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I don't trust Facebook or Twitter to distinguish disinformation from information. Why would anyone?
by hirundo 6y ago
I don't trust Facebook or Twitter to distinguish disinformation from information. Why would anyone?
- MrBuddyCasino 6y agoThey can’t and they shouldn’t. The potential good that could come from this does not outweigh the catastrophic failure modes of this approach. Some enlightened people understood this, hundreds of years ago. Its time for another amendment. EDIT since this is related, another horrendous idea that recently disgraced my timeline https://twitter.com/yelp/status/1314197509623947265?s=21 https://twitter.com/yelp/status/1314197509623947265?s=21
- ciarannolan 6y ago> Today, we’re announcing a new consumer alert to stand against racism. I read this, laughed, and closed the tab. The world has gone mad.
- lawnchair_larry 6y agoWow, I had not seen that from Yelp. That is a horrible idea, and because they control brick and mortar reputation more than anything else, there is nothing that can be done about it. Hopefully they get sued for libel and realize what a dumb approach this is.
- cageface 6y agoThose enlightened people never conceived of a world where a lie could be spread to millions of people by anyone at the click of a button or spewed in volume by bots posing as people.
- hnracer 6y agoMaybe they did conceive of it and they don't care. This type of action satisfies the objective of enforcing the orthodoxy by chilling any speech or action that could be remotely construed as being antagonistic, which is perhaps the true goal.
- enumjorge 6y agoUnderstandable. How do you propose we deal with the current wave of propaganda and misinformation that these platforms enable, especially since they’re already having a very real effect on politics all over the world?
- DethNinja 6y agoAdd critical thinking and logic lessons to school curriculum. Issue would be solved in about a generation but governments and large companies would hate that.
- tstrimple 6y agoThat will never happen in this country. The truth of the situation is, one political party benefits from this ignorance way more than the other, and they are protecting their investment in keeping the electorate ignorant. https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/news/2012-06-27/gop-opposes-critical-thinking/ https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/news/2012-06-27/gop-op... > "Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."
- maharashtra 6y agoLet's start with domestic journalists who abuse their vastly disproportionate power.
- scoot_718 6y agoSo you're part of the "tear down journalism" crowd that are a part of the problem?
- ForHackernews 6y agoThe far right have been attacking journalists as "enemies of the people" for a while now. Extreme leftists tend to hate mainstream journalism, too.
- srsQtho00 6y agoThomas Jefferson wrote the living should not be ruled by the dead, and that the Constitution should expire after 19 years. James Madison wrote the Senate should protect the moneyed from democracy, and the Constitution was forever. If you’re going to point at their ideas, don’t cherry pick nebulous middle ground cartoon versions of their actual positions. Don’t lump them all together as believing in the same values.
- tyre 6y agoWhat do you propose to combat disinformation campaigns? Look at what’s happening. The end results of allowing anything to happen on social media are not good. We’re not in a good place. So we can ignore that for rigid principles, or admit that those principles don’t stand up to the real world. No, no one hundreds of years ago had any idea about the scale or effect of social networks. Yes there was propaganda and brainwashing, but the speed and adaptability and design of these systems is so different as to be categorically unrecognizable. So. What do you propose?
- RandomTisk 6y agoPeople tend to over-inflate the potential impact of fake information sources. False information tends to hurt people and we're extremely adept at recognizing false agents, whether they be random tweets, facebook posts or media outlets. Some people walk around so afraid of someone spreading a lie that could hurt them that they insist on authoritarian controls on speech but the fear is completely unfounded. For smart intelligent people, false statements create untrustworthy agents. For oppressive despots, false statements are always the most expedient shortcuts to some desired outcome. What countries like China are doing are playing the despot and preventing their people from thinking critically as much as possible, and silicon valley thinks that's a wonderful idea.
- rndgermandude 6y agoWe're far from being in a perfect place, but we're in a relatively good place compared to the rest of history. Reinstituting modernized versions of monarchs and clerics who tell us what we're allowed to know and to think. I neither want Facebook and a few corporations to declare themselves the gatekeeper of morality and acceptable thought nor do I want the oppressive regimes and dictators use freedom of expression against us by flooding us with misinformation and lies. But forking over control to a group of tech figures like Zuckerberg, Dorsey, Bezos, or Pichai cannot be the answer to the threat of Putin and Xi Jinping.
- Karunamon 6y agoHaving principles hurts sometimes. Sometimes they require you to do things that are painful with the understanding that the alternative is even worse. I'd gladly take a world with disinformation over a world in which an unaccountable third party determines what is truth, and therefore okay to say. I can work around the first problem with some effort much easier than the second one.
- scoot_718 6y agoThey have to. Doing nothing is so much worse. It won't be an amendment, it'll be the end of the constitution.
- hshs8sis9 6y agoThe same enlightened people that had negro sex slaves?
- realHistory00 6y agoThomas Jefferson wrote the living should not be ruled by the dead, and that the Constitution should expire after 19 years. James Madison wrote the Senate should protect the moneyed from democracy, and the Constitution was forever. If you’re going to point at their ideas, don’t cherry pick nebulous middle ground cartoon versions of their actual positions, and lump them together as on the same page. Some enlightened people that knew much less about reality than we do and have been dead for 200 years. Old ideas of American civic life have become a religion unto themselves. Jefferson wrote of that too: laws must change as human awareness grows. It’s time to change things, I would agree. I’d start by burying old idols. Little left to be gleaned from men who died without knowing of Einstein, Godel, and the rest of modern invention.
- op03 6y agoTemporarily it's fine I think. Cause no one else has the skills or resources. And things are happening too fast and at huge scales to depend on local law enforcement/courts to handle it. You can see them freaking out everyday. There was a time I thought the US and EU wld get things under control specifically after Brexit and Trump but its quite obvious govts don't have what it takes right now. Will be interesting to see what the counter reaction is from bad actors. I highly doubt they are going into retirement now.
- raverbashing 6y ago> does not outweigh the catastrophic failure modes Here's the opposite catastrophic failure mode which the enlightened free speech defenders fail to notice (or do notice but don't care because they're not the affected parties - or at least doesn't think it affects them or are simply accomplices) Truckloads and truckloads of unchecked fabricated BS drowning the discourse. Mob censorship.
- bdamm 6y agoThey're removing bots. I for one appreciate the lowered noise floor. If a platform (Facebook) is claiming that it's for people, then we should know when a post is from a person or a bot.
- root_axis 6y ago> The potential good that could come from this does not outweigh the catastrophic failure modes of this approach. Such as?
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoSuch as, say, Fox News buying Facebook? Or Soros? Or RT buying Twitter? Or a Saudi sovereign wealth fund? Now how do you feel about Twitter and Facebook deciding what misinformation is?
- root_axis 6y ago> Now how do you feel about Twitter and Facebook deciding what misinformation is? I don't see how that changes anything except the political leanings of the website operators. Can you explain what the problem is?
- hnracer 6y agoOne problem is that the power to vet/censor particular things may be beneficial in a certain pair of hands but disastrous in another, especially when you're dealing with a platform that has extremely powerful network effects and controls so much of the information flow in society. To reiterate the point of the previous comment, would you feel comfortable if FB came under control of the Saudis while it was engaged in extensive vetting? I would not. Naval says that one test of a good system is whether you can hand the keys over to your adversary and things don't go wrong, which applies well in this case. Another problem is that vetting (/censorship) is often supported when it's "your side" doing the vetting, but I don't trust that any politically tilted group of individuals will engage in unbiased, non-partisan vetting. FB's staff is of a certain political demographic that differs substantially to the country at large and this will likely sway the decision making away from a fair and balanced outcome. If FB or Twitter engages in vetting I would like to see it done in a satellite office set up explicitly for that purpose where great effort is made to select individuals without extreme political leanings.
- 6y ago
- ben_w 6y agoDon’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The catastrophic failure mode of doing nothing is that democracies vote to stop being democratic, and do so with deafening applause. It has happened before. Let them fight disinformation; also require them to be open about how they are doing it so they can’t become a disinformation provider of their own — there are already enough people, left and right, who think FB et al are censoring their ‘truths’ for nefarious reasons.
- cryptica 6y agoBecause Mark Zuckerberg created a lot of wealth so he has proven himself to be trustworthy and he has a lot at stake. On the other hand, run-of-the-mill elected officials don't have as much money so they are not trustworthy since they don't have much to lose if things go bad. Why would Mark Zuckerberg want to harm a country that his business depends on? Why would someone destroy their own house? It makes no sense. On the other hand, politicians have plenty of incentives to harm the country; since they can just sell out to foreign powers in order to gain favors and make a quick buck after they leave office. Politicians cannot be trusted because they have nothing to lose from making things worse. Corporations on the other hand can be trusted because they have a lot to lose if the country goes down the drain. In times like these, it's important that we all come together and support our corporations in order to protect our democracy.
- sneak 6y agoPeople already trust these companies 100% to decide what they can read, de facto: The evidence is that your FB messenger inbox is not filled with porn spam 400 times per second. This is all fine and good until these centralized, sometimes-censored systems are commandeered by the state to censor person-to-person communications (whether it be on a certain topic, using certain keywords, or all messages to/from users in a certain geofence). This is turnkey tyranny, and you wouldn't even know it had happened. The command to the service providers would be gag ordered, it wouldn't be visible, it wouldn't be reproducible, and it wouldn't make the news. I am convinced that this represents one of the greatest threats to our society: the danger is imminent. If it hasn't happened already, it will soon. https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/ https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24630900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24630900
- unethical_ban 6y agoWhat is the alternative? Think you're the smartest person on the planet, unaffected by misinformation? "Feed me the libraries worth of bullshit from the Internet, and I will sort through this free market firehose to come to a logical, evidence based conclusion", hm? Have you ever read spam ads on Craigslist, fake comments on news sites, bots on Tinder, etc? There are patterns, there are foul motives, and with their internal data, there is certainly technical stats to identify related accounts participating in bad faith campaigns. I understand the gut feeling to be suspicious of any large org to filter information. People on this very thread are screaming "censorship!" as if they were Orwell in the streets warning us the end is nigh. However, if you look at Twitter or Facebook on any given day, you can see that a lot of bullshit, emanating from every possible angle of the political spectrum, still exists. Much of it organic, much of it bots, I'm sure. Let's stop hitting the panic button every time they remove Iranian bot networks.
- apostacy 6y ago> I understand the gut feeling to be suspicious of any large org to filter information. People on this very thread are screaming "censorship!" as if they were Orwell in the streets warning us the end is nigh. I mean, these companies have a monopoly or near monopoly on communications, and they have openly said they are going to arbitrarily remove information that they don't like, without any kind of transparency or accountability. Is the fact that congress is not enacting a law supposed to mean that it is not censorship, and that we can't complain about it? Would you be ok with other private networks doing it? Besides, if we must have censorship, could we at least have someone more deserving of our trust do it? These policies of removing "fake news" greatly worsened COVID-19. As late as February, they were removing "disinformation" that it was infectious human to human. Telling someone to mask up in early March could get you banned. Posting first party evidence of the chaos in China in January could get you banned. It was fake news and disinformation. They were protecting us. These companies should be begging us for a second chance to filter the truth for us. Not just are these companies fallible, but they also have a very obvious neoliberal agenda. I've watched every single progressive podcast I liked get shadowbanned or outright removed from every major platform over the last year. Why are people so eager for this?
- chrisco255 6y agoAgreed. Unless they're dismantling themselves I really don't trust this effort.
- obviouslynotme 6y agoOr anyone really. After 2016, I stopped watching and reading the current news completely. Everyone is lying to you now. I just wait 6 months before having an opinion on anything. That gives more than enough time for most of the rumors and mistakes to iron themselves out. As an unexpected side effect, I am happier than I have ever been. The world isn't going to end and I need to stop worrying that it will.
- sb057 6y ago>The world isn't going to end and I need to stop worrying that it will. Debatable, but even if it is, you still shouldn't waste your time worrying about it.
- tenebrisalietum 6y agoI don't use Facebook or Twitter as a serious source of news or foundational information. It's fun sometimes. If Facebook or Twitter disappeared tomorrow, society would not regress or be hurt in any way. Anything that collects a mass number of likely untrained/uneducated people in a common space, where they can create a post record of anything with no restriction of content to the world at large, will never be a serious source of news or foundational information. You may sift through this and get something useful or interesting once in a while, but it is simply incapable of as a whole of being anything great. The fact that these networks exist as primarily ad businesses is probably the best thing that can become of them. The most useful/meaningful thing totally free/open social networks can do in a general sense is provide a venue for people to post raw media of events, such as crimes, etc. which can be useful if you are near that locality, but the comments and subsequent discussion have a very low chance of being anything but emotional expressions. I am fine with whatever actions Facebook or Twitter take to do this if they feel the need. Facebook and Twitter are not government agencies. People choose to use them. People whine and bitch about how everyone they know are on Facebook and Twitter, but alternatives do exist and it is possible to use them. You can also just text/SMS your friends and family.
- klyrs 6y agoIn general? Not really. On specific issues where there is overwhelming evidence and consensus coming from outside? Yes, it's good that they act on that. It's true that absolute truths are hard to find. But absolute bullshit is much much easier to identify, and should be curtailed when it's doing harm.
- jeremyjh 6y agoAre you suggesting they shouldn’t identify user accounts in violation of terms of service (e.g. spam bots) and terminate them?