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Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”

669 points by URfejk 5y ago

iammisc 5y ago
Facebook is a pseudo government with sovereinty over a type of resource that we have fully yet to understand as a species.
- forz877 5y ago
  Facebook isn't the only source of information, and in fact, I'd argue, more misinformation exists because of facebook, not more control.
  - iammisc 5y ago
    That doesn't matter though, because most people 'live' in this new space via Facebook, in the same way that a plurality of people 'live' in the physical world we inhabit via the nation of China (PRC being the most populous nation). Simply because of that, we cannot discount the over-influence of Facebook. Even more poignant, Facebook's dominance in this regard is much more disproportionate than China's dominance of the world population. (Facebook having a little under half the world's population). Even though I don't live on planet Facebook anymore, the truth is Facebook heavily affects my life. I don't see how anyone can reasonably argue against this.
    - forz877 5y ago
      Influence is a lot different than psuedo-governance.
mikem170 5y ago
The submitted postimg.cc screenshot had the following cdc.gov link [0], which appears to be flagged as false information. The following text was on that cdc page: > After December 31, 2021, CDC will withdraw the request to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of the CDC 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel, the assay first introduced in February 2020 for detection of SARS-CoV-2 only. CDC is providing this advance notice for clinical laboratories to have adequate time to select and implement one of the many FDA-authorized alternatives. > Visit the FDA website for a list of authorized COVID-19 diagnostic methods. For a summary of the performance of FDA-authorized molecular methods with an FDA reference panel, visit this page. > In preparation for this change, CDC recommends clinical laboratories and testing sites that have been using the CDC 2019-nCoV RT-PCR assay select and begin their transition to another FDA-authorized COVID-19 test. CDC encourages laboratories to consider adoption of a multiplexed method that can facilitate detection and differentiation of SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses. Such assays can facilitate continued testing for both influenza and SARS-CoV-2 and can save both time and resources as we head into influenza season. Laboratories and testing sites should validate and verify their selected assay within their facility before beginning clinical testing. I'm personally not sure what to make of all this, the cdc link doesn't seem controversial, and perhaps flagging this as false information was done in error? But screen shots are lame so I figured I'd repost as a link and the text for convenience. [0] https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dls/locs/2021/07-21-2021-lab-alert-Changes_CDC_RT-PCR_SARS-CoV-2_Testing_1.html https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dls/locs/2021/07-21-2021-lab-alert...
- jtbayly 5y ago
  I assume it has been claimed on FB that this is proof that the flu didn't disappear but just got misdiagnosed as Covid, and/or that the Covid tests results couldn't be trusted at all, hence they have been withdrawn.
  - belltaco 5y ago
    That's exactly what happened in right wing circles, I saw it on Twitter and Reddit too.
  - manofmanysmiles 5y ago
    How should this be interpreted? Isn’t implying that the test can’t tell the difference between flu and covid? If that’s true, then, how can we be sure that flu hasn’t been misdiagnosed? What percentage of Covid cases were classified using PCR tests?
    - unanswered 5y ago
      > If that’s true, then, how can we be sure that flu hasn’t been misdiagnosed? Because I haven't seen anything on Facebook, or self-censoring HN for that matter, validating those claims. So they must be but only false but really out-there wacky conspiracy theories.
    - 13years 5y ago
      Yes, it does state that. However, there is the word 'and' between detection and differentiation. The original could not detect, so therefore differentiation is a moot point. Also, the test for flu was a separate test. So it would have had no effect on the lower flu incidence assuming we didn't test for flu at a lesser rate.
      - _-david-_ 5y ago
        >assuming we didn't test for flu at a lesser rate. Do we have any numbers on this? I would imagine a lot of people who went to the doctor or whoever complaining of flu like symptoms would have been tested for covid.
vfclists 5y ago
Facebook could be right ;) Just because some info appears on a the CDC page doesn't mean it can't be erroneous. It is not as though health authorities have always been correct on every thing, have they?
- noxer 5y ago
  Either way they play arbiter with no transparency as to how they do it. They mostly outsource the "truth finding" but then pay them so its all a huge mess and simply not what people want them to do. I dont use FB but I would not want HN to decide whats true and what not. If wrong stuff is postedon here we (the user) figure it out just fine.
- vfclists 5y ago
  Unrelated question: What happens when your HN karma drops to zero?
  - unanswered 5y ago
    Dang bans you for wrongthink long before then.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    Then when you log in, you see a (0) after your user name. Not much else. You can still post. If you've been posting abusive comments or otherwise breaking the site rules, you may get banned, but that's not triggered by your karma (so far as I know).
literallyaduck 5y ago
Perhaps Facebook needs to be charged for practicing medicine without a license.
crummybowley 5y ago
And this is why Facebook has no business being part of fact checking. While it may look different, this is no different than two folks on the phone getting interrupted by ATT and being told they are incorrect on their assumptions about topic X. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are the carrier, and should be treated as such.
- aeturnum 5y ago
  The problem is that one of the main differentiating factors of these platforms is selecting which post to present to the user at a particular moment. It's a valuable service - there are lots of posts - but it means the platforms are always somewhat going to be in the business of choosing one post over another. > While it may look different, this is no different than two folks on the phone getting interrupted by ATT and being told they are incorrect on their assumptions about topic X. There are many ways in which this is different, most of which relate to the differences between audio and visual communication mediums.
- scotuswroteus 5y ago
  >"treated as such" -Facebook isn't legally required to fact check. -The CDC position is sufficiently controversial that this is well within the margin of error we'd expect of a fact checker. -AT&T isn't amplifying your phone call to millions by selective algorithms that enhance the most controversial and hateful messages -Carriers are heavily regulated, in part because they enjoy natural monopolies (in AT&T's case, only so many companies should be digging trenches and connecting physical wirelines into homes and businesses)
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    This argument I see everywhere "Facebook amplified your voice, a phone line does not" misses a key point: Facebook chooses to amplify voices. All any of us wanted really was for our friends to see what we say, if they choose to see it. So really, Facebook and similar entities at creating the problem deliberately and then claiming they're entitled to solve it by placing scarlet letters around their site.
- 5y ago
cpr 5y ago
Let's face it, Big Social Media's "disinformation" label is no more than "things that go against the mainstream narrative" these years.
- 13years 5y ago
  It will always be so. The power to control information is far too tempting to not be subverted for nefarious means.
  - babesh 5y ago
    It isn't just the social media giants. It applies to most if not all the corporate giants. Google's search and YouTube, Apple news, Netflix, Disney, etc...
- w0m 5y ago
  replace "mainstream narrative" with "X narrative" and you have a point. 'mainstream' is meaningless.
  - Fellshard 5y ago
    At this point, by sheer institutional volume, 'mainstream' means 'American East Coast Left-liberal'.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - mrobot 5y ago
    I think i would restrict it to "X narrative, where X is chosen from spectrum of acceptable opinion dictated by appointed board of directors, USA, inc.".
- seriousquestion 5y ago
  An honest label would be "unapproved".
vmception 5y ago
gigglesnort if true, that is maximum irony and exposes the folly of Facebook's positioning as an arbiter, or exposes the power of their positioning
tiffanyh 5y ago
Long time ago, Google use to give higher weight to .gov domains. Seems like at minimum the opposite should never happen, and that's negatively flagging .gov domains. Edit: why the downvotes? If you disagree, please post a comment so we can have a healthy dialogue.
noxer 5y ago
"This claim about fact-checking was disputed."
samirillian 5y ago
Wow, two wrongs sometimes do make a right!
rubatuga 5y ago
Claim: Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information“ My rating: True
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
loycombinate 5y ago
Maybe it’s a fake link
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
infamouscow 5y ago
I look forward to Facebook losing their Section 230 protection because of this, and their platform(s) dying a slow death.
forz877 5y ago
We attribute way too much to random happenstance than real trends, and that is ultimately why our societies crumble over time.
nixpulvis 5y ago
OK, random thought experiment. As someone without a facebook it's hard for me to evaluate, but how much damage would really be caused if facebook just disappeared one day?
- underseacables 5y ago
  Absolutely zero. People would find another way to communicate, socialize, or whatever. The loss of Facebook would be a loss of jobs and income for people, but that’s it. Facebook serves no positive purpose in society, and it seems the best thing a person can do, is to delete their Facebook account.
  - AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
    1. Lots of information will disappear. Vast majority of it will be garbage, but occasional jewels in the mud will get thrown away as well. 2. S&P 500 will go down 2.5% the very instant FB disappears. Further consequences for financial markets are hard to predict.
    - nixpulvis 5y ago
      I was more thinking about the facebook groups. Where would they go? Discord? Meetup? Some new aggregator? Would anything actually improve?
      - bmarquez 5y ago
        I'm seeing more of my Facebook groups move to Telegram chat rooms or channels.
  - SquareWheel 5y ago
    Zero damage? No way. Millions of people would lose contact with friends and family that they have no other connections with. Companies that depend on Facebook advertising would disappear. People would be locked out of OAuth accounts on thousands of websites. It would be catastrophic.
nafix 5y ago
How should this message from the CDC be interpretted? Why is the CDC removing authorization for this test? This is the CDC post in question: https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dls/locs/2021/07-21-2021-lab-alert-Changes_CDC_RT-PCR_SARS-CoV-2_Testing_1.html https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dls/locs/2021/07-21-2021-lab-alert...
- hnthrowaway8493 5y ago
  Here's a nice article answering your question and explaining the confusion here. It definitely seems like people who want to believe that covid is a hoax are taking this CDC post (which is technical and directed at scientists in testing labs) out of context and misinterpreting it to back up their narrative. https://www.factcheck.org/2021/07/scicheck-viral-posts-misrepresent-cdc-announcement-on-covid-19-pcr-test/ https://www.factcheck.org/2021/07/scicheck-viral-posts-misre... From the article: In explaining the CDC’s decision to end the use of its own PCR test at the end of 2021, Kristen Nordlund, an agency spokeswoman, in an email to us cited “the availability of commercial options for clinical diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 infection, including multiplexed (discussed here) and high-throughput options” — referring to technologies that use an automated process to administer hundreds of tests per day. “Although the CDC 2019 Novel Coronavirus (2019 nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel met an important unmet need when it was developed and deployed and has not demonstrated any performance issues, the demand for this test has declined with the emergence of other higher-throughput and multiplexed assays,” Nordlund said. She continued: “CDC is encouraging public health laboratories (PHL) to adopt the CDC Influenza SARS-CoV-2 (Flu SC2) Multiplex Assay to enable continued surveillance for both influenza and SARS-CoV-2, which will save both time and resources for PHL.”
- rossdavidh 5y ago
  If I'm reading the post correctly (and I am no expert in the field), they're saying "this test will be obsolete by end of year, as better tests become available". It was an EULA, which is by intention "we wouldn't approve this so quickly except this is an emergency", so it's not surprising that as better tests were developed they would withdraw the EULA. Given that they were withdrawing it with several months' advance notice, I doubt there was anything massively wrong with it.
davidw 5y ago
These discussions lack a lot of nuance. I think all of these things are worth considering: * FB is a company, not a government, so they can more or less do what they want. * It's concerning that one company has so much influence. "Just go somewhere else" is tough with the network effects that a system like theirs has. * FB is responsible for tons of misinformation spreading and is very toxic in a lot of ways. I'm not really sure what, if anything we should do, but it'd be nice to read a bit more elevated discussions about the problems with social media.
- tehjoker 5y ago
  The government is leaning on FB to do what the government wants. It's a slight of hand. FB is a government agent.
  - davidw 5y ago
    I do not think FB is a "government agent" from everything I've read. They operate within government rules and regulations, and they're certainly going to listen to the government, but listening is normal for any company. They can still do what they want.
    - adolph 5y ago
      > They can still do what they want. Sure FB, you can do what you want. It'd just be a shame if it were determined you were a monopoly, sure would be a shame. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2020/12/ftc-sues-facebook-illegal-monopolization https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2020/12/ftc-s...
      - davidw 5y ago
        You know they lost, don't you?
    - arminiusreturns 5y ago
      Do you know about lifelog and In-q-tel?
btbuildem 5y ago
I imagine they flagged it as false not because of the link, but because of who shared/posted it.
- UnFleshedOne 5y ago
  And that's way worse than erroneously flagging the link itself.
AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
The Revolution devours its children
Finger_Fudge 5y ago
Fact checking is just so Orwellian, how is it even possible that intelligent-seeming people have fallen for this trick? And what happens when the media lies, such as when they told us a year and a half ago that "masks actually spread COVID?" This is all so unbelievably ridiculous. I no longer trust the authorities and fact checking is just making it worse.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
The CDC was spreading misinformation, and we shouldn’t expect the government to be immune from misinformation (through incompetence usually).
- ARandomerDude 5y ago
  CDC was spreading...immune... If this pun was intentional, well done.
gfalcao 5y ago
TLS issues accessing this page
hartator 5y ago
Link to the CDC guidance in question: https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dls/locs/2021/07-21-2021-lab-alert-Changes_CDC_RT-PCR_SARS-CoV-2_Testing_1.html https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dls/locs/2021/07-21-2021-lab-alert...
anm89 5y ago
I mean, once they are in the business of fact checking, I don't see why any specific source would be off limits. On the other hand I think this shows the absurdity especially of labeling things as inaccurate without saying what specifically you are actually calling inaccurate because how would you know if the fact check is valid or not.
- rossdavidh 5y ago
  ...plus, it's not like the CDC is incapable of error, but I trust them on this issue a whole lot more than Facebook.
  - anm89 5y ago
    Right, if they have to fact check anything, it seems like they'd have to fact check everything, and then if Facebook is capable and required to fact check every single thing on it's platform and arbitrate the truth it's like they'd have to be some kind of omniscient truth knower. If they aren't in some privileged position of truth holding all you've got is facebook applying its narrative layer on top of everyone else's narrative layer. You're exactly where you started. I guess a better way to say this is that I think the idea that Facebook is capable of arbitrating the truth is at its core, philosophically, a nonsense proposition.
andrewmcwatters 5y ago
The CDC has already lied multiple times to the American people in egregiously obvious ways, so I don’t see this as unexpected.
- CivBase 5y ago
  Relevant article/thread from a day ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27984908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27984908
  - andrewmcwatters 5y ago
    Thanks for sharing this! The comments are also an interesting read.
svaha1728 5y ago
Text classification with Transformers is hard. Humans are expensive. My guess is also that the link got flagged because of who shared it, but that's just a guess.
- _-david-_ 5y ago
  Information can be accurate or fake based on who said it?
  - svaha1728 5y ago
    I'm guessing the heuristics behind their text classification model, not if that's a valid assumption outside of the Facebook metaverse. My guess would be that you could also figure out word salad to throw at their False Information model that would create false positives.
  - Roboprog 5y ago
    Sure. Orange man rushed out a shot. It must be bad. Gray man said get the shot. It’s good. I’m not saying that kind of “thinking” is valid, but it’s apparently widely accepted. (I got the shot, but I can see why some people would have considerations)
  - kevinmgranger 5y ago
    The context of a page can provide misleading implications. But "False / Fake" isn't the word I'd use for that, to be fair.
- specialist 5y ago
  Surely government sites in their host countries can be whitelisted?
- beezischillin 5y ago
  I might be wrong on this but I think their fact checking partners just go all around on Facebook and fact check specific links and claims, I don’t think it’s flagged automatically and paired with a fact check, or at least the few I looked at were directly referencing the source for the content that was shared.
ravenstine 5y ago
I actually verified this yesterday on my own FB acount. https://imgur.com/a/5tgkbFL https://imgur.com/a/5tgkbFL Not sure if it's still happening, but you can test it if you make the post visible to only you and you wait ~5 minutes for that misinformation message to show up. Even if the fact checker had some kind of point, I don't know how labeling an authoritative source as "false information" helps anyone understand anything just because part of the information might be outdated. Nevertheless, the level of carelessness upon which this mechanism seems to have been built upon is an embarrassment.
- mrfusion 5y ago
  More than an embarrassment, it’s chilling.
  - a9h74j 5y ago
    I don't know how bad it would be for the magnetic poles to flip. But I don't want it happening every six months.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  It helps people understand a lot; it helps people see this fact checking charade for what it really is.
  - tomp 5y ago
    Or that CDC advice is a charade...
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  I don't get why they can't add a regex to ok *.gov$ websites. > Nevertheless, the level of carelessness upon which this mechanism seems to have been built upon is an embarrassment. Same mechanism would flag and ban folks who argued that the lab leak hypothesis was a possibility and was worth investigating... Interesting how the media changed their narrative on this one.
40four 5y ago
People still use Facebook?! :p
padastra 5y ago
There was a point in which the possibility of lab origin was “misinformation” or where accelerating the vaccine timeline to one year was “misinformation” or where face masks being helpful was “misinformation”. And at each stage people look at the current “all smart people agree on these truths” and feel so goddamn certain about banning other beliefs.
tomrod 5y ago
Facebook needs down votes. That would help resolve the issue by the community flagging things, rather than this hodge podge of approaches.
president 5y ago
2020 was the year where tech companies went into censorship overdrive. They are not afraid of the consequences and I believe this is because they have somehow captured the government in a very significant way.
chris_wot 5y ago
My wife tried to hide her age, but not being terribly Facebook savvy changed her DOB to the current date. She was immediately blocked from Facebook. She appealed and gave her proof of age. Still, Facebook wouldn’t budge. Facebook’s automated mechanisms suck. If they can’t tell that someone who has been on the platform for over a decade with photos showing she is a middle aged women, married with two kids, is not, in fact, several days old, then they have no business fact checking posts from the CDC! The simple fact is, I have massively decreased my use of Facebook in the last 6 months. I really feel that for the health and safety of everyone it might be a good idea for others to do so also.
- specialist 5y ago
  Open markets require a way to escalate and resolve disputes, adjudicated impartially.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  I haven't used Facebook in a decade. Not even a little bit. I highly recommend it.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
- base698 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%...
ergot_vacation 5y ago
An outcome that absolutely no one could have anticipated. No Sir.
gunapologist99 5y ago
Facebook seems to be censoring so much because Facebook believes that most people will actually believe whatever bits of misinformation are floating around out there. But is everyone that easily manipulated? More importantly, does everyone actually believe that they can be easily manipulated, or do they just think that everyone else is so easily manipulated, but somehow they're above the fray? And at what point does the censorship to protect me from manipulation become manipulation itself? Facebook is fighting a losing battle if they think they will survive a battle with their own users. This is way past censoring Alex Jones. You can't possibly censor every crackpot conspiracy theorist. Actually, we're probably all crackpot conspiracy theorists in some way. We probably all believe some conspiracy about 9/11 or the NSA or elections or vaccines or masks or aliens or royal families or whatever. The rate of censoring is almost certainly accelerating faster than facebook's growth, and once you've been censored once, you're likely to radically curb your use of that platform. I can't imagine that FB doesn't have stats on how many people keep using FB after they've been censored just once. FB only works when you and 99% of your social group are on there. And the network effect works in reverse, too.
- afavour 5y ago
  > do they just think that everyone else is so easily manipulated, but somehow they're above the fray? Based on my own anecdotal evidence, it’s exactly this. The people that went down the rabbit hole of QAnon on YouTube are, in their mind, the informed ones. They’re the ones that went out of their way to do the research and the rest of us are just lemmings. Thus, spending hours staring at an algorithmically generated video feed is actually a positive attribute rather than the obviously negative one the rest of us see.
  - codeecan 5y ago
    If you believe "the vaccine turned people into the Hulk", thats a mental health problem. But when inconvenient claims, like "vaccines can cause blood clots in rare cases", often flagged as misinformation, you don't instil much confidence with the public. And so they go out and get information from other sources.
anonymouswacker 5y ago
True yesterday; false today; who knows what tomorrow will bring.
RandallBrown 5y ago
I wonder what the explanation from the "Why?" button would be? It's too bad nobody posted (that I could find) that too.
dbtc 5y ago
The autocurated feeds are the main engine of the business, which is competing against the other apps for the User's attention (and perhaps also competing against all other aspects of the User's life) These feeds are optimized for "engagement" first. That's business. So, now, trying to fix the problem of false information, the arsonists have joined the fire brigade.
DevKoala 5y ago
The jokes write themselves in this clown world.
nikkinana 5y ago
Cancel facebook
mcbits 5y ago
Hypothesis: The accompanying text in people's posts sharing the link got flagged, but Facebook's system doesn't differentiate between that and flagging the link itself. It just sees the link being repeatedly flagged and failing whatever fact-checking procedure they have.
gunapologist99 5y ago
An irony here is that Facebook is now censoring the CDC, when it previously claimed that it was censoring using the guidelines of the CDC. Another irony is that the White House said that it was flagging comments for Facebook fact-checkers just last week: “We’ve increased disinformation research and tracking within the Surgeon General’s Office. We are flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.” Apparently this now includes posts from another part of the executive branch.
- busymom0 5y ago
  The same press secretary claims vaccines have gone through FDA approval when none of them have: > "This is what they’re — what the information — some of this misinformation is doing — and misleads the public by falsely alleging that mRNA vaccines are untested and, thus, risky, even though many of them are approved and have gone through the gold standard of the FDA approval process." https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/2021/07/16/press-briefing-by-press-secretary-jen-psaki-july-16-2021/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/202... The people who talk about misinformation are often the biggest source of misinformation.
  - gunapologist99 5y ago
    This appears to be 100% correct. None of the vaccines have gone through "the gold standard" of the full vaccine approval process. They have only received FDA approval for emergency use and have not received full approval. Biden is planning to push through full approval this fall: https://www.cbsnews.com/video/biden-predicts-full-fda-vaccine-approval-by-this-fall/ https://www.cbsnews.com/video/biden-predicts-full-fda-vaccin... [video] https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/biden-admin-signals-intent-to-force-fda-approval-of-covid-vaccines https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/biden-admin-signals-int...
jjmorrison 5y ago
The only solution is to censor everything.
okareaman 5y ago
It's getting kind of embarrassing to be a computer programmer when supposedly the best programmers in the world at Google, Facebook and Amazon can't fix simple problems and perpetrate junk on the world. A simple thing like if url == CDC then don't show the warning. Oh, and we don't know how to fix the mermaid problem in Norway. Sorry. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27991322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27991322
newbamboo 5y ago
It’s like a cytokine storm of debunkery. When everything is seen as disinformation it kills the host.
ulfw 5y ago
Facebook should have stayed a social network like myspace used to be. People following people. Their pivot into a news aggregator / news feed is what is slowly eroding trust because of easy manipulation by nefarious actors.
pokstad 5y ago
Facebook and other social media groups should not be allowed to automate moderation of their platforms. All content should be inspected by a human, just like the underwear I’m wearing. All users that sign up should be verified to be adults who they claim to be.
takeda 5y ago
Most misinformation is at least in part founded on truth, it is just that some of it is left out, some changed and a lot of BS is added. The links to CDC forwarded on Facebook contain the misinformation in the description, very few actually click on the link and read it. Facebook simply used their system to add clarification. The misinformation that is spread says that CDC, banned RT-PCR, because it confused flu with covid. When in reality FDA approved new tests that test for both to save time and resources as the flu season is approaching.
busymom0 5y ago
Here is a partial historical list of scientific consensus "deniers" proven right which this sort of censorship will either silence by big tech or due to self-censorship: 1. Ignaz Semmelweis, who suggested that doctors should wash their hands, and who eliminated puerpal fever as a result, was fired, harassed, forced to move, had his career destroyed, and died in a mental institution at age 47. All this because he went against consensus science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis#Conflict_with_established_medical_opinion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis#Conflict_with... 2. Alfred Wegener, the geophysicist who first proposed continental drift, the basis of plate tectonics, was berated for over 40 years by mainstream geologists who organized to oppose him in favour of a trans-oceanic land bridge. All this because he went against consensus science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Wegener#Reaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Wegener#Reaction 3. Aristarchus of Samos, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, brilliant minds and leaders in their field all supported the heliocentric model. They were at some point either ignored, derided, vilified, or jailed for their beliefs. All this because they went against consensus science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei#Controversy_over_heliocentrism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei#Controversy_ov... 4. J Harlen Bretz, the geologist who documented the catastrophic Missoula floods, was ridiculed and humiliated by uniformitarian "elders" for 30 years before his ideas were accepted. He first proposed that a giant flood raked Eastern Washington in prehistoric times, and who suffered ridicule and skepticism until decades of further research proved his thesis. All this because he went against consensus science. He was eventually awarded the Penrose Medal. https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/bretzs-flood-for-geologist-states-great-flood-is-a-story-of-ridicule-redemption/ https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/bretzs-floo... 5. Carl F. Gauss, discoverer of non-Euclidean geometry, self-censored his own work for 30 years for fear of ridicule, reprisal, and relegation. It did not become known until after his death. Similar published work was ridiculed. His personal diaries indicate that he had made several important mathematical discoveries years or decades before his contemporaries published them. Scottish-American mathematician and writer Eric Temple Bell said that if Gauss had published all of his discoveries in a timely manner, he would have advanced mathematics by fifty years All this because he went against consensus science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss#Personality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss#Personali... 6. Hans Alfven, a Nobel plasma physicist, showed that electric currents operate at large scales in the cosmos. His work was considered unorthodox and is still rejected despite providing answers to many of cosmology's problems. All this because he went against consensus science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannes_Alfvén https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannes_Alfvén 7. Georg Cantor, creator of set theory in mathematics, was so fiercely attacked that he suffered long bouts of depression. He was called a charlatan and a corrupter of youth and his work was referred to as utter nonsense. All this because he went against consensus science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Cantor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Cantor 8. Kristian Birkeland, the man who explained the polar aurorae, had his views disputed and ridiculed as a fringe theory by mainstream scientists until fifty years after his death. He is thought by some to have committed suicide. All this because he went against consensus science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristian_Birkeland#Legacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristian_Birkeland#Legacy 9. Gregor Mendel, founder of genetics, whose seminal paper was criticized by the scientific community, was ignored for over 35 years. Most of the leading scientists simply failed to understand his obscure and innovative work. All this because he went against consensus science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Mendel#Initial_reception_of_Mendel's_work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Mendel#Initial_receptio... 10. Michael Servetus discovered pulmonary circulation. As his work was deemed to be heretical, the inquisitors confiscated his property, arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and burned him at the stake atop a pyre of his own books. All this because he went against consensus science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Servetus#Imprisonment_and_execution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Servetus#Imprisonment_... 11. Amedeo Avogadro's atomic-molecular theory was ignored by the scientific community, as was future similar work. It was confirmed four years after his death, yet it took fully one hundred years for his theory to be accepted. All this because he went against consensus science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amedeo_Avogadro#Response_to_the_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amedeo_Avogadro#Response_to_th...
jijji 5y ago
The first problem is that people would get their news from a place like Facebook... That's like taking stock market advice from the guy that Mows your lawn
tmpz22 5y ago
You know for all the crap Google gets at least they will show up on a lot of Google posts here and say "Yeah that sucks" when their organization messes up. Facebook? Nada.
kjrose 5y ago
Facebook decided it wants to arbitrarily decide what is truth... before the science is actually settled. When you do this, this is what happens.
kalaido 5y ago
Censorship was and is still never the right way. Who is checking those private "fact-checkers"?
ostenning 5y ago
Ministry of truth
a254613e 5y ago
I think there's a pretty clear explanation, when you look how this link and the information within it is being used in the anti-vaxx/covid denial groups. 1. People post CDC link out of context, and claim how all the numbers of infections from previous year are inaccurate. How testing is useless, covid doesn't exist etc. 2. Facebook fact-checks this, and marks the content as "False information" 3. The link gets marked as false information in the system, and regardless of the context that popup shows up, as they can not check every single comment written around this link and even if they could it would delay marking it as false information substantially.
stevenalowe 5y ago
I would love to turn the FB fact-checking “feature” off for what I read, but I’d probably leave it on for what I post/share Hey FB: Two checkboxes, problem solved. You’re welcome.
foolzcrow 5y ago
we are plebs now.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Report them it's an AI goof. It's the only way they really have. They can't hire enough people to possibly go through all the crap that the antivaxx contingencies pump out so they have to depend on trainable AI. I'm facebook daily and I see that they aren't filtering enough junk that is nothing less than made up lies stuck into meme form. They don't even try to make it look fake now that they know the uninformed and ignorant of the world will sop up everything they get fed as if it were scientific fact.
mvexel 5y ago
Realizing that most arguments made here are perfectly valid in either case, it strikes me as ironic that nobody seems to question the authenticity of the image that spawned this discussion in the first place.

669 points by URfejk 5y ago

Facebook is a pseudo government with sovereinty over a type of resource that we have fully yet to understand as a species.

forz877 5y ago
Facebook isn't the only source of information, and in fact, I'd argue, more misinformation exists because of facebook, not more control.
- iammisc 5y ago
  That doesn't matter though, because most people 'live' in this new space via Facebook, in the same way that a plurality of people 'live' in the physical world we inhabit via the nation of China (PRC being the most populous nation). Simply because of that, we cannot discount the over-influence of Facebook. Even more poignant, Facebook's dominance in this regard is much more disproportionate than China's dominance of the world population. (Facebook having a little under half the world's population). Even though I don't live on planet Facebook anymore, the truth is Facebook heavily affects my life. I don't see how anyone can reasonably argue against this.
  - forz877 5y ago
    Influence is a lot different than psuedo-governance.

mikem170 5y ago

The submitted postimg.cc screenshot had the following cdc.gov link [0], which appears to be flagged as false information. The following text was on that cdc page: > After December 31, 2021, CDC will withdraw the request to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of the CDC 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel, the assay first introduced in February 2020 for detection of SARS-CoV-2 only. CDC is providing this advance notice for clinical laboratories to have adequate time to select and implement one of the many FDA-authorized alternatives. > Visit the FDA website for a list of authorized COVID-19 diagnostic methods. For a summary of the performance of FDA-authorized molecular methods with an FDA reference panel, visit this page. > In preparation for this change, CDC recommends clinical laboratories and testing sites that have been using the CDC 2019-nCoV RT-PCR assay select and begin their transition to another FDA-authorized COVID-19 test. CDC encourages laboratories to consider adoption of a multiplexed method that can facilitate detection and differentiation of SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses. Such assays can facilitate continued testing for both influenza and SARS-CoV-2 and can save both time and resources as we head into influenza season. Laboratories and testing sites should validate and verify their selected assay within their facility before beginning clinical testing. I'm personally not sure what to make of all this, the cdc link doesn't seem controversial, and perhaps flagging this as false information was done in error? But screen shots are lame so I figured I'd repost as a link and the text for convenience. [0] https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dls/locs/2021/07-21-2021-lab-alert-Changes_CDC_RT-PCR_SARS-CoV-2_Testing_1.html https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dls/locs/2021/07-21-2021-lab-alert...

jtbayly 5y ago
I assume it has been claimed on FB that this is proof that the flu didn't disappear but just got misdiagnosed as Covid, and/or that the Covid tests results couldn't be trusted at all, hence they have been withdrawn.
- belltaco 5y ago
  That's exactly what happened in right wing circles, I saw it on Twitter and Reddit too.
- manofmanysmiles 5y ago
  How should this be interpreted? Isn’t implying that the test can’t tell the difference between flu and covid? If that’s true, then, how can we be sure that flu hasn’t been misdiagnosed? What percentage of Covid cases were classified using PCR tests?
  - unanswered 5y ago
    > If that’s true, then, how can we be sure that flu hasn’t been misdiagnosed? Because I haven't seen anything on Facebook, or self-censoring HN for that matter, validating those claims. So they must be but only false but really out-there wacky conspiracy theories.
  - 13years 5y ago
    Yes, it does state that. However, there is the word 'and' between detection and differentiation. The original could not detect, so therefore differentiation is a moot point. Also, the test for flu was a separate test. So it would have had no effect on the lower flu incidence assuming we didn't test for flu at a lesser rate.
    - _-david-_ 5y ago
      >assuming we didn't test for flu at a lesser rate. Do we have any numbers on this? I would imagine a lot of people who went to the doctor or whoever complaining of flu like symptoms would have been tested for covid.

vfclists 5y ago

Facebook could be right ;) Just because some info appears on a the CDC page doesn't mean it can't be erroneous. It is not as though health authorities have always been correct on every thing, have they?

noxer 5y ago
Either way they play arbiter with no transparency as to how they do it. They mostly outsource the "truth finding" but then pay them so its all a huge mess and simply not what people want them to do. I dont use FB but I would not want HN to decide whats true and what not. If wrong stuff is postedon here we (the user) figure it out just fine.
vfclists 5y ago
Unrelated question: What happens when your HN karma drops to zero?
- unanswered 5y ago
  Dang bans you for wrongthink long before then.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  Then when you log in, you see a (0) after your user name. Not much else. You can still post. If you've been posting abusive comments or otherwise breaking the site rules, you may get banned, but that's not triggered by your karma (so far as I know).

literallyaduck 5y ago

Perhaps Facebook needs to be charged for practicing medicine without a license.

crummybowley 5y ago

And this is why Facebook has no business being part of fact checking. While it may look different, this is no different than two folks on the phone getting interrupted by ATT and being told they are incorrect on their assumptions about topic X. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are the carrier, and should be treated as such.

aeturnum 5y ago
The problem is that one of the main differentiating factors of these platforms is selecting which post to present to the user at a particular moment. It's a valuable service - there are lots of posts - but it means the platforms are always somewhat going to be in the business of choosing one post over another. > While it may look different, this is no different than two folks on the phone getting interrupted by ATT and being told they are incorrect on their assumptions about topic X. There are many ways in which this is different, most of which relate to the differences between audio and visual communication mediums.
scotuswroteus 5y ago
>"treated as such" -Facebook isn't legally required to fact check. -The CDC position is sufficiently controversial that this is well within the margin of error we'd expect of a fact checker. -AT&T isn't amplifying your phone call to millions by selective algorithms that enhance the most controversial and hateful messages -Carriers are heavily regulated, in part because they enjoy natural monopolies (in AT&T's case, only so many companies should be digging trenches and connecting physical wirelines into homes and businesses)
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  This argument I see everywhere "Facebook amplified your voice, a phone line does not" misses a key point: Facebook chooses to amplify voices. All any of us wanted really was for our friends to see what we say, if they choose to see it. So really, Facebook and similar entities at creating the problem deliberately and then claiming they're entitled to solve it by placing scarlet letters around their site.
5y ago

cpr 5y ago

Let's face it, Big Social Media's "disinformation" label is no more than "things that go against the mainstream narrative" these years.

13years 5y ago
It will always be so. The power to control information is far too tempting to not be subverted for nefarious means.
- babesh 5y ago
  It isn't just the social media giants. It applies to most if not all the corporate giants. Google's search and YouTube, Apple news, Netflix, Disney, etc...
w0m 5y ago
replace "mainstream narrative" with "X narrative" and you have a point. 'mainstream' is meaningless.
- Fellshard 5y ago
  At this point, by sheer institutional volume, 'mainstream' means 'American East Coast Left-liberal'.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- mrobot 5y ago
  I think i would restrict it to "X narrative, where X is chosen from spectrum of acceptable opinion dictated by appointed board of directors, USA, inc.".
seriousquestion 5y ago
An honest label would be "unapproved".

vmception 5y ago

gigglesnort if true, that is maximum irony and exposes the folly of Facebook's positioning as an arbiter, or exposes the power of their positioning

tiffanyh 5y ago

Long time ago, Google use to give higher weight to .gov domains. Seems like at minimum the opposite should never happen, and that's negatively flagging .gov domains. Edit: why the downvotes? If you disagree, please post a comment so we can have a healthy dialogue.

noxer 5y ago

"This claim about fact-checking was disputed."

samirillian 5y ago

Wow, two wrongs sometimes do make a right!

rubatuga 5y ago

Claim: Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information“ My rating: True

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

loycombinate 5y ago

Maybe it’s a fake link

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

infamouscow 5y ago

I look forward to Facebook losing their Section 230 protection because of this, and their platform(s) dying a slow death.

forz877 5y ago

We attribute way too much to random happenstance than real trends, and that is ultimately why our societies crumble over time.

nixpulvis 5y ago

OK, random thought experiment. As someone without a facebook it's hard for me to evaluate, but how much damage would really be caused if facebook just disappeared one day?

underseacables 5y ago
Absolutely zero. People would find another way to communicate, socialize, or whatever. The loss of Facebook would be a loss of jobs and income for people, but that’s it. Facebook serves no positive purpose in society, and it seems the best thing a person can do, is to delete their Facebook account.
- AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
  1. Lots of information will disappear. Vast majority of it will be garbage, but occasional jewels in the mud will get thrown away as well. 2. S&P 500 will go down 2.5% the very instant FB disappears. Further consequences for financial markets are hard to predict.
  - nixpulvis 5y ago
    I was more thinking about the facebook groups. Where would they go? Discord? Meetup? Some new aggregator? Would anything actually improve?
    - bmarquez 5y ago
      I'm seeing more of my Facebook groups move to Telegram chat rooms or channels.
- SquareWheel 5y ago
  Zero damage? No way. Millions of people would lose contact with friends and family that they have no other connections with. Companies that depend on Facebook advertising would disappear. People would be locked out of OAuth accounts on thousands of websites. It would be catastrophic.

nafix 5y ago

How should this message from the CDC be interpretted? Why is the CDC removing authorization for this test? This is the CDC post in question: https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dls/locs/2021/07-21-2021-lab-alert-Changes_CDC_RT-PCR_SARS-CoV-2_Testing_1.html https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dls/locs/2021/07-21-2021-lab-alert...

hnthrowaway8493 5y ago
Here's a nice article answering your question and explaining the confusion here. It definitely seems like people who want to believe that covid is a hoax are taking this CDC post (which is technical and directed at scientists in testing labs) out of context and misinterpreting it to back up their narrative. https://www.factcheck.org/2021/07/scicheck-viral-posts-misrepresent-cdc-announcement-on-covid-19-pcr-test/ https://www.factcheck.org/2021/07/scicheck-viral-posts-misre... From the article: In explaining the CDC’s decision to end the use of its own PCR test at the end of 2021, Kristen Nordlund, an agency spokeswoman, in an email to us cited “the availability of commercial options for clinical diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 infection, including multiplexed (discussed here) and high-throughput options” — referring to technologies that use an automated process to administer hundreds of tests per day. “Although the CDC 2019 Novel Coronavirus (2019 nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel met an important unmet need when it was developed and deployed and has not demonstrated any performance issues, the demand for this test has declined with the emergence of other higher-throughput and multiplexed assays,” Nordlund said. She continued: “CDC is encouraging public health laboratories (PHL) to adopt the CDC Influenza SARS-CoV-2 (Flu SC2) Multiplex Assay to enable continued surveillance for both influenza and SARS-CoV-2, which will save both time and resources for PHL.”
rossdavidh 5y ago
If I'm reading the post correctly (and I am no expert in the field), they're saying "this test will be obsolete by end of year, as better tests become available". It was an EULA, which is by intention "we wouldn't approve this so quickly except this is an emergency", so it's not surprising that as better tests were developed they would withdraw the EULA. Given that they were withdrawing it with several months' advance notice, I doubt there was anything massively wrong with it.

davidw 5y ago

These discussions lack a lot of nuance. I think all of these things are worth considering: * FB is a company, not a government, so they can more or less do what they want. * It's concerning that one company has so much influence. "Just go somewhere else" is tough with the network effects that a system like theirs has. * FB is responsible for tons of misinformation spreading and is very toxic in a lot of ways. I'm not really sure what, if anything we should do, but it'd be nice to read a bit more elevated discussions about the problems with social media.

tehjoker 5y ago
The government is leaning on FB to do what the government wants. It's a slight of hand. FB is a government agent.
- davidw 5y ago
  I do not think FB is a "government agent" from everything I've read. They operate within government rules and regulations, and they're certainly going to listen to the government, but listening is normal for any company. They can still do what they want.
  - adolph 5y ago
    > They can still do what they want. Sure FB, you can do what you want. It'd just be a shame if it were determined you were a monopoly, sure would be a shame. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2020/12/ftc-sues-facebook-illegal-monopolization https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2020/12/ftc-s...
    - davidw 5y ago
      You know they lost, don't you?
  - arminiusreturns 5y ago
    Do you know about lifelog and In-q-tel?

btbuildem 5y ago

I imagine they flagged it as false not because of the link, but because of who shared/posted it.

UnFleshedOne 5y ago
And that's way worse than erroneously flagging the link itself.

AlexTWithBeard 5y ago

The Revolution devours its children

Finger_Fudge 5y ago

Fact checking is just so Orwellian, how is it even possible that intelligent-seeming people have fallen for this trick? And what happens when the media lies, such as when they told us a year and a half ago that "masks actually spread COVID?" This is all so unbelievably ridiculous. I no longer trust the authorities and fact checking is just making it worse.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

The CDC was spreading misinformation, and we shouldn’t expect the government to be immune from misinformation (through incompetence usually).

ARandomerDude 5y ago
CDC was spreading...immune... If this pun was intentional, well done.

gfalcao 5y ago

TLS issues accessing this page

hartator 5y ago

Link to the CDC guidance in question: https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dls/locs/2021/07-21-2021-lab-alert-Changes_CDC_RT-PCR_SARS-CoV-2_Testing_1.html https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dls/locs/2021/07-21-2021-lab-alert...

anm89 5y ago

I mean, once they are in the business of fact checking, I don't see why any specific source would be off limits. On the other hand I think this shows the absurdity especially of labeling things as inaccurate without saying what specifically you are actually calling inaccurate because how would you know if the fact check is valid or not.

rossdavidh 5y ago
...plus, it's not like the CDC is incapable of error, but I trust them on this issue a whole lot more than Facebook.
- anm89 5y ago
  Right, if they have to fact check anything, it seems like they'd have to fact check everything, and then if Facebook is capable and required to fact check every single thing on it's platform and arbitrate the truth it's like they'd have to be some kind of omniscient truth knower. If they aren't in some privileged position of truth holding all you've got is facebook applying its narrative layer on top of everyone else's narrative layer. You're exactly where you started. I guess a better way to say this is that I think the idea that Facebook is capable of arbitrating the truth is at its core, philosophically, a nonsense proposition.

andrewmcwatters 5y ago

The CDC has already lied multiple times to the American people in egregiously obvious ways, so I don’t see this as unexpected.

CivBase 5y ago
Relevant article/thread from a day ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27984908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27984908
- andrewmcwatters 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing this! The comments are also an interesting read.

svaha1728 5y ago

Text classification with Transformers is hard. Humans are expensive. My guess is also that the link got flagged because of who shared it, but that's just a guess.

_-david-_ 5y ago
Information can be accurate or fake based on who said it?
- svaha1728 5y ago
  I'm guessing the heuristics behind their text classification model, not if that's a valid assumption outside of the Facebook metaverse. My guess would be that you could also figure out word salad to throw at their False Information model that would create false positives.
- Roboprog 5y ago
  Sure. Orange man rushed out a shot. It must be bad. Gray man said get the shot. It’s good. I’m not saying that kind of “thinking” is valid, but it’s apparently widely accepted. (I got the shot, but I can see why some people would have considerations)
- kevinmgranger 5y ago
  The context of a page can provide misleading implications. But "False / Fake" isn't the word I'd use for that, to be fair.
specialist 5y ago
Surely government sites in their host countries can be whitelisted?
beezischillin 5y ago
I might be wrong on this but I think their fact checking partners just go all around on Facebook and fact check specific links and claims, I don’t think it’s flagged automatically and paired with a fact check, or at least the few I looked at were directly referencing the source for the content that was shared.

ravenstine 5y ago

I actually verified this yesterday on my own FB acount. https://imgur.com/a/5tgkbFL https://imgur.com/a/5tgkbFL Not sure if it's still happening, but you can test it if you make the post visible to only you and you wait ~5 minutes for that misinformation message to show up. Even if the fact checker had some kind of point, I don't know how labeling an authoritative source as "false information" helps anyone understand anything just because part of the information might be outdated. Nevertheless, the level of carelessness upon which this mechanism seems to have been built upon is an embarrassment.

mrfusion 5y ago
More than an embarrassment, it’s chilling.
- a9h74j 5y ago
  I don't know how bad it would be for the magnetic poles to flip. But I don't want it happening every six months.
betwixthewires 5y ago
It helps people understand a lot; it helps people see this fact checking charade for what it really is.
- tomp 5y ago
  Or that CDC advice is a charade...
908B64B197 5y ago
I don't get why they can't add a regex to ok *.gov$ websites. > Nevertheless, the level of carelessness upon which this mechanism seems to have been built upon is an embarrassment. Same mechanism would flag and ban folks who argued that the lab leak hypothesis was a possibility and was worth investigating... Interesting how the media changed their narrative on this one.

40four 5y ago

People still use Facebook?! :p

padastra 5y ago

There was a point in which the possibility of lab origin was “misinformation” or where accelerating the vaccine timeline to one year was “misinformation” or where face masks being helpful was “misinformation”. And at each stage people look at the current “all smart people agree on these truths” and feel so goddamn certain about banning other beliefs.

tomrod 5y ago

Facebook needs down votes. That would help resolve the issue by the community flagging things, rather than this hodge podge of approaches.

president 5y ago

2020 was the year where tech companies went into censorship overdrive. They are not afraid of the consequences and I believe this is because they have somehow captured the government in a very significant way.

chris_wot 5y ago

My wife tried to hide her age, but not being terribly Facebook savvy changed her DOB to the current date. She was immediately blocked from Facebook. She appealed and gave her proof of age. Still, Facebook wouldn’t budge. Facebook’s automated mechanisms suck. If they can’t tell that someone who has been on the platform for over a decade with photos showing she is a middle aged women, married with two kids, is not, in fact, several days old, then they have no business fact checking posts from the CDC! The simple fact is, I have massively decreased my use of Facebook in the last 6 months. I really feel that for the health and safety of everyone it might be a good idea for others to do so also.

specialist 5y ago
Open markets require a way to escalate and resolve disputes, adjudicated impartially.
betwixthewires 5y ago
I haven't used Facebook in a decade. Not even a little bit. I highly recommend it.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

base698 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%...

ergot_vacation 5y ago

An outcome that absolutely no one could have anticipated. No Sir.

gunapologist99 5y ago

Facebook seems to be censoring so much because Facebook believes that most people will actually believe whatever bits of misinformation are floating around out there. But is everyone that easily manipulated? More importantly, does everyone actually believe that they can be easily manipulated, or do they just think that everyone else is so easily manipulated, but somehow they're above the fray? And at what point does the censorship to protect me from manipulation become manipulation itself? Facebook is fighting a losing battle if they think they will survive a battle with their own users. This is way past censoring Alex Jones. You can't possibly censor every crackpot conspiracy theorist. Actually, we're probably all crackpot conspiracy theorists in some way. We probably all believe some conspiracy about 9/11 or the NSA or elections or vaccines or masks or aliens or royal families or whatever. The rate of censoring is almost certainly accelerating faster than facebook's growth, and once you've been censored once, you're likely to radically curb your use of that platform. I can't imagine that FB doesn't have stats on how many people keep using FB after they've been censored just once. FB only works when you and 99% of your social group are on there. And the network effect works in reverse, too.

afavour 5y ago
> do they just think that everyone else is so easily manipulated, but somehow they're above the fray? Based on my own anecdotal evidence, it’s exactly this. The people that went down the rabbit hole of QAnon on YouTube are, in their mind, the informed ones. They’re the ones that went out of their way to do the research and the rest of us are just lemmings. Thus, spending hours staring at an algorithmically generated video feed is actually a positive attribute rather than the obviously negative one the rest of us see.
- codeecan 5y ago
  If you believe "the vaccine turned people into the Hulk", thats a mental health problem. But when inconvenient claims, like "vaccines can cause blood clots in rare cases", often flagged as misinformation, you don't instil much confidence with the public. And so they go out and get information from other sources.

anonymouswacker 5y ago

True yesterday; false today; who knows what tomorrow will bring.

RandallBrown 5y ago

I wonder what the explanation from the "Why?" button would be? It's too bad nobody posted (that I could find) that too.

dbtc 5y ago

The autocurated feeds are the main engine of the business, which is competing against the other apps for the User's attention (and perhaps also competing against all other aspects of the User's life) These feeds are optimized for "engagement" first. That's business. So, now, trying to fix the problem of false information, the arsonists have joined the fire brigade.

DevKoala 5y ago

The jokes write themselves in this clown world.

nikkinana 5y ago

Cancel facebook

mcbits 5y ago

Hypothesis: The accompanying text in people's posts sharing the link got flagged, but Facebook's system doesn't differentiate between that and flagging the link itself. It just sees the link being repeatedly flagged and failing whatever fact-checking procedure they have.

gunapologist99 5y ago

An irony here is that Facebook is now censoring the CDC, when it previously claimed that it was censoring using the guidelines of the CDC. Another irony is that the White House said that it was flagging comments for Facebook fact-checkers just last week: “We’ve increased disinformation research and tracking within the Surgeon General’s Office. We are flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.” Apparently this now includes posts from another part of the executive branch.

busymom0 5y ago
The same press secretary claims vaccines have gone through FDA approval when none of them have: > "This is what they’re — what the information — some of this misinformation is doing — and misleads the public by falsely alleging that mRNA vaccines are untested and, thus, risky, even though many of them are approved and have gone through the gold standard of the FDA approval process." https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/2021/07/16/press-briefing-by-press-secretary-jen-psaki-july-16-2021/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/202... The people who talk about misinformation are often the biggest source of misinformation.
- gunapologist99 5y ago
  This appears to be 100% correct. None of the vaccines have gone through "the gold standard" of the full vaccine approval process. They have only received FDA approval for emergency use and have not received full approval. Biden is planning to push through full approval this fall: https://www.cbsnews.com/video/biden-predicts-full-fda-vaccine-approval-by-this-fall/ https://www.cbsnews.com/video/biden-predicts-full-fda-vaccin... [video] https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/biden-admin-signals-intent-to-force-fda-approval-of-covid-vaccines https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/biden-admin-signals-int...

jjmorrison 5y ago

The only solution is to censor everything.

okareaman 5y ago

It's getting kind of embarrassing to be a computer programmer when supposedly the best programmers in the world at Google, Facebook and Amazon can't fix simple problems and perpetrate junk on the world. A simple thing like if url == CDC then don't show the warning. Oh, and we don't know how to fix the mermaid problem in Norway. Sorry. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27991322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27991322

newbamboo 5y ago

It’s like a cytokine storm of debunkery. When everything is seen as disinformation it kills the host.

ulfw 5y ago

Facebook should have stayed a social network like myspace used to be. People following people. Their pivot into a news aggregator / news feed is what is slowly eroding trust because of easy manipulation by nefarious actors.

pokstad 5y ago

Facebook and other social media groups should not be allowed to automate moderation of their platforms. All content should be inspected by a human, just like the underwear I’m wearing. All users that sign up should be verified to be adults who they claim to be.

takeda 5y ago

Most misinformation is at least in part founded on truth, it is just that some of it is left out, some changed and a lot of BS is added. The links to CDC forwarded on Facebook contain the misinformation in the description, very few actually click on the link and read it. Facebook simply used their system to add clarification. The misinformation that is spread says that CDC, banned RT-PCR, because it confused flu with covid. When in reality FDA approved new tests that test for both to save time and resources as the flu season is approaching.

busymom0 5y ago

Here is a partial historical list of scientific consensus "deniers" proven right which this sort of censorship will either silence by big tech or due to self-censorship: 1. Ignaz Semmelweis, who suggested that doctors should wash their hands, and who eliminated puerpal fever as a result, was fired, harassed, forced to move, had his career destroyed, and died in a mental institution at age 47. All this because he went against consensus science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis#Conflict_with_established_medical_opinion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis#Conflict_with... 2. Alfred Wegener, the geophysicist who first proposed continental drift, the basis of plate tectonics, was berated for over 40 years by mainstream geologists who organized to oppose him in favour of a trans-oceanic land bridge. All this because he went against consensus science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Wegener#Reaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Wegener#Reaction 3. Aristarchus of Samos, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, brilliant minds and leaders in their field all supported the heliocentric model. They were at some point either ignored, derided, vilified, or jailed for their beliefs. All this because they went against consensus science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei#Controversy_over_heliocentrism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei#Controversy_ov... 4. J Harlen Bretz, the geologist who documented the catastrophic Missoula floods, was ridiculed and humiliated by uniformitarian "elders" for 30 years before his ideas were accepted. He first proposed that a giant flood raked Eastern Washington in prehistoric times, and who suffered ridicule and skepticism until decades of further research proved his thesis. All this because he went against consensus science. He was eventually awarded the Penrose Medal. https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/bretzs-flood-for-geologist-states-great-flood-is-a-story-of-ridicule-redemption/ https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/bretzs-floo... 5. Carl F. Gauss, discoverer of non-Euclidean geometry, self-censored his own work for 30 years for fear of ridicule, reprisal, and relegation. It did not become known until after his death. Similar published work was ridiculed. His personal diaries indicate that he had made several important mathematical discoveries years or decades before his contemporaries published them. Scottish-American mathematician and writer Eric Temple Bell said that if Gauss had published all of his discoveries in a timely manner, he would have advanced mathematics by fifty years All this because he went against consensus science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss#Personality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss#Personali... 6. Hans Alfven, a Nobel plasma physicist, showed that electric currents operate at large scales in the cosmos. His work was considered unorthodox and is still rejected despite providing answers to many of cosmology's problems. All this because he went against consensus science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannes_Alfvén https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannes_Alfvén 7. Georg Cantor, creator of set theory in mathematics, was so fiercely attacked that he suffered long bouts of depression. He was called a charlatan and a corrupter of youth and his work was referred to as utter nonsense. All this because he went against consensus science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Cantor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Cantor 8. Kristian Birkeland, the man who explained the polar aurorae, had his views disputed and ridiculed as a fringe theory by mainstream scientists until fifty years after his death. He is thought by some to have committed suicide. All this because he went against consensus science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristian_Birkeland#Legacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristian_Birkeland#Legacy 9. Gregor Mendel, founder of genetics, whose seminal paper was criticized by the scientific community, was ignored for over 35 years. Most of the leading scientists simply failed to understand his obscure and innovative work. All this because he went against consensus science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Mendel#Initial_reception_of_Mendel's_work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Mendel#Initial_receptio... 10. Michael Servetus discovered pulmonary circulation. As his work was deemed to be heretical, the inquisitors confiscated his property, arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and burned him at the stake atop a pyre of his own books. All this because he went against consensus science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Servetus#Imprisonment_and_execution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Servetus#Imprisonment_... 11. Amedeo Avogadro's atomic-molecular theory was ignored by the scientific community, as was future similar work. It was confirmed four years after his death, yet it took fully one hundred years for his theory to be accepted. All this because he went against consensus science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amedeo_Avogadro#Response_to_the_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amedeo_Avogadro#Response_to_th...

jijji 5y ago

The first problem is that people would get their news from a place like Facebook... That's like taking stock market advice from the guy that Mows your lawn

tmpz22 5y ago

You know for all the crap Google gets at least they will show up on a lot of Google posts here and say "Yeah that sucks" when their organization messes up. Facebook? Nada.

kjrose 5y ago

Facebook decided it wants to arbitrarily decide what is truth... before the science is actually settled. When you do this, this is what happens.

kalaido 5y ago

Censorship was and is still never the right way. Who is checking those private "fact-checkers"?

ostenning 5y ago

Ministry of truth

a254613e 5y ago

I think there's a pretty clear explanation, when you look how this link and the information within it is being used in the anti-vaxx/covid denial groups. 1. People post CDC link out of context, and claim how all the numbers of infections from previous year are inaccurate. How testing is useless, covid doesn't exist etc. 2. Facebook fact-checks this, and marks the content as "False information" 3. The link gets marked as false information in the system, and regardless of the context that popup shows up, as they can not check every single comment written around this link and even if they could it would delay marking it as false information substantially.

stevenalowe 5y ago

I would love to turn the FB fact-checking “feature” off for what I read, but I’d probably leave it on for what I post/share Hey FB: Two checkboxes, problem solved. You’re welcome.

foolzcrow 5y ago

we are plebs now.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

Report them it's an AI goof. It's the only way they really have. They can't hire enough people to possibly go through all the crap that the antivaxx contingencies pump out so they have to depend on trainable AI. I'm facebook daily and I see that they aren't filtering enough junk that is nothing less than made up lies stuck into meme form. They don't even try to make it look fake now that they know the uninformed and ignorant of the world will sop up everything they get fed as if it were scientific fact.

mvexel 5y ago

Realizing that most arguments made here are perfectly valid in either case, it strikes me as ironic that nobody seems to question the authenticity of the image that spawned this discussion in the first place.