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Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to one
- dunpeal 8y agoI wonder what the score would be if Facebook users were to rate its trustworthiness on a scale from zero to one.
- bilbo0s 8y agoTo be fair, Facebook users can rate Facebook's trustworthiness by simply not using Facebook. Which I would recommend. What impact on physical and mental health does it have to sit around checking different screens for InstaFaceSnap or RedditTwitTube updates?
- crankylinuxuser 8y agoUsers/useds: Bill (not FB user) Sue (FB user) Jill (FB user) Conversation: Sue: Bill is just so unreliable. He says things and doesnt do them. Jill: Yah he did the same to me! ------ (Notices Bill's ghost profile's trustworthiness score go down, without any interaction from Bill at all. What exactly do we do about that? We in the US have no rights like this. The corps can do whatever they want, and maybe just maybe, a decent law will be passed to protect us. Or likely not.) Edit: Useds was name given by Stallman from https://stallman.org/facebook.html https://stallman.org/facebook.html . Also, -1? Where am I being wrong? Are ghost profiles being dismissed, or trustworthiness? Or is it the fact I'm putting these things together?
- pjc50 8y agoI think this article specifically refers to "how reliable someone's flagging reports are", which doesn't mean anything for non-account-holders.
- drivingmenuts 8y ago> maybe just maybe, a decent law will be passed to protect us. Against what? A company rating their trust in our ability to use their resources? This happens on a daily basis with almost any company; it's just less formalized.
- amelius 8y agoPerhaps there is a reciprocal element. If Facebook appears not trustworthy to me, then I don't trust Facebook, and then probably I will appear not trustworthy to Facebook.
- MichaelKSpencer 8y agoYes I imagine most consumers will eventually come to think like this. You might be a bit ahead of the curve though?
- ForHackernews 8y agoInteresting. I wonder if this includes lies told in private messages?
- mic47 8y agoAccording to article it looks like it's about marking something as fake news (i.e. how "correct" you are in that). At least that is how I understood it.
- MichaelKSpencer 8y agoThat would be the day - encrypt your Messenger convos, but they show Ads and ensure you aren't bullying or lying to anyone.
- ForHackernews 8y ago"No honey, I'm still at work" <GPS Location: Mistress' apartment> trustworthiness_score -= 0.1
- 21 8y agoCan you GDPR request this?
- giancarlostoro 8y agoYou should be able to.
- fipple 8y agoWhy? If I store your height and weight for you as part of my app, but compute on the server-side the quotient of those for server-side features, why do I need to give you that intermediate value? Would you then be entitled to any intermediate variables used in any calculations that use your data?
- knorthfield 8y agoIt's not personally identifiable data, so probably not.
- janvidar 8y agoIt is still data that Facebook has about you.
- icebraining 8y agoFrom the GDPR, Art.4 (1): "‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person". This certainly seems to fit.
- Someguywhatever 8y agoIf you could, then I suspect that you could do things like makes posts and GPDR the result, if you rinse and repeat you could probably reverse engineer what the algorithm is.
- creaghpatr 8y agoShare Washington Post articles and rat out your neighbors who post Infowars and you'll be set.
- artemisyna 8y ago...and so does every other big tech company that needs to deal with spam. (Ie, any social media half worth their salt.)
- currymj 8y agoyeah, if you have a spam detector that outputs a probability, then that's a rating of trustworthiness on a scale of 0 to 1.
- misterbowfinger 8y agoCould we change the title to "Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users"? The zero to one bit is irrelevant and obvious to programmers.
- MichaelKSpencer 8y agoPeople just don't like being equated to a number, even if it's for a "good cause".
- _bxg1 8y agoI'll just leave this here https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-social-credit https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-social-credit
- pc86 8y agoA. A dictatorial, totalitarian government rating all its citizens based on opaque criteria and using that to restrict access to essential services, financial support, and general life and liberty. B. A private company scoring its users to combat spam, as all social networks do.
- _bxg1 8y agoIt's a short hop to banks (also private companies!) asking Facebook for those numbers, and it's not a stretch for the government to do the same.
- dahdum 8y agoI wonder if they will let you advertise to people based on trustworthiness, seems like a metric that would be rather useful for a lot of different scenarios. Also fantastic as a hiring screen.
- patrickg_zill 8y agoTo close the loop: government immigration authority claims the right to use your social media accounts as input to determine whether you may enter the country.
- pjc50 8y ago"Lyons said she soon realized that many people were reporting posts as false simply because they did not agree with the content." Well, yes. Have they not learned from any of the preceding work on moderating?
- mic47 8y agoI worked for FB anti-spam team, and believe me, nobody trusted user feedback absolutely (i.e. it's good to send to review, but not automatically take down). I guess that with fake news the signal to noise ratio is even worse. The whole article sounds more like focusing on one implementation details of review queue prioritization (i.e. what is the difference of definition of "fake news" for this user vs Facebook's definition), rather than bigger picture.
- WiseWeasel 8y agoTo me, fake news also includes slanted coverage of true events (i.e. covering events in such a way as to convey a sponsored message, biased polling methodology, etc.). That encompasses statistically approaching 100% of trashy sources you’re likely to encounter as 'sponsored content', as well as a healthy portion of more established sources' content. I'd be likely to report a majority as fake news in perfectly good faith if given the option. Maybe the term isn’t as narrowly defined as your (former?) employer would like. Edit: upon a bit more reflection, I do take for granted a desire to protect life and liberty (in that order), and anything that appears to threaten that view will draw special scrutiny, and potential abuse of reporting features.
- macintux 8y agoThe problem with conflating biased coverage with fake news is that the latter phrase becomes meaningless. "Fake" means "false", not "stuff I disagree with".
- seymour1 8y agoBut the parent commenter's issue does imply a solution! Just add "Biased/slanted coverage" to the list of reasons to report, and now your "Fake News" section is much higher signal to noise.
- vorpalhex 8y ago> Because Facebook forwards posts that are marked as false to third-party fact-checkers, she said it was important to build systems to assess whether the posts were likely to be false to make efficient use of fact-checkers’ time. This seems like a "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" kind of thing. On one hand, I understand not wanting to forward every single story when a troll is mass-reporting, on the other hand though, this seems like a very 1984 approach that like all algorithms is horrendously naive. Any closed group is likely to have a skewed sense of reality. On one hand, third party fact checkers are hopefully true to their title, but on the other hand, they could just be adding their own bias to the decisions with no oversight in a way that affects users going forward. Add in no ability to appeal and no visibility into the system, and you have a closed system ripe for abuse. Good job Facebook, you have learned nothing.
- reaperducer 8y agothird-party fact-checkers This is the part that stood out to me. It's allows Facebook to tell lawmakers and the public "Hey, look! We're taking things seriously!" Until something goes wrong. Then they can lay the blame on someone else and issue another non-apology apology saying, "We can do better."
- traek 8y agoWhat would a better solution look like, in your view? Is it the third-party aspect that you take issue with, or the fact-checking? Or the combination of the two?
- creaghpatr 8y agoIt gets even worse when you find out who the 'fact' 'checkers' are.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- a235 8y ago
- jwilk 8y agoArchived copy without GDPR nag screen: https://web.archive.org/web/20180821143120/https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/08/21/facebook-is-rating-trustworthiness-its-users-scale-zero-one/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180821143120/https://www.washi...
- MichaelKSpencer 8y agoThanks I've yet to read the original.
- FabHK 8y agoI wonder whether there's some PageRank-like principal eigenvalue problem under the hood (similar to EigenTrust). As my Linear Algebra prof used to say - deep down, everything is just linear algebra... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EigenTrust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EigenTrust
- akhilcacharya 8y agoI bet your graph theory professor thought otherwise!
- antidesitter 8y agoI thought so too but then there’s the edge space and cycle space which are essentially linear algebra over F2.
- rmrfrmrf 8y agoWith how many bits of precision?
- lez 8y agoI'm curious how Facebook will distinguish between a fake news and a sci-fi essay I just posted on my blog. I'm guessing I'll be having close to zero visitors on my sci-fi blog.
- MichaelKSpencer 8y agoTry writing about stuff that is against Silicon Valley, all of these platforms band up against you - it's amazing.
- deanclatworthy 8y agoIt's smart to go public with this. There is established research in this area and a trove of algorithms for measuring trust. Even if it's as simple as lowering a user's trust ranking after false reports - when applied across a dataset as large as FB's it's going to be somewhat accurate. The article goes on to suggest this is just one of a range of heuristics use to determine trustworthiness. I can imagine all kinds of profile interactions that would be be good indicators of this.
- eivarv 8y agoI don't understand why the big players such as Facebook and Google keeps insisting on using (appeals to) authority as a proxy to truth, when we have rules and systems for critical thinking. It seems to me that if the claims and stories in question could be re-posed (e.g. as falsifiable, logically coherent statements or arguments) the worst of "fake news" could be weeded out. The rest (and biases, etc.) would likely have to be left as an exercise for the (critical) reader.
- drb91 8y agoMaybe because it’s cheaper than being regulated like other broadcast media is, a likely response to non-action to widely harmful content.
- eivarv 8y agoSure, but what they do is really a "non-action" – as the entire premise is built upon a logical fallacy it can't guarantee truth, won't end the problem, and can (obviously) be gamed.
- unparagoned 8y agoThe tools and systems we have around critical thinking and logical statements are nowhere near sufficient to solve the problem let alone computer. Give it a try you'll never get people to agree what the logical consistent statement best represents an article.
- chongli 8y agoGoogle and Facebook want to have their cake and eat it too: billions of users without having millions of customer service workers. What they're trying to accomplish, to my mind at least, would require the invention of general AI. Automatic content moderation sounds very close to a Turing test to me.
- MichaelKSpencer 8y agoGoogle Home is maybe years ahead of what Facebook voice-AI will feel like.
- intended 8y ago>some users began falsely reporting items as untrue, a new twist on information warfare for which it had to account "new", > But how these new credibility systems work is highly opaque, and the companies are wary of discussing them, in part because doing so might invite further gaming — a predicament that the firms increasingly find themselves in as they weigh calls for more transparency around their decision-making. Fractal stupidity - this is the term for this situation You build better systems, which dont ACTUALLY capture the core bad behavior. Users figure out the edges of said system, and start finding newer ways to slip through the gaps. Now you need a new system. Repeat till the history of the system looks like a pullitzer prize winning Kafka novel.
- protomyth 8y agoWhy do I get the feeling someone is having fun making fuzzy system models? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_logic
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- qrbLPHiKpiux 8y agoDidn't I see this Black Mirror episode?
- bopbop 8y agoNo, this from next series and has a happy ending /s
- pnathan 8y agoBefore reading the article, I estimate that the technical detail is this: a normalized statistical value is generated for a particular user's willingness to share fake news after reading the article: a normalized statistical value is generated for a particular user's willingness to report news they disagree with. yeah, nothing to see here..... :-/ I'll write a note to the journalist, hopefully they can elide or contextualize this kind of thing in further articles.
- forapurpose 8y agoA bunch of related thoughts: 1. How do we know FB will assign the scores fairly and objectively? We don't, of course, but is there any legal requirement or protection for users? 2. How is it like the Chinese government's social credit score? Right now Facebook says it's used for filtering user reports, but if FB becomes confident in it, what else might it be used for? Will they sell the score to advertisers and vendors so that they can filter customers? To credit score companies? To insurance companies and potential employers? Will it be used to 'nudge' mass behavior in certain directions? Is there anything preventing FB from doing those things? 3. As usual it's the powerful (FB, potentially their advertisers and other partners) who have information about ordinary people (FB users). Isn't it more important that ordinary people have trust information on the powerful? What is Mark Zuckerberg's trust score? Google's? Elon Musk's? Various politicians? 4. According to the article, FB isn't releasing the algorithm because it would enable users to game it (in fairness, I don't remember if FB said that or someone else). But those with resources and motivation, such as the high-end propagandists, will learn how to game it anyway, which can have at least two consequences: 1) Propaganda may become harder to identify, and 2) power will be even more concentrated in the hands of the few - FB, their partners, and those who can game the system. 5. As seems the norm for tech, the users have very little agency (other than to try to please the system); they are objects of technology and of those who control it. It bears repeating that we've come a long way from the world of free-as-in-speech systems and the idea that the goal is end-user control. In another context, an article posted to HN paraphrased Alan Kay as asking, 'Should the computer program the kid or should the kid program the computer?' [0] I think our society has answered that question for the present. [0] http://wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html http://wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html
- dragonwriter 8y ago> "Lyons said she soon realized that many people were reporting posts as false simply because they did not agree with the content." So, people report posts as false when they do not agree that they are true? I'm struggling to understand how that is a surprise, or what other possible thing you could expect. That's literally exactly what “false” means.
- ithilglin909 8y agoBy "agree with the content", the author clearly doesn't means "believe that the content is factually incorrect", rather that they disagree with the viewpoint expressed in the story.
- ithilglin909 8y agoAnd I'm certain a story that touches on any controversial issue would be more likely to get flagged as false, regardless of whether the content is factual.
- MichaelKSpencer 8y agoI was just thinking the same thing.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> By "agree with the content", the author clearly doesn't means "believe that the content is factually incorrect" I disagree that that is obvious, and, moreover, I would disagree with the idea that the author would have any way of telling whether someone flagging merely disagreed with some aspect of the viewpoint/presentation outside of the base facts or disagreed with both the viewpoint and the fact claims, seeing the latter as misrepresented to serve the former. Further, it's virtually impossible to cleanly separate disagreement on viewpoint from disagreement over facts, because the two mutually interact (particularly viewpoints not only shape perception of facts but also perceptions of the; relative importance of facts.) For instance, there is a story right now circulating in even fairly mainstream, especially conservative, media (notably including Fox News) and being widely shared on social media alleging that a proposed California law would ban restaurants from serving children any drinks except the two choices of milk and water. This story is invariably couches in a lot of viewpoint around crazy nanny state liberals and other conservative stereotypes of California. It is very likely that lots of people would disagree strongly with the viewpoint of the story. But the actual proposal, as one discovers with a few minutes of research, (1) doesn't limit what restaurants can offer to children (it limits “default drink options” for children's meal combos) and the limitation it proposes isn't to just milk and water (it includes milk, water, flavored water, and nondairy milk alternatives). It is, in other words, factually false in several dimensions. Now, if one agrees with the viewpoint, one may be more likely to dismiss those factual errors, even if you are aware of them, as minor and tangential. If one disagrees with the viewpoint, one is likely more inclined to see them as significant and central and indicative of a deliberate distortion to push an agenda.
- ChuckMcM 8y agoI am tempted to paraphrase the Elephant man, "I am not a sigmoid function, I am a human being!" in response to that headline :-) That said, I think it is great that they are trying to characterize this sort of thing. The second law of institutions is that every process must require more people to execute than can conspire without being detected[1]. But relying so much on humans in one way or another is going to gum it up. My mom for example, a certified human, would always flag anything that offended her belief system as 'fake news.' Fact checking is fine but it is important to understand that conspiracy folks actually believe what they are saying is true, regardless of any facts presented that contradict their world view. I have always attributed that to an internally rooted desire to "need" it to be true, either for their own self image or their own conscience. [1] No, I just made that up. But the kernel is true, if you have a system that is being gamed you have to build a defense that cannot itself be gamed.
- move-on-by 8y ago> if you have a system that is being gamed you have to build a defense that cannot itself be gamed. I guess, except without transparency and accountability, this will give more power to those gaming the system
- panarky 8y ago> every process must require more people to execute than can conspire without being detected Step 1 - let users report posts that are false Step 2 - human fact checkers investigate user reports Step 3 - rely more on users who report posts as false that really are false, and less on users who report posts as false that really are true Step 4 - repeat step 3 but for the fact checkers themselves Step 5 - train an ML model to automate more of the fact checking work
- degenerate 8y agoStep 6 - abandon the project when an edge case creates a PR nightmare
- antidesitter 8y agoThis reminds me of a generative adversarial network.
- calimac 8y agoIs this an issue that relates to data rights? Who gave facebook the right to slice and dice my usage habits into a social model? What data relationships does facebook rely on to aggregate the signals into their prediction algorithm? Does Alphabet have any agreement or contract pertaining to data exchange? Does facebook rely on their billions of listening nodes, the social sharing button on most every website you visit, to incorporate your web browsing habits into the social trust score? Alphabet and facebook worked together in China to build the Chinese Social Credit Score. Is this the prelude to the US version?
- InfiniteBeing 8y agoI'm going to guess that a lot of truly trustworthy right leaning people are going to get worse scores than they should because they don't believe in the left wing dominate media's narratives.
- prolikewh0a 8y ago>left wing dominate media's narratives Like what?
- gfo 8y agoIs there such a thing as a perfect algorithm where you can publish it and trying to "game" is nearly impossible? In this context, a "perfect" algorithm would be one where someone trying to "game" the system would essentially be forced to post only true content to achieve a near perfect score? I hope one factor in their scoring involves number of cases where someone reports factually accurate content as false on numerous occasions or does the same for opinion-based content. Of course, that then requires a means for validating the content as opinion or fact-checking, but they're already heading down that path.
- trumped 8y agoIt's not a matter of if they will game the system, it's a matter of when (no software is perfect, not even PageRank).
- creaghpatr 8y agoI'm here for the Black Mirror 'Nosedive' comparisons.
- dwd 8y agoIt's very Bookerian. I think we can all agree that the secret algorithm is going to be in the social signalling - job status, who you know, where you live. Make everyone's rating public and you're there, or worse make it available to whoever pays.
- MichaelKSpencer 8y agoThe "Black Mirror" coming true slant is albeit amusing.
- j-c-hewitt 8y agoAs they will hire biased 'fact'-checkers, you will wind up with people getting greylisted by stating controversial but popular positions (e.g. "eating meat is immoral" / "raising taxes lowers economic productivity" / "welfare programs create perverse incentives" / "sales taxes are regressive" / "Islam is an inherently expansionist religion / "Islam has bloody borders" / "Christianity is inherently misogynist" / "Abortion is murder" / "Republicans are Nazis in discount menswear" / "I voted for Donald Trump and I support our president"). What you will be left with is what many people originally flocked to the internet to avoid: the 'MSM echo chamber' of anodyne center-left opinion against which no dissent will be tolerated.
- luka-birsa 8y agoIs it anything like the Chinese credit system? Seems the two could share the notes.
- cheeseomlit 8y agoSounds just like it to me, except we are being categorized by corporations instead of the state. How long until potential employers make a good social score a pre-requisite to hiring?
- singularity2001 8y ago> except we are being categorized by corporations instead of the state. The difference vanishes when your state is run by corporations.
- freeflight 8y ago> except we are being categorized by corporations instead of the state Considering that the state very likely has wholesale access to all the data, I'm not sure that's making actually much of a difference.
- prolikewh0a 8y agoWill I be denied employment if I don't have social media?
- cheeseomlit 8y agoI wouldn't be surprised if that's already considered a red flag. "No facebook? Sounds anti-social.."
- makecheck 8y agoOne of the things I liked about Slashdot was the option to periodically review random comments (with context), and how they were rated, with the option to state whether this was appropriate. Furthermore, the ratings themselves had descriptors: Insightful, Funny, etc. I think this idea should be taken further so that you can’t post as much (or even at all) unless you are actively participating in meta-moderating, i.e. helping the community.
- nixarian 8y agoBut remember, China's social credit system is terrible! How could anyone think of rating people like that?
- justfor1comment 8y agoNow it's my personal goal to have a score of zero on FB.
- safgasCVS 8y agoThere have numerous times in history where free speech has been stifled and it turned out to be a bad idea. But I'm sure this time is going to be different
- aglavine 8y agoFree speech is not being stifled. They want to regulate content in their site. You can publish your content in other places. I appreciate fake news being cleaned in my timeline, if the cost is no more than some occasional legit news being pruned once in awhile.
- safgasCVS 8y agoAlternatively don't offload the responsibility of what is acceptable content to a powerful 3rd party and use your common sense. Free speech isn't there to protect stuff what you agree with
- aglavine 8y agoIt takes valuable time to do that and I don't care who does the cleaning as long as it works. If it doesn't, people will always be aware of that and sites like Facebook risks to lost all of their business in that scenario.
- JohnClark1337 8y agoAnyone who has worked IT should know that the trustworthiness of users is always zero.
- kstenerud 8y agoFacebook is finally learning from the playbook of insurance companies, using your hangouts, friends, job, acquaintances, activities and behavior to assign you a risk score. It's designed to reduce THEIR risk, which means by default that it will be stacked against YOU, and they won't care about those getting ground up in the wheels of the machine.
- halfjoking 8y ago"You're either a 1 or a 0, alive or dead" -https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r3cM5P8tUhc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r3cM5P8tUhc
- synaesthesisx 8y agoAre you a one or a zero?
- ada1981 8y agoSo the bots will auto-post links to Wikipedia articles in certain groups and then 1 in 1,000 will be on the target groups with the fake news. This will become like gaming Google rank.
- MichaelKSpencer 8y agoI had a revelation a few days ago, a crypto "Airdrop" is nothing but a campaign that turns people into bots.
- tzm 8y agoIf measuring emotional response is a signal for trust, does non-participatory behavior yield the lowest trust "score"?
- diogenescynic 8y agoI’d rate Mark Zuckerberg a zero.
- MichaelKSpencer 8y agoSo not running for President in 2020? I think Bernie at 80 might make a better leader.
- throwawaymanbot 8y agoThe great Chinese social credit system through the private back door... How long before Insurance companies are using this data to charge you more?
- octosphere 8y agoFacebook is already strict enough and doesn't need detection algorithms like this. I once setup an array of doppelgänger accounts to see how long it would take for Facebook to correlate the accounts and ban all those accounts in one fell swoop. It was not long until each account was subjected to a rigorous test, where I was asked to match people's Facebook photos with their username. A daunting task if most of your friends were token friends added merely to boost your profile and make it seem popular. Of course I managed to solve half of those prompts, but the other doppelgänger accounts were swiftly banned, leading me to think that Facebook's algorithm works half the time, which in computer science terms is not good enough, but in reality, is enough to deter a substantial amount of bad actors.