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I remember being very concerned that the fact checkers wouldn't be operating in a vacuum and we'd have a bunch of facebook execs being arbiters of truth. And t

I remember being very concerned that the fact checkers wouldn't be operating in a vacuum and we'd have a bunch of facebook execs being arbiters of truth. And that appears to be exactly what has happened. This is terrifying. A handful of mainstream publications and a bunch of basically unknown facebook folks are now the censors. We've already seen well known EFF activists rated untrue for their arguments against warrantless surveillance, and now the censors already can't agree on climate change. I've seen arguments about Confederate generals rated as false because of modern news events - in ways that disagree with well tenured academic historians. We seem doomed in this regard.

throw737 6y ago
I go to pub with some facebook "censors". We are not doomed, but facebook as a platform is.
supercanuck 6y ago
Facts are a pesky thing, they end up being correct even when you disagree.
- kube-system 6y ago
  Nobody here is concerned about Facebook's ability to morph the fabric of reality -- just their ability to influence other people.
sneak 6y ago
How is Facebook the arbiter of truth when many, many websites other than Facebook exist, and most human beings do not use Facebook? This is a very different scenario than a single company owning every broadcast tower in a town, pre-internet. The ability to access Facebook strongly implies general internet access, which is a compelling argument against Facebook exerting any sort of authority over general truth.
- Karunamon 6y ago
  Facebook is the 6th most popular website on the planet (behind Google, Youtube, and 3 Chinese sites). That puts them in a position of control over a great deal of the world's information diet. If they say something is false or true, many people will believe it. If they censor something, many people will never see it.
  - sneak 6y ago
    How does that put them in control? Users still read at least five other websites. Their popularity does not give them any ability to censor information widely, unless perhaps they collude with search engines to blacklist certain terms across all popular sites. The fact that many people use Facebook is an indicator that those same huge groups also have access to every other website, which reduces the persuasiveness of the argument that Facebook gets to be the arbiter of truth, so long as all of those Facebook users have internet access that can access sites that are not Facebook. If anything, the real arbiters would be the ISPs, who get to decide which sites you can even access, in real-time.
    - dragontamer 6y ago
      > How does that put them in control? Users still read at least five other websites. I can't read Chinese. So discount those sites.
    - Karunamon 6y ago
      >Users still read at least five other websites. Three of those are entirely Chinese and can be discounted from this conversation due to government. That leaves two sites run by the same company, all of which are headquartered in the same general area and have similar culture, and both have ongoing censorship/misinformation controversies.
      - sneak 6y ago
        Ok, what about all of the other websites on the internet?
raxxorrax 6y ago
Let us be honest here. The people that have the job to sort out this stuff might also not be the brightest stars in the night sky. If I had vested interests where manipulation of social media nets me advantages, I would be very content with the situation.
- IAmEveryone 6y ago
  In this case, the low-level moderators were apparently overruled by a self-describe “conservative” higher-up.
  - raxxorrax 6y ago
    Yes, and I think whoever is responsible has a deeper understanding. People focusing on sanctioning people not believing in climate change are a larger hindrance to find support for climate policies than complete deniers. I believe in climate change, but I am very skeptical why we need to censor people for speaking their mind. So if they had free reign, it would have been a net negative for everyone.
- HumblyTossed 6y ago
  > The people that have the job to sort out this stuff might also not be the brightest stars in the night sky. Why not?
  - raxxorrax 6y ago
    Maybe they are... I just thought they might want to do a different job.
- GoodJokes 6y ago
  Let’s be honest here. Hackernews commenters inflate their own intelligence a lot and might not be the brightest stars in the sky.
Broken_Hippo 6y ago
... And before that, there was local news and newspapers. Some time before that it might be your boss, your parents, or the local clergy. This is no change, but business as normal. What has changed is that we actually have easy access to information outside of the keyholders. So when the government and some in society dismiss complaints about police brutality, we can have the retribution of actual video (an example with both historical and current examples), and it is so much harder to dismiss. Unfortunately, not everyone is willing to believe facts - but again, I'm not sure this is more true today either, since folks have been rejecting things like modern medicine and science and so on for generations if not centuries. We simply know about it more, thanks to - in part, for good and bad - facebook. And reddit and HN and every social place on the internet.
- free_rms 6y ago
  It is a change, because it's centralized and national in scope. No single partisan local newspaper editor had the kind of reach that facebook has.
- dfxm12 6y ago
  I do think there are at least two material differences today. One is that you no longer need "physical access" to someone to manipulate them. It is so much easier to get your message to someone today. You don't even need to buy a costly newspaper or TV network. You can be individually targeted from anywhere in the world relatively easily. The scale is completely different. Second is that attackers are able to target specific people in a specific way thanks to the data collected by us online (I mean, your clergy doesn't have access to your search history). Your local clergy has to put forth a message that both appeals to an entire congregation and also fits in roughly with what is expected to be heard from clergy. The congregation can then talk to each other and decide if the message makes sense. Attackers going after a specific person don't have to deal with either of these.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  There's quite a difference between social media interjecting its opinion into your private, personal conversations and whatever the clergy at your local church back in the 90s would have said. They would not have even had visibility into say, what you might be talking about at the local pub or hanging out with your neighbors. A local newspaper might pitch a story, but editorials were clearly labeled and there were often competing newspapers in most towns. Statistically, police brutality isn't a problem and far more people suffer from the effects of too little policing than not (see murder rate in Chicago or Juarez). In this era, we suffer from magnification and amplification of the marginal. A thing that does not occur very often, statistically, can get blown completely out of proportion. The power of social media is the power of propaganda. Propaganda has been used throughout history to start wars, revolutions, religious battles, etc. It has the ability to shape the perception of reality in a way that has heretofore been unthinkable. Facebook alone has an audience and reach that no TV channel or newspaper has ever had. Quantity has a quality all its own.
newacct583 6y ago
I'm curious about the confederate general thing, do you have a link? It's true there is gray area everywhere, I guess I have a hard time believing that Facebook would bother stepping into a genuine aspect of history, in an area that isn't really much disputed.
- pjc50 6y ago
  The Confederacy is hugely disputed. Certainly in relation to its intent, purpose, heroes, and legacy.
  - newacct583 6y ago
    Not in a fact-checker-visible sense it isn't, though. We know who the actors were and what they did and how they wrote about it. The US civil war is one of, if not the, best-attested conflicts of its century. What is there to fact check? Like I said, I'm curious and suspect the real issue is a little deeper.
    - s1artibartfast 6y ago
      I'm not particularly familiar with the matter, but the actions and wirittings are still subject to interpretation. Some examples might be: What was the reason for the confederacy to declare independence. What were General E Lees motivations for joining the war. What was the motivation for most soldiers (who were not slave owners) joining the war. You can find hundreds of books disputing these topics.
      - newacct583 6y ago
        Once again, reasons and motivations aren't the subject of "fact checking" in the sense we're discussing. That's interpretive history, not factual stuff. And I'd be shocked beyond belief if Facebook was actually stepping in here, which is why I asked for a cite. I'll be blunt: this didn't happen. They never fact checked a post about a confederate general, and if they did it was over some kind of obviously false thing that wouldn't be controversial. Edit: OK, I found a situation: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/jun/12/facebook-posts/fact-checking-claims-about-robert-e-lees-position-/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/jun/12/facebook-p... tl;dr: Facebook put a fact check warning on a piece that claimed in isolation that "Lee opposed both secession and slavery" without mentioning the fact that he led the confederate army in war against the United States or that he personally owned slaves. That seems about right to me.
atlgator 6y ago
Facebook can’t have it both ways. They can’t tell Congress they are like the telephone company (an agnostic communication channel) and then turn around and censor whatever they feel like. Either take responsibility for the content or stay out of it.
- tzs 6y ago
  The whole point of section 230 of the CDA was to say that they can. Before 230, there had been court rulings that said if a platform moderated user supplied content they were liable for that content. Section 230 was written to reverse those rulings. I'm not sure why, but a myth has taken hold that under 230 you have to be neutral to get the liability shield.
  - atlgator 6y ago
    TIL. Thanks for pointing me to the legislation.
  - anonbcpolitics 6y ago
    It's not a new myth but a new suggestion. 230 was written for a bulletin board site in '96. Twitter and other social media behemoths still enjoy this protection. There's been proposals to hold these behemoths accountable by taking away their liability IF they do not act neutral and meet a certain criteria (X users, X income, etc.).
    - Nasrudith 6y ago
      "Accountable", there is that weasel word again for "do what we want or else" without even defining it.
      - anonbcpolitics 6y ago
        I clearly defined what and why. Sorry one word triggered you so bad you couldn't add to the conversation. Pick from a thesaurus and move on.
  - 6y ago
dependenttypes 6y ago
> We've already seen well known EFF activists rated untrue for their arguments against warrantless surveillance Got a link about that?
- barbacoa 6y ago
  From my understanding the story is: * Patriot act is up for renewal * Amendment proposed to not allow section 215 to be used to search internet history W/O warrant. * Patriot act reauthorized W/O internet history protection amendment. * PF rules "[Congress] voted for federal agencies to have access to your internet history without obtaining a warrant." is false because of semantic word games. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/may/21/facebook-posts/did-us-senators-vote-reveal-internet-browser-histo/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/may/21/facebook-p...
  - raxxorrax 6y ago
    Technically, that would be a great case to strengthen anonymity.
  - dependenttypes 6y ago
    Politifact seems extremely dishonest in this. Even with these semantic word games "[Congress] voted for federal agencies to have access to your internet history without obtaining a warrant." is still true. Thank you a lot. Do you happen to have a source for "I've seen arguments about Confederate generals rated as false because of modern news events - in ways that disagree with well tenured academic historians" as well maybe?
josefresco 6y ago
> I've seen arguments about Confederate generals rated as false because of modern news events - in ways that disagree with well tenured academic historians. Do you have a source for this claim?
pjc50 6y ago
The problem is that there is a well-funded war on facts. This isn't new either; the legacy version was the systematic denial that smoking caused cancer. This has been going on since the 1950s, and is still being litigated. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3490543/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3490543/ The result of this is that any single point of fact-determination becomes a target. It's good of Facebook to take some kind of stand against the most fraudulent and racist articles that get circulated on there; the "blood libel" against Jews and so on. But now they're dragged into the other conflicts. There will be a lot of money available from Exxon-Mobil to deny climate change, for example. Ultimately the concept of "fact" as something outside subjectivity will be destroyed. The rotation of the earth around the sun is really just your opinion, right? /s If heliocentricity were politically convenient or profitable there would be an astroturf campaign promoting it on facebook. (A subgenre of this is libel lawsuits, which are much less of a problem in the US due to "anti-SLAPP" laws: https://www.medialaw.org/topics-page/anti-slapp?tmpl=component&print=1 https://www.medialaw.org/topics-page/anti-slapp?tmpl=compone... but may be a significant problem in the UK; e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/dec/17/bbc-trafigura https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/dec/17/bbc-trafigura and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLibel_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLibel_case , lasting over a decade)
- koheripbal 6y ago
  Ideally, facts could assert themselves. Unfortunately, humans are needed to assert facts, and therefor any judgements based on facts require human interpretation. We can dissolve interpretations down as far as we like to leave as little room for bias and dishonesty (and that is a useful effort), but ultimately there will always be POWER in the hands of those who we abdicate arbitration authority to. ...and power corrupts. The alternative is creating a diverse ecosystem of organizations/individuals who's analysis/logic people can choose to subscribe to and judge based on the reputation that they garner over time. ...and diversity of thought and analysis liberates.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    > The alternative is creating a diverse ecosystem of organizations/individuals who's analysis/logic people can choose to subscribe to Allowing people to "choose" to subscribe to certain things has the ability to get them and others killed. That's why I mentioned the blood libel, while desperately casting around for something that people on HN wouldn't pointlessly dispute as subjective. The bar for "this is genuinely dangerous" should be very high, though! (the question of "what is a fact" could easily absorb a large part of an undergraduate History and Philosophy of Science degree, but we can all agree that there are certain things which are provably not facts?)
refurb 6y ago
Yup. This is why I actually agree with Zuckerberg on his “no censorship” approach. He’s smart enough to recognize that taking on the burden of what should be censored and what shouldn’t is a quagmire he’d prefer to avoid. No matter how “good” your filters are, you’re going to piss off a massive group of customers, despite all the effort. It’s just a massive time sink with little to no benefit. “The only way to win is to not play at all.”
- pjc50 6y ago
  > I actually agree with Zuckerberg on his “no censorship” approach. But this is a complete nonsense! Facebook cheerfully and aggressively censors anything sexual, far over and above local concerns of legality. Even before FOSTA/SESTA. (example list from 2018 of censored FB content rules: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/24/facebook-content-that-gets-you-banned-according-to-community-standards.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/24/facebook-content-that-gets-y... )
  - s1artibartfast 6y ago
    The grey area and room for debate is much greater for truth than nudity and sexuality. zuckerbergs policy preference was no censorship of fake news, not no censorship whatsoever.
    - vkou 6y ago
      > The grey area and room for debate is much greater for truth than nudity and sexuality. That's your subjective opinion. Different cultures will significantly disagree with you (and with the Zuck) on what the gray area for nudity and sexuality is.
      - s1artibartfast 6y ago
        Different cultures may disagree on what the policy should be, but Zuckerberg has the ability to create nudity rules that are objective, whether you agree with them or not. For example, FB can make a policy that says no exposed nipples for females. There may be different opinions on the value of such a policy, but not the execution/implementation. This is much more difficult for a policy stating that content must not be "misleading". Fact checking is much more problematic, because there can be support for either interpretation, nuance, as well as scientific uncertainty.
jariel 6y ago
"I remember being very concerned that the fact checkers wouldn't be operating in a vacuum and we'd have a bunch of facebook execs being arbiters of truth." This isn't the hurdle - the reality of nuance is the hurdle. Any one of us would have tremendous difficulty in parsing through the reams of various ways people can comment on the world around them. It's an impossible problem. Not even a team of people watching your every post would produced consistent results. "The earth increases in temperature by 0.1 degrees last year" - says John. Well ... there are a handful of different ways of indicating the 'Earths Temperature' so we're already dead in the water. "The winters are colder where I am so looks like 'global cooling to me'" - says Judy. Well, if it is getting cooler where this person is, it would look like the Earth is cooling to a person with that narrow frame of reference. If it was a war of 'scientific voices' with references to specific articles etc. this would be one thing, but we're talking about FB: casual discussion and propagation of 'water cooler banter'. I don't think anyone has a solution.
Chirael 6y ago
This reminds me of when people said that the DMCA would be used to silence critics, or DRM would be used to prevent people from fixing their own devices. In those other cases, too, the outcome was obvious and predicted, but they went ahead anyway. We can only hope, pray, and take action[1] to try to prevent the same thing from happening with the government trying to force companies to build backdoors into encryption, a battle we have been fighting for literally decades[2]. [1] https://act.eff.org/action/stop-the-earn-it-bill-before-it-breaks-encryption https://act.eff.org/action/stop-the-earn-it-bill-before-it-b... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
tabtab 6y ago
Re: "This is terrifying. A handful of mainstream publications and a bunch of basically unknown facebook folks are now the censors." It's not much different than when the TV news was controlled by 3 networks.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  And in fact, there is a huge difference between this era and that era---people who don't like Facebook's tone can use a different site (or run their own) for much lower cost and fewer governmental barriers to entry than the FCC represents to the television industry.
- specialist 6y ago
  Broadcast vs targeted. Very different.
Supermancho 6y ago
> This is terrifying. Ironically, this news is terrifying if you have a very inaccurate view of human behavior. The following posts about "mindless masses" is so dismissive that I have to question the voracity of the analysis. People who use facebook are constantly faced with the dissonance of things found on facebook that do not correlate with reality. Even if FB was your one source of truth (there are no people who "only use facebook" or FB+Google, etc) they cannot inherently trust everything they read from day to day contradiction with their own community realities.
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  True, but since policies are directed to regulate social media, the question of relevance to the general population is entirely skipped.
xaedes 6y ago
That is why I recently said: Fact checking == Truth Factory. Lets open a ministry for that, guess the name.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  So long as there are other sources of information, the risk of one source having a Ministry of Truth is irrelevant. In a vibrant marketplace of ideas, a "Ministry of Truth" is just "quality standards."
- CarbyAu 6y ago
  Uh, Ministry for Science?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
thelightthat 6y ago
Could you elaborate on your point about the Confederate generals?
- wpasc 6y ago
  Not OP but I can imagine an example might look something like this: (Please note below is not my view, but a hypothetical) Professor of history/analytical view of history may label Robert E. Lee a skilled tactician. Someone on facebook posts a Robert E Lee post saying he was a skilled tactician. 'Skilled tactician' seeming to be positive stance on Robert E Lee running counter to the viewpoint that, as a confederate general, he was pure evil with no positive qualities, the story then gets flagged as false despite the historians assertions that he was a skilled tactician.
root_axis 6y ago
Every news source is biased, don't rely on Facebook for news. It seems absurd that anyone would actually suggest otherwise.
tossAfterUsing 6y ago
> A handful of mainstream publications and a bunch of basically unknown facebook folks are now the censors. I share your concern. And, hasn't this been the case for as long as there have been centralized publications?
danudey 6y ago
Facebook said they don't want to be the arbiters of truth, so they're allowing climate change deniers to prevent their posts from being flagged as false, which they are. In other words, they're being arbiters of truth.
ouid 6y ago
It seems to me that the problem lies not in the fact that our information is unreliable, but that the social contract has broken down. If you want to foster an environment where honestly is viable, you have to start from the very foundations of society.

throw737 6y ago

I go to pub with some facebook "censors". We are not doomed, but facebook as a platform is.

supercanuck 6y ago

Facts are a pesky thing, they end up being correct even when you disagree.

kube-system 6y ago
Nobody here is concerned about Facebook's ability to morph the fabric of reality -- just their ability to influence other people.

sneak 6y ago

How is Facebook the arbiter of truth when many, many websites other than Facebook exist, and most human beings do not use Facebook? This is a very different scenario than a single company owning every broadcast tower in a town, pre-internet. The ability to access Facebook strongly implies general internet access, which is a compelling argument against Facebook exerting any sort of authority over general truth.

Karunamon 6y ago
Facebook is the 6th most popular website on the planet (behind Google, Youtube, and 3 Chinese sites). That puts them in a position of control over a great deal of the world's information diet. If they say something is false or true, many people will believe it. If they censor something, many people will never see it.
- sneak 6y ago
  How does that put them in control? Users still read at least five other websites. Their popularity does not give them any ability to censor information widely, unless perhaps they collude with search engines to blacklist certain terms across all popular sites. The fact that many people use Facebook is an indicator that those same huge groups also have access to every other website, which reduces the persuasiveness of the argument that Facebook gets to be the arbiter of truth, so long as all of those Facebook users have internet access that can access sites that are not Facebook. If anything, the real arbiters would be the ISPs, who get to decide which sites you can even access, in real-time.
  - dragontamer 6y ago
    > How does that put them in control? Users still read at least five other websites. I can't read Chinese. So discount those sites.
  - Karunamon 6y ago
    >Users still read at least five other websites. Three of those are entirely Chinese and can be discounted from this conversation due to government. That leaves two sites run by the same company, all of which are headquartered in the same general area and have similar culture, and both have ongoing censorship/misinformation controversies.
    - sneak 6y ago
      Ok, what about all of the other websites on the internet?

raxxorrax 6y ago

Let us be honest here. The people that have the job to sort out this stuff might also not be the brightest stars in the night sky. If I had vested interests where manipulation of social media nets me advantages, I would be very content with the situation.

IAmEveryone 6y ago
In this case, the low-level moderators were apparently overruled by a self-describe “conservative” higher-up.
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  Yes, and I think whoever is responsible has a deeper understanding. People focusing on sanctioning people not believing in climate change are a larger hindrance to find support for climate policies than complete deniers. I believe in climate change, but I am very skeptical why we need to censor people for speaking their mind. So if they had free reign, it would have been a net negative for everyone.
HumblyTossed 6y ago
> The people that have the job to sort out this stuff might also not be the brightest stars in the night sky. Why not?
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  Maybe they are... I just thought they might want to do a different job.
GoodJokes 6y ago
Let’s be honest here. Hackernews commenters inflate their own intelligence a lot and might not be the brightest stars in the sky.

Broken_Hippo 6y ago

... And before that, there was local news and newspapers. Some time before that it might be your boss, your parents, or the local clergy. This is no change, but business as normal. What has changed is that we actually have easy access to information outside of the keyholders. So when the government and some in society dismiss complaints about police brutality, we can have the retribution of actual video (an example with both historical and current examples), and it is so much harder to dismiss. Unfortunately, not everyone is willing to believe facts - but again, I'm not sure this is more true today either, since folks have been rejecting things like modern medicine and science and so on for generations if not centuries. We simply know about it more, thanks to - in part, for good and bad - facebook. And reddit and HN and every social place on the internet.

free_rms 6y ago
It is a change, because it's centralized and national in scope. No single partisan local newspaper editor had the kind of reach that facebook has.
dfxm12 6y ago
I do think there are at least two material differences today. One is that you no longer need "physical access" to someone to manipulate them. It is so much easier to get your message to someone today. You don't even need to buy a costly newspaper or TV network. You can be individually targeted from anywhere in the world relatively easily. The scale is completely different. Second is that attackers are able to target specific people in a specific way thanks to the data collected by us online (I mean, your clergy doesn't have access to your search history). Your local clergy has to put forth a message that both appeals to an entire congregation and also fits in roughly with what is expected to be heard from clergy. The congregation can then talk to each other and decide if the message makes sense. Attackers going after a specific person don't have to deal with either of these.
chrisco255 6y ago
There's quite a difference between social media interjecting its opinion into your private, personal conversations and whatever the clergy at your local church back in the 90s would have said. They would not have even had visibility into say, what you might be talking about at the local pub or hanging out with your neighbors. A local newspaper might pitch a story, but editorials were clearly labeled and there were often competing newspapers in most towns. Statistically, police brutality isn't a problem and far more people suffer from the effects of too little policing than not (see murder rate in Chicago or Juarez). In this era, we suffer from magnification and amplification of the marginal. A thing that does not occur very often, statistically, can get blown completely out of proportion. The power of social media is the power of propaganda. Propaganda has been used throughout history to start wars, revolutions, religious battles, etc. It has the ability to shape the perception of reality in a way that has heretofore been unthinkable. Facebook alone has an audience and reach that no TV channel or newspaper has ever had. Quantity has a quality all its own.

newacct583 6y ago

I'm curious about the confederate general thing, do you have a link? It's true there is gray area everywhere, I guess I have a hard time believing that Facebook would bother stepping into a genuine aspect of history, in an area that isn't really much disputed.

pjc50 6y ago
The Confederacy is hugely disputed. Certainly in relation to its intent, purpose, heroes, and legacy.
- newacct583 6y ago
  Not in a fact-checker-visible sense it isn't, though. We know who the actors were and what they did and how they wrote about it. The US civil war is one of, if not the, best-attested conflicts of its century. What is there to fact check? Like I said, I'm curious and suspect the real issue is a little deeper.
  - s1artibartfast 6y ago
    I'm not particularly familiar with the matter, but the actions and wirittings are still subject to interpretation. Some examples might be: What was the reason for the confederacy to declare independence. What were General E Lees motivations for joining the war. What was the motivation for most soldiers (who were not slave owners) joining the war. You can find hundreds of books disputing these topics.
    - newacct583 6y ago
      Once again, reasons and motivations aren't the subject of "fact checking" in the sense we're discussing. That's interpretive history, not factual stuff. And I'd be shocked beyond belief if Facebook was actually stepping in here, which is why I asked for a cite. I'll be blunt: this didn't happen. They never fact checked a post about a confederate general, and if they did it was over some kind of obviously false thing that wouldn't be controversial. Edit: OK, I found a situation: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/jun/12/facebook-posts/fact-checking-claims-about-robert-e-lees-position-/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/jun/12/facebook-p... tl;dr: Facebook put a fact check warning on a piece that claimed in isolation that "Lee opposed both secession and slavery" without mentioning the fact that he led the confederate army in war against the United States or that he personally owned slaves. That seems about right to me.

atlgator 6y ago

Facebook can’t have it both ways. They can’t tell Congress they are like the telephone company (an agnostic communication channel) and then turn around and censor whatever they feel like. Either take responsibility for the content or stay out of it.

tzs 6y ago
The whole point of section 230 of the CDA was to say that they can. Before 230, there had been court rulings that said if a platform moderated user supplied content they were liable for that content. Section 230 was written to reverse those rulings. I'm not sure why, but a myth has taken hold that under 230 you have to be neutral to get the liability shield.
- atlgator 6y ago
  TIL. Thanks for pointing me to the legislation.
- anonbcpolitics 6y ago
  It's not a new myth but a new suggestion. 230 was written for a bulletin board site in '96. Twitter and other social media behemoths still enjoy this protection. There's been proposals to hold these behemoths accountable by taking away their liability IF they do not act neutral and meet a certain criteria (X users, X income, etc.).
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    "Accountable", there is that weasel word again for "do what we want or else" without even defining it.
    - anonbcpolitics 6y ago
      I clearly defined what and why. Sorry one word triggered you so bad you couldn't add to the conversation. Pick from a thesaurus and move on.
- 6y ago

dependenttypes 6y ago

> We've already seen well known EFF activists rated untrue for their arguments against warrantless surveillance Got a link about that?

barbacoa 6y ago
From my understanding the story is: * Patriot act is up for renewal * Amendment proposed to not allow section 215 to be used to search internet history W/O warrant. * Patriot act reauthorized W/O internet history protection amendment. * PF rules "[Congress] voted for federal agencies to have access to your internet history without obtaining a warrant." is false because of semantic word games. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/may/21/facebook-posts/did-us-senators-vote-reveal-internet-browser-histo/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/may/21/facebook-p...
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  Technically, that would be a great case to strengthen anonymity.
- dependenttypes 6y ago
  Politifact seems extremely dishonest in this. Even with these semantic word games "[Congress] voted for federal agencies to have access to your internet history without obtaining a warrant." is still true. Thank you a lot. Do you happen to have a source for "I've seen arguments about Confederate generals rated as false because of modern news events - in ways that disagree with well tenured academic historians" as well maybe?

josefresco 6y ago

> I've seen arguments about Confederate generals rated as false because of modern news events - in ways that disagree with well tenured academic historians. Do you have a source for this claim?

pjc50 6y ago

The problem is that there is a well-funded war on facts. This isn't new either; the legacy version was the systematic denial that smoking caused cancer. This has been going on since the 1950s, and is still being litigated. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3490543/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3490543/ The result of this is that any single point of fact-determination becomes a target. It's good of Facebook to take some kind of stand against the most fraudulent and racist articles that get circulated on there; the "blood libel" against Jews and so on. But now they're dragged into the other conflicts. There will be a lot of money available from Exxon-Mobil to deny climate change, for example. Ultimately the concept of "fact" as something outside subjectivity will be destroyed. The rotation of the earth around the sun is really just your opinion, right? /s If heliocentricity were politically convenient or profitable there would be an astroturf campaign promoting it on facebook. (A subgenre of this is libel lawsuits, which are much less of a problem in the US due to "anti-SLAPP" laws: https://www.medialaw.org/topics-page/anti-slapp?tmpl=component&print=1 https://www.medialaw.org/topics-page/anti-slapp?tmpl=compone... but may be a significant problem in the UK; e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/dec/17/bbc-trafigura https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/dec/17/bbc-trafigura and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLibel_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLibel_case , lasting over a decade)

koheripbal 6y ago
Ideally, facts could assert themselves. Unfortunately, humans are needed to assert facts, and therefor any judgements based on facts require human interpretation. We can dissolve interpretations down as far as we like to leave as little room for bias and dishonesty (and that is a useful effort), but ultimately there will always be POWER in the hands of those who we abdicate arbitration authority to. ...and power corrupts. The alternative is creating a diverse ecosystem of organizations/individuals who's analysis/logic people can choose to subscribe to and judge based on the reputation that they garner over time. ...and diversity of thought and analysis liberates.
- pjc50 6y ago
  > The alternative is creating a diverse ecosystem of organizations/individuals who's analysis/logic people can choose to subscribe to Allowing people to "choose" to subscribe to certain things has the ability to get them and others killed. That's why I mentioned the blood libel, while desperately casting around for something that people on HN wouldn't pointlessly dispute as subjective. The bar for "this is genuinely dangerous" should be very high, though! (the question of "what is a fact" could easily absorb a large part of an undergraduate History and Philosophy of Science degree, but we can all agree that there are certain things which are provably not facts?)

refurb 6y ago

Yup. This is why I actually agree with Zuckerberg on his “no censorship” approach. He’s smart enough to recognize that taking on the burden of what should be censored and what shouldn’t is a quagmire he’d prefer to avoid. No matter how “good” your filters are, you’re going to piss off a massive group of customers, despite all the effort. It’s just a massive time sink with little to no benefit. “The only way to win is to not play at all.”

pjc50 6y ago
> I actually agree with Zuckerberg on his “no censorship” approach. But this is a complete nonsense! Facebook cheerfully and aggressively censors anything sexual, far over and above local concerns of legality. Even before FOSTA/SESTA. (example list from 2018 of censored FB content rules: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/24/facebook-content-that-gets-you-banned-according-to-community-standards.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/24/facebook-content-that-gets-y... )
- s1artibartfast 6y ago
  The grey area and room for debate is much greater for truth than nudity and sexuality. zuckerbergs policy preference was no censorship of fake news, not no censorship whatsoever.
  - vkou 6y ago
    > The grey area and room for debate is much greater for truth than nudity and sexuality. That's your subjective opinion. Different cultures will significantly disagree with you (and with the Zuck) on what the gray area for nudity and sexuality is.
    - s1artibartfast 6y ago
      Different cultures may disagree on what the policy should be, but Zuckerberg has the ability to create nudity rules that are objective, whether you agree with them or not. For example, FB can make a policy that says no exposed nipples for females. There may be different opinions on the value of such a policy, but not the execution/implementation. This is much more difficult for a policy stating that content must not be "misleading". Fact checking is much more problematic, because there can be support for either interpretation, nuance, as well as scientific uncertainty.

jariel 6y ago

"I remember being very concerned that the fact checkers wouldn't be operating in a vacuum and we'd have a bunch of facebook execs being arbiters of truth." This isn't the hurdle - the reality of nuance is the hurdle. Any one of us would have tremendous difficulty in parsing through the reams of various ways people can comment on the world around them. It's an impossible problem. Not even a team of people watching your every post would produced consistent results. "The earth increases in temperature by 0.1 degrees last year" - says John. Well ... there are a handful of different ways of indicating the 'Earths Temperature' so we're already dead in the water. "The winters are colder where I am so looks like 'global cooling to me'" - says Judy. Well, if it is getting cooler where this person is, it would look like the Earth is cooling to a person with that narrow frame of reference. If it was a war of 'scientific voices' with references to specific articles etc. this would be one thing, but we're talking about FB: casual discussion and propagation of 'water cooler banter'. I don't think anyone has a solution.

Chirael 6y ago

This reminds me of when people said that the DMCA would be used to silence critics, or DRM would be used to prevent people from fixing their own devices. In those other cases, too, the outcome was obvious and predicted, but they went ahead anyway. We can only hope, pray, and take action[1] to try to prevent the same thing from happening with the government trying to force companies to build backdoors into encryption, a battle we have been fighting for literally decades[2]. [1] https://act.eff.org/action/stop-the-earn-it-bill-before-it-breaks-encryption https://act.eff.org/action/stop-the-earn-it-bill-before-it-b... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

tabtab 6y ago

Re: "This is terrifying. A handful of mainstream publications and a bunch of basically unknown facebook folks are now the censors." It's not much different than when the TV news was controlled by 3 networks.

shadowgovt 6y ago
And in fact, there is a huge difference between this era and that era---people who don't like Facebook's tone can use a different site (or run their own) for much lower cost and fewer governmental barriers to entry than the FCC represents to the television industry.
specialist 6y ago
Broadcast vs targeted. Very different.

Supermancho 6y ago

> This is terrifying. Ironically, this news is terrifying if you have a very inaccurate view of human behavior. The following posts about "mindless masses" is so dismissive that I have to question the voracity of the analysis. People who use facebook are constantly faced with the dissonance of things found on facebook that do not correlate with reality. Even if FB was your one source of truth (there are no people who "only use facebook" or FB+Google, etc) they cannot inherently trust everything they read from day to day contradiction with their own community realities.

raxxorrax 6y ago
True, but since policies are directed to regulate social media, the question of relevance to the general population is entirely skipped.

xaedes 6y ago

That is why I recently said: Fact checking == Truth Factory. Lets open a ministry for that, guess the name.

shadowgovt 6y ago
So long as there are other sources of information, the risk of one source having a Ministry of Truth is irrelevant. In a vibrant marketplace of ideas, a "Ministry of Truth" is just "quality standards."
CarbyAu 6y ago
Uh, Ministry for Science?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

thelightthat 6y ago

Could you elaborate on your point about the Confederate generals?

wpasc 6y ago
Not OP but I can imagine an example might look something like this: (Please note below is not my view, but a hypothetical) Professor of history/analytical view of history may label Robert E. Lee a skilled tactician. Someone on facebook posts a Robert E Lee post saying he was a skilled tactician. 'Skilled tactician' seeming to be positive stance on Robert E Lee running counter to the viewpoint that, as a confederate general, he was pure evil with no positive qualities, the story then gets flagged as false despite the historians assertions that he was a skilled tactician.

root_axis 6y ago

Every news source is biased, don't rely on Facebook for news. It seems absurd that anyone would actually suggest otherwise.

tossAfterUsing 6y ago

> A handful of mainstream publications and a bunch of basically unknown facebook folks are now the censors. I share your concern. And, hasn't this been the case for as long as there have been centralized publications?

danudey 6y ago

Facebook said they don't want to be the arbiters of truth, so they're allowing climate change deniers to prevent their posts from being flagged as false, which they are. In other words, they're being arbiters of truth.

ouid 6y ago

It seems to me that the problem lies not in the fact that our information is unreliable, but that the social contract has broken down. If you want to foster an environment where honestly is viable, you have to start from the very foundations of society.