8 ms·

Previously > Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation on its platform That is exactly what censorship is.

by est 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
_rpd 10y ago
Perhaps if the definition of 'misinformation' is expanded to include legitimate but politically inconvenient information.
- leesalminen 10y ago
  There is currently a subset of the internet talking about how the Earth is flat. While that may seem to be "misinformation" to you or I, why is it "wrong" for it to be shared/discussed/thought about on Facebook?
  - _rpd 10y ago
    You're probably posing this question to HN as a whole, rather than me, however, my comment was focusing on the term 'exactly' in the comment to which I was replying. I personally think that there is legitimate censorship (child porn, detailed instructions for constructing weapons of mass destruction, etc), but that the vast majority of 'fake news' and even outright false information doesn't fall into that scope. Even there I have to hedge though, since some false information can cause very harmful panic.
    - leesalminen 10y ago
      Ah, you are correct. My apologies, and it was not meant as an attack on you personally. I agree with your examples, of course. I'm not against common sense restrictions. But, I think these should be decided upon up front with a transparent review process for adding new categories. To leave that open ended would inevitably lead to abuse.
  - woodruffw 10y ago
    The fact that you chose a relatively benign falsehood (the earth being flat) reveals that you, yourself, understand that it's "wrong" for it to be shared in a way that incorrectly reflects its truth value. It shouldn't be our concern if conspiracy theorists decide to share misinformation among themselves. It becomes our concern when they take advantage of human emotions and insufficient algorithmic filtering to manipulate their way to the top of the newsfeeds of major social sites.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - anigbrowl 10y ago
    It's not wrong for it to be shared, but nor is it wrong to automatically affix a tag saying '90% bullshit.' I would much prefer that such things weren't in demand; it'd be great to live in a world where every adult person had reliable bullshit detectors, so we wouldn't be swamped in logical fallacies and ancillary nonsense, but in the meantime the speed and connectedness of our social technologies has vastly outpaced the general population's ability to digest the available information, and so the disease of populism has broken out again as the new media go through their adolescent stage.
    - jon-wood 10y ago
      Sadly I doubt adding the hypothetical bullshit tag would help. The sort of people sharing and reading this stuff are ones who want to believe it. If you start tagging it as fake they'll just fall back to the argument that The Man doesn't want you to know the truth. There's no quick fix for this. It's going to take a generation or two of concerted education from an early age in critical thinking, and somehow I doubt making people question what they're told is going to be a priority for the next four years.
- jayess 10y ago
  There's no "perhaps" about it.
- android521 10y ago
  You can be certain that it will be used that way.
- Inconel 10y ago
  All this talk of fake news and censorship increasingly makes me feel as though journalism is abdicating its responsibility to be a voice of dissent and skepticism by being entirely too cozy with corporate and government interests in exchange for access. This quote has been attributed to many people over the years but I've always been fond of the saying: News is something somebody doesn't want printed; all else is advertising.
chourobin 10y ago
To be fair, dealing with fake news doesn't mean taking posts down. He mentioned just showing a warning next to stories flagged as false -- much like how spam is treated in our emails.
skybrian 10y ago
It does seem scary if they screw it up, but I can see how it could be done right, at least for the low-hanging fruit. How about a simple dialog? "This article is mostly false according to Snopes. Are you sure you want to share it?" Then if you think Snopes got it wrong, you can post it anyway. Or how about: "This article is satire. Are you sure you want to share it?" There's nothing wrong with posting satire if that's what you meant to do. If that's not what you meant, it saves you some embarrassment for posting it as fact. Seems like that's what a (semi-)intelligent assistant should do, right?
- est 10y ago
  The exact same thing happens within China many years ago. China is decades ahead in information flow control. Websites like Weibo/QQ/Wechat will display a banner text saying some tweets (or microblogging cards as you call it) contains a mis-information. Any mis-information with more than five hundred retweets will face criminal prosecution. The result? Authorities fight mis-information with half-baked and premature refutes. In practice refutes can be 100% arbitrary even fake. You can't refute a refute because they are final, non-debatable and in-reversible. Remember the refute mechanism is to stop the spread of "mis-information" so debate refutes are dangerous and would cause Streisand effect. The best part, the process is 100% manual, so PR firms totally lobbied website admins, officials in power, this corrupted industry is multi-million dollar business today. So who watches the watchmen? It's a twisted long path ahead.
  - skybrian 10y ago
    Good to know. Only, that doesn't sound like the "exact same thing". More like the parallel universe version (where Spock has a beard). I think the key point here is making sure your intelligent assistant works for you. Unfortunately, currently available assistants all come from powerful companies.
  - ambicapter 10y ago
    > Any mis-information with more than five hundred retweets will face criminal prosecution. Seems like a BIG difference.
throwaway5752 10y ago
This is sophistry. If I have a business, I can say "shirts and shoes required". We have laws about protected classes that are vulnerable to discrimination as exceptions, but on _my private property_ I can - within proscribed legal limits - dictate acceptable behavior, and ask people not adhering to those rules to leave. You can dress it up, but Facebook is a private website. They do fancy stuff with information they collect about you and use it to sell you ads. They have terms of service that define acceptable behavior, and they have no SLA / guarantee about what you share reaching others or what others share reaching you. That is the deal. If you don't like the deal, Facebook is not a right, and you can choose to not use Facebook or not, depending on your morals. Now, what the article described, "Facebook does not intend to suppress the posts itself. Instead, it would offer the software to enable a third party — in this case, most likely a partner Chinese company — to monitor popular stories and topics that bubble up as users share them across the social network, the people said. Facebook’s partner would then have full control to decide whether those posts should show up in users’ feeds." <- This is completely censorship. Governments censor. Facebook saying it doesn't want a bunch of Macedonian fake news click bait stories crapping up it's platform is a business decision by a private company.
- kareemm 10y ago
  When companies have wide-ranging impacts on real-world events (governments, economies, land use, etc) they tend to get regulated. I would be shocked if the large tech co's weren't subject to increased regulation 10y from now.
  - est 10y ago
    So why is taxi a regulated industry?
    - tn13 10y ago
      Why is a Hispanic lady selling her home made dish is subject to regulation and jail term ?
- quickConclusion 10y ago
AndrewKemendo 10y ago
I wouldn't be so quick to throw around that term. The reason many, including myself, dislike the term censorship as applied to private entities is because it equivocates the threat between censors. If Facebook prevents me from communicating something because they don't like it, the ramification is that I simply post it elsewhere and distribute it there. If the government prevents me from communicating something because they don't like it, the ramification is that I have no outlet for it that does not come with the threat of violence, in the form of jail. Very different outcomes. At the point in which Facebook = Government in terms of state monopolized communications channel with government enforcement mechanisms then this definition would fit. It is however, despite it's popularity, nowhere near that nor reasonably possible.
- inimino 10y ago
  Throwing people in jail isn't necessary, subtle influences in what people see and don't see are far more effective.
  - mc32 10y ago
    The PRC uses many methods to suppress other opinion and among the tools they have and use is jail/prison, so, despite having sophisticated as well as cruder alternatives, there comes a time when dissidents use all manners of dissemination at their disposal to counteract and the state resorts to jail, show trials, etc.
    - inimino 10y ago
      That is true. However, it is not necessary to escalate to throwing people in jail to qualify as censorship.
  - AndrewKemendo 10y ago
    While it's true, that jail is the extreme on the coercion scale, it's the lack of options and the vast difference in ramifications that is the real point between censorship and private discrimination.
codedokode 10y ago
I don't think so. Censorship is about blocking truthful information by the government. Banning a fake news post is moderation. And if someone would pay Facebook to block or promote some content it would be neither of those.
- inimino 10y ago
  Who decides what news is true?
  - codedokode 10y ago
    In an Internet discussion everyone decides for themselves.

Previously > Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation on its platform That is exactly what censorship is.

by est 10y ago

Previously > Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation on its platform That is exactly what censorship is.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

_rpd 10y ago

Perhaps if the definition of 'misinformation' is expanded to include legitimate but politically inconvenient information.

leesalminen 10y ago
There is currently a subset of the internet talking about how the Earth is flat. While that may seem to be "misinformation" to you or I, why is it "wrong" for it to be shared/discussed/thought about on Facebook?
- _rpd 10y ago
  You're probably posing this question to HN as a whole, rather than me, however, my comment was focusing on the term 'exactly' in the comment to which I was replying. I personally think that there is legitimate censorship (child porn, detailed instructions for constructing weapons of mass destruction, etc), but that the vast majority of 'fake news' and even outright false information doesn't fall into that scope. Even there I have to hedge though, since some false information can cause very harmful panic.
  - leesalminen 10y ago
    Ah, you are correct. My apologies, and it was not meant as an attack on you personally. I agree with your examples, of course. I'm not against common sense restrictions. But, I think these should be decided upon up front with a transparent review process for adding new categories. To leave that open ended would inevitably lead to abuse.
- woodruffw 10y ago
  The fact that you chose a relatively benign falsehood (the earth being flat) reveals that you, yourself, understand that it's "wrong" for it to be shared in a way that incorrectly reflects its truth value. It shouldn't be our concern if conspiracy theorists decide to share misinformation among themselves. It becomes our concern when they take advantage of human emotions and insufficient algorithmic filtering to manipulate their way to the top of the newsfeeds of major social sites.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- anigbrowl 10y ago
  It's not wrong for it to be shared, but nor is it wrong to automatically affix a tag saying '90% bullshit.' I would much prefer that such things weren't in demand; it'd be great to live in a world where every adult person had reliable bullshit detectors, so we wouldn't be swamped in logical fallacies and ancillary nonsense, but in the meantime the speed and connectedness of our social technologies has vastly outpaced the general population's ability to digest the available information, and so the disease of populism has broken out again as the new media go through their adolescent stage.
  - jon-wood 10y ago
    Sadly I doubt adding the hypothetical bullshit tag would help. The sort of people sharing and reading this stuff are ones who want to believe it. If you start tagging it as fake they'll just fall back to the argument that The Man doesn't want you to know the truth. There's no quick fix for this. It's going to take a generation or two of concerted education from an early age in critical thinking, and somehow I doubt making people question what they're told is going to be a priority for the next four years.
jayess 10y ago
There's no "perhaps" about it.
android521 10y ago
You can be certain that it will be used that way.
Inconel 10y ago
All this talk of fake news and censorship increasingly makes me feel as though journalism is abdicating its responsibility to be a voice of dissent and skepticism by being entirely too cozy with corporate and government interests in exchange for access. This quote has been attributed to many people over the years but I've always been fond of the saying: News is something somebody doesn't want printed; all else is advertising.

chourobin 10y ago

To be fair, dealing with fake news doesn't mean taking posts down. He mentioned just showing a warning next to stories flagged as false -- much like how spam is treated in our emails.

skybrian 10y ago

It does seem scary if they screw it up, but I can see how it could be done right, at least for the low-hanging fruit. How about a simple dialog? "This article is mostly false according to Snopes. Are you sure you want to share it?" Then if you think Snopes got it wrong, you can post it anyway. Or how about: "This article is satire. Are you sure you want to share it?" There's nothing wrong with posting satire if that's what you meant to do. If that's not what you meant, it saves you some embarrassment for posting it as fact. Seems like that's what a (semi-)intelligent assistant should do, right?

est 10y ago
The exact same thing happens within China many years ago. China is decades ahead in information flow control. Websites like Weibo/QQ/Wechat will display a banner text saying some tweets (or microblogging cards as you call it) contains a mis-information. Any mis-information with more than five hundred retweets will face criminal prosecution. The result? Authorities fight mis-information with half-baked and premature refutes. In practice refutes can be 100% arbitrary even fake. You can't refute a refute because they are final, non-debatable and in-reversible. Remember the refute mechanism is to stop the spread of "mis-information" so debate refutes are dangerous and would cause Streisand effect. The best part, the process is 100% manual, so PR firms totally lobbied website admins, officials in power, this corrupted industry is multi-million dollar business today. So who watches the watchmen? It's a twisted long path ahead.
- skybrian 10y ago
  Good to know. Only, that doesn't sound like the "exact same thing". More like the parallel universe version (where Spock has a beard). I think the key point here is making sure your intelligent assistant works for you. Unfortunately, currently available assistants all come from powerful companies.
- ambicapter 10y ago
  > Any mis-information with more than five hundred retweets will face criminal prosecution. Seems like a BIG difference.

throwaway5752 10y ago

This is sophistry. If I have a business, I can say "shirts and shoes required". We have laws about protected classes that are vulnerable to discrimination as exceptions, but on _my private property_ I can - within proscribed legal limits - dictate acceptable behavior, and ask people not adhering to those rules to leave. You can dress it up, but Facebook is a private website. They do fancy stuff with information they collect about you and use it to sell you ads. They have terms of service that define acceptable behavior, and they have no SLA / guarantee about what you share reaching others or what others share reaching you. That is the deal. If you don't like the deal, Facebook is not a right, and you can choose to not use Facebook or not, depending on your morals. Now, what the article described, "Facebook does not intend to suppress the posts itself. Instead, it would offer the software to enable a third party — in this case, most likely a partner Chinese company — to monitor popular stories and topics that bubble up as users share them across the social network, the people said. Facebook’s partner would then have full control to decide whether those posts should show up in users’ feeds." <- This is completely censorship. Governments censor. Facebook saying it doesn't want a bunch of Macedonian fake news click bait stories crapping up it's platform is a business decision by a private company.

kareemm 10y ago
When companies have wide-ranging impacts on real-world events (governments, economies, land use, etc) they tend to get regulated. I would be shocked if the large tech co's weren't subject to increased regulation 10y from now.
- est 10y ago
  So why is taxi a regulated industry?
  - tn13 10y ago
    Why is a Hispanic lady selling her home made dish is subject to regulation and jail term ?
quickConclusion 10y ago

AndrewKemendo 10y ago

I wouldn't be so quick to throw around that term. The reason many, including myself, dislike the term censorship as applied to private entities is because it equivocates the threat between censors. If Facebook prevents me from communicating something because they don't like it, the ramification is that I simply post it elsewhere and distribute it there. If the government prevents me from communicating something because they don't like it, the ramification is that I have no outlet for it that does not come with the threat of violence, in the form of jail. Very different outcomes. At the point in which Facebook = Government in terms of state monopolized communications channel with government enforcement mechanisms then this definition would fit. It is however, despite it's popularity, nowhere near that nor reasonably possible.

inimino 10y ago
Throwing people in jail isn't necessary, subtle influences in what people see and don't see are far more effective.
- mc32 10y ago
  The PRC uses many methods to suppress other opinion and among the tools they have and use is jail/prison, so, despite having sophisticated as well as cruder alternatives, there comes a time when dissidents use all manners of dissemination at their disposal to counteract and the state resorts to jail, show trials, etc.
  - inimino 10y ago
    That is true. However, it is not necessary to escalate to throwing people in jail to qualify as censorship.
- AndrewKemendo 10y ago
  While it's true, that jail is the extreme on the coercion scale, it's the lack of options and the vast difference in ramifications that is the real point between censorship and private discrimination.

codedokode 10y ago

I don't think so. Censorship is about blocking truthful information by the government. Banning a fake news post is moderation. And if someone would pay Facebook to block or promote some content it would be neither of those.

inimino 10y ago
Who decides what news is true?
- codedokode 10y ago
  In an Internet discussion everyone decides for themselves.