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Hearing exposes Facebook’s toothless 'fake news' policy

3 points by colinprince 8y ago

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
tor0viking 8y ago
Facebook's campaign against fake news seemed at first to focus on sites and pages that were created with the express purpose of spreading obvious falsehoods. Things like "Hillary Clinton is really a man", etc. News created and spread by people who intentionally crafted and disseminated falsehoods. But now people (like the author of this BBC article) seem to want this campaign against "fake news" to spread to sites like Infowars that engage in aggressive conspiratorial thinking but often skate on the very edge of truth, or germinate from an initial seed of truth. Watch InfoWars as an academic exercise, you'll see that Alex Jones tends to take real events and news and extrapolate out with what most people would consider very conspiratorial thinking. Regardless of what you think about him, I think it's clear he honestly believes what he says. Yes he speculates wildly but he is just a man spreading his opinions, not conspiring to sow dissent with falsehoods. But who is able to determine the difference between "fake news" and "harmless" speculation? It is an impossible task. Is the idea that Putin has compromising info on the President "fake news"? Should anyone engaging in such conjecture be banned from publishing on Facebook? Is the idea that Hillary and the CIA were working together to rig the election speculation, or "fake news"? Should such thought be censored? I believe the answer to these sorts of questions often lie in the inner politics of the answerer, and therein lies the danger. We live in a free society. We embrace the marketplace of ideas because we have faith that the best way to fairly distill truth from noise is by giving people unobstructed access to that noise. The moment we stray from that belief system, we wander into the maw of tyranny. The reason why some people want to ban Alex Jones is because some people clearly don't like what he says. But if it's truly ridiculous, the crowd will recognize it as being so. Why does a private entity get to decide what billions of people of people potentially have access to? We must preserve freedom of thought. We must have faith in humanity. Once we lose that faith, nothing stands between us and tyranny.

3 points by colinprince 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Facebook's campaign against fake news seemed at first to focus on sites and pages that were created with the express purpose of spreading obvious falsehoods. Things like "Hillary Clinton is really a man", etc. News created and spread by people who intentionally crafted and disseminated falsehoods. But now people (like the author of this BBC article) seem to want this campaign against "fake news" to spread to sites like Infowars that engage in aggressive conspiratorial thinking but often skate on the very edge of truth, or germinate from an initial seed of truth. Watch InfoWars as an academic exercise, you'll see that Alex Jones tends to take real events and news and extrapolate out with what most people would consider very conspiratorial thinking. Regardless of what you think about him, I think it's clear he honestly believes what he says. Yes he speculates wildly but he is just a man spreading his opinions, not conspiring to sow dissent with falsehoods. But who is able to determine the difference between "fake news" and "harmless" speculation? It is an impossible task. Is the idea that Putin has compromising info on the President "fake news"? Should anyone engaging in such conjecture be banned from publishing on Facebook? Is the idea that Hillary and the CIA were working together to rig the election speculation, or "fake news"? Should such thought be censored? I believe the answer to these sorts of questions often lie in the inner politics of the answerer, and therein lies the danger. We live in a free society. We embrace the marketplace of ideas because we have faith that the best way to fairly distill truth from noise is by giving people unobstructed access to that noise. The moment we stray from that belief system, we wander into the maw of tyranny. The reason why some people want to ban Alex Jones is because some people clearly don't like what he says. But if it's truly ridiculous, the crowd will recognize it as being so. Why does a private entity get to decide what billions of people of people potentially have access to? We must preserve freedom of thought. We must have faith in humanity. Once we lose that faith, nothing stands between us and tyranny.