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> We are aware that The BMJ is not the only high quality information provider to have been affected by the incompetence of Meta’s fact checking regime. It is n
by j_m_b 5y ago
> We are aware that The BMJ is not the only high quality information provider to have been affected by the incompetence of Meta’s fact checking regime.
It is not an acceptable tradeoff that some high quality information is censored in order that bad information is policed.
- teachrdan 5y agoI'd normally agree with you. But in the case of Covid, some political actors are launching coordinated efforts to deliberately misinform millions of Americans in regards to a virus that has, so far, killed over 800,000 people here. How do we deal with this challenge without censoring some information that ought not be censored?
- SpicyLemonZest 5y agoI don't agree with the premise that censorship helps in the first place. If Facebook established a new policy that nobody's allowed to say bad things about fast food, and you saw an article explaining how fast food is healthy and good for you, would you trust it?
- shadowgovt 5y agoAh, that's the tricky part. It's not about what you or I would do, it's about what the median user does when the topic is public health and safety. And half of everyone is below average.
- throw10920 5y agoErm, no, it's not. "It" is about taking principled actions, regardless of the outcome. "Outcomes over principles" is one of the most destructive and evil ideologies known to man, and the source for all kinds of tyranny disguised under the banner of "We know what's best for you". Censorship, in the sense of suppressing one's opinions and freedom of expression, is morally wrong, full stop - and even if it weren't, it's not even effective in the case of Facebook, because censorship just feeds (crazy) conspiracy theories and breeds distrust.
- shadowgovt 5y ago> censorship just feeds (crazy) conspiracy theories and breeds distrust. I think we saw enough of crazy conspiracy theories occurring before the latest trend of service info-shaping to conclude that it's an independent variable. Silicon Valley companies held the line on being agnostic media for decades. The result was a world that appears to have necessitated another approach, because bad actors figured out how to exploit the laissez-faire approach of the digital media to signal-boost crazy conspiracy theories, misinformation, and propaganda. It was the laissez-faire Facebook of the mid-2010s that allowed foreign companies to signal-shape a US election via paid-for advertising and micro-targeting [https://www.vox.com/2018/5/10/17339864/congress-russia-advertisements-facebook-donald-trump-president https://www.vox.com/2018/5/10/17339864/congress-russia-adver...].
- r-w 5y agoNo, half of everyone is below median :)
- analogdreams 5y agoSeeing as the #1 political bad actor is Dr. Anthony Fauchi. So we could start by removing him.
- zekica 5y agoWhy don't the mainstream actually inform people of all important facts? Them being trustworthy, will make people less inclined to believe misinformation. If you skip over important questions, these gaps will be filled with bull**ters.
- DrHilarius 5y agoIf misinformation cannot reliably be distinguished from truth, how can you so confidently assert that there are "coordinated efforts to deliberately misinform"?
- dionian 5y agoHow do we know the misinformation from the authorities is not similarly a problem? CDC and FDA flip flopped so many times over the last few years. WHO and CDC were telling us not to worry about pandemics, and instead worry about "stigma" instead as late as March 2020. https://twitter.com/DrTedros/status/1229137314074505216?s=20 https://twitter.com/DrTedros/status/1229137314074505216?s=20 https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1224734993966096387?s=20 https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1224734993966096387?s=20 Censorship is not the answer. It actually gives more credence to the persecuted/wrong and lets them gain more supporters. Just like we dont ban KKK or Nazi stuff, we openly destroy their arguments with facts, not fascism.
- escaper 5y agoSo what's the answer then. I see a lot of "this doesn't work because x or y" but no one has any answers. The fact is, it's a lot better to police thousands of pieces of dangerous misinformation than to hide a few legitimate pieces. Like everything else, it's a trade-off.
- tzs 5y ago> Censorship is not the answer. It actually gives more credence to the persecuted/wrong and lets them gain more supporters. Just like we dont ban KKK or Nazi stuff, we openly destroy their arguments with facts, not fascism. Destroying their arguments with facts doesn't work, because they just replace them with new arguments. Since it takes much less effort to generate new but plausible sounding incorrect arguments than it does to refute such arguments, the misinformation wins. It used to work back when distribution of ideas was slow or expensive or both. Those times are long gone.
- r-w 5y agoThey also don't listen anymore, thanks to echo chambers.
- stjohnswarts 5y agoCDC didn't flip flop. They used the information they had on hand. If you don't like it then don't listen to it but they weren't "wrong" given the information they had at the time. We haven't actually ever been through this sort of thing in over 100 years. I trust them more than Fox, Trump, and Breitbart news. The secret is they are willing to change their interpretation rather than stick to their guns when the evidence says otherwise; unlike right wing media who continue to say it's just a bad flu and that we should just get over 800,000 dead people and quit being "wimps".
- DocTomoe 5y agoI feel this is the new "will someone please think of the children?" argument which showed up every now and then, with every other law officially meant to "stop child pornography", a goal no sensible person would dare to speak out against, but were later used for far less noble purposes. If you cut out a man's tounge, you do that because you are afraid of what he might say - or that's what people will think. It's better to make better arguments than they do. If you resort to obvious censorship, you are just creating martyrs.
- stjohnswarts 5y agoThis is a one off mistake isn't it? I'd rather 1 good article get cancelled by accident if it mean 100-1000 disinformation memes or troll accounts get cancelled.
- mitigating 5y agoHow would it be possible for a system like that to be accurate all the time?
- baskethead 5y agoFacebook is a trillion dollar company. Spend more money on content control and content verification. Use intelligent humans and more of them. It may not be profitable but it will increase trust in the platform immensely if the fact checkers are fair and consistent. Not nameless bots or people that don’t give a fuck.