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Facebook is arbitraging manpower here. Firstly, this article is about American issues, so it’s only the America issue “lens” that is being used to focus on iss
by intended 6y ago
Facebook is arbitraging manpower here.
Firstly, this article is about American issues, so it’s only the America issue “lens” that is being used to focus on issues. These same and similar issues must exist for every other country, many of whom have 0 ability to fund and afford individuals who can dedicate their time and lives to fact checking their Local power structures or narratives.
Secondly, even the constrained solution/issue space is too deep for Facebook to effectively police - leaving aside the philosophical arguments.
Removing statements which say “all minority people need to die” is easy,
Removing opinion pieces ? Suppose Kanye says he doesn’t believe in vaccines and that is his opinion. Remove ? Keep?
Is it noteworthy because a huge personality said it ? What about people who are B list celebrities. Or C list ?
What about an article which says “we find that the science on climate change makes claims that are not supported entirely by the data, here is why and here is research.” -
Now you need specialistS or have access to a network of diagnosticians who can tell you whether complex pieces of content are Trojans or not.
Facebook and social media enterprises are paying the price of the hollowing out of editorial boards. All those local newspapers and newsrooms where stuff gets filtered - that is the likely amount of (Skilled) manpower Facebook needs to employ to handle this.
This is where the social media model totally collapses - you can have issues with climate denial, fake medicine, voter suppression etc. - and sub divisions of these problem.
There’s never a shortage of problems and a fractal level of complexity.
How do you ever satisfy the verification needs at this point?
Therefore social networks will always have massive numbers of bad actors, subterranean cults, hidden mind viruses infecting armies of people, propaganda and legions of victims.
This isn’t an idle question - the problems here are about the nature of how humans structure Their networks, verify information and build trust.
Facebook or any social network will always fail at this, unless they see this as what it really is - time to make editorial decisions on content on the network at scale.
The Silicon Valley hey day ideal of free speech is dead. We’re now in a rear guard action to ring fence people from infectious and malicious ideas.
If you think this is a step too far, please remember that America has people actively fighting wearing face masks during the greatest modern Pandemic.
- ogre_codes 6y ago> Removing an article which says ... This is no different from removing an article which says you shouldn't use vaccines because they are ineffective and cause Autism. When the facts which are used to back the opinion are false, then the factual portions of that opinion piece are subject to fact checking. Otherwise, there is zero point to having Fact checkers or any sort of moderation.