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Why Is Facebook So Afraid of Checking Facts?
- pseingatl 6y agoPerhaps because they do not want to be considered "publishers."
- dadarepublic 6y agoFrom what I gathered FTA it sounds like the author is putting forth the notion that Facebook is relying on old, mostly debunked theories around a "backfire effect" - when fact-checking increases polarization and results in the opposite of the intent of the fact-check. The author then goes on to discuss how more recent studies (including their own research) and even some of the original authors of that pervious research had changed course and believe that fact-checking can indeed help course correct those misled by misinformation. Therein lies the rub, according to the author Facebook's policies around the original research hasn't been updated to match more recent findings. This can be troubling given the stakes at hand.
- thisisnico 6y agoFacebook would be so much better with fact-checking. It seriously would improve the state of the world.
- cheez 6y agoI don't know his name, but what was your opinion on that guy from Google who said we shouldn't force women into STEM for the equality, but let them do what they want (which may not be STEM.) Is the world better off without that opinion (or fact, depending on who you ask?)
- thisisnico 6y agoMy opinion is that you cannot fact check opinion pieces. There is a difference between news and opinion articles.
- cheez 6y agoBut according to him, he was using facts backed by research. You see how this can be sticky.
- krapp 6y agoYou certainly can fact check the assumptions behind opinions or their sources, particularly in a venue where the intent of the author is to influence the reader into accepting an opinion.
- cheez 6y agoWhat is a fact when it comes to sociological research?
- vorpalhex 6y agoWhat makes you think that? Their moderation team is not paid well, mostly outsourced to contracting firms, and has no accountability. What happens when their moderation team decides some anti-vax nuttery is "a fact" and then bans anyone disagreeing? As a reminder, this is a group that handed out punishments for pictures of infants being breastfed.
- thisisnico 6y agoI'm not insinuating that they use the same method used as the moderation team.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cityzen 6y agobecause they're an advertising company and advertising isn't based on facts?
- cheez 6y agobecause when ppl are involved, there is no such thing as an objective fact.
- justinzollars 6y agoThe answer isn't always "a" or "b" its often shades of grey.
- dilippkumar 6y agoThis article misses a crucial point: I do not want fact checked information. I do not want a ministry of Truth telling me what’s an acceptable set of statements to trust. I do not want a third party providing unsolicited opinions on how much I conform with the acceptable statements a ministry of Truth has blessed for public use. I’ll provide three arguments. First, how will Facebook or any other entity that takes on the responsibility to fact check stand up to coordinated misinformation campaigns like “Iraq has WMDs” where an omniscient fact checker could have literally saved thousands of lives. Second, how will Facebook or CNN or Snopes or any other entity fact check disagreeing experts on a subject - for example Sweden’s epidemiologists vs rest of the world taking opposing views on quarantine measures - is anybody at Facebook or any other place qualified to fact check Sweden’s top government advisers? Third, how will Facebook or any single entity fact check unqualified experts on subjects? When Albert Einstein submitted his paper on the Photoelectric effect (which eventually won him a Nobel Prize) he didn’t have a Ph.D nor was he enrolled as a student - he was just an anonymous clerk at a patent office. Today’s reddit would brand him an “armchair physicist” conducting thought experiments. How on earth will Facebook or any Ministry of Truth attempt to fact check anything like this? So, if you rule out Facebook’s ability to fact check coordinated government propaganda, government policy advisors that are literally balancing lives and the economy and fundamental advances in science, what else is there to fact check? A fact checker can only end up becoming a re-enforcement mechanism for popularly held beliefs. Let’s ask Galelio how that worked out for him.
- kick 6y ago...and you go to Facebook for your scientific and world news? Facebook is a toy. Relying on a platform with a built-in way to reply to posts with nothing more than a laugh-cry-smiley to deliver you accurate news in the first place is ridiculous. They could never be a Ministry of Truth or whatever you're implying, because it's a toy. If they want to fact-check posts on their site, it changes literally nothing of importance. They don't, which is fine, but even assuming they did they'd never be capable of anything resembling anything in Orwell's novels.
- oarabbus_ 6y ago
- advisedwang 6y agoPaying people to review content costs money and that eats into their bottom line. Efficacy and political fallout are factors for sure, but "company avoids spending money" doesn't need much further explanation. This is no different from a company using cheaper (and perhaps less safe) parts, using the cheapest call center they can (and letting customer service suffer) or any other way of cutting corners to save a few cents.
- TomMckenny 6y agoBecause they were hammered into submission by demagogues and their supporters who rely on disinformation and conspiracy theories to retain power.
- BenoitEssiambre 6y agoAdding a "(?) Unverified" to the Like options might help?
- okintheory 6y agoIt seems to me that there's an obvious alternative to checking facts, but it's one that scares FB much more than fact checking. Suppose they were transparent! Suppose it was easy to see unobfuscated statistics about who is paying for what on FB. Suppose journalists could easily look up how much white nationalists are spending on targeted advertising in each US state. Suppose we could see how much Exxon, Chevron, Koch Industries are spending, or health insurance companies, or anyone else for that matter. Suppose we could also see how much engagement there is with each post from Breitbart, NYTimes, Young Turks and so on. If we had these facts, as Facebook does, we'd be off to a good start.
- glitchc 6y agoWhy just stop at Facebook? All businesses operate on the model where they take dirty money and try to do clean things with at least some of that money. Heck, most charities operate this way. Let's just make everyone transparent. We should know if the Red Cross is receiving money from Smith and Wesson. Bad individuals and corporations make donations to good causes all the time. You can think of it as moral outrage, but personally I think of it as reparations. The consequences of that action will be as follows: Most of these businesses AND charities will drown in the moral outrage and close their doors. And that will have a detrimental impact on society, because the good that those businesses/charities did will go with the bad. Facebook has one powerful good use case. It makes it trivially easy to connect with relatives and friends far away from us. There are other platforms out there, but until Facebook, there wasn't much, and even now, Facebook is the simplest and most convenient of them all. If Facebook dies, this good use case goes with it.
- catalogia 6y ago> All businesses operate on the model where they take dirty money and try to do clean things with at least some of that money. That's a bit too cynical even for me. There do still exist businesses that simply produce a product or perform a service, selling it honestly without any tricks or subterfuge.
- 6y ago
- CyanLite2 6y agoSimple: "Ignorant" people make up a large percentage of their user base. They argue with "informed" people and it drives traffic and revenue. Meanwhile the social fabric of the United States is being torn apart by political polarization.
- ksk 6y agoThat's the job of news organizations and journalists who have access to experts to verify the information. Also, it seems like Facebook is just a scapegoat here. IMHO, The real problem is that people on both sides of the political spectrum are re-sharing "news" that they have zero idea if its true or not.
- neogodless 6y agoThis is essentially an "individual responsibility" argument. Do I think people "should" be individually responsible? Yes. Do I believe that's going to happen? No. Forty years ago we got our news from a handful of networks that stuck to "the middle". It was no doubt imperfect, but if they would post crazy conspiracy on the nightly news, they would quickly vanish as a network. On the other hand, convince a few million individuals to share a far left or far right story full of misinformation, and it works. The individuals are not "shamed" into avoiding that mistake again.
- ksk 6y agoIts also a "facebook is not a news organization or a fact checking organization with access to an army of experts in every domain" argument. >Forty years ago we got our news from a handful of networks that stuck to "the middle". It was no doubt imperfect, but if they would post crazy conspiracy on the nightly news, they would quickly vanish as a network. I do not think that rumors and misinformation were less prevalent 40 years ago. Is there any consensus (not sparse data) on that? My hunch is that we're in a much better situation today than ever before. Aanyone with an internet connection and some free time has the ability to fact-check a piece of news. This was not available to people earlier, so they had to use their judgement and either choose to believe it or not.
- typenil 6y agoAh yes. Let's have Facebook be the arbiter of truth; after all, their behavior so far is nothing short of the pinnacle of ethics, wisdom, and transparency. Let's not worry about how that could backfire at all or the countless times that the "correct" opinion has turned out to be wrong. The truth is too flimsy to stand on its own. We must protect our inferiors from wrongthink.
- neogodless 6y agoAs long as Facebook is such a large part of how a large number of people interact with each other and share information, the power or risk of their power is great. So perhaps the question is - where is the greater risk? That they merely facilitate the spread of misinformation as a neutral party, or that they take a opinionated stance to reduce the spread of misinformation, but hold the power to bias that filter? I don't like either option, but I also don't see the multitudes of individuals choosing to largely choose an alternative for their interactions any time soon either. An ideal for me would be a much more decentralized internet, but there are lots of initiatives to make that happen that are arguably much less successful than Facebook's grasp on the power it holds.
- lucidone 6y agoOnly allowing "true" information on any platform (or in any form of discourse, really) is effectively impossible given the subjective nature of truth. Philosophers have spent their lives arguing this topic, a tech giant isn't about to answer that question.
- protonfish 6y agoAgreed there is no guaranteed way to only allow truth. However, there are many easy ways to remove utter nonsense. Maybe we should start with that and see how it goes.
- lucidone 6y agoI agree in principle (e.g., Pizzagate and similar conspiracy theories), but delegating the arbitration of facts to a private company seems dangerous territory to me. The inconvenient answer as it appears to me is that folks have to discern what is nonsense and what isn't, which leaves us exactly where we are.
- protonfish 6y agoThat does not sound like a good solution to the problem of powerful bad actors using social media to spread conflict and misinformation. In fact, it is not a solution at all. I don't understand this attitude of defeatism. Clearly how things are is bad. We should explore solutions. Is that too radical for you? Asking private companies to discern between nonsense of good facts is something that is commonly done with all publications - newspapers, magazines, TV, radio. This is nothing new. Healthy moderation has always been a key part of civil discourse - and FB's moderation is utter garbage. The solution? Demand they moderate less bad.
- lucidone 6y agoI pay a newspaper to discern the "truth" of real world events. They sell credibility. They have an interest (both ethical via their staff - most journalists want to tell the truth, and financial - why pay for a garbage paper) in being credible. Facebook sells ads and has a history of poor decision making with regards to their platform. Would facebook improve the credibility of their platform at the expense of their bottom line? I doubt it. Facebook won't solve this problem for us. This is a human issue, not a technological one.
- caseysoftware 6y agoAs much as I'd like to hammer on Facebook for this, they're just one of many, many questionable actors here. Almost 10 years ago, I conducted an experiment. I watched an hour of CNN every night but it was never that night's coverage. It was from exactly two weeks ago. It was amazing how much "breaking news!" was irrelevant or just outright wrong, how many large trend predictions were wrong, and how many "[person] will do X" were wrong. While the predictions could have been portrayed as opinions, they were presented as facts and the obvious next steps or conclusions. I realized pretty quickly that avoiding CNN kept out the blatantly wrong information so even if I didn't replace it with anything, I was net ahead. A few years ago, I discovered this article and realized that some portion of it was probably on purpose: https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-alters-our-thoughts https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-...
- bertil 6y ago> Whatever Facebook says (or thinks) about the backfire effect, this phenomenon has not, in fact, been “shown” or demonstrated in any thorough way. I’m positive that the company has conducted internal AB-test to check for those and has a far more nuanced view on those than Wired assumes.
- munificent 6y agoThe answer is obvious: Facebook loves misinformation. Facebook's business model is fairly straightforward: they want you to spend as much time on Facebook as possible so you can consume as many ads as possible. Contentious, provocative content drives engagement. It's easier to provide an unending source of engaging content if you don't restrict that content to the set of things that are true. Truth has the unfortunate tendency to be boring in most cases. If Facebook nuked all the lies, Facebook would be less interesting and ad revenue would go down.
- foobar_ 6y agoI still don't understand why social media has to censor things when it can just as well label it as inaccurate / spam according to experts or something. Now flat earth's think they are right like Galelio.
- reaperducer 6y agoWhy is Facebook So Afraid of Checking Facts? IMO, for two reasons. First, because some facts, especially in news stories, are easily back-and-white: The car crashed. The person died. Some facts are greyscale. The trouble you incur from fact-checking the greys isn't worth the time, money, or effort. Which leads to reason number two: Facebook is less Algorithms Will Save The World™ than Google, but in spite of its mantra of "connecting people," it's not all that interested in interacting with actual people. Wetware is messy, time-consuming, and expensive. And while there are plenty of companies that find success working with people, that sort of work doesn't fit into its SV Bubble mindset, or lead to hockey stick-style revenue.
- choward 6y agoAs much as I dislike facebook, I think the root problem is the lack of critical thinking many people have. Our education system that's optimized for standardized tests don't really help with that. For example when I state opinions I don't expect everyone to take them as fact without doing their own research. But that's pretty much what a lot of people do. Doing your own research should be the norm (your already using the internet!) with any opinions you read like on Facebook. But there are sources you should be able to take seriously like the government. However, there is one government official that straight lies on Twitter all day and a good majority of the country believes him. When you believe that it's a lot easier to make the jump to believe everything you see on Facebook. One thing Facebook should do is make the news feed fully configurable and deterministic so you only see things from people you know in a non biased way. That will never happen since that's a big part of their business model.