare with scientific research papers and compare with other news sources to see who's reporting. You have to do that foot work, if you can't do it, you'll never get accurate news. Once you know a few news sources that are generally trustworthy this gets a lot easier of course, with some exceptions. You only really have to do this once per source to get a basic feeling. We can't just go out and do that for people either without introducing similar biases. It has to be done by every individual who wants an accurate depiction of the truth. Call it idealistic, but anything less is unacceptable in one way or another, so it's the way it has to be. At best we could build vetting tools into social networks or perhaps better as browser extensions to allow you to filter and see general details about sources, it might be difficult to not introduce issues into these sorts of tools though. Voting systems and public commenting offer a decent alternative in many ways, but often produce one set of biases that dominate completely. They're no replacement for proper research.
      - captain_crabs 10y ago
        Ah, I see your point about outsourced thinking. If you take a bunch of informed, critical thinkers who do their research and point them at the same group of sources, I wager you'd end up with a largely consistent set of questions being asked, and relatively "factual"(from the pov of an average American) group of answers (who owns them, how was this article paid for, etc). Through this, you could make whatever bias exists in a piece really explicit (loosely defined as relations & incentives). So the "vetting" toolsets that make this easy and available are what make consuming news more humane. I think the "ministry of truth" thought is valid, because an organization started off of good will and good intent might be that way for a while, but after it is cemented in and the people who run it filter out, the power structure it leaves is ripe for abuse. But this is what the hard question is: how might we tackle this, beyond just telling people to think better? If you had to create a new "article" primitive, meaning, you had to have these things to be considered an article, what would you put in it to aid explicit bias and relieve the burden on informed thinkers? (Title, Author, Contents, ...)
  - baumandm 10y ago
    I would expect Facebook to have a vested interest in being such a reputable organization. If one doesn't trust the information he or she sees on Facebook, that certainly reflects on Facebook (whether rightly or wrongly).
    - problems 10y ago
      I don't think so, Facebook is a platform, people treat it like one in my experience at least. Facebook doesn't write news so they can't become a reputable authority for news. You can blame facebook about as much as you can blame the existence of the internet itself.

fisherjeff 10y ago

Just out of curiosity - who do you think should be deciding that? Certainly not the individual, given the immense resource advantage of the organizations putting out false information.

problems 10y ago
Certainly the individual, assisted by the extreme ease of finding fairly accurate information from reputable organizations. It's extremely worrying that anyone would propose anything else - how some refuse to think for themselves or vet information properly in this day and age I'll never understand.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  >the extreme ease of finding fairly accurate information from reputable organizations. The what now? Doesn't "finding fairly accurate information from reputable organizations" just mean handing your thinking over to the definition of "reputable"?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - problems 10y ago
    You can pretty much drop any fake news item into Google and immediately get back results from more reputable sites saying it's fake. Yes, you might have to do a little research into what's reputable, what their biases are, etc, but it's really not that hard and only has to be done about once or twice per major source. If you can't be assed to do that, yeah, you get fake news, enjoy it. I don't think a sizeable portion of the population is changing their political opinions over it, more that the bases are using it to confirm pre-existing biases.
    - akisej 10y ago
      How many do you discover via google.com vs social networking sites like Facebook? The logistics of switching between discovering an article on Facebook and verifying it on google.com is cumbersome enough with short attention spans on web. If you consume content passively on mobile (as an increasing number of people do), there's no reasonable expectation you can be held to, to switch between Safari/ Chrome and Facebook every time you read something. Of all the articles you read in a day, how many do you yourself verify by looking them up? How many do you consider "plausible enough", hence never bother checking on their factuality? If something does conform to your pre-existing biases, you have zero incentive to actively look for something that challenges your opinion, but if a disclaimer was "right there", it might be harder for you to ignore.
- captain_crabs 10y ago
  When the ideal is more work than the default, most people won't behave ideally. So while I agree with you in spirit, who defines the reputable organizations? Individuals have an asymmetric losing fight here since the effort it takes to put out crap is far less than to deal with it. How can we make the process of finding & consuming news humane in that it works ideally for the average/below-average user? That's the hard question, and I think it still remains.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - problems 10y ago
    It's not a hard question, it's an easy one - We can't fix it. If you want accurate news you have to think, you have to be willing to know a site's history, who pays for it, what their usual bias is, how they compare with scientific research papers and compare with other news sources to see who's reporting. You have to do that foot work, if you can't do it, you'll never get accurate news. Once you know a few news sources that are generally trustworthy this gets a lot easier of course, with some exceptions. You only really have to do this once per source to get a basic feeling. We can't just go out and do that for people either without introducing similar biases. It has to be done by every individual who wants an accurate depiction of the truth. Call it idealistic, but anything less is unacceptable in one way or another, so it's the way it has to be. At best we could build vetting tools into social networks or perhaps better as browser extensions to allow you to filter and see general details about sources, it might be difficult to not introduce issues into these sorts of tools though. Voting systems and public commenting offer a decent alternative in many ways, but often produce one set of biases that dominate completely. They're no replacement for proper research.
    - captain_crabs 10y ago
      Ah, I see your point about outsourced thinking. If you take a bunch of informed, critical thinkers who do their research and point them at the same group of sources, I wager you'd end up with a largely consistent set of questions being asked, and relatively "factual"(from the pov of an average American) group of answers (who owns them, how was this article paid for, etc). Through this, you could make whatever bias exists in a piece really explicit (loosely defined as relations & incentives). So the "vetting" toolsets that make this easy and available are what make consuming news more humane. I think the "ministry of truth" thought is valid, because an organization started off of good will and good intent might be that way for a while, but after it is cemented in and the people who run it filter out, the power structure it leaves is ripe for abuse. But this is what the hard question is: how might we tackle this, beyond just telling people to think better? If you had to create a new "article" primitive, meaning, you had to have these things to be considered an article, what would you put in it to aid explicit bias and relieve the burden on informed thinkers? (Title, Author, Contents, ...)
- baumandm 10y ago
  I would expect Facebook to have a vested interest in being such a reputable organization. If one doesn't trust the information he or she sees on Facebook, that certainly reflects on Facebook (whether rightly or wrongly).
  - problems 10y ago
    I don't think so, Facebook is a platform, people treat it like one in my experience at least. Facebook doesn't write news so they can't become a reputable authority for news. You can blame facebook about as much as you can blame the existence of the internet itself.