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> Sheryl Sandberg: “The responsibility for an open platform is to let people express themselves. We don’t check the information people put on Facebook before th

by bambax 9y ago

> Sheryl Sandberg: “The responsibility for an open platform is to let people express themselves. We don’t check the information people put on Facebook before they run it, and I don’t think anyone should want us to do that.” What a bunch of lies. Try posting a nude pic on Facebook and see what happens. If they can check for nudity why wouldn't they check for "fake news"? Non-porn nudity is free speech, more than fake news. But fake news are viral and efficient at engaging people, while nudity scares advertisers away. Everything Facebook does is business-oriented -- which is fine, maybe, and probably inevitable. But them lecturing us about morals makes me incredibly angry.

mseebach 9y ago
It's a good point that it's difficult to defend the position of protecting children from seeing boobies, but not fake news. The trick, of course, is that very little of what is broadly considered fake news by various people is just biased or editorialised. Very little is actually flat out lies and fabrication presented as fact - Facebook could presumably remove this (and aren't they actually?), but few of the people shouting about fake news would notice, because what they actually want gone is on the Breitbart/Fox News/MSNBC/SNL spectrum, and that would indeed be very undesirable.
throw2016 9y ago
How does one check for 'fake news'? Its easy to throw around these words but they lack meaning and value. Rumour mongering is as old as society itself, global platforms amplify impact. This kind of paranoia about 'fake news' ends up in the 'ministry of truth'. There is no other alternative.
- krapp 9y ago
  >How does one check for 'fake news'? Its easy to throw around these words but they lack meaning and value. Fake news has a well defined, explicitly understood meaning - the presentation of falsehood as legitimate news, and its virality on the web, particularly in social media. Merely biased news isn't fake news, nor is news for which the facts are initially misunderstood at the time of reporting fake news.
  - tqi 9y ago
    Agree there are lots of clear cut cases. But, for example, would you consider articles that are talk about climate change (either for or against it's existence) fake or biased news?
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - mattferderer 9y ago
      Not the perfect solution but I would prefer one like Wikipedia & others use. Allow flagging by users if a news story lacks citations or credible references. Uphold all journalism to a higher standard. For the most popular stories on Facebook have a trained employee from Facebook research it or crowd base it with users you trust. Show users a message that says whether the news article has been marked as false, questionable or verified. Facebook could even charge money for instant review & verification to news outlets. As machine learning gets better & has more use cases to look at, they could possibly offload the work from humans as well.
    - krapp 9y ago
      To me, unless there is outright fabrication or an intent to deceive on the part of the original reporting source, it isn't fake news.
    - SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
      Climate change might not have been the best example as its a closed and shut case from a scientific perspective. Maybe the merits of doing anything about it would be a better example?
      - ams6110 9y ago
        "Closed and shut" seems to me to be exactly NOT the point of view of science. If someone came along with another theory that fit observations better than current theories do, would you want science to reject it because that particular subject is considered "closed and shut?"
- SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
  At a hackathon my team wrote an api for aggregating data on publications/journalists. We set it up to collect 'tags' that were descriptive of qualities that individual articles presented such as "no sources", "anonymous sources", "click-bait", "well-sourced", "professional", etc. The idea was that given enough time and submitted entries you could get a picture of how accurate a journalist/publication was over time. We were planning on having this database be curated a la Wikipedia/StackOverflow and allow for people to go back and check the veracity of claims attributed to anonymous sources to get a picture of how good a journalist/publication's anonymous sources tended to be.
- ams6110 9y ago
  My "fake news" alarm goes off when I hear the same phraseology or specific keywords used in multiple sources in the same news cycle. This indicates to me that an agenda is being pushed, rather than news being reported objectively. I consider "fake news" to be any news being reported with an unstated agenda or bias, not just outright lies. Editorializing is fine, if it's clearly identified as such.
linkregister 9y ago
Does Facebook actually monitor anything? I was under the impression that it was 100% user-complaint moderated, at least for discovery.

by bambax 9y ago

mseebach 9y ago

It's a good point that it's difficult to defend the position of protecting children from seeing boobies, but not fake news. The trick, of course, is that very little of what is broadly considered fake news by various people is just biased or editorialised. Very little is actually flat out lies and fabrication presented as fact - Facebook could presumably remove this (and aren't they actually?), but few of the people shouting about fake news would notice, because what they actually want gone is on the Breitbart/Fox News/MSNBC/SNL spectrum, and that would indeed be very undesirable.

throw2016 9y ago

How does one check for 'fake news'? Its easy to throw around these words but they lack meaning and value. Rumour mongering is as old as society itself, global platforms amplify impact. This kind of paranoia about 'fake news' ends up in the 'ministry of truth'. There is no other alternative.

krapp 9y ago
>How does one check for 'fake news'? Its easy to throw around these words but they lack meaning and value. Fake news has a well defined, explicitly understood meaning - the presentation of falsehood as legitimate news, and its virality on the web, particularly in social media. Merely biased news isn't fake news, nor is news for which the facts are initially misunderstood at the time of reporting fake news.
- tqi 9y ago
  Agree there are lots of clear cut cases. But, for example, would you consider articles that are talk about climate change (either for or against it's existence) fake or biased news?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - mattferderer 9y ago
    Not the perfect solution but I would prefer one like Wikipedia & others use. Allow flagging by users if a news story lacks citations or credible references. Uphold all journalism to a higher standard. For the most popular stories on Facebook have a trained employee from Facebook research it or crowd base it with users you trust. Show users a message that says whether the news article has been marked as false, questionable or verified. Facebook could even charge money for instant review & verification to news outlets. As machine learning gets better & has more use cases to look at, they could possibly offload the work from humans as well.
  - krapp 9y ago
    To me, unless there is outright fabrication or an intent to deceive on the part of the original reporting source, it isn't fake news.
  - SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
    Climate change might not have been the best example as its a closed and shut case from a scientific perspective. Maybe the merits of doing anything about it would be a better example?
    - ams6110 9y ago
      "Closed and shut" seems to me to be exactly NOT the point of view of science. If someone came along with another theory that fit observations better than current theories do, would you want science to reject it because that particular subject is considered "closed and shut?"
SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
At a hackathon my team wrote an api for aggregating data on publications/journalists. We set it up to collect 'tags' that were descriptive of qualities that individual articles presented such as "no sources", "anonymous sources", "click-bait", "well-sourced", "professional", etc. The idea was that given enough time and submitted entries you could get a picture of how accurate a journalist/publication was over time. We were planning on having this database be curated a la Wikipedia/StackOverflow and allow for people to go back and check the veracity of claims attributed to anonymous sources to get a picture of how good a journalist/publication's anonymous sources tended to be.
ams6110 9y ago
My "fake news" alarm goes off when I hear the same phraseology or specific keywords used in multiple sources in the same news cycle. This indicates to me that an agenda is being pushed, rather than news being reported objectively. I consider "fake news" to be any news being reported with an unstated agenda or bias, not just outright lies. Editorializing is fine, if it's clearly identified as such.

linkregister 9y ago

Does Facebook actually monitor anything? I was under the impression that it was 100% user-complaint moderated, at least for discovery.