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Facebook seems to be censoring so much because Facebook believes that most people will actually believe whatever bits of misinformation are floating around out

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.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    "If you believe "the vaccine turned people into the Hulk", thats a mental health problem." Then half the population is mentally ill. Come to think of it, that would explain a lot of issues we are dealing with...
    - account42 5y ago
      Or perhaps half the popultation does not in fact believe that but you insist on putting any detractors in one bucket.
  - lern_too_spel 5y ago
    Has "vaccines can cause blood clots in rare cases" been flagged as misinformation? I don't think it has. I get the impression that the misinformation filter is 99% accurate.
  - robbrown451 5y ago
    There are crazy things that people believe (not necessarily vaccines turning people into the Hulk, but still) that, in the past, I would have assumed were mental health issues. But when massive numbers of people believe these things, blaming it on individual problems is not so productive. About 300 people a day are dying because intense political polarization has caused people to believe whatever best feeds their tribal urges. The same thing caused an attack on the US seat of government, and a very large percentage of the population thinks that's ok. I don't know the solution, short of us declaring that the internet and cable tv was a bad idea and we need to go back to simpler times of unconnected computers and 3 TV networks. But I'd agree that facebook, Twitter, etc has to do something.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - exporectomy 5y ago
    > If you believe "the vaccine turned people into the Hulk", thats a mental health problem. Can you identify anyone who actually believes that? Keep in mind that people don't always have logically consistent beliefs, and they sometimes exaggerate their beliefs so they're not even true at all. If I really believed that claim, I would be making a bet with somebody who doesn't believe it and prove myself right by finding this hulk and asking them to punch a hole in a brick wall of flip a car over or something like that. Are there people who have put their own skin in the game like that to support that belief? If not, you're probably strawmanning.
- 0xcde4c3db 5y ago
  I think there's also a tendency for the targeting of any given scam/psyop/sales pitch/etc. to make targets look foolish to non-targets. That is, the more narrowly targeted it is to bypass your bullshit filter, the more obvious it seems to someone else. So they walk away from hearing about your situation thinking that they're too smart to be fooled... only to fall for something that was designed to bypass their bullshit filter, possibly without even realizing it.
- SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
  >The people that >They >us How do you know “your side” is right? Read your comment again, but consider a hypothesis that you are entirely wrong about most things - how would you know? Everyone seems to lack a consideration that there is even a possibility they could be wrong. If they are exposed two sides, and you one, how do you know you are right? You probably are. But… it’s the absolutism that is starting to become obvious to me.
  - Nursie 5y ago
    Humans have things called facts, science and critical thinking. With this set of tools, it is in fact possible to determine that some ideas are meritless bull. We see a proliferation of the latter right now.
    - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
      Agreed. So if you go off truthful websites like the CDC for example… oh wait, some of those links you won’t see because someone chose that for you.
      - Nursie 5y ago
        I will, because I won’t be browsing there from a social media site. Facebook isn’t the internet. It’s not even very interesting.
        _-david-_ 5y ago
        Maybe you will see it, but many people get their news from social media. Seeing how Facebook is now censoring the CDC website (or at least a certain page) many people will not.
  - jjeaff 5y ago
    While there is disinformation out there, it is rare to see completely fabricated primary sources. For example, when a bunch of news sources are saying things like the election was rigged, you can go to the published court cases and the handwritten affidavits. You can then see that 87 judges of all types totally rejected the ridiculous arguments. You can then read through about 250 pages of affidavits and see that they are nothing but vaguely racist, speculative garbage. Regarding things like the covid vaccine, you can look at the 96% vaccination rate of doctors or you can listen to basically every single immunology or virology expert. It is quite telling that pretty much the only doctors making the media rounds fear mongering about the vaccine are gastroenterologists, opthalmologists, or other unrelated fields. So no, nothing is certain, but some things are pretty close to certain.
wffurr 5y ago
The problem is FB "recommending" content and groups and prioritizing the feed. They could just not do that and the problem solves itself. Just show me a time descending list of posts filtered by whatever set of friends I am viewing. Don't recommend groups or friends or content from people or groups I haven't subscribed to. Let me search for groups or friends instead.
- gunapologist99 5y ago
  The discussion about the algorithmic feed seems to be out of context for this thread (i.e., Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”) I don't believe the problem is facebook recommending anything -- the problem is facebook trying to ban certain content entirely (at least in the context of this thread -- algorithmic feeds are a separate problem.)
  - Terretta 5y ago
    > I'm not making the connection between an algorithmic feed and anything I wrote. > The title of this thread is 'Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”'. > I don't believe the problem is facebook recommending anything -- the problem is facebook trying to ban certain content entirely You say you don't believe (a), and you state that the problem is (b). I'm seeing "belief" without substantiation in both of those sentences. I'm also actively not taking username "gunapologist" as related to the merits of beliefs or statements in any way. Finally, it's not clear to me that Facebook is a censor. I hold they have a right to promote or not promote whatever they want. Give someone a megaphone, suddenly anyone not handed a megaphone cries censor. No, just not amplified. Commercially, choosing not to promote a thing is much like a TV channel choosing not to run an ad or sponsor an event, something they choose to not do all the time. I'd rather FB promote nothing, go back to a timeline of posts from my connections, and seems like "a problem" (one of many) is solved.
    - gunapologist99 5y ago
      > I'm also actively not taking username "gunapologist" as related in any way. rotfl touché > I'm seeing "belief" without substantiation in both of those sentences. that's why I said "believe". my opinions about what facebook should and shouldn't be doing are simply that.. opinions. if I were to say any of this on facebook, it's possible that I could immediately be banned, and where's the fun in that. (that's a serious question.. isn't facebook supposed to be a fun place to communicate? if we have to worry about the ban hammer, how is it either?) Moderation should be like HN: light, but still there. If it gets too heavy, civil discourse dies. If it disappears, then the place might turn into lord of the flies. (although, I hope a place like that always exists, too.)
foepys 5y ago
> FB only works when you and 99% of your social group are on there. You can choose whatever social group you want on social media. The days of physical presence and limited supply of peers are over. Your IRL friends don't believe that the government is made up of lizard people? Go find yourself a Facebook, Telegram, Discord, etc. group, you will find plenty of like-minded people and "proof" there. People can and do survive on online contacts alone, so being shunned is not a problem for them. At least not in the medium term.
- TheParkShark 5y ago
  I appreciate the use of medium term in this context.
- inetknght 5y ago
  > You can choose whatever social group you want on social media What social group you want is guided by what social groups are recommended to you
- mynameisash 5y ago
  > you will find plenty of ... "proof" there. Unfortunately, I think this is true but not realized. I found out that my brother was "going to do his own research" on the COVID-19 vaccines, which really is just code for, "I'm going to look online at sources in my echo chamber." (Because how many people really do their own research by talking with virologists, epidemiologists, etc.?) It wasn't until he had some social pressure and the death of two acquaintances that he decided it was important to go get vaccinated.
TrispusAttucks 5y ago
You are absolute right. Censorship is... A STRANGE GAME. THE ONLY WINNING MOVE IS NOT TO PLAY.
- icebraining 5y ago
  Except that's not a winning move either, because (currently) you'll be heavily criticized for it as well.
  - lmm 5y ago
    It is the winning move in the long or even medium term, for the same reasons as not paying Dane-geld. Once you start censoring politically unacceptable content there will be no end of demands for you to censor more and more.
- pedroma 5y ago
  The only winning move is to censor everything.
bitL 5y ago
The issue is an increasing infantilization world-wide where some group thinks it needs to "protect the others", assuming they are the single source of truth and that it's obvious they are. It's a well known bias which for some reason aligns with the current zeitgeist. As everything before, it shall too pass at some point.
- cmurf 5y ago
  It's not a new problem. 20 years ago at a national park with signs "don't feed the wildlife" with a parent teaching her 3 year old to feed the wild life within 3 feet of such a sign. I said "do you see the sign? why are you doing this?" She scoffed, pouted, and ran with her child to her car and drove away. We treat her like a child because so many adults act like children. They seek what their parents never gave them, and unfortunately keep barking up the wrong tree, but you can't just refrain from sugggesting they not feed wildlife or it leads to mayhem. Today we have so many humans defecating in the lakes near Maroon Bells that the park might close. For at least a decade that park has a "pack it out" policy, including your own poop. There are that many people pooping in the woods, and it's not good enough to dig holes. People so infantilized they lack the emotional coping skill to poop in a sack and pack it out, so they swim out in a lake with numerous "do not swim" signs and take a dump. People are fucking stupid. If you don't tell them this, they think it isn't true, and the rules for for someone else.
  - morpheos137 5y ago
    You lost me at pack it out. Do other animals pack it out?
    - majewsky 5y ago
      The purpose of a nature preserve, unsurprisingly, is to preserve nature as it exists within this space. Any human interference with nature inside the preserve runs the risk of tipping the scales of the natural lifecycle's balance. If someone were to bring their dog into the preserve and hunt and kill some rabbits, it would probably be quite obvious that they would be disturbing the natural balance that the nature preserve is supposed to protect. Leaving your excrements is prohibited for the same reason, although on a subtler level. Your excrement can contain germs not native to the area which could start an epidemic if stuff goes really bad. Just today, there was news that the National Forest Service estimates half of all deer to already have been infected with SARS-CoV-2. Now thankfully, Covid-19 does not seem to be a dangerous disease in deer. Just imagine if it weren't that benign and a significant amount of deer had been wiped out by it nationwide (or even worldwide). That's the kind of low-probability-but-high-danger scenario that packing it out is supposed to prevent.
snowwrestler 5y ago
Facebook is removing content because that is ground they want to stand on. Removing content feels like censorship, so it lends itself to political grandstanding in their favor. Millions of people get upset and demand that Facebook handle all content neutrally, which is exactly what Facebook wanted everyone to think in the first place. The real issue with Facebook is the editorial decisions they make about promoting some content over others. It’s totally optional and is also a powerful form of censorship. A link that shows up in no one’s “algorithmic timeline” is worthless, even if it is not actually removed from the platform. The essential lie is that the algorithm is neutral. It’s not; it is intentionally biased to favor Facebook’s goals: increase ad inventory and the data used to target ads.
- cududa 5y ago
  I’m sorry but my profession is vaccine hesitancy and persuasion researcher and OP is just wrong. I have n=20,000 polls showing people get disinformation from Facebook that informs their decision to not get vaccinated and hours of focus group recordings also showing this.
  - coryrc 5y ago
    Who is wrong?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - IfOnlyYouKnew 5y ago
      The 99.5% of dead people that weren’t vaccinated. This isn’t difficult.
  - testernews 5y ago
    You forgot your /s there bud
  - tasogare 5y ago
    > my profession is vaccine hesitancy and persuasion researcher Can't get if this is sarcasm or not. If true, it's scary how fast micro-fields are created and funded once there is a political purpose behind it, so that policies can be rubber-stamped as science. If false, nice troll.
Aunche 5y ago
Facebook cares about their bottom line more than anything else. In a vacuum, they're pro free speech because there's more content to serve ads off of. However, presently people will get companies to boycott ads on your platform if they see something on it they don't like. Also Biden just blamed Facebook for not censoring enough so they're likely facing pressure from Washington as well. https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/16/politics/biden-facebook-covid-19/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/16/politics/biden-facebook-covid...
IfOnlyYouKnew 5y ago
If stuff people see on Facebook has absolutely no effect on their believes, then, yes, it wouldn't make sense for Facebook to delete disinformation. It also wouldn't make sense to post any dis- or -information on Facebook. And it wouldn't make any difference if Facebook deleted anything or not, so people could stop complaining about "censorship" for exactly the same reason you want people to stop demanding action from Facebook. The fact that the latter two aren't happening seems to suggest nobody–you included–believes it's all quite as meaningless.
pessimizer 5y ago
Facebook is censoring because politicians who are also murmuring about tech antitrust are demanding that they do. They're just trying to survive the rage cycle. edit: So since they don't have any overarching philosophy about what to censor, some of the choices they make are overzealous or bizarre.
RGamma 5y ago
In short: Epistemic security is dying. Eventually you won't even know what that means. What cruel irony that the medium that would bring us knowledge might get us oblivion. Welcome to the society in chains.
hintymad 5y ago
Honest question: who's fact checking the fact checkers in FB? No offense, but those fact checkers are not necessarily smart or knowledgeable in every subject. They don't necessarily know the difference between DNA and RNA, allele or gene, second international vs third international, and the list goes on. The fact checkers may be ideologues themselves. They fact checkers may not even make it through college courses. So, I really don't get why they think they know the truth of everything and can tell FB users what is misinformation and what is not.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  My personal guess is they are people in a middle management position designated full autonomy on their decision. It just so happens that the cultural beliefs there skew left since it is in California and in tech. Why factual information gets censored though is a genuine question. It is a legitimate "who watches the watchmen" issue seeing as they literally get to enforce whatever ideology tickles their fancy that moment.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    My guess is that fact checking falls on low paid workers with high "performance metrics" they're expected to meet to keep their job-- not managers. At least, that seems to be the model used when the curtain has been pulled back on social media QA.
  - bmcahren 5y ago
    This is incredibly off-base. The truth is they have outsourced fact checking to the "International Fact-Checking Network at Poynter" who has to uphold standards not just freely enforce whatever ideology tickles their fancy. Knowing one low-level employee of one of the subcontractors involved; it works something like this: 1. An article is posted to Facebook/Twitter/etc and is automatically flagged based on keywords or manually flagged based on user reports of misinformation. 2. Fact checking organizations take up fact-checking of the article for a small fee. 3. In this case for the organization I am personally aware of, the fact checking company has a large number of independent contractors who can research a "batch" of claims/articles. 4. Usually the jobs are broken up into simple questions. 5. You along with many others provide answers and must provide pertinent factual sources supporting the veracity of your assessment that this is either true, partly false, or false along with other categories such as if it is clearly and obviously satire. 6. Your answers are judged vs the final determination. Those who consistently skew in any direction are dismissed from eligibility to participate in the future. 7. The fact checking organization once it has enough answers for confidence has higher-level employees double-check the answer and source information. 8. The fact checking organization submits it's formal assessment on the article/opinion to the IFCN. 9. Companies like Facebook use multiple IFCN assessments and perhaps other fact check assessments to provide pertinent information that corrects misinformation that has spread rampantly over the last year like "Joe Biden wants to defund police departments across the US" with corrections like "After being asked if "We can reduce the responsibilities assigned to the police and redirect some of the funding for police into social services, mental health counselling, and affordable housing." Mr Biden has answered "Yes" to a question about whether he agrees with this redirecting of funding. I may be slightly off in how this works but the overall program is the same for most social networks that care about misinformation. There is more information in the sources below: Sources: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/2593586717571940?id=673052479947730 https://www.facebook.com/business/help/2593586717571940?id=6... https://ifcncodeofprinciples.poynter.org/ https://ifcncodeofprinciples.poynter.org/ https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-53997196 https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-53997196
torgian 5y ago
You’ll be surprised at how many people will believe anything if it’s from a source they “trust”.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
lern_too_spel 5y ago
"Censoring" is a fairly hyperbolic way of describing marking a post as misinformation. As far as the business analysis, I'm sure there are some number-crunchers at Facebook who looked at lockdown usage of the platform, the lockdown's effect on ad revenue, declining use due to deaths, how much marking misinformation changed a poster's beliefs, how much marking misinformation changes a poster's usage, and figured out whether marking misinformation made financial sense. I don't think they care at all about what you might think is freedom or what someone else might think is moral, and the idea that some other commenters have put forth that marking misinformation would affect antitrust litigation seems just as wacky as some of the Facebook posts I've seen about vaccines and 5g.
hammyhavoc 5y ago
Speak for yourself, in my circles,conspiracy theorists are an absolute minority. All I'm interested in are facts and truths.
emodendroket 5y ago
> 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? I mean, having watched family members descend into raving about the Pope and George Soros harvesting children for adrenochrome despite no previous interest in current events, yeah, I think people can be manipulated by obviously bogus information. You can decide for yourself what you think should or shouldn't be done about it but I don't think that point should be in doubt anymore.
cyanydeez 5y ago
enough people are being manipulated. 600k americans didnt die of covid because health officials were wrong.
- account42 5y ago
  You mean the health officials that initially told people not to wear masks?
Consultant32452 5y ago
It's important to remember the history here. In 2015 social media was basically the wild west. You could get away with saying all sorts of crazy stuff and nobody cared. After the 2016 election all of the big social media CEOs were dragged in front of Congress to testify about fake news, Russian propaganda, etc. They were directly threatened by lawmakers that if they didn't shape up by censoring us that lawmakers would bring the hammer down. What we are experiencing now is 5 years of development on that threat. The social media CEOs are in a position where if the media manages to make a big fuss about some sort of "misinformation" then Congress will respond by dragging their butts back to testify and/or regulation. This has turned the social media CEOs into slaves of the corporate press. All it takes is a few tweets from the right people asking Zuck why he's platforming "Nazis" or whatever they are calling moderate Republicans and anti-war leftists these days and these companies will jump. This is the censorship that the government demanded, and they can't escape. I'm not sure what the answer is, because if we all jump ship from FB/Twitter/etc onto a "new" platform, it won't be long until that new CEO gets dragged before Congress and is given the same threats.
- tstrimple 5y ago
  There seems to be this pervasive myth that conservatives are being censored on sites like Facebook. That's at odds with the fact that far right misinformation still dominates those websites. Just what evidence would be sufficient to convince conservatives that they aren't being unduly censored? https://www.npr.org/2021/03/06/974394783/far-right-misinformation-is-thriving-on-facebook-a-new-study-shows-just-how-much https://www.npr.org/2021/03/06/974394783/far-right-misinform... https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2021/02/01/censorship-conservatives-trump-facebook-twitter-youtube/4316155001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2021/02/01/censorship-co... > “Republicans, or more broadly conservatives, have been spreading a form of disinformation on how they're treated on social media. They complain they’re censored and suppressed but, not only is there not evidence to support that, what evidence exists actually cuts in the other direction,” said Paul Barrett, deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, which released the report Monday.
  - Consultant32452 5y ago
parineum 5y ago
>at what point does the censorship to protect me from manipulation become manipulation itself? Immediately. Everyone has biases.
- account42 5y ago
  I would go further and say that manipulation is the entire point of censorship.
  - parineum 5y ago
    I agree but I think that people are less receptive to that idea despite it being tautological.
kjrose 5y ago
The question is how quickly can google and facebook lose their advertising monopoly by playing this game.
coss 5y ago
Most people have their minds made up and just look for articles supporting it. I can't help but feel we are doomed in this respect. Only teaching critical reasoning can help combat this and I fear most countries aren't up for the challenge.
orionblastar 5y ago
Usually if there is no scientific proof of something, there will be a conspiracy theory on it. Like Bigfoot, no scientific data that he exists. Just some big footprints that someone made with modified shoes.
tstrimple 5y ago
Conservatives are vaccinating at a fraction of the rate they should be, and it's pretty much directly attributable to directed misinformation. Yeah, I think there's plenty of evidence to suggest misinformation works, and it's potentially extremely damaging. How many more people have died due to Covid because of people downplaying the virus? We still have Trump supporters claiming it's not real.
intended 5y ago
Yes. Plus its not “people” will believe whatever bits of misinformation is out there. Take it this way from marketing speak: —————- Content is being made and iterated upon rapidly, over social media to find new and innovative ways of winning “mindshare” among consumers. With new technology we can cluster user groups and tailor make perfect user experiences after extensively a/b testing content to most closely match user preferences. All of this can be done cheaply and at scale, for increasingly new types of content and complexity levels. ———— That is the problem. It’s not whether people will believe misinformation, its that content creation is faster at changing and sounds plausible enough to slip past your typical bullshit filter.
raxxorrax 5y ago
> This is way past censoring Alex Jones Censoring Alex Jones gives far too much credit to Alex Jones because of the reasons you explained. It might not feel like a loss, but it was clear from the beginning that it won't stop there. I thought this was a lesson already learned to be honest.
CamperBob2 5y ago
But is everyone that easily manipulated? Enough to elect a President, so... yes.
zibzab 5y ago
> But is everyone that easily manipulated? Yes > More importantly, does everyone actually believe that they can be easily manipulated, No > or do they just think that everyone else is so easily manipulated, but somehow they're above the fray? Yes
Fjolsvith 5y ago
These days the difference between conspiracy theory and truth is about 6 months.

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.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  "If you believe "the vaccine turned people into the Hulk", thats a mental health problem." Then half the population is mentally ill. Come to think of it, that would explain a lot of issues we are dealing with...
  - account42 5y ago
    Or perhaps half the popultation does not in fact believe that but you insist on putting any detractors in one bucket.
- lern_too_spel 5y ago
  Has "vaccines can cause blood clots in rare cases" been flagged as misinformation? I don't think it has. I get the impression that the misinformation filter is 99% accurate.
- robbrown451 5y ago
  There are crazy things that people believe (not necessarily vaccines turning people into the Hulk, but still) that, in the past, I would have assumed were mental health issues. But when massive numbers of people believe these things, blaming it on individual problems is not so productive. About 300 people a day are dying because intense political polarization has caused people to believe whatever best feeds their tribal urges. The same thing caused an attack on the US seat of government, and a very large percentage of the population thinks that's ok. I don't know the solution, short of us declaring that the internet and cable tv was a bad idea and we need to go back to simpler times of unconnected computers and 3 TV networks. But I'd agree that facebook, Twitter, etc has to do something.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- exporectomy 5y ago
  > If you believe "the vaccine turned people into the Hulk", thats a mental health problem. Can you identify anyone who actually believes that? Keep in mind that people don't always have logically consistent beliefs, and they sometimes exaggerate their beliefs so they're not even true at all. If I really believed that claim, I would be making a bet with somebody who doesn't believe it and prove myself right by finding this hulk and asking them to punch a hole in a brick wall of flip a car over or something like that. Are there people who have put their own skin in the game like that to support that belief? If not, you're probably strawmanning.
0xcde4c3db 5y ago
I think there's also a tendency for the targeting of any given scam/psyop/sales pitch/etc. to make targets look foolish to non-targets. That is, the more narrowly targeted it is to bypass your bullshit filter, the more obvious it seems to someone else. So they walk away from hearing about your situation thinking that they're too smart to be fooled... only to fall for something that was designed to bypass their bullshit filter, possibly without even realizing it.
SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
>The people that >They >us How do you know “your side” is right? Read your comment again, but consider a hypothesis that you are entirely wrong about most things - how would you know? Everyone seems to lack a consideration that there is even a possibility they could be wrong. If they are exposed two sides, and you one, how do you know you are right? You probably are. But… it’s the absolutism that is starting to become obvious to me.
- Nursie 5y ago
  Humans have things called facts, science and critical thinking. With this set of tools, it is in fact possible to determine that some ideas are meritless bull. We see a proliferation of the latter right now.
  - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
    Agreed. So if you go off truthful websites like the CDC for example… oh wait, some of those links you won’t see because someone chose that for you.
    - Nursie 5y ago
      I will, because I won’t be browsing there from a social media site. Facebook isn’t the internet. It’s not even very interesting.
      - _-david-_ 5y ago
        Maybe you will see it, but many people get their news from social media. Seeing how Facebook is now censoring the CDC website (or at least a certain page) many people will not.
- jjeaff 5y ago
  While there is disinformation out there, it is rare to see completely fabricated primary sources. For example, when a bunch of news sources are saying things like the election was rigged, you can go to the published court cases and the handwritten affidavits. You can then see that 87 judges of all types totally rejected the ridiculous arguments. You can then read through about 250 pages of affidavits and see that they are nothing but vaguely racist, speculative garbage. Regarding things like the covid vaccine, you can look at the 96% vaccination rate of doctors or you can listen to basically every single immunology or virology expert. It is quite telling that pretty much the only doctors making the media rounds fear mongering about the vaccine are gastroenterologists, opthalmologists, or other unrelated fields. So no, nothing is certain, but some things are pretty close to certain.

wffurr 5y ago

The problem is FB "recommending" content and groups and prioritizing the feed. They could just not do that and the problem solves itself. Just show me a time descending list of posts filtered by whatever set of friends I am viewing. Don't recommend groups or friends or content from people or groups I haven't subscribed to. Let me search for groups or friends instead.

gunapologist99 5y ago
The discussion about the algorithmic feed seems to be out of context for this thread (i.e., Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”) I don't believe the problem is facebook recommending anything -- the problem is facebook trying to ban certain content entirely (at least in the context of this thread -- algorithmic feeds are a separate problem.)
- Terretta 5y ago
  > I'm not making the connection between an algorithmic feed and anything I wrote. > The title of this thread is 'Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”'. > I don't believe the problem is facebook recommending anything -- the problem is facebook trying to ban certain content entirely You say you don't believe (a), and you state that the problem is (b). I'm seeing "belief" without substantiation in both of those sentences. I'm also actively not taking username "gunapologist" as related to the merits of beliefs or statements in any way. Finally, it's not clear to me that Facebook is a censor. I hold they have a right to promote or not promote whatever they want. Give someone a megaphone, suddenly anyone not handed a megaphone cries censor. No, just not amplified. Commercially, choosing not to promote a thing is much like a TV channel choosing not to run an ad or sponsor an event, something they choose to not do all the time. I'd rather FB promote nothing, go back to a timeline of posts from my connections, and seems like "a problem" (one of many) is solved.
  - gunapologist99 5y ago
    > I'm also actively not taking username "gunapologist" as related in any way. rotfl touché > I'm seeing "belief" without substantiation in both of those sentences. that's why I said "believe". my opinions about what facebook should and shouldn't be doing are simply that.. opinions. if I were to say any of this on facebook, it's possible that I could immediately be banned, and where's the fun in that. (that's a serious question.. isn't facebook supposed to be a fun place to communicate? if we have to worry about the ban hammer, how is it either?) Moderation should be like HN: light, but still there. If it gets too heavy, civil discourse dies. If it disappears, then the place might turn into lord of the flies. (although, I hope a place like that always exists, too.)

foepys 5y ago

> FB only works when you and 99% of your social group are on there. You can choose whatever social group you want on social media. The days of physical presence and limited supply of peers are over. Your IRL friends don't believe that the government is made up of lizard people? Go find yourself a Facebook, Telegram, Discord, etc. group, you will find plenty of like-minded people and "proof" there. People can and do survive on online contacts alone, so being shunned is not a problem for them. At least not in the medium term.

TheParkShark 5y ago
I appreciate the use of medium term in this context.
inetknght 5y ago
> You can choose whatever social group you want on social media What social group you want is guided by what social groups are recommended to you
mynameisash 5y ago
> you will find plenty of ... "proof" there. Unfortunately, I think this is true but not realized. I found out that my brother was "going to do his own research" on the COVID-19 vaccines, which really is just code for, "I'm going to look online at sources in my echo chamber." (Because how many people really do their own research by talking with virologists, epidemiologists, etc.?) It wasn't until he had some social pressure and the death of two acquaintances that he decided it was important to go get vaccinated.

TrispusAttucks 5y ago

You are absolute right. Censorship is... A STRANGE GAME. THE ONLY WINNING MOVE IS NOT TO PLAY.

icebraining 5y ago
Except that's not a winning move either, because (currently) you'll be heavily criticized for it as well.
- lmm 5y ago
  It is the winning move in the long or even medium term, for the same reasons as not paying Dane-geld. Once you start censoring politically unacceptable content there will be no end of demands for you to censor more and more.
pedroma 5y ago
The only winning move is to censor everything.

bitL 5y ago

The issue is an increasing infantilization world-wide where some group thinks it needs to "protect the others", assuming they are the single source of truth and that it's obvious they are. It's a well known bias which for some reason aligns with the current zeitgeist. As everything before, it shall too pass at some point.

cmurf 5y ago
It's not a new problem. 20 years ago at a national park with signs "don't feed the wildlife" with a parent teaching her 3 year old to feed the wild life within 3 feet of such a sign. I said "do you see the sign? why are you doing this?" She scoffed, pouted, and ran with her child to her car and drove away. We treat her like a child because so many adults act like children. They seek what their parents never gave them, and unfortunately keep barking up the wrong tree, but you can't just refrain from sugggesting they not feed wildlife or it leads to mayhem. Today we have so many humans defecating in the lakes near Maroon Bells that the park might close. For at least a decade that park has a "pack it out" policy, including your own poop. There are that many people pooping in the woods, and it's not good enough to dig holes. People so infantilized they lack the emotional coping skill to poop in a sack and pack it out, so they swim out in a lake with numerous "do not swim" signs and take a dump. People are fucking stupid. If you don't tell them this, they think it isn't true, and the rules for for someone else.
- morpheos137 5y ago
  You lost me at pack it out. Do other animals pack it out?
  - majewsky 5y ago
    The purpose of a nature preserve, unsurprisingly, is to preserve nature as it exists within this space. Any human interference with nature inside the preserve runs the risk of tipping the scales of the natural lifecycle's balance. If someone were to bring their dog into the preserve and hunt and kill some rabbits, it would probably be quite obvious that they would be disturbing the natural balance that the nature preserve is supposed to protect. Leaving your excrements is prohibited for the same reason, although on a subtler level. Your excrement can contain germs not native to the area which could start an epidemic if stuff goes really bad. Just today, there was news that the National Forest Service estimates half of all deer to already have been infected with SARS-CoV-2. Now thankfully, Covid-19 does not seem to be a dangerous disease in deer. Just imagine if it weren't that benign and a significant amount of deer had been wiped out by it nationwide (or even worldwide). That's the kind of low-probability-but-high-danger scenario that packing it out is supposed to prevent.

snowwrestler 5y ago

Facebook is removing content because that is ground they want to stand on. Removing content feels like censorship, so it lends itself to political grandstanding in their favor. Millions of people get upset and demand that Facebook handle all content neutrally, which is exactly what Facebook wanted everyone to think in the first place. The real issue with Facebook is the editorial decisions they make about promoting some content over others. It’s totally optional and is also a powerful form of censorship. A link that shows up in no one’s “algorithmic timeline” is worthless, even if it is not actually removed from the platform. The essential lie is that the algorithm is neutral. It’s not; it is intentionally biased to favor Facebook’s goals: increase ad inventory and the data used to target ads.

cududa 5y ago
I’m sorry but my profession is vaccine hesitancy and persuasion researcher and OP is just wrong. I have n=20,000 polls showing people get disinformation from Facebook that informs their decision to not get vaccinated and hours of focus group recordings also showing this.
- coryrc 5y ago
  Who is wrong?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - IfOnlyYouKnew 5y ago
    The 99.5% of dead people that weren’t vaccinated. This isn’t difficult.
- testernews 5y ago
  You forgot your /s there bud
- tasogare 5y ago
  > my profession is vaccine hesitancy and persuasion researcher Can't get if this is sarcasm or not. If true, it's scary how fast micro-fields are created and funded once there is a political purpose behind it, so that policies can be rubber-stamped as science. If false, nice troll.

Aunche 5y ago

Facebook cares about their bottom line more than anything else. In a vacuum, they're pro free speech because there's more content to serve ads off of. However, presently people will get companies to boycott ads on your platform if they see something on it they don't like. Also Biden just blamed Facebook for not censoring enough so they're likely facing pressure from Washington as well. https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/16/politics/biden-facebook-covid-19/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/16/politics/biden-facebook-covid...

IfOnlyYouKnew 5y ago

If stuff people see on Facebook has absolutely no effect on their believes, then, yes, it wouldn't make sense for Facebook to delete disinformation. It also wouldn't make sense to post any dis- or -information on Facebook. And it wouldn't make any difference if Facebook deleted anything or not, so people could stop complaining about "censorship" for exactly the same reason you want people to stop demanding action from Facebook. The fact that the latter two aren't happening seems to suggest nobody–you included–believes it's all quite as meaningless.

pessimizer 5y ago

Facebook is censoring because politicians who are also murmuring about tech antitrust are demanding that they do. They're just trying to survive the rage cycle. edit: So since they don't have any overarching philosophy about what to censor, some of the choices they make are overzealous or bizarre.

RGamma 5y ago

In short: Epistemic security is dying. Eventually you won't even know what that means. What cruel irony that the medium that would bring us knowledge might get us oblivion. Welcome to the society in chains.

hintymad 5y ago

Honest question: who's fact checking the fact checkers in FB? No offense, but those fact checkers are not necessarily smart or knowledgeable in every subject. They don't necessarily know the difference between DNA and RNA, allele or gene, second international vs third international, and the list goes on. The fact checkers may be ideologues themselves. They fact checkers may not even make it through college courses. So, I really don't get why they think they know the truth of everything and can tell FB users what is misinformation and what is not.

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
My personal guess is they are people in a middle management position designated full autonomy on their decision. It just so happens that the cultural beliefs there skew left since it is in California and in tech. Why factual information gets censored though is a genuine question. It is a legitimate "who watches the watchmen" issue seeing as they literally get to enforce whatever ideology tickles their fancy that moment.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  My guess is that fact checking falls on low paid workers with high "performance metrics" they're expected to meet to keep their job-- not managers. At least, that seems to be the model used when the curtain has been pulled back on social media QA.
- bmcahren 5y ago
  This is incredibly off-base. The truth is they have outsourced fact checking to the "International Fact-Checking Network at Poynter" who has to uphold standards not just freely enforce whatever ideology tickles their fancy. Knowing one low-level employee of one of the subcontractors involved; it works something like this: 1. An article is posted to Facebook/Twitter/etc and is automatically flagged based on keywords or manually flagged based on user reports of misinformation. 2. Fact checking organizations take up fact-checking of the article for a small fee. 3. In this case for the organization I am personally aware of, the fact checking company has a large number of independent contractors who can research a "batch" of claims/articles. 4. Usually the jobs are broken up into simple questions. 5. You along with many others provide answers and must provide pertinent factual sources supporting the veracity of your assessment that this is either true, partly false, or false along with other categories such as if it is clearly and obviously satire. 6. Your answers are judged vs the final determination. Those who consistently skew in any direction are dismissed from eligibility to participate in the future. 7. The fact checking organization once it has enough answers for confidence has higher-level employees double-check the answer and source information. 8. The fact checking organization submits it's formal assessment on the article/opinion to the IFCN. 9. Companies like Facebook use multiple IFCN assessments and perhaps other fact check assessments to provide pertinent information that corrects misinformation that has spread rampantly over the last year like "Joe Biden wants to defund police departments across the US" with corrections like "After being asked if "We can reduce the responsibilities assigned to the police and redirect some of the funding for police into social services, mental health counselling, and affordable housing." Mr Biden has answered "Yes" to a question about whether he agrees with this redirecting of funding. I may be slightly off in how this works but the overall program is the same for most social networks that care about misinformation. There is more information in the sources below: Sources: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/2593586717571940?id=673052479947730 https://www.facebook.com/business/help/2593586717571940?id=6... https://ifcncodeofprinciples.poynter.org/ https://ifcncodeofprinciples.poynter.org/ https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-53997196 https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-53997196

torgian 5y ago

You’ll be surprised at how many people will believe anything if it’s from a source they “trust”.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

lern_too_spel 5y ago

"Censoring" is a fairly hyperbolic way of describing marking a post as misinformation. As far as the business analysis, I'm sure there are some number-crunchers at Facebook who looked at lockdown usage of the platform, the lockdown's effect on ad revenue, declining use due to deaths, how much marking misinformation changed a poster's beliefs, how much marking misinformation changes a poster's usage, and figured out whether marking misinformation made financial sense. I don't think they care at all about what you might think is freedom or what someone else might think is moral, and the idea that some other commenters have put forth that marking misinformation would affect antitrust litigation seems just as wacky as some of the Facebook posts I've seen about vaccines and 5g.

hammyhavoc 5y ago

Speak for yourself, in my circles,conspiracy theorists are an absolute minority. All I'm interested in are facts and truths.

emodendroket 5y ago

> 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? I mean, having watched family members descend into raving about the Pope and George Soros harvesting children for adrenochrome despite no previous interest in current events, yeah, I think people can be manipulated by obviously bogus information. You can decide for yourself what you think should or shouldn't be done about it but I don't think that point should be in doubt anymore.

cyanydeez 5y ago

enough people are being manipulated. 600k americans didnt die of covid because health officials were wrong.

account42 5y ago
You mean the health officials that initially told people not to wear masks?

Consultant32452 5y ago

It's important to remember the history here. In 2015 social media was basically the wild west. You could get away with saying all sorts of crazy stuff and nobody cared. After the 2016 election all of the big social media CEOs were dragged in front of Congress to testify about fake news, Russian propaganda, etc. They were directly threatened by lawmakers that if they didn't shape up by censoring us that lawmakers would bring the hammer down. What we are experiencing now is 5 years of development on that threat. The social media CEOs are in a position where if the media manages to make a big fuss about some sort of "misinformation" then Congress will respond by dragging their butts back to testify and/or regulation. This has turned the social media CEOs into slaves of the corporate press. All it takes is a few tweets from the right people asking Zuck why he's platforming "Nazis" or whatever they are calling moderate Republicans and anti-war leftists these days and these companies will jump. This is the censorship that the government demanded, and they can't escape. I'm not sure what the answer is, because if we all jump ship from FB/Twitter/etc onto a "new" platform, it won't be long until that new CEO gets dragged before Congress and is given the same threats.

tstrimple 5y ago
There seems to be this pervasive myth that conservatives are being censored on sites like Facebook. That's at odds with the fact that far right misinformation still dominates those websites. Just what evidence would be sufficient to convince conservatives that they aren't being unduly censored? https://www.npr.org/2021/03/06/974394783/far-right-misinformation-is-thriving-on-facebook-a-new-study-shows-just-how-much https://www.npr.org/2021/03/06/974394783/far-right-misinform... https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2021/02/01/censorship-conservatives-trump-facebook-twitter-youtube/4316155001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2021/02/01/censorship-co... > “Republicans, or more broadly conservatives, have been spreading a form of disinformation on how they're treated on social media. They complain they’re censored and suppressed but, not only is there not evidence to support that, what evidence exists actually cuts in the other direction,” said Paul Barrett, deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, which released the report Monday.
- Consultant32452 5y ago

parineum 5y ago

>at what point does the censorship to protect me from manipulation become manipulation itself? Immediately. Everyone has biases.

account42 5y ago
I would go further and say that manipulation is the entire point of censorship.
- parineum 5y ago
  I agree but I think that people are less receptive to that idea despite it being tautological.

kjrose 5y ago

The question is how quickly can google and facebook lose their advertising monopoly by playing this game.

coss 5y ago

Most people have their minds made up and just look for articles supporting it. I can't help but feel we are doomed in this respect. Only teaching critical reasoning can help combat this and I fear most countries aren't up for the challenge.

orionblastar 5y ago

Usually if there is no scientific proof of something, there will be a conspiracy theory on it. Like Bigfoot, no scientific data that he exists. Just some big footprints that someone made with modified shoes.

tstrimple 5y ago

Conservatives are vaccinating at a fraction of the rate they should be, and it's pretty much directly attributable to directed misinformation. Yeah, I think there's plenty of evidence to suggest misinformation works, and it's potentially extremely damaging. How many more people have died due to Covid because of people downplaying the virus? We still have Trump supporters claiming it's not real.

intended 5y ago

Yes. Plus its not “people” will believe whatever bits of misinformation is out there. Take it this way from marketing speak: —————- Content is being made and iterated upon rapidly, over social media to find new and innovative ways of winning “mindshare” among consumers. With new technology we can cluster user groups and tailor make perfect user experiences after extensively a/b testing content to most closely match user preferences. All of this can be done cheaply and at scale, for increasingly new types of content and complexity levels. ———— That is the problem. It’s not whether people will believe misinformation, its that content creation is faster at changing and sounds plausible enough to slip past your typical bullshit filter.

raxxorrax 5y ago

> This is way past censoring Alex Jones Censoring Alex Jones gives far too much credit to Alex Jones because of the reasons you explained. It might not feel like a loss, but it was clear from the beginning that it won't stop there. I thought this was a lesson already learned to be honest.

CamperBob2 5y ago

But is everyone that easily manipulated? Enough to elect a President, so... yes.

zibzab 5y ago

> But is everyone that easily manipulated? Yes > More importantly, does everyone actually believe that they can be easily manipulated, No > or do they just think that everyone else is so easily manipulated, but somehow they're above the fray? Yes

Fjolsvith 5y ago

These days the difference between conspiracy theory and truth is about 6 months.