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It’s not really possible for Facebook to take itself out of the equation—Facebook sets up its algorithms to encourage the spread of engaging content. So if a st
by rlanday 6y ago
It’s not really possible for Facebook to take itself out of the equation—Facebook sets up its algorithms to encourage the spread of engaging content. So if a story spreads on Facebook, it’s because they designed their algorithms to make engaging content spread. But if Facebook goes and adds a special-case on top, “don’t spread this particular story,” then they’re obviously interfering at that point. So they sort of inherently have to take a position one way or the other. The only other option is to do something like always make the algorithms focus on engagement without any special-casing, possibly with a general rule to limit how fast any new story spreads, but presumably they have reasons for not wanting to do that.
- evgen 6y agoThere is a reason they engaged fact checking companies to do what they do when it comes to some stories on the site. If you are surprised that they are actually using them I have no idea what to say.
- rlanday 6y agoBut this is not a decision they made based on anything their fact-checkers told them. This is a decision they’re making before they get the results of the fact check. Andy Stone did eventually follow up with a clarification: > This is part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation. We temporarily reduce distribution pending fact-checker review. So apparently this is a standard process, but the process is kind of ironic in that it claims to farm out this decision to a neutral-as-possible third-party, when really they first have to make a preliminary decision internally.