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Facebook to ban misinformation on voting in upcoming U.S. elections

102 points by crunchiebones 8y ago

x220 8y ago
I really don't think you should remove information (or even be able to sue someone, except for defamation) for it being false, because it gives people the false impression that if information is printed or allowed on Facebook that it's probably accurate. We need to give everyone the impression that whatever they read might be false, because it actually might be false. Maybe that will make people think critically about what they read.
- donatj 8y ago
  This. Assume everything is false until proven otherwise.
  - x220 8y ago
    I don't go that far. I tend to look at a few things: * what is the source? do they have a reputable history? * do they have conflicts of interest? * do they have a history of faithfully printing retractions and admitting mistakes, or a history of exaggerating facts? * do they have a history of writing accurately about subjects I am an expert about? (e.g. subfields of computer science) If they score pretty well, I tend to believe in the facts (and evaluate the interpretation) they espouse until I come across something that contradicts it. So far the only source I regularly trust is the Economist, but I haven't researched the history of many news organizations. It's just a starting point for me.
  - kadendogthing 8y ago
    That is terribly inefficient.
    - craftyguy 8y ago
      That is very effective.
      - kadendogthing 8y ago
        Not really. There is a whole host of information that you'd never be able to operate on, mainly because you as a person do not have the time or expertise to discern what's true and what's not on every subject that comes up.
  - philliphaydon 8y ago
    “Believe none of what you hear, and only half of what you see”
  - matt4077 8y ago
    So every time you let your spouse take your car you do a DNA test to make sure they haven't been switched with a look-alike? That's just a somewhat extreme illustration of how you, and everybody else, has to rely on heuristics to evaluate statements. It's impossible to even prove a tenth of percentage points of the facts you rely on daily from first principle.
- f39uyc3 8y ago
  An ability to trace the sources of the posts might be interesting. And connecting that to discourse about the typical accuracy of those sources. "This content paid for by... here's the other content they paid for/posted, the trend of topics they discuss, and a weighted bullshit meter" But Facebook plainly wants to moderate the narratives for themselves; until recently their entire news feed was human curated. Now they're just going to keep it behind the scenes, use some algorithms, and offer pay to play, so yeah, they'll get right on doing something that offers visibility.
  - specialist 8y ago
    Journalism requires citations. Otherwise it's just gossip.
  - x220 8y ago
    I think that leaving information up on the website, but make plainly visible the sponsor (and a list of other items sponsored), would be a decent feature that Facebook would absolutely never implement.
    - ianai 8y ago
      That is a reason against facebooks business model.
- bcheung 8y ago
  Agreed. Critical thinking is becoming a lost art that we should not use "workarounds". Also, who gets to decide what is true? Silicon Valley tech employees lean overwhelming to the left. How do you remove this bias? But really, this is a problem of society in general, not a tech problem. People are trained to take what they here with a grain of salt. Having official fact checkers lends authority to what is on Facebook which may or may not be true based solely on whether it was flagged / censored.
- ianai 8y ago
  It was clear the internet was full of lies long before the aol dial up days. If the message hasn’t sunk in by now I think people aren’t going to get it, ever. I’m not sure there’s even a positive way out of this for Facebook.
  - error_logic 8y ago
    There are always new people learning old things about the Internet. Much like cleaning, you will never get to 100%, but without effort the problem will be far worse.
- ghobs91 8y ago
  Or you could use your critical thinking skills and keep in mind that they're not going to catch everything. This falls in line with the mentality of "don't let perfectionism get in the way of progress". We need to focus more on teaching critical thinking in schools, it will lead to people who can call out bullshit way more reliably.
  - tlarkworthy 8y ago
    I think education in critical thinking would solve the problem, but I also think digital media literacy would help too and is probably an easier lesson to scale.
  - x220 8y ago
    How do you think people practically learn critical thinking skills? Occasionally people need to be fooled, and shown that they were fooled.
- pcwalton 8y ago
  This logic would also have us stop prosecuting pickpockets on subways, for fear that people might stop being careful with their belongings. Private social media platforms should both take steps to remove obviously false material and educate users as to how to recognize misinformation.
  - x220 8y ago
    I don't know what sort of people you talk to, but I don't treat legal behavior in anywhere near a similar way to the way I treat illegal or directly harmful behavior. The idea of even making such an analogy feels wrong to me. Pickpocketing physically damages you and your property. To draw a parallel with speech stretches my imagination too thin.
    - pcwalton 8y ago
      Conspiracy theories that circulate on social media are causing damage to our democracy. Facebook is a private platform. It's not, and it shouldn't be, bound by the First Amendment.
- r00fus 8y ago
  information or dis-information? "Lies spread around the world before the truth laces up it's boots" according to Mark Twain ... and that was before Radio, TV or the Internet. Hard to inoculate your population when they're swimming in toxic filth daily.
anonytrary 8y ago
"Ban misinformation"? This is a very slippery slope... Facebook's very own Babel's Tower.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
s73v3r_ 8y ago
This is something that seriously needs to be clamped down on. It is outright fraud, plain and simple. And since it's being done with the intention of disenfranchising people, it is extremely evil.
- x220 8y ago
  Fraud requires financial gain. This is just lying. People are allowed to lie in this way, and you should not believe everything you read, particularly if it sounds very appealing, gets your emotions fired up, or seems to offer benefit without requiring any payment or responsibility.
  - donarb 8y ago
    A lot of these fake news sites don’t care about the truth. They’re all about generating clicks to their sites which produce revenue.
    - x220 8y ago
      I don't see how that's relevant.
  - s73v3r_ 8y ago
    "People are allowed to lie in this way" No. I flat out reject the idea that people should be able to lie about the facts of when and where voting occurs for the purposes of disenfranchisement. That should be severely punished. That is not freedom of speech, that is again outright fraud.
- darpa_escapee 8y ago
  Do we know who is engaging in this behavior? I'd like to know who they are so we can make sure they don't try to do something similar again.
  - codyb 8y ago
    I don't have links but the Russians were definitely targeting communities in efforts to reduce turnout during the 2016 election. Reading about the scale and intricacy of their influence campaign is pretty fascinating and worth a read.
394549 8y ago
> Months ago, senior Facebook executives briefly debated banning all political ads, which produce less than 5 percent of the company’s revenue, sources said. The company rejected that because product managers were loath to leave advertising dollars on the table... Gotta remember what's most important. /s
- r00fus 8y ago
  They have a fiduciary duty to their investors to not leave money on the table... blah blah blah. There is a lot of cheerleading of bloodthirsty capitalism in the hallowed halls of CNBC and the like.
- 6nf 8y ago
  5% is a lot. Political ads are 5% of Facebook's revenue? Wow that's way more than I expected.
- dlivingston 8y ago
  They are a business, after all.
  - tivert 8y ago
    > They are a business, after all. Just like a cigarette company that doesn't want to leave money on the table from not courting youth sales. It's a twisted idea that the logic of business success can be used to justify all kinds of destructive and harmful decisions by businesses.
    - dlivingston 8y ago
      Agreed, but the idea that any publicly traded company can or will have ethics is an equally absurd idea. I tend to think of companies as Darwinian machines whose evolutionary 'fitness function' is the maximization of profits.
    - nickodell 8y ago
      There are both business and public policy arguments for not banning political ads, as the article notes.
inetknght 8y ago
Roads have speed limits. Social media can have link limits. Sure, you might be able to exceed your limit by posting to something that is patently or opinionatedly false. But how would you enforce it if a person can simply say "oops sorry I thought you knew it was a joke" or "I agree with its opinion"? Analogy: if a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound? If you only violate a speed limit when you're caught and the police write a ticket, how would you get caught on social media?
- genericone 8y ago
  In order to prevent virality on WeChat, they impose a 100 share limit before limiting new shares to invites-only and only for people who have a linked mobile number. What this effectively means is that if WeChat detects a 'viral-event', anonymity can be squashed and those responsible for causing the viral-event can be identified and I suppose questioned at a later date on whether they are anti-government or simply rabble-rousers. Is this what you mean by wanting to have social media limits? That the government can step in and say, "Ma'am, you've shared enough, what's going on here, you're going to need a permit for this discussion" ?
  - bcoates 8y ago
    It's just a painfully dumb metaphor, don't overthink it.
  - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
    Well, its not a discussion after hundreds of strangers have been pulled in. Its more of a mob? Its disingenuous to talk about free speech on the web, deliberately ignoring how virality is a new thing and its not working out well to ignore what it can do
  - fooker 8y ago
    Limiting to 100 is still a large exponential. In just 5 'levels' of share, it can reach about 300 million people.
    - 8y ago
buboard 8y ago
The upcoming US elections may prove to be a watershed moment for modern democracies in general. There is a widely held belief in academic cycles that mass voter manipulation through social media has managed to trump all other kinds of propaganda, causing people to become electoral zombies. This belief is based on flimsy evidence and on a mountain of bias. I hope facebook and the other media do everything by the book and according to the mandates of their favorite party politics. This will be an easy way to finally dissolve these mass delusions and make it obvious that societal change is real.
- yourbandsucks 8y ago
  The academics are wrong, the problem is tribalism. Facts don't matter, thought doesn't matter, even ideology doesn't matter. It's just about tribes at this point for a decent chunk of the population. Now, social media is an excellent platform for whipping up further tribalism. But it's not so straightforward as "a few cambridge analytica ad buys -> electoral zombies".
  - aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
    Wait a sec! There is nothing wrong with tribalism per se. The problem is that fake news are convincing people that my tribe is wrong, which is obviously nonsense! /s
- narrator 8y ago
  Instead of mass voter manipulation of voters through the establishment media? Nobody would be in a panic at all if Hillary had won.
  - thefounder 8y ago
    The issue with Facebook is that it's too easy for someone from Russia for example to place ads. I believe the established media doesn't run thousands of ads paid by thousands of unknown individuals.
    - 8y ago
bcoates 8y ago
Soon you'll see this linked from a Facebook post to prove that you can trust information posted on Facebook. After all, if it was false they'd remove it!
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
spangry 8y ago
"On the issue of fake news, Facebook has held off on a total ban, instead limiting the spread of articles marked as false by vetted fact-checkers. However, that approach can leave fact-checkers overwhelmed and able to tackle only the most viral hoaxes." Does anyone else find this concerning? Even the smallest bias held by fact-checkers can dramatically skew things towards one side e.g. only "fact-check" articles that favour one side.
- yourbandsucks 8y ago
  What if one "side" traffics in far more falsehoods than the other "side"? An unbiased approach will fact-check them far more often.
- x220 8y ago
  You find it concerning because it's easy to abuse. The fact-checkers get to decide what is "true", and other Facebook users are unlikely to listen to you if you try and convince them that the fact-checkers are wrong.
  - dymk 8y ago
    Honestly, the much harder problem is convincing people that fact checkers are right, if they already disagree with the fact checker. And they are much more numerous than those who already happened to agree with the fact checker.
    - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
      In my experience the biggest problem with fact checkers is that facts are complicated. Somebody says "the speed of light is 300,000 km/s" and you go to a fact checker and you get: > "TRUE: The speed of light is approximately 300,000 km/s." Then you go to another one and you get: > "FALSE: the speed of light is actually 299,792,458 m/s in a vacuum and has a medium-dependent value through air, water or another medium ... " Then you get into an argument with someone where the distinction matters and they cite the first one, or get into one where it doesn't and they cite the second one.
shironineja__ 8y ago
I’m so happy I can believe everything I read on the Internet again. Thanks Facebook!!
dev_dull 8y ago
This is such a slippery slope. Even now snopes hasn’t debunked the “Trump tower server communicating to Russia”[1] story even though it was simply spam and is soundly debunked. And when we learned that or national intelligence agencies wire tapped a duly elected president? CNN called it fake news (“we’re dumber for having heard that”). If we let these “fact checkers” control the narrative we’re sacrificing our own ability to critically judge things for ourselves. Because we’ll never see it. I have zero doubt that “misinformation” is simply — or already — overloaded with political biases. 1. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-server-tied-to-russian-bank/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-server-tied-to-russi...
- AlexandrB 8y ago
  > If we let these “fact checkers” control the narrative we’re sacrificing our own ability to critically judge things for ourselves. Give me a break. We sacrificed our ability to critically judge things for ourselves the second we decided we're ok with algorithmic feeds and timelines. Adding fact checkers only changes some input variables - the net result is still that each social media user lives in a thought prison of their own design.
monochromatic 8y ago
Great, Facebook as the ministry of truth.
thrower123 8y ago
I really think they have better things to worry about. Maybe fixing their news feed so that I don't see the same four pieces of content day after day after day. With a few hundred contacts on Facebook that aren't unfollowed, I should be seeing something, but it's not surfacing at all. Even if I turn on notifications for particular people that I really care about seeing content from, about half the time I don't see things. Really makes it pointless to bother with Facebook very much.
sergiotapia 8y ago
They'll most likely filter out anything conservative.
- dymk 8y ago
  Why do you think that might be?
  - hyperdunc 8y ago
    Are you insinuating conservatives are disproportionately creating fake news? Silicon Valley's left wing bias is well established. There's no way companies like Facebook can censor impartially.
- tzs 8y ago
  Are conservatives disproportionately posting false information about voting requirements, voting methods, long lines at polling places, and violence at polling places? That's what the article is about filtering, so if conservatives aren't doing that more than liberals, their posts won't be hit more.
golemiprague 8y ago
Or in other words, Facebook is going to push left wing propaganda. It is not going to change anything, everybody know s that most of those tech companies are lefties and will ignore it and just find alternative ways to spread right wing news.
kadendogthing 8y ago
Good. And if they happen to more consistently filter conservative sources this time around [1], then maybe the conservative ecosystem should fix that instead of opting to jerk off about a dystopian future (sourced from a book they read in middle school) because someone has the intellectual fortitude to appropriately label and filter fud. [1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/is-facebook-censoring-conservative-news/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/is-facebook-censoring-cons...
ta0001 8y ago
But only after they elect their nazi-candidate in Brazil, after that, zuck will remove the fakenews factory, soooo timely!
Deimorz 8y ago
Here's the official Facebook post about it: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/10/voter-suppression-policies/ https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/10/voter-suppression-polic...
ta0001 8y ago
But they only will remove after they finish electing their nazi-candidate in Brazil. Im talking about real nazi, not a comedy guy like trump, but a real nazi. After they finish in Brazil, they will remove the fakenews factory... sooooo timely!
liftbigweights 8y ago
The nytimes, cnn and washingtonpost should join Facebook, Google and Twitter to form an organization to get rid of misinformation once and for all. We can call it the Ministry of Truth or something like that so it has credibility. Maybe the good honest unbiased folks at snopes can run it for them with some help from the JDL and SPLC.
moogly 8y ago
Just in time for Zuckerberg's presidential campaign!
gtirloni 8y ago
It's great that FB can even try and I'm sure they will improve things somehow. My concern is apps like WhatsApp which can't peak into conversations. We're going through elections in Brazil and the amount of fake news I receive daily from family and friends is shocking . Some days I try to be a fact-checker to send a message that they should know better but it only creates anger (and I never take a position , simply show the facts. I'm sure they catalog me as being a member of whatever other side they hate). People only want to read/see things that agree with their views to the point that they are happy to forward pure crap to others.
WAthrowaway 8y ago
They really should just disallow all posting from Nov 1 until after the elections. It would be much more effective
GhostVII 8y ago
The ban on misinformation is only on information regarding how you can vote, which seems reasonable since it is something that can be fairly easily fact-checked - either you can vote over mail, or you can't, there isn't an in-between. However I think it would be better if they didn't try and limit the spread of false articles - instead maybe they could put some kind of disclaimer on the post, saying "Facebook fact-checkers believe this to be false" or something like that. Then the actual distribution of the content isn't up to the fact-checkers. Obviously Facebook can do what they want, they are a private company, but I think it is best if they treat everyone's opinion/articles equally as much as possible, so long as they are not violating the content guidelines on the website.
voidr 8y ago
Facebook needs to be regulated or the US will become the next China. Once the other tech companies see that they can censor political views they disagree with, they will and the US will have what China has without even the state mandating it.
throw2016 8y ago
Facebook and Twitter are aggressively censoring alternative media and news sites that cover police brutality, political opinion and corruption. [1] It's very strange to see these arbitrary and heavy handed actions not receiving the same outrage as possible censorship by Google in China, when they are in effect the same thing. Clamping down on political opinion and activism ie dissent is censorship. The chinese do it directly without apology, we are using sophistry by using nebulous ministry of truth terms like 'fakenews', conspiracy and FUD to achieve the same ends. [1] https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/10/tide-turning-regulating-facebook-google.html https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/10/tide-turning-regulat...
beezischillin 8y ago
I'm not particularly happy that social media companies are deciding on tripling down on shady behaviour. They're always heavy-handed and go around banning, silencing and censoring even unrelated stuff. It's gotten to a point where people in my circle of friends are moving on to alternatives because they had enough of dealing with their private communications being scrutinised, dissected and used as a reason to censor them by very fallible bots. I understand the challenges and issues involved in this whole kerfuffle --- but in the end if your users are unhappy and leaving your service, you're failing on delivering on your promises. I wish I was smart enough to think up an instant solution to this, but I'm not. All I know is that there has to be a better way out of this than just a black and white solution. Society should be able to develop a way to integrate social media into itself and use it non-destructively.
dnjdirjrmrf 8y ago
Who decides what is real or not? What is "misinformation" or not? Disturbing af
- krapp 8y ago
  You're absolutely right... "dnjdirjrmrf"... Objective reality doesn't exist, and there is no such thing as either misinformation or disinformation, and we should be frightened of anyone who tries to distinguish between them. Truth is lies and lies are truth.
  - dnjdirjrmrf 8y ago
    Would you like your telephone company filtering your words to your friends and family based on what they define as "true"? If I'm communicating with friends and colleagues and acquaintances, I do not need other people policing my speech

102 points by crunchiebones 8y ago

x220 8y ago

I really don't think you should remove information (or even be able to sue someone, except for defamation) for it being false, because it gives people the false impression that if information is printed or allowed on Facebook that it's probably accurate. We need to give everyone the impression that whatever they read might be false, because it actually might be false. Maybe that will make people think critically about what they read.

donatj 8y ago
This. Assume everything is false until proven otherwise.
- x220 8y ago
  I don't go that far. I tend to look at a few things: * what is the source? do they have a reputable history? * do they have conflicts of interest? * do they have a history of faithfully printing retractions and admitting mistakes, or a history of exaggerating facts? * do they have a history of writing accurately about subjects I am an expert about? (e.g. subfields of computer science) If they score pretty well, I tend to believe in the facts (and evaluate the interpretation) they espouse until I come across something that contradicts it. So far the only source I regularly trust is the Economist, but I haven't researched the history of many news organizations. It's just a starting point for me.
- kadendogthing 8y ago
  That is terribly inefficient.
  - craftyguy 8y ago
    That is very effective.
    - kadendogthing 8y ago
      Not really. There is a whole host of information that you'd never be able to operate on, mainly because you as a person do not have the time or expertise to discern what's true and what's not on every subject that comes up.
- philliphaydon 8y ago
  “Believe none of what you hear, and only half of what you see”
- matt4077 8y ago
  So every time you let your spouse take your car you do a DNA test to make sure they haven't been switched with a look-alike? That's just a somewhat extreme illustration of how you, and everybody else, has to rely on heuristics to evaluate statements. It's impossible to even prove a tenth of percentage points of the facts you rely on daily from first principle.
f39uyc3 8y ago
An ability to trace the sources of the posts might be interesting. And connecting that to discourse about the typical accuracy of those sources. "This content paid for by... here's the other content they paid for/posted, the trend of topics they discuss, and a weighted bullshit meter" But Facebook plainly wants to moderate the narratives for themselves; until recently their entire news feed was human curated. Now they're just going to keep it behind the scenes, use some algorithms, and offer pay to play, so yeah, they'll get right on doing something that offers visibility.
- specialist 8y ago
  Journalism requires citations. Otherwise it's just gossip.
- x220 8y ago
  I think that leaving information up on the website, but make plainly visible the sponsor (and a list of other items sponsored), would be a decent feature that Facebook would absolutely never implement.
  - ianai 8y ago
    That is a reason against facebooks business model.
bcheung 8y ago
Agreed. Critical thinking is becoming a lost art that we should not use "workarounds". Also, who gets to decide what is true? Silicon Valley tech employees lean overwhelming to the left. How do you remove this bias? But really, this is a problem of society in general, not a tech problem. People are trained to take what they here with a grain of salt. Having official fact checkers lends authority to what is on Facebook which may or may not be true based solely on whether it was flagged / censored.
ianai 8y ago
It was clear the internet was full of lies long before the aol dial up days. If the message hasn’t sunk in by now I think people aren’t going to get it, ever. I’m not sure there’s even a positive way out of this for Facebook.
- error_logic 8y ago
  There are always new people learning old things about the Internet. Much like cleaning, you will never get to 100%, but without effort the problem will be far worse.
ghobs91 8y ago
Or you could use your critical thinking skills and keep in mind that they're not going to catch everything. This falls in line with the mentality of "don't let perfectionism get in the way of progress". We need to focus more on teaching critical thinking in schools, it will lead to people who can call out bullshit way more reliably.
- tlarkworthy 8y ago
  I think education in critical thinking would solve the problem, but I also think digital media literacy would help too and is probably an easier lesson to scale.
- x220 8y ago
  How do you think people practically learn critical thinking skills? Occasionally people need to be fooled, and shown that they were fooled.
pcwalton 8y ago
This logic would also have us stop prosecuting pickpockets on subways, for fear that people might stop being careful with their belongings. Private social media platforms should both take steps to remove obviously false material and educate users as to how to recognize misinformation.
- x220 8y ago
  I don't know what sort of people you talk to, but I don't treat legal behavior in anywhere near a similar way to the way I treat illegal or directly harmful behavior. The idea of even making such an analogy feels wrong to me. Pickpocketing physically damages you and your property. To draw a parallel with speech stretches my imagination too thin.
  - pcwalton 8y ago
    Conspiracy theories that circulate on social media are causing damage to our democracy. Facebook is a private platform. It's not, and it shouldn't be, bound by the First Amendment.
r00fus 8y ago
information or dis-information? "Lies spread around the world before the truth laces up it's boots" according to Mark Twain ... and that was before Radio, TV or the Internet. Hard to inoculate your population when they're swimming in toxic filth daily.

anonytrary 8y ago

"Ban misinformation"? This is a very slippery slope... Facebook's very own Babel's Tower.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

s73v3r_ 8y ago

This is something that seriously needs to be clamped down on. It is outright fraud, plain and simple. And since it's being done with the intention of disenfranchising people, it is extremely evil.

x220 8y ago
Fraud requires financial gain. This is just lying. People are allowed to lie in this way, and you should not believe everything you read, particularly if it sounds very appealing, gets your emotions fired up, or seems to offer benefit without requiring any payment or responsibility.
- donarb 8y ago
  A lot of these fake news sites don’t care about the truth. They’re all about generating clicks to their sites which produce revenue.
  - x220 8y ago
    I don't see how that's relevant.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  "People are allowed to lie in this way" No. I flat out reject the idea that people should be able to lie about the facts of when and where voting occurs for the purposes of disenfranchisement. That should be severely punished. That is not freedom of speech, that is again outright fraud.
darpa_escapee 8y ago
Do we know who is engaging in this behavior? I'd like to know who they are so we can make sure they don't try to do something similar again.
- codyb 8y ago
  I don't have links but the Russians were definitely targeting communities in efforts to reduce turnout during the 2016 election. Reading about the scale and intricacy of their influence campaign is pretty fascinating and worth a read.

394549 8y ago

> Months ago, senior Facebook executives briefly debated banning all political ads, which produce less than 5 percent of the company’s revenue, sources said. The company rejected that because product managers were loath to leave advertising dollars on the table... Gotta remember what's most important. /s

r00fus 8y ago
They have a fiduciary duty to their investors to not leave money on the table... blah blah blah. There is a lot of cheerleading of bloodthirsty capitalism in the hallowed halls of CNBC and the like.
6nf 8y ago
5% is a lot. Political ads are 5% of Facebook's revenue? Wow that's way more than I expected.
dlivingston 8y ago
They are a business, after all.
- tivert 8y ago
  > They are a business, after all. Just like a cigarette company that doesn't want to leave money on the table from not courting youth sales. It's a twisted idea that the logic of business success can be used to justify all kinds of destructive and harmful decisions by businesses.
  - dlivingston 8y ago
    Agreed, but the idea that any publicly traded company can or will have ethics is an equally absurd idea. I tend to think of companies as Darwinian machines whose evolutionary 'fitness function' is the maximization of profits.
  - nickodell 8y ago
    There are both business and public policy arguments for not banning political ads, as the article notes.

inetknght 8y ago

Roads have speed limits. Social media can have link limits. Sure, you might be able to exceed your limit by posting to something that is patently or opinionatedly false. But how would you enforce it if a person can simply say "oops sorry I thought you knew it was a joke" or "I agree with its opinion"? Analogy: if a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound? If you only violate a speed limit when you're caught and the police write a ticket, how would you get caught on social media?

genericone 8y ago
In order to prevent virality on WeChat, they impose a 100 share limit before limiting new shares to invites-only and only for people who have a linked mobile number. What this effectively means is that if WeChat detects a 'viral-event', anonymity can be squashed and those responsible for causing the viral-event can be identified and I suppose questioned at a later date on whether they are anti-government or simply rabble-rousers. Is this what you mean by wanting to have social media limits? That the government can step in and say, "Ma'am, you've shared enough, what's going on here, you're going to need a permit for this discussion" ?
- bcoates 8y ago
  It's just a painfully dumb metaphor, don't overthink it.
- JoeAltmaier 8y ago
  Well, its not a discussion after hundreds of strangers have been pulled in. Its more of a mob? Its disingenuous to talk about free speech on the web, deliberately ignoring how virality is a new thing and its not working out well to ignore what it can do
- fooker 8y ago
  Limiting to 100 is still a large exponential. In just 5 'levels' of share, it can reach about 300 million people.
  - 8y ago

buboard 8y ago

The upcoming US elections may prove to be a watershed moment for modern democracies in general. There is a widely held belief in academic cycles that mass voter manipulation through social media has managed to trump all other kinds of propaganda, causing people to become electoral zombies. This belief is based on flimsy evidence and on a mountain of bias. I hope facebook and the other media do everything by the book and according to the mandates of their favorite party politics. This will be an easy way to finally dissolve these mass delusions and make it obvious that societal change is real.

yourbandsucks 8y ago
The academics are wrong, the problem is tribalism. Facts don't matter, thought doesn't matter, even ideology doesn't matter. It's just about tribes at this point for a decent chunk of the population. Now, social media is an excellent platform for whipping up further tribalism. But it's not so straightforward as "a few cambridge analytica ad buys -> electoral zombies".
- aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
  Wait a sec! There is nothing wrong with tribalism per se. The problem is that fake news are convincing people that my tribe is wrong, which is obviously nonsense! /s
narrator 8y ago
Instead of mass voter manipulation of voters through the establishment media? Nobody would be in a panic at all if Hillary had won.
- thefounder 8y ago
  The issue with Facebook is that it's too easy for someone from Russia for example to place ads. I believe the established media doesn't run thousands of ads paid by thousands of unknown individuals.
  - 8y ago

bcoates 8y ago

Soon you'll see this linked from a Facebook post to prove that you can trust information posted on Facebook. After all, if it was false they'd remove it!

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

spangry 8y ago

"On the issue of fake news, Facebook has held off on a total ban, instead limiting the spread of articles marked as false by vetted fact-checkers. However, that approach can leave fact-checkers overwhelmed and able to tackle only the most viral hoaxes." Does anyone else find this concerning? Even the smallest bias held by fact-checkers can dramatically skew things towards one side e.g. only "fact-check" articles that favour one side.

yourbandsucks 8y ago
What if one "side" traffics in far more falsehoods than the other "side"? An unbiased approach will fact-check them far more often.
x220 8y ago
You find it concerning because it's easy to abuse. The fact-checkers get to decide what is "true", and other Facebook users are unlikely to listen to you if you try and convince them that the fact-checkers are wrong.
- dymk 8y ago
  Honestly, the much harder problem is convincing people that fact checkers are right, if they already disagree with the fact checker. And they are much more numerous than those who already happened to agree with the fact checker.
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    In my experience the biggest problem with fact checkers is that facts are complicated. Somebody says "the speed of light is 300,000 km/s" and you go to a fact checker and you get: > "TRUE: The speed of light is approximately 300,000 km/s." Then you go to another one and you get: > "FALSE: the speed of light is actually 299,792,458 m/s in a vacuum and has a medium-dependent value through air, water or another medium ... " Then you get into an argument with someone where the distinction matters and they cite the first one, or get into one where it doesn't and they cite the second one.

shironineja__ 8y ago

I’m so happy I can believe everything I read on the Internet again. Thanks Facebook!!

dev_dull 8y ago

This is such a slippery slope. Even now snopes hasn’t debunked the “Trump tower server communicating to Russia”[1] story even though it was simply spam and is soundly debunked. And when we learned that or national intelligence agencies wire tapped a duly elected president? CNN called it fake news (“we’re dumber for having heard that”). If we let these “fact checkers” control the narrative we’re sacrificing our own ability to critically judge things for ourselves. Because we’ll never see it. I have zero doubt that “misinformation” is simply — or already — overloaded with political biases. 1. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-server-tied-to-russian-bank/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-server-tied-to-russi...

AlexandrB 8y ago
> If we let these “fact checkers” control the narrative we’re sacrificing our own ability to critically judge things for ourselves. Give me a break. We sacrificed our ability to critically judge things for ourselves the second we decided we're ok with algorithmic feeds and timelines. Adding fact checkers only changes some input variables - the net result is still that each social media user lives in a thought prison of their own design.

monochromatic 8y ago

Great, Facebook as the ministry of truth.

thrower123 8y ago

I really think they have better things to worry about. Maybe fixing their news feed so that I don't see the same four pieces of content day after day after day. With a few hundred contacts on Facebook that aren't unfollowed, I should be seeing something, but it's not surfacing at all. Even if I turn on notifications for particular people that I really care about seeing content from, about half the time I don't see things. Really makes it pointless to bother with Facebook very much.

sergiotapia 8y ago

They'll most likely filter out anything conservative.

dymk 8y ago
Why do you think that might be?
- hyperdunc 8y ago
  Are you insinuating conservatives are disproportionately creating fake news? Silicon Valley's left wing bias is well established. There's no way companies like Facebook can censor impartially.
tzs 8y ago
Are conservatives disproportionately posting false information about voting requirements, voting methods, long lines at polling places, and violence at polling places? That's what the article is about filtering, so if conservatives aren't doing that more than liberals, their posts won't be hit more.

golemiprague 8y ago

Or in other words, Facebook is going to push left wing propaganda. It is not going to change anything, everybody know s that most of those tech companies are lefties and will ignore it and just find alternative ways to spread right wing news.

kadendogthing 8y ago

Good. And if they happen to more consistently filter conservative sources this time around [1], then maybe the conservative ecosystem should fix that instead of opting to jerk off about a dystopian future (sourced from a book they read in middle school) because someone has the intellectual fortitude to appropriately label and filter fud. [1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/is-facebook-censoring-conservative-news/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/is-facebook-censoring-cons...

ta0001 8y ago

But only after they elect their nazi-candidate in Brazil, after that, zuck will remove the fakenews factory, soooo timely!

Deimorz 8y ago

Here's the official Facebook post about it: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/10/voter-suppression-policies/ https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/10/voter-suppression-polic...

ta0001 8y ago

But they only will remove after they finish electing their nazi-candidate in Brazil. Im talking about real nazi, not a comedy guy like trump, but a real nazi. After they finish in Brazil, they will remove the fakenews factory... sooooo timely!

liftbigweights 8y ago

The nytimes, cnn and washingtonpost should join Facebook, Google and Twitter to form an organization to get rid of misinformation once and for all. We can call it the Ministry of Truth or something like that so it has credibility. Maybe the good honest unbiased folks at snopes can run it for them with some help from the JDL and SPLC.

moogly 8y ago

Just in time for Zuckerberg's presidential campaign!

gtirloni 8y ago

It's great that FB can even try and I'm sure they will improve things somehow. My concern is apps like WhatsApp which can't peak into conversations. We're going through elections in Brazil and the amount of fake news I receive daily from family and friends is shocking . Some days I try to be a fact-checker to send a message that they should know better but it only creates anger (and I never take a position , simply show the facts. I'm sure they catalog me as being a member of whatever other side they hate). People only want to read/see things that agree with their views to the point that they are happy to forward pure crap to others.

WAthrowaway 8y ago

They really should just disallow all posting from Nov 1 until after the elections. It would be much more effective

GhostVII 8y ago

The ban on misinformation is only on information regarding how you can vote, which seems reasonable since it is something that can be fairly easily fact-checked - either you can vote over mail, or you can't, there isn't an in-between. However I think it would be better if they didn't try and limit the spread of false articles - instead maybe they could put some kind of disclaimer on the post, saying "Facebook fact-checkers believe this to be false" or something like that. Then the actual distribution of the content isn't up to the fact-checkers. Obviously Facebook can do what they want, they are a private company, but I think it is best if they treat everyone's opinion/articles equally as much as possible, so long as they are not violating the content guidelines on the website.

voidr 8y ago

Facebook needs to be regulated or the US will become the next China. Once the other tech companies see that they can censor political views they disagree with, they will and the US will have what China has without even the state mandating it.

throw2016 8y ago

Facebook and Twitter are aggressively censoring alternative media and news sites that cover police brutality, political opinion and corruption. [1] It's very strange to see these arbitrary and heavy handed actions not receiving the same outrage as possible censorship by Google in China, when they are in effect the same thing. Clamping down on political opinion and activism ie dissent is censorship. The chinese do it directly without apology, we are using sophistry by using nebulous ministry of truth terms like 'fakenews', conspiracy and FUD to achieve the same ends. [1] https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/10/tide-turning-regulating-facebook-google.html https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/10/tide-turning-regulat...

beezischillin 8y ago

I'm not particularly happy that social media companies are deciding on tripling down on shady behaviour. They're always heavy-handed and go around banning, silencing and censoring even unrelated stuff. It's gotten to a point where people in my circle of friends are moving on to alternatives because they had enough of dealing with their private communications being scrutinised, dissected and used as a reason to censor them by very fallible bots. I understand the challenges and issues involved in this whole kerfuffle --- but in the end if your users are unhappy and leaving your service, you're failing on delivering on your promises. I wish I was smart enough to think up an instant solution to this, but I'm not. All I know is that there has to be a better way out of this than just a black and white solution. Society should be able to develop a way to integrate social media into itself and use it non-destructively.

dnjdirjrmrf 8y ago

Who decides what is real or not? What is "misinformation" or not? Disturbing af

krapp 8y ago
You're absolutely right... "dnjdirjrmrf"... Objective reality doesn't exist, and there is no such thing as either misinformation or disinformation, and we should be frightened of anyone who tries to distinguish between them. Truth is lies and lies are truth.
- dnjdirjrmrf 8y ago
  Would you like your telephone company filtering your words to your friends and family based on what they define as "true"? If I'm communicating with friends and colleagues and acquaintances, I do not need other people policing my speech