6 ms·

So, Singapore bureaucrats decide what is fake and what is the ultimate truth. What is facebook going to do after it bends to multiple state actors whose ultima

• alecco 7y ago
  Usually they care more about internal things than outside. See China.
  • newbrict 7y ago
    Oceania is at war with East Asia, it's always been at war with East Asia
• ub 7y ago
  Isn't this what Sacha Baron Cohen asked for in his speech? That there be state mandated rules on what's fake vs not. I don't think this issue has any good solutions - damned if you do, damned if you don't. The only 'okay' way to solve for this is to crowd-source a variety of opinions on the issue and show what else people are saying about it - not as the ultimate truth, but rather to broaden people's perspective on it that there are different ways to look at the same issue.
  • dharma1 7y ago
    I've always wondered how Wikipedia has solved this... Isn't it essentially the same problem?
    • enitihas 7y ago
      Wikipedia just has far less active users than Facebook. As in, number of users actively creating content. The amount of content on Facebook is also orders of magnitude higher than Wikipedia. And the friction in creating content is also much lower on Facebook.
    • jeswin 7y ago
      Wikipedia built a culture in which editors who lean towards truthful informative are encouraged, and a userbase which values that. This is only possible with non-profits having strong voluntary and academic participation. Nobody will dedicate quality time for a closed for-profit network like Facebook. But I feel that the bigger problem is that people want fake news. Most people have a hard time living their everyday lives; fake news which supports their choices and viewpoints is a release, and it makes them feel good. And networks do a good job of surfacing similar content once they gauge one's interests.
      • shadowgovt 7y ago
        The sheer volume of user-generated traffic on Facebook suggests that plenty of people are willing to dedicate quality time to it.
    • nkkollaw 7y ago
      Wikipedia publishes a lot of incorrect information. The fact that you can source a piece of information doesn't make it true.
    • shadowgovt 7y ago
      It's not really solved on Wikipedia. Wikipedia fights happen all the time in controversial topics, and it's essentially solved by techno-theocracy; moderators show up and lock a contentious topic against vandalism when it's too heated, and whatever the current state of the edit war is gets frozen.
    • Andrex 7y ago
      There are regular articles about how Wikipedia editors abuse their powers. - https://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/10/13/wikipedias-dark-side/ https://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/10/13/wikipedias-dark-si... - https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4xangm/wikipedia-editor-says-sites-toxic-community-has-him-contemplating-suicide https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4xangm/wikipedia-editor-s... - https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/one-third-of-personal-attacks-on-wikipedia-come-from-active-editors/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/one-t...
    • Mirioron 7y ago
      They haven't. Wikipedia is essentially a battleground when it comes to recent topics that are politicized. Sometimes an admin will essentially lock editing of the page and whatever version was up at the time is essentially staying there.
    • purple-again 7y ago
      They haven’t solved it! A group has wrangled the power and Wikipedia represents their vision of the truth. This is fine where talking about objective things like Trump was at the White House for Thanksgiving in 2019. This is not fine for subjective things which is WAY more of the world then people want to admit. We eat food for breakfast. Is this statement true or false? You could mark it either way and both could be supported by rational thought! If you don’t come up with a framework for answering first and then evaluate that question within the context of the agreed upon framework the truthiness of the statement will remain subjective.
  • bpfrh 7y ago
    I don't think you can regulate opinions. But what you can do quite easily is to disallow statements that are factual wrong. That would solve at least a part of the problem. If I say things which where already proven wrong, then I can't post them on Ads.
    • briandear 7y ago
      > things which where already proven wrong Proven by whom?
    • remotecool 7y ago
      in one of Trumps first speeches, he mentioned 'illegal immigrants' and all liberal media said he was talking about immigrants (which implies legal immigrants, but this isn't what he meant or said). I heard the speech myself and couldn't believe outright lying by the media. What's worse, is that everyone that hates Trump believed it and can't be convinced otherwise. The best lies have some truth to them..and are more believable by the public. I already see political ads talking about Trump being impeached, which is factually wrong. I would hope these sorts of ads would be banned and the 'facts' won't be based on an interpretation of the truth.
  • k_sze 7y ago
    But then it bursts people’s political and opinion bubbles, which is something Facebook might not want. Keeping people in bubbles is how Facebook keeps people browsing and wasting their time on Facebook. Because people like their bubbles.
• BubRoss 7y ago
  Singapore already jails people for being critical of the government on Facebook, so this shouldn't seem like a stretch for them. The news here is Facebook going along with a dictatorship (Singapore's elections aren almost impossible for anyone but the ruling party to win).
• hiccuphippo 7y ago
  They only show the notice to citizens of the country. People from other countries would see their own notices.
• freddie_mercury 7y ago
  Why do you think US corporations shouldn't be subject to local laws when they do business around the world? I'm pretty sure Facebook had no problem taking money from advertisers when users in Singapore viewed ads.....
  • thewhitetulip 7y ago
    The larger question is if who decides what's fact and fiction. Depending on where you stand on your political leanings, you can choose to select or reject facts
• shadowgovt 7y ago
  Yes; that's how it's been solved in the past. In Google Maps, for instance, disputed national borders will show up differently depending on what nation the system determines the request is coming from. And Twitter hides some feeds in countries where advocating for Naziism is illegal (leading to the funny side effect that even though Twitter won't ban the feeds in the US, some quick queries routed through an appropriate VPN can tell a person whether Twitter has flagged an account as a Nazi sympathizer).
• nutjob2 7y ago
  You make it sound like readers will slavishly accept what the government has decided. That's not realistic. They're not censoring so how is this not just more speech? In that sense is positive. Some people will accept it blindly, but then again people accept the most mindless BS because someone wrote it on FB. I don't mind that the government gives me their view, since I'm free to disregard it, or use it to take a contrary view. The fact is that people have to learn how to read and think critically, and for themselves, there is no other way.
• emn13 7y ago
  In the US, we call these bureaucrats "judges", and the falsehoods they might combat "libel" and "defamation". No it's not the same, but this doesn't exactly sound like 1984 either. Frankly, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing that there's some form of pushback against falsehoods, even for political falsehoods. The risks are overblown; it's not like we don't already have a system of checks & balances for stuff like this - a little more judicial application might help. People imply that the distinction between truth and falsehood is a matter of opinion, and you're doing that too by phrasing things like "bureaucrats decide what is fake and what is the ultimate truth". And yes: if you distill it down to a completely binary choice, there's probably some token of opinion in pretty much any case that matters. But that's a ridiculous oversimplification. Just because there's some tiny amount of opinion in anything, doesn't mean there isn't a significant portion of fairly objective observation in many statements. The plain facts matter too; not just the opinion, and it's just not all that hard to identify lies regardless of opinion. So: yes there are cornercases, but throwing the whole concept of objective fact out of the window because some small details are unclear is ridiculous. In any case, content platforms -like facebook- do some of this kind of thing internally, without (as much) oversight, with far more impact, even if it's subtler. Just because it's possible to abuse censorship doesn't mean every possible quality filter must necessarily turn out horrible. Just because opinions may differ doesn't mean there aren't considerable agreements about what's true (and those truths matter, too!). In terms of risks: there's no reason not to spot check + audit; no reason for the moderation to be secret; no reason for the information itself to be completely suppressed (simply not regurgitated without caveats) - all kinds of reasons why this isn't necessarily a problem, and it's IMNSHO obvious that nowadays noise is far more harmful to rational discourse than explicit censorship; and as censorship goes the implicit censorship of unchecked social bubbles is more likely to be misleading than explicit censorship. Btw, I don't know enough about the singeporean system to have an opinion either way: but this casual disdain for anything that even reeks of censorship just doesn't make any sense.
  • Mirioron 7y ago
    >In the US, we call these bureaucrats "judges", and the falsehoods they might combat "libel" and "defamation". No it's not the same, but this doesn't exactly sound like 1984 either. Libel laws in the US are incredibly weak. It's very difficult for a public figure to win a case of defamation against them. But even if that weren't so, the justice system is pretty broken. If you can't afford a lawyer then your outlook isn't good. If that same system starts deciding what is and isn't true then you essentially have a system where poor people are liars. >and it's IMNSHO obvious that nowadays noise is far more harmful to rational discourse than explicit censorship How can you tell? Things that are actually explicitly censored are things you might not even find out about. The US has secret courts and puts gag orders on those that are in there. Yet people aren't outraged about it. I think the disdain for censorship isn't strong enough.
• DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
  Regardless of whether or not the posts contain falsehoods, so far, the posts the government has demanded Facebook to "correct" are all critical of the government. This should surprise no one. I doubt we'll see the Singaporean government demand Facebook correct fibs made by its own ministers or supporters. It's one of the obvious reasons why a Ministry of Truth à la Sacha Baron Cohen is a dangerous idea.
• Mountain_Skies 7y ago
  My step-mother recently had one of her posts marked as false by Facebook. I don't doubt Facebook's accuracy here. For decades she has been into National Inquierer level conspiracy theories but it still felt like overreach by Facebook to single out a particular post. It also implies a degree of accuracy in her other posts, much of which are also nutty half (and often less than half) truths. Facebook has already shown itself to not operate in good faith. It's highly likely that they will make use of their power as arbiter of truth to push their own agendas.
• badrabbit 7y ago
  Yeah, it can serve different content based on location just like with GDPR.