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People keep saying that Facebook should be doing more to block fake news, but here's the part that I don't get: why do you want Facebook to exercise even _more_

• NikolaeVarius 10y ago
  It's easy to be outraged rather than actually thinking about the problem. HEADLINE:"FACEBOOK NEWS FEED POPULATED BY BIASED EDITORS" INTERNET:"MACHINE LEARNING IS UNBIASED WHY ISN"T FB USING ML?" -- HEADLINE:"FACEBOOK NEWS FEED POPULATED BY FAKE NEWS BECAUSE ML ISN'T DIFFERENTIATING NEWS TYPES" INTERNET:"FACEBOOK NEEDS TO CONTROL WHAT NEWS GETS ON THE NEWS FEED" --- HEADLINE:"FACEBOOK CENSORING CONTROVERSIAL NEWS" INTERNET:"FACEBOOK NEEDS TO HIRE EDITORS THAT WON'T CENSOR THINGS" GOTO 1
  • Gargoyle 10y ago
    I don't think Facebook needs to control what gets on the news feed.
  • EdHominem 10y ago
    They could have avoided all of that by not interfering. All they need to do is nothing. Don't favor some news, don't block fact-checkers. Just let me see everything my friends post.
    • bryansum 10y ago
      Great point; the question then becomes why is this interference necessary? Largely due to ads. Instagram made their feed algorithmic recently for this reason.
• snowwrestler 10y ago
  Fighting fake news would not increase the degree to which Facebook shapes what people see. It would just adjust the criteria. Facebook already exerts total control over what its users see. "Discretion" is not the right word, though, because Facebook is algorithmic. The problem is simply that the algorithm is optimizing for the wrong thing, which is causing harm. It's like if you decided what to eat and drink solely by how sweet things taste. Each individual bite would be pleasurable. But the long-term health effects of eating nothing but sweets would be terrible. Blocking is not the only answer BTW. Simple labeling would go a long way. The Onion would still be funny with a little "satire" tag.
  • makomk 10y ago
    It would just adjust the criteria from things Facebook thinks they'd want to see to things that powerful people think would tilt the users' political views in the right direction. That's a major change, and one that - by design - transfers a huge amount of power and control from individual Facebook users to the centralized approvers of permitted content.
    • snowwrestler 10y ago
      Thinking about politics first is a backward way to look at the world. We need to know the truth about facts. Only then can we make useful political decisions about those facts.
      • wu-ikkyu 10y ago
        "The truth about facts" is extremely ambiguous. However, I'm sure the new Minitrue department at Facebook will solve this problem.
      • SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
        How does Facebook determine what facts are without politics? Facebook fact checking materials before displaying them is fundamentally political, if only because the decision of filtering strategy is a political choice.
• phailhaus 10y ago
  > why do you want Facebook to exercise even _more_ discretion over what kind of news people see? The argument is that, whether we like it or not, Facebook has become the hub for millions of people and these people share articles with each other. Media has become decentralized, and although the libertarian approach of do-nothing sounds nice, we just found out that in practice it doesn't work very well. You thought the Reddit fiasco with the marathon bomber was bad? The equivalent is happening a thousand times over with fake news spreading faster than the news that debunks it.
  • Spivak 10y ago
    What's your metric for communication platform full of user generated content 'working well'? I'm not trying to be snarky, I don't see how this can possibly be a failing of Facebook unless you really believe that an algorithm that ranks posts can actually fix the human problems that underlie this issue.
    • phailhaus 10y ago
      When I said that it wasn't "working well", I was referring to the epidemic of fake news. It turns out that, for better or worse, a significant amount of the population is using Facebook for its news source. We can say that they're silly and shouldn't be using Facebook for news, but they are and they're not going to stop until a systemic solution is put into place.
• zzalpha 10y ago
  Ultimately it's a very hard problem to solve. Fake news, and its far more dangerous big brother, propaganda, can have an enormous effect on a society. Providing people with tools to identify real information from fake information seems like a great thing for those who want to use them. But a lot of folks (whether they realize it or not) want to see fake news because it confirms their personal worldview (or: how everyone loves confirmation bias) and makes them feel good about being part of their in-group. I suspect folks who push for censorship think that it will somehow ensure these types of folks don't consume fake news or propaganda (probably without realizing that they, too, have consumed fake news from time to time). But the reality is fake news has existed for a very very long time. Hell, you could tune into MSNBC or Fox News and find stories that border pretty closely on fake news without even trying. And, again, they do it because it increases ratings. And it increases ratings because it makes people in their respective demographics feel good. So what you're ultimately trying to fight is the human need for a sense of belonging, and the desire to feel good about their personal beliefs. Good luck with that...
  • ska 10y ago
    Fake news is propaganda, full stop. While it is often more concerning when done by a state actor, there is no fundamental difference.
    • mtgx 10y ago
      Yes. The problem is most of these companies that want to fight "fake news" would probably almost completely focus on "new sites" that have fake news, and perhaps a couple of other "more obvious" big sites like Breitbart. But what happens when the fake news comes from CNN? Will Facebook block CNN or WSJ articles that spout lies and are blatantly incorrect? The problem with this is that these days, you often also get the "real news" from smaller sites, like DemocracyNow, or others even smaller, that report on NoDAPL protests when none of the big news sites do. What if Facebook gets used to censoring these sites, though, even though they report the real news out there? And would we even know? After all, they are small sites, that few people would know about in the beginning.
    • zzalpha 10y ago
• scottmf 10y ago
  No one thinks it would be a simple task, but if you consider it a threat to democracy you can understand why many want a solution. Blatant lies intended to scare people into voting a certain way are a problem. How much of a difference is there really between "vote X or I'll kill your family" and "vote X or someone else will kill your family" if the intent is the same?
  • inimino 10y ago
    > How much of a difference is there really ... ... a pretty damn big difference there. Not the best analogy you could have used.
• dimfeld 10y ago
  The gray zone expands even more with the lesser-known satire sites, which sometimes have a mix of articles that are obviously satire, and some that aren't. For example, I've seen a few articles shared as truth from "World News Daily Report," which played it so straight that I would have considered it "fake news" if I hadn't seen the satire disclaimer tucked at the bottom of the page. Other articles on that same site are much more obviously satirical though. I tend to blame this on poor writing rather than malice, though you can probably make a decent counterargument. Some sort of "possibly false" notice attached to links like these, rather than just a "block or not" decision, seems like it would strike a nice balance here.
• thesagan 10y ago
  Also, the people making loud, direct calls for censorship are mostly journalists, writers, and opinion-makers. Seems like great fodder for views and clicks. Perhaps there's much for them to gain by whipping up drama (and potentially alienating competition).
• worldsayshi 10y ago
  Wouldn't it be reasonable to force facebook and similar social network sites to be transparent about how they rank articles? And in combination with this make reasonable legislation on content responsibility.
  • tedunangst 10y ago
    BuzzFeed would certainly love that. How to maximize your facebook score, complete with regress test framework.
• ChuckMcM 10y ago
  Welcome to the original "editorial" question. Read up on "Yellow Journalism" for a history. The answer to your rhetorical is "some people start from a position of reporting responsibility some start from a position of personal responsibility." Lets presume there is a conversation between Alice and Bob on what is happening. Eve can hear both conversations and to some extent can ascertain when either Alice or Bob are communicating a falsehood or a misstatement to the other. In the personal responsibility policy camp Eve doesn't do anything, it is up to Alice and Bob to evaluate the integrity and accuracy of the other's facts. In the reporting responsibility policy camp, if either Alice or Bob is communicating to a group (which is to say the communication is one to many) then Eve must inform the many when Alice states a falsehood or lies, conversely if Bob is the one who is communicating to the many then his falsehoods and/or misleading statements must be called out. Facebook lands in the middle because both Alice and Bob are in fact communicating to lots of people (everyone on the feed, everyone reading the comments section what ever). As the "market maker" for this meeting of speakers and listeners, either Facebook is 100% responsible for the quality of the facts or 100% not responsible for the quality of the facts. If you think of the information being exchanged as "product" and people publishing information as "sellers" and people reading that information "buyers" (even though there may be no financial transaction involved), there is quite a bit of experiential guidance around what the market owner must do versus the sellers and buyers in the market. The challenge is that people who might be suspicious being offered a Rolex watch at a flea market for a fraction of the price, seem more willing to believe a "news story" from an unaccredited news source which differs markedly from what the mainstream press is reporting. If they saw such news stories as 'cheap rolexes' it might activate the same sorts of suspicions they would get in a market when the price is too good to be true.
• cwyers 10y ago
  Facebook already exercises a lot of discretion -- they reorder posts on your timeline to drive engagement, they promote related links, they have the Trending bar, etc. People aren't asking them to do more. They're asking them to do what they're doing now more responsibly.
  • criddell 10y ago
    I couldn't agree more. I don't think Facebook should necessarily block fake news (however you want to define it) but it might be nice to let me know before I share a story that they think it's satirical because of reason A and reason B or that it's inaccurate for other reasons. This is good for me because I don't look dumb for sharing something that's incorrect and it's good for Facebook because now they know even more about me (that I love satire but hate fake news, for example).
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
• EdHominem 10y ago
  Funny that they managed to block the fact-checker. I'd be happy if they did nothing, and simply let me read what I want. But this is the worst situation.
  • makomk 10y ago
    It's easy to verify that a plugin modifies the Facebook site and block links to it. It's much harder to tell whether the list of fake news sites it uses is itself fake or the plugin is a security issue, let alone whether particular articles are truthful.
    • EdHominem 10y ago
      > It's easy to verify that a plugin modifies the Facebook site No, it doesn't. That's a serious abuse of the language. What you describe would be hacking into Facebook. What the plugin does is help me not load content I don't want. The browser is my user-agent and I'm instructing it how to display the content delivered to me. > It's much harder to tell whether the list of fake news sites it uses is itself fake Exactly, and yet they're trying harder to block a fact checker than to block the bad news. If they just backed off on both I could see the bad news and have my plugin flag it. > or the plugin is a security issue, Not even close. It's not like Facebook is cleaning up malware plugins. They're only targeting this one because it threatens their editorial control of my feed.
      • jamespo 10y ago
        which they are completely within their rights to do
        • EdHominem 10y ago
          Well, actually, perhaps not. That's the point. Past a certain size, if you're sleazy and manipulative we're going to control your actions. But even if, how is that "sure, but you can't legally stop them" a defense? How is it one you feel compelled to make? Especially because I can technologically stop them. They can block one plugin, and detect one set of blocks, but it's a game we've played many times before and the defense always loses.
• loceng 10y ago
  As long as it is public as to what they are blocking or flagging, then it's better than not doing it at all. The bigger problem is people may not either care or believe something is fake news, just because someone highlights it as such. It would be nice if there were questionnaires with people's voting, so post-election we could see how much understanding or knowledge different groups have; you couldn't, at least initially, put any weight on what someone's vote is worth based on this of course.
• Shendare 10y ago
  That's why you don't block; you flag. Let people make their own choices, but informed. Allow users to flag a link or post with tags such as Satire, Misleading, Controversial, Editorialized, Biased, Debunked, etc. Everyone else can still view the links and posts, but with some small indication of its trustworthiness. Though I feel like some tags, such as Debunked, should perhaps require a supporting link attached to a flag.
  • hydrogen18 10y ago
    What about 'Deplorables'? Can we tag news stories as that?
  • cpeterso 10y ago
    Tagging by users can easily be gamed but it would be a useful signal for an algorithm.
  • exolymph 10y ago
    > Allow users to flag a link or post with tags such as Satire, Misleading, Controversial, Editorialized, Biased, Debunked, etc. The entire problem is that most people don't know or realize when articles qualify for any of these criteria.
  • _up 10y ago
    Are the ads also getting a "biased"-tag? It also stifles media competency. I think a better approach would be to give a daily or weekly summary of questionable Articles that where opened by the user.
• alexc05 10y ago
  I think it is because people are generally NOT saying that they should necessarily BLOCK things, but instead label them appropriately. THIS IS SATIRE: at the top of ONION articles. THIS IS FAKE: on top of us-political-truth-grabber-buzz.com maybe OPINION gets added to HUFFPO I think that would likely be enough to satisfy most of the needs. ... Although while we're talking blue sky / greenfield ... maybe we add something like: Here's How Ridiculously Expensive It Is To Replace A Windshield On An Aston Martin |[ $4414.41 ] to all that shitty clickbait out there :)
  • serge2k 10y ago
    YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT THIS MAN DID FOR HIS DOG! [He dressed up like it's favorite toy and it was adorable] God that sounds amazing. I'd want to see the dog video, but I refuse to click on principle. Can crowdsource summaries and make a chrome plugin?
    • joatmon-snoo 10y ago
      The crowdsourcing is almost already there: https://www.facebook.com/StopClickBaitOfficial/ https://www.facebook.com/StopClickBaitOfficial/
• alberth 10y ago
  >>"People keep saying that Facebook should be doing more to block fake news but ... why do you want Facebook to" For the same reasons why I want my email provider to block spam or for my search engineer provider to block shady viagra ads.
• forgetsusername 10y ago
  >but here's the part that I don't get: why do you want Facebook to exercise even _more_ discretion over what kind of news people see? This one is easy: people in these parts think that the fake news is one-sided, and that it got a president they don't like elected. So now fake news is a major issue.
  • inimino 10y ago
    And the solution is, obviously, technology, and specifically machine learning because that's the solution to everything these days.
    • DefaultUserHN 10y ago
      No. The solution is to setup a Ministry of Truth like what Facebook is trying to do. People are too stupid and must be protected from reading #FakeNews because they can not think for themselves. Let the corporations and the government think for them.
• quadrangle 10y ago
  I suggest Facebook block all types of content… they can start by blocking all personally-identifiable information. Short of that, they should be responsible and shut down their irresponsible service.