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Ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to Community Notes model

• visarga 2y ago
  Are they just reinventing reddit?
• zahlman 2y ago
  It seems like a much smaller fraction of comments were flagged and/or killed here compared to the recent Trudeau thread, which surprises me because the level of discourse I observed was at least as bad.
• anshumankmr 2y ago
  I am sure Mark wanted to do this for quite some time. Community Notes have been a way to let the audience do the fact checking for them, in exchange for a "sense of pride and accomplishment" instead of paying millions or billions to vendors and alienate half of its audience. The timing is obviously to placate Trump. The effectiveness of Community Notes is up to debate. Though I personally have seen some really brutally honest or hillarious fact checks (check out Community Notes Violations on Twitter) but I still feel it can be brigaded by trolls to say the inverse is the truth. I have an anecdotal example from recent memory which on a post of someone commenting on the new Superman trailer, with a shot of Corenswet as Clark Kent gushing about how much he looked like Superman. I saw a humorous community note on that post that claimed the person in the image is not Superman but Clark Kent and they are separate people. To me this raises the question, couldn't Community Notes potentially be overwhelmed by trolls to claim a falsehood as the truth for more nefarious reasons (this may have happened already, though I have not seen it yet).
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• benatkin 2y ago
  From the video: > drugs, terrorism, child exploitiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide doesn't fit neatly into any of those, but it does fit more into immigration, at least in the rhetoric (the Rohingya have long been present in Myanmar but have been denied citizenship by the government): > We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate. ...and in Facebook's warped views, the ones that permitted the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal, that means ready to be boosted by the algorithm.
• donohoe 2y ago
  From bad to worse. Meta is probably one of the single largest funders of fact checking. Now that appears to be coming to an end. Third parties will no longer be able to flag misinfo on FB, Instagram or Threads in the US. This is not good imho.
  • raxxor 2y ago
    I think internet discussion worked far better without fact checkers, where some of them cannot really be called accurate. The community notes are the better approach. They aren't always correct either, but it certainly is the better fit for freedom of expression and freedom of speech. Fact checkers are the authority approach that just does not fit.
    • hmmm-i-wonder 2y ago
      I haven't seen a single discussion be worse off due to fact checking, but I've seen tons of discussions where having it would improve things. I have seen people get mad because they can't post BS without it being challenged. To claim internet discussion worked better without fact checking is something I haven't seen any actual evidence for, just opinions like yours. Community notes is just a watered down, more easily 'ignored' version that appeases people that were angry about fact checkers to begin with. Hopefully there is a push-back, likely from EU legislation. Between the AI generators many of these companies are implementing and changes like this, platforms need to be held more accountable for what they allow to be posted on them.
      • raxxor 2y ago
        Claims are challenged all the time by other users and there are enough cases where fact checkers were wrong or heavily biased. EU legislation tries to introduce "trusted flaggers". A ridiculous approach, an information authority by a state-like entity doesn't work, even if they paint these flaggers as independent. They simply are not, a trusted and verifiable fact. Community notes provide higher quality info, it is the better approach. That is an opinion of course. We will probably see community notes on trusted flaggers.
• saxonww 2y ago
  What I think I just read is that content moderation is complicated, error-prone, and expensive. So Meta is going to do a lot less of it. They'll let you self-moderate via a new community notes system, similar to what X does. I think this is a big win for Meta, because it means people who care about the content being right will have to engage more with the Meta products to ensure their worldview is correctly represented. They also said that their existing moderation efforts were due to societal and political pressures. They aren't explicit about it, but it's clear that pressure does not exist anymore. This is another big win for Meta, because minimizing their investment in content moderation and simplifying their product will reduce operating expenses.
  • philipwhiuk 2y ago
    > reduce operating expenses If you assume they are immune to politics (not true but let's go with it), this is the most obvious reason. They've seen X hasn't taken that much heat for Community Notes and they're like "wow we can cut a line item". The real problem is, Facebook is not X. 90% of the content on Facebook is not public. You can't Fact Check or Community Note the private groups sharing blatantly false content, until it spills out via a re-share. So Facebook will remain a breeding ground of conspiracy, pushed there by the echo chamber and Nazi-bar effects.
    • raxxor 2y ago
      How would fact checkers access the 90% of private content? And should they? I don't think so, even if the respective private content is questionable. The EU goes its own way with trusted flaggers, which is more or less the least sensible option. It won't take long until bounds are overstepped and legal content gets flagged. Perhaps it already happened. This is not a solution to even an ill-defined problem.
      • timeon 2y ago
        Yes. Those are all bad solutions. Banning social networks would be probably better.
• blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  Corporate censorship should have never happened. It is a huge corruption of public discourse and the political process. These platforms have hundreds of millions of users, or more, and are as influential as governments. They should be regulated like public utilities so they cannot ban users or censor content, especially political speech. Personally I don’t trust Zuck and his sudden shift on this and other topics. It doesn’t come with a strong enough rejection of Meta/Facebook’s past, and how they acted in the previous election cycle, during COVID, during BLM, etc. But I guess some change is still good.
  • jhedwards 2y ago
    Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there's any reasonable political discourse that is ever* censored by social media companies. During COVID, there were people spreading lies about the vaccine, which many people believed, and many people died as a result of believing those lies. Even Louis Brandeis, one of the fiercest advocates of free speech, made an exception for emergency situations[0], which is arguably what a pandemic is. But again, lies about a vaccine do not constitute reasonable public discourse, it is more akin to screaming fire in a crowded theater. If you have counter examples of regular public discourse that has been censored by a social media company, please share it. * I realize "ever" is a stretch, I'm sure there are instances, but my understanding is that they are the exception rather than the rule. [0] "If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence. Only an emergency can justify repression. Such must be the rule if authority is to be reconciled with freedom." - Louis Brandeis, Whitney vs. California
    • SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
      It's hard to talk about, because when a discussion is successfully censored you usually don't hear about it and presume any discourse on it would have been unreasonable. I would point towards immigration as a topic where meaningful discourse is missing from social media. On most social media sites, the discussion will be dominated by people who think immigration should rarely if ever be restricted; Twitter has been colonized by some people who take the opposite extreme, often for overtly racist reasons, although this is tempered a bit by Elon Musk's personal support of high skill visas. The "normie" immigration restrictionist position, that immigrants are great but only so long as they enter the country lawfully, is something I very often see expressed in news interviews or supported by older relatives and rarely if ever see expressed on a social media platform. I don't know how I'd go about proving this is downstream of fact checking, but there's a lot of orgs who argue that it's factually false to characterize, for example, someone who crosses the border without authorization and then applies for asylum as an illegal immigrant.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• pavlov 2y ago
  Meta also nominated a Trump-affiliated boxing entertainment businessman to its board yesterday. They’re doing everything they can to suck up to the incoming administration.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • netsharc 2y ago
    It seems one doesn't become billionaire without being a immoral opportunist...
• aimazon 2y ago
  Mark has looked at what has happened to Twitter since Musk took over, a notable decline in activity and value… and decided he wants a piece of that? Musk is begging people on Twitter to post more positive content, as it devolves into 4chan-lite. If Musk’s ideological experiment with Twitter had proven the idea that you can have a pleasant to use website without any moderation then Mark’s philosophical 180 would at least make sense, but this doesn’t, at all. What’s to gain? Musk has done everyone a favor by demonstrating that moderation driven by a fear of government intervention was actually a good thing.
  • dpritchett 2y ago
    Could be an exit strategy… maybe he’s tired of running a social network and wants to help run governments and fly to space like the other guys.
  • SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
    It starts to make more sense when you think about who is arm in arm with the president elect. I don't know that Musk believes his philosophy is wrong and now he has the power to pressure others.
  • bamboozled 2y ago
    I use meta products, it’s anecdotal but they’re dead. At least they seem very stagnant. This is appeasing the new establishment and hoping for more engagement ?
  • notahacker 2y ago
    New government. So you've got lack of moderation driven by a fear of government intervention.
  • wumeow 2y ago
    > Mark has looked at what has happened to Twitter since Musk took over, a notable decline in activity and value… and decided he wants a piece of that? Hell yes he does, Twitter helped Musk get a seat at the table with Trump and the ability to influence US policy decisions at an unprecedented level. Zuck craves power and sees sucking up to the incoming administration as an easy path to get more of it.
• arielcostas 2y ago
  Zuck's video claims Europe has been imposing a lot of censorship lately, which is a nicer way for him to say "we have done a crappy job at stopping misinformation and abusive material, got fined A LOT by countries who actually care about it, and that's somehow not our fault". Community notes is good news, and something I was expecting to disappear from Twitter since Elon bought it a couple years ago, especially since they have called out his lies more than once. Hearing Facebook/Instagram/Threads are getting them is great. Then he claims "foreign governments are pushing against American companies" like we aren't all subject to the same laws. And actually, it wasn't the EU who prohibited a specific app alleging "security risks" because actually they can't control what's said there; it was the US, censoring TikTok. Perhaps we the europeans should push for a ban of US platforms like Twitter, especially when its owner has actually pledged to weaponise the platform to favour far-right candidates like AfD (Germany) or Reform UK. And definitely push for bigger fines to monopolistic companies like Meta.
  • zahlman 2y ago
    Why should social media operators be responsible for "stopping misinformation" in the first place? That sounds a lot like the logic that was used to justify smashing the printing presses in Gutenberg's day, not to mention by countless villains of dystopian sci-fi (e.g. Fahrenheit 451), in turn based on other real-world concerns. I think I should have a right to let others lie to me, and decide for myself if I believe them. In the alternative where someone prevents me from hearing it, that other person is deciding for me. Why should I accept that other person as more qualified to do my own thinking? It's really strange to me how calls for banning "misinformation" in the US seem to come from the same political direction as complaints about controversial books being taken out of educational curricula.
    • arielcostas 2y ago
      > It's really strange to me how calls for banning "misinformation" in the US seem to come from the same political direction as complaints about controversial books being taken out of educational curricula. I'm not in (or from) the US, I'm european and probably "more used to" regulation :). Thing is, banning misinformation isn't the solution, but the artificial algorithm should stop recommending accounts that keep feeding fake news to people, since community notes take a while to appear. Or some indicator like "this account's posts has received a lot of community notes in the last 30 days, please take what this tweet says with a grain of salt". Young people keep getting feed far-right bullshit, which is the reason a party like Se Acabó La Fiesta (Alvise Perez) got to the European parliament in the first place, because he kept posting fake stuff, and until the justice ruled otherwise, people would just believe it. Because unfortunately, many people aren't able to "do their thinking" because of confirmation bias. "They say what I want to hear, so it must be true".
• jjulius 2y ago
  If you think this move exists in a vacuum or is actually about "getting back to their roots with free speech", you're wrong. Alongside Dana White joining the board[0], it's clear that this is solely about currying favor with the incoming administration. [0] https://www.npr.org/2025/01/06/nx-s1-5250310/meta-dana-white-ufc https://www.npr.org/2025/01/06/nx-s1-5250310/meta-dana-white...
  • meta_x_ai 2y ago
    [flagged]
  • gizmo 2y ago
    It's not solely about currying favor. Many tech giants hate getting pushed around by politicians and courts around the world demanding censorship. Free speech rights in the US are much stronger than elsewhere in the world, and even businesses as large as Meta need political support to successfully push back on censorious overreach. For context, in Germany you can face up to 3 years prison time for insulting a politician: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-greens-habeck-presses-charges-over-online-insult/a-70793557 https://www.dw.com/en/germany-greens-habeck-presses-charges-...
    • tartoran 2y ago
      > Many tech giants hate getting pushed around by politicians and courts around the world demanding censorship. They may not like that but they also don't like to take responsibility either.
    • jjulius 2y ago
      >It's not solely about currying favor. Many tech giants hate getting pushed around by politicians and courts around the world demanding censorship. Taking steps to not be pushed around by an incoming president who has clearly suggested he'll push them around is, quite literally, currying favor.
  • philwelch 2y ago
    Just like complying with government censorship demands was about currying favor with the outgoing administration.
• philjohn 2y ago
  They've also said there will be more harmful (but legal) content on there as they'll no longer automatically look for it, but require it to be reported before taking action. As someone who worked on harmful content, specifically suicide and self injury, this is just nuts - they were raked over the coals in both the UK by an inquest into the suicide of a teenage user who rabbit holed on this harmful content, and also with the parents of teenagers who took their lives, who Zuck turned around and apologised to as his latest senate hearing. There is research that shows exposure to suicide and self injury content increases suicidal ideation. I'm hoping that there is some nuance that has been missed from the article, but if not, this would seem like a slam dunk for both the UK and EU regulators to take them to task on.
  • rayiner 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • ceejayoz 2y ago
      > And why aren't you considering the countervailing harm to society of centralized moderation? Are there reproducible studies showing that? What is the effect size? (These objections go both ways!)
      • rayiner 2y ago
        There’s lots of mainstream media content I think is psychologically harmful and should be suppressed, such as content normalizing adultery. But I’m quite content to live in a society where the social norm favors people saying what they want and the burden is on the opponents of that to produce strong evidence of harm.
        • ceejayoz 2y ago
          Convenient that only your debate opponents need provide reproducible studies that meet your standards.
• julianeon 2y ago
  Translation: community notes are “good enough” from the perspective of the business community, and probably an order of magnitude cheaper.
• incomingpain 2y ago
  >Ending Third Party Fact Checking Program, Moving to Community Notes CNotes were extremely successful on X. The problem with censorship, why digg and reddit died as platforms, you end up with second order consequences. The anti-free speech people will always deeply analyze their opponent's speech to find a violation of the rules. They try to make rules that sound reasonable but are beyond section 230. No being anti-LGBT for ex. But then every joke, miscommunication, etc leads to bans. You also ban entire cultures with this rule. Ive had bans because I meant to add NOT to my 1 sentence, but failed to do so. Then when it comes to politics. You've banned entire swaths of people/viewpoints. There's no actual meaningful conversation happening on reddit. Reddit temporarily influenced politics in this way. In a recent election a politician built a platform that mirrored the subreddit. There was polls and if you were to go by reddit... the liberals were about to take at least a minority government, if not majority. What actually happened? The platform was bizarre and very out of touch with the province. They got blasted in the election. The incumbent majority got stronger.
  • macNchz 2y ago
    > CNotes were extremely successful on X. > reddit died By all measures I can find, reddit continues to grow year over year, while X seems to have been flat or in decline, so I’m not sure this is a strong premise.
    • incomingpain 2y ago
      Facebook is #1, followed by youtube. Tiktok is 4th. Linkedin is 8th. X is 12th. Reddit is 16th. Reddit fell a great deal in rankings. They mostly use bots to make it appear like they are still relevant. Which ironically is creating a 'dead internet' conspiracy theory. In reality its just 'dead reddit'
      • ceejayoz 2y ago
        Ranked by whom, on what metrics? What were their relative rankings on the same metrics, say, five years ago?
• bhouston 2y ago
  Zuckerberg knows which way the winds are blowing in the US Capital and is ensuring he is aligned with them so to avoid political blowback on his company. I suspect the changes to the fact checking / free speech will align with Trump's political whims. Thus fact checking will be gone on topics like vaccines, trans people, threats from immigrants, etc. While the well documented political censorship at Meta affecting Palestine will remain because it does align with Trump's political whims... - https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/12/20/meta-systemic-censorship-palestine-content https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/12/20/meta-systemic-censorship... - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/29/meta-censorship-palestine https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/29/m...
  • spencerflem 2y ago
    People down voting this are being silly. Here's the topics the announcement mentioned: "We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate." Palestine is completely absent.
• maxfurman 2y ago
  Meta is giving up on the (impossible by design) task of policing their own platform. The result will be even more poisonous to users. Just like cigarette companies using chemicals in the papers so that they burn slower. Does it improve the product? Maybe, along one dimension.
  • yodsanklai 2y ago
    > Meta is giving up on the (impossible by design) task of policing their own platform. It's a bit more than giving up. They are also going to push more political contents on feed.
    • nicce 2y ago
      And save money in the meantime, assuming users will not leave because of this.
• Volundr 2y ago
  As far as I can tell they gave up moderation a few years ago, at least every time I report someone spamming about "Elon Musk giving away a million dollars if you click this shady link" or the like I invariably get told it meets their "community standards" and won't be removed. I guess technically I haven't seen a female nipple there though so, job well done?
  • mint2 2y ago
    They also allow the scammiest ads for products that are 100% obvious frauds - pure distilled snake oil. It really brings meta’s image to the dirt. They’re like an online super market tabloid these days.
• drawkward 2y ago
  Will this totally end content moderation? That could be a small silver lining, as content moderation for FB appears to be extremely hazardous to one's mental health: https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/22/business/facebook-content-moderators-kenya-ptsd-intl/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/22/business/facebook-content-mod...
  • pjc50 2y ago
    Obviously exposing the same content which was proven to cause harm to the content moderators to absolutely everybody on the platform will be worse.
    • drawkward 2y ago
      It is not obvious that many people (when was the last time a single post was seen by the entirety of the platform?) seeing occasional soul-destroying stuff is worse than seeing soul-destroying stuff as full-time employment, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for the length of one's work life. Also: perhaps the occasional soul-destroying post would help people break their social media addictions.
      • philjohn 2y ago
        Counterpoint: Molly Russell. https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Molly-Russell-Prevention-of-future-deaths-report-2022-0315_Published.pdf https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Molly-Ru...
        • drawkward 2y ago
          Certainly poor molly russell does not appear to have seen this cintent occasionally, which is just my point. There is no mention of how she accessed this content either: was it a message board, or was it served algorithmically, which is important to the contention here.
          • philjohn 2y ago
• dmazin 2y ago
  As a leftist, while this is concerning, it's also important to remember that Meta censors left content as much as it does right content. So, while this announcement certainly seems to be in bad faith (what could Mark mean by "gender" other than transphobic discussion?), this should be a boon both for far-right and left discussion. Does that mean increased polarization and political violence? Surely, surely.
  • spencerflem 2y ago
    You know that this announcement is made to win favor with Trump. I would not expect that leftism will be any more allowed
    • dmazin 2y ago
      I agree. At the very least, it's using Trump as cover. That said, if they remove the political filter, they're opening the door for all discussion (even from the left). Of course, they could surreptitiously filter out the left. Hell, why not?
      • spencerflem 2y ago
        That's my guess as to what they intend to do. Just moving the needle for allowed content to include transphobia and racism.
  • lapcat 2y ago
    > this should be a boon both for far-right and left discussion. If by left discussion you mean discussion of the genocide in Gaza, don't count on it, because this censorship is bipartisan in the United States. Zuck cares about currying favor with the powerful. He doesn't give a crap about the powerless. Also, he's pretending that Texas, the proposed site for content moderation, is not politically biased, which is laughable. "We're moving from a blue state to a red state" is not a serious proposal for reducing or eliminating bias.
    • nailer 2y ago
• paxys 2y ago
  FYI Meta just removed Nick Clegg as their global head of policy and replaced him with Joel Kaplan, who was Trump's deputy chief of staff. They also appointed Dana White, a prominent Trump supporter, to their board this week. Their content moderation team is moving from California to Texas. If people think all this is Meta going "neutral", you are delusional.
  • MrMcCall 2y ago
    You have gotten to the heart of the matter. Well done, indeed, sir/madam!
• rayiner 2y ago
  > Starting in the US, we are ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to a Community Notes model. The Community Notes model works great on X at dealing with misinformation. More broadly, this is a vindication of the principle that putatively neutral "expert" institutions cannot be trusted unless they're subject to democratic checks and balances.
• Apreche 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • bamboozled 2y ago
    Maybe some desperation going on behind the scenes ?
  • leovingi 2y ago
    As opposed to them being brave, independent champions when it came to suppressing discussions about Covid or the Hunter Biden laptop
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• beanjuiceII 2y ago
  great news by the zuck good to see the framework being laid is having benefits for everyone
• throwaway12127 2y ago
  Dupe with more explicit comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42622082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42622082
• ColdTakes 2y ago
  This is my conspiracy theory but this is all in preparation for the end of Section 230 which will also inadvertently kill Blue Sky.
  • nunez 2y ago
    Can you elaborate?
    • ColdTakes 2y ago
      There is a long history but the short of it is, before Section 230, platforms that moderated user content faced potential liability. Oakmont v. Prodigy[1] is a case where Prodigy was held liable for defamatory posts due to its moderation efforts. However, in Cubby v. CompuServe[2], the court ruled that platforms without active moderation, CompuServe were not liable for user-generated content because they were just hosting with no active involvement. Section 230 protected platforms from liability for user content, allowing them to moderate in good faith without being held responsible for all harmful material if they weren't able to moderate everything. I believe Elon and Trump, being the internet's biggest liars, have the goal to remove Section 230 making moderating online more or less a crime that will open you to litigation and allow them and all of their followers to spread lies not only unchecked but with the threat of punishment if a company, like Blue Sky, were to try to moderate them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Prodigy_Services_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Prod.... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubby,_Inc._v._CompuServe_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubby,_Inc._v._CompuServe_Inc.
  • josephcsible 2y ago
    I wouldn't mourn the loss of BlueSky, because it's basically designed from the ground up to create filter bubbles and echo chambers, and social media needs way less of those.
    • ColdTakes 2y ago
      I'm sure you also think Twitter is the free speech capital of the internet as well.
• oliviergg 2y ago
  Zuck claims "Europe has an ever increasing number of laws,institutionalizing censorship and making difficult to build something innovative" Ouch. As a European, I feel very wary of such a sentence and the implications. Time for Europe to wake up ? (edit: fix typos)
  • mongol 2y ago
    We are awake. We should decouple ourselves from the tech giants on the other side of the pond. They don't have our best interests in mind.
    • oliviergg 2y ago
      I'm not sure that we are awake. As a dev for a long time, I realized only 6 months ago, that all the tools I use daily are directly from US. My job and my life would be very very different without this technology. We are loosing ground, or more, we are falling down more and more quickly.
      • mongol 2y ago
        It is individual of course. But for example Emanuel Macron and Mario Draghi have sounded the bell quite clearly. As individual citizens we should try to buy European any time there is a European alternative.
        • sickofparadox 2y ago
          >try to buy European any time there is a European alternative Good luck with that considering: >"Europe has an ever increasing number of laws,institutionalizing censorship and making difficult to build something innovative."
          • mongol 2y ago
            I don't take that for gospel. It is just Marc's poor take.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• gabaix 2y ago
  Ironically the post is affected by Hacker News flame-war detection system.
  • dredmorbius 2y ago
    If this occurs, and you feel it shouldn't, you can request mods disable the flamewar detector by emailing them at hn@ycombinator.com.
• rayiner 2y ago
  > We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate. It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms. My mom and my wife’s mom both have remarked in the last year that they’re upset with speech policing. My mom can’t say things about immigration that she thinks as an immigrant, and my mother in law is censored on gender issues despite having been married to a transgender person in the 1990s. They’re not ideological “free speech” people. Neither are political, though both historically voted left of center “by default.” The acceptable range of discourse on these issues in the social circles inhabited by Facebook moderators (and university staff) is too narrow, and imposing that narrow window on normal people has produced a backlash among the very people who are key users of Facebook these days (normie middle age to older people). This is a smart move by Zuckerberg.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• dagmx 2y ago
  I’m less concerned by the change of fact checking to community notes, because meta had often neutered the ability of their fact checkers anyway. What I am concerned about is their allowance of political content again. Between genocides and misinformation campaigns, meta has shown that the idea of the town square does not scale. Not with their complete abandonment of any kind of responsibility to the social construct of its actual users. Meta are an incredibly poor steward of human mental health. Their algorithms have been shown to create intense feedback loops that have resulted in many deaths, yet they continue down the march of bleeding as much out of people as possible.
  • mongol 2y ago
    > the idea of the town square does not scale. Completely agree. Instead of one giant town square ("Facebook") what we would benefit from are 1000 smaller ones ("Facebook competitors") and some way to "travel" between them. That is a smaller more human scale that can be responsibly governed. It does not create hyper-billionaires though.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• aurareturn 2y ago
  I speculated what Zuckerberg wanted and what he'd do when he visited Mar-a-lago[0]: * Push to ban Tiktok * Drop antitrust lawsuits against Meta * Meta will relax "conservative" posts on its platforms * Zuckerberg will donate to Trump's cause So far, Zuckerberg has already donated to Trump's cause. Now he has relaxed "conservative" posts on its platforms directly or indirectly. When Trump comes into power, he'll likely ask the FTC to drop its antitrust lawsuit against Meta under the disguise of being pro-business. My last speculation is push to ban Tiktok. I'm sure it was discussed. Trump has donors who wanted him to reverse the Tiktok ban. Zuckerberg clearly wants Tiktok banned. Trump will have to decide who to appease when he comes into office. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42262573#42262975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42262573#42262975
  • pbasista 2y ago
    > ban Tiktok I would be really interested in how someone could spin advocating for less moderation and at the same time asking to ban the competitors' social media platforms.
    • GuinansEyebrows 2y ago
      you’re assuming some kind of ideologically purity when it comes to “freedom of information” when the real answer is profit motive.
    • zahlman 2y ago
      It's not about the users of that competing platform, but about the country where the parent company is registered (https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/24/tech/tiktok-douyin-bytedance-china-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/24/tech/tiktok-douyin-bytedance-...).
      • pbasista 2y ago
        > the country where the parent company is registered Ok. But then, if the country of the platform's owner is the issue, why only ban TikTok? And leave other Chinese social media platforms unaffected? In other words, how is e.g. RedNote safer from foreign influence than TikTok?
• bananapub 2y ago
  while it's obviously fair to be very very wary of everything FB does, especially moderation, the other side of this is a worldwide campaign by the worst people alive to use these platforms to shape public opinion and poison our (ie at least the West's) culture to death.
• goshx 2y ago
  I read this as Zuck kneeling to the new king and first lady (Musk). I highly doubt these changes were not influenced (forced?) by them.
  • wtcactus 2y ago
    Of course, that you can also read it as Zuck not having to kneel to the old king anymore.
    • goshx 2y ago
      I don't remember him changing these rules for Trump's first term. Do you?
• theptip 2y ago
  Community notes seems to be quite well received. I like that the algorithm seems to be public and (IIUC) tamper-evident. The obvious context is that either Meta gets out of the content moderation game voluntarily, or the incoming admin goes to war with them. > focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations. I imagine this will in practice determine how far they can go in the EU. Community notes, sure. No moderation? Maybe not.
  • qingcharles 2y ago
    I really like Community Notes, and hate the rest of what Twitter has become. But... Community Notes is subject to "tampering." Elon's either removes the CNs himself from his posts, or his brigade downvote them to infinity so they don't appear on all the misinfo he posts.
    • warkdarrior 2y ago
      > Elon's either removes the CNs himself from his posts, or his brigade downvote them to infinity so they don't appear on all the misinfo he posts. I don't know if this is the case, but X is Elon's property, so he can shape it as he pleases. Assuming that X (or Facebook) is unbiased and working for your benefit is simply foolish, unless you are Musk (or Zuckerberg).
    • raphman 2y ago
      [Posted also in another thread:] I am not so sure that Musk or right-wing moderators are directly to blame for the lack of published community notes. My guess: in recent months, many people (e.g., me) who are motivated to counter fake news have left Twitter for other platforms. Thus, proposed CNs are seen and upvoted by fewer people, resulting in fewer of them being shown to the public. Also, I ask myself: why should I spend time verifying or writing CNs when it does not matter - the emperor knows that he is not wearing any clothes, and he does not care.
    • hcurtiss 2y ago
      Do we have any evidence that Musk has removed a CN on his own post? I've personally seen evidence to the contrary, and he makes a point of highlighting that even he gets a CN every now and then.
• TrackerFF 2y ago
  Hot take: This is to please the incoming president. Both the far-right and far-left live off misinformation, but right now the far-right is experiencing a renaissance, and tech moguls are bending the knee to be on good terms with the leaders. MAGA and European far-right politicians have been moaning for ages that fact checking is "politically biased". The Biden laptop controversy was the catalyst for this.
  • tacitusarc 2y ago
    In what sense is this a hot take? This seems to be the dominant explanation by a wide margin.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
  Perhaps, given the situation with Twitter, now "X", more web and mobile app users will come to understand that despite its size, Facebook is someone's personal website. Like "X", one person has control. Zuckerberg controls over 51% of the company's voting shares. Meta is not a news organization. It has no responsibility to uphold journalistic standards. It does not produce news; in fact, it produces no content at all. It is a leech, a parasite, an unnecessary intermediary that is wholly reliant on news content produced by someone else being requested through its servers.
  • megous 2y ago
    News organizations have no responsibility either. And I don't see why publisher of news even if they just re-publish should not be held to some responsibilities, like eg. abstaining from nefarious manipulation of content people see on their platform.
    • timeon 2y ago
      Not sure about US but unlike Facebook, news publishers are regulated by law where I live.
  • xvector 2y ago
    As if actual journalists care to uphold "journalistic standards." X/FB is far more trustworthy than the legacy news media, which happily censors salient stories at the request of the government and pushes very specific agendas that are totally out of touch with the average voter. I can't even count how many times I've seen literal video evidence for a story on X that the news media twists or refuses to cover.
    • blitzar 2y ago
      I can't even count how many times I've seen literal video evidence for a story on X that was from totally unrelated incident but claimed to be proof of a completely made up thing that was happening right now.
• JumpinJack_Cash 2y ago
  Tech has become so entrenched with Government. The Metaverse and the WFH bets made by Zuck were controversial but at least it was something rooted in tech and population habits trends and vision without any political poop attached to it. This one is pure political poop to please Orange Man. Also I believe that fact-checking needed to be slowly sunsetted after the COVID emergency was over, but the timing of this announcement and the binary nature of the decision means that it was done with intention to get in the graces of the new administration. If these techs executives become the American equivalent of Russian Oligarchs I hope that States would go after their wealth based on their residence and even ADS-B private jet trackers if they were to move to say Wyoming but partying every weekend in Los Angeles/NYC etc.
• matrix87 2y ago
  during the biden administration they were expected to shift their moderation policies to fit in with the political ideology currently in the white house now it's been normalized and the other party is doing it. but the news outlets have waited until now to start crying wolf?
  • blased 2y ago
    Maybe, just maybe, it's because most people in the media are Democrats, and therefore inherently self-biased in their concerns and worldviews, and they have a belief that prevents any critical self-examination easily summed up by the Stephen Colbert line that: "reality has a liberal bias." You can't argue with someone who thinks their beliefs are merely "reality." At least the other side recognizes it as religion, etc.
    • bdangubic 2y ago
      there is a huge difference between a belief and a fact. most of the discontent in today's world is this exact issue...
      • coolhand2120 2y ago
        > there is a huge difference between a belief and a fact. What if a fact is disputed? Do you not have to choose which fact to believe? Gestalting between two disputed facts is the basis for scientific revolutions. Ptolemaic astronomers certainly had a belief that epicycles were "fact" and made every non-scientific attempt to destroy heliocentrism. Only when enough people didn't _believe_ in that "fact" did we evolve to better understanding. You can say "these were not facts and were just flawed observations", but you'll ignore that Ptolemaics _said_ these ideas were facts and had strong evidence and a belief that it really was. This model can be applied over and over again to many domains. This isn't my idea, rather it comes from the seminal work "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by TS Kuhn. So, no, there is not a bold line between belief and fact. We choose what facts to believe.
        • 2y ago
• insane_dreamer 2y ago
  NYTimes with more on this: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01/07/business/meta-fact-checking https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01/07/business/meta-fact-c...
  • chillacy 2y ago
    Ironic that the NYT's article here focuses on the political angle instead of just the "facts" so to speak... > It is likely to please President-elect Trump and his allies.
    • insane_dreamer 2y ago
      because part of reporting events is reporting the context and repercussions of those events that's what journalism is about; otherwise we don't need newspapers, all we need are company PR releases
• insane_dreamer 2y ago
  I'm sure it's a win for Meta (less responsibility, less expense, potentially less criticism, potentially more ad dollars), but certainly a loss for users. More glad than ever that I deleted my FB account 10 years ago, and Twitter once it went X.
  • skillpass 2y ago
    Why is it “certainly a loss for users”? Many are likely to enjoy the ability to post without censorship on topics they care about.
    • insane_dreamer 2y ago
      Fact-checking and censorship are two very different things.
      • pessimizer 2y ago
        Deleting isn't fact-checking. Whereas "community noting" actually can make a case for being fact-checking.
        • insane_dreamer 2y ago
          Fact checkers weren't deleting posts and didn't even have the right to do so. They are separate journalistic orgs tagging posts. Deleting is done by Meta moderators, which is something else entirely. I think you also just proved my point that if HN users can't even get basic facts about an event right, how do you expect the average FB user to do so? Goes to show that even on HN "community noting" would be a disaster.
      • efdee 2y ago
        Indeed. This was more censorship than fact-checking.
      • quantadev 2y ago
        The problem with "fact-checking" is that if it's done by humans at all then it will be heavily biased. With Silicon-Valley people being in charge of "fact-checking" for the past decade there's been countless examples of them doing mass cancellations calling things lies that we all know ended up being true.
• JohnMakin 2y ago
  I'm certain it will make parts of the user experience worse, but at least for the Threads app, this seems at least a little necessary - if you're aiming to be the "new" twitter or whatever social need twitter was fulfilling, you need to break free of the shackles of IG/Meta moderation, which is very unforgiving and brutal in very subtle ways that aren't always easy to figure out. But basically, I find a platform like Threads/Twitter are probably unusable for a lot of people unless you can say "hey, you're an asshole" every now and then without Meta slapping you on the wrist or suppressing your content. One of the only visible actions Meta has taken on my account was once when a cousin commented on a musical opinion I had posted to facebook, I jokingly replied "I'll fight you" and I caught an instant 2 week posting ban and a flag on my account for "violence." Couldn't even really appeal it, or the hoops were so ridiculous that I didn't try. The hilarious thing is these bans will still let you consume the sites' content (gotta get those clicks), you just are unable to interact with it. This kind of moderation is pointless as users will always get around it anyway - leading to stuff like "unalive" to replace killing/suicide references, or "acoustic" to refer to an autistic person, etc. Just silliness, as you'll always be able to find a way to creatively convey your point such that auto-moderators don't catch it.
  • baggachipz 2y ago
    A tale as old as time. On old forums and groups: h4xor, ghey, etc.
    • wbl 2y ago
      Clbuttic
      • ceejayoz 2y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
  • circlingthesun 2y ago
    I once posted a picture of an email stating my train was delayed in French. So the word 'retard' appeared in it. Instagram banned me from monetization or partnerships or something on my account, because the word for delay in French is offensive in English.
• kelseydh 2y ago
  It's funny how facebook got so political all the normies left, then they downranked political content so much that the political people left too. Facebook is a ghost town now.
  • 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
    Do they still mandate using your legal name? That's the biggest no-go for me. It's just awful opsec.
    • ziml77 2y ago
      How do they validate that? YouTube also wanted my full name before they finally switched back to usernames. I just made up a pseudonym back then.
      • kelseydh 2y ago
        Facebook has pretty advanced features that cross check your digital signatures like IP address, browser, registered email, etc to prevent sockpuppeting. This is especially true if you want to make ads with your account.
    • Digit-Al 2y ago
      Don't know if they mandate it, but I know a few people who use either names that are a slight modification of their real name, or completely made up names.
  • kamikazeturtles 2y ago
    Surprisingly, Facebook has 2.1 billion daily active users. I primarily use the app for its Marketplace feature as an alternative to Craigslist.
    • in_cahoots 2y ago
      Doesn’t the second sentence explain the first? I can’t tell the number of times I’ve heard a variation of, “I hate Facebook [newsfeed]. I only use it for Messenger/ niche Groups/ local events/ Marketplace.” Facebook has positioned itself so that it’s almost a necessity if you want to be involved in your community, however you define it. You may hate Zuck, moderation, and ‘the algo’ and yet you can’t get away from Meta the company. And millions of other users feel the same way.
• tptacek 2y ago
  I'd like to hear an informed take from anybody who thinks that Facebook's fact-checkers were a better product feature than Community Notes. All of the articles I'm seeing about this online are ideological, but this feels like the kind of decision that should have been in the works for multiple quarters now, given how effective Notes have been, and how comically ineffective and off-putting fact-checkers have been. The user experience of fact-checkers (forget about people pushing bogus facts, I just mean for ordinary people who primarily consume content rather than producing it) is roughly that of a PSA ad spot series saying "this platform is full of junk, be on your guard".
  • josefritzishere 2y ago
    Generally fb has trended to worse rather than better. I already passed my personal tipping point years ago and quit fb.
    • tptacek 2y ago
      It is what it is. It's a hotspot for local politics, so quitting it isn't really an option for me.
      • yieldcrv 2y ago
        All the burning man camps I get invited to are a bunch of Gen X-ers conferring on Facebook groups so I wind up making a new Facebook account once a year for a few months although could see this moving to Discord across those same age ranges, I’m in some local groups there which overlap with festivals/events/things like the burn.
        • Karrot_Kream 2y ago
          Yeah younger millenials and GenZ tend to do this sort of conversation on Discord.
          • yieldcrv 2y ago
• scop 2y ago
  This is unequivocally good. That’s it. That’s the comment.
• FergusArgyll 2y ago
  I know there has been a lot of ink spilled trying to persuade that Technology can't solve our deeper problems and Technologists are too optimistic about having real-world impact etc. etc. But I think community notes (the model, not necessarily the specific implementation of one company or another) is one of those algorithms that truly solve a messy messy sticky problem. Fact-checking and other "Big J Journalist" attempts to suppress "misinformation" is a very broken model. 1) It leads to less and less trust in the fact checkers which drives more people to fringe outlets etc. 2) They also are in fact quite biased (as are all humans, but it's less important if your electrician has socialist/MAGA/Libertarian biases) 3) The absolute firehose of online content means fact checkers/media etc. can't actually fact check everything and end up fact checking old fake news while the new stuff is spreading The community notes model is inherently more democratic, decentralized and actually fair. and this is the big one it works! unlike many of the other "tech will save us" (e.g. web3 ideas) It is extremely effective and even-handed. I recommend reading the Birdwatch paper [0], it's quite heartening and I'm happy more tech companies are moving in that direction [0] https://github.com/twitter/communitynotes/blob/main/birdwatch_paper_2022_10_27.pdf https://github.com/twitter/communitynotes/blob/main/birdwatc...
  • qingcharles 2y ago
    Agreed. I think people are looking at CN/Birdwatch being from Twitter and seeing red without looking at the details. CN predates Musk burning Twitter to the ground, and CN is actually a decent product that can only get better as it is honed.
    • mrguyorama 2y ago
      But community notes have been around since before Musk bought twitter and they have not had any effect at reducing the amount of outright falsehoods passed off as "news" on that hellscape. Why do people keep championing it as a success story when it demonstrably hasn't helped? Frankly, if it worked, it would have been removed by now. It's "controlled opposition" basically.
• guybedo 2y ago
  It's a welcome move as this "fact checkers" thing was doomed to fail, mostly because "who decides what the truth is, and who fact checks the fact checkers?". Sad thing is, this move isn't motivated by Mark Zuckerberg having a eureka moment and now trying to seek out the truth to build a better product for human kind. This move is motivated by Mark's realizing he is on the wrong side of American politics now, being left behind by the Trump/Musk duo.
• baggy_trough 2y ago
  The moderation tools were themselves offensive and abusive. I use FB to read what my friends and relatives have to say. I don't want FB to interfere with their posts under any normal circumstance, but somehow, they felt like they should do this. But the real reason I can't use FB much any more is that the feed is stuffed full of crap I didn't ask for, like Far Side cartoons etc.
• freshnode 2y ago
  Polarization drives ad revenue. $10 says Zuck is going to start throwing grenades at the UK and EU soon too. We're entering a dangerous period, and it's not for anything as noble as the virtues of absolute free speech
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• autoexec 2y ago
  > Once the program is up and running, Meta won’t write Community Notes or decide which ones show up. They are written and rated by contributing users. Sure "Meta" won't, but I wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of "contributing users" end up being facebook's AI accounts
• elorant 2y ago
  My gut feeling is that this will be accompanied by a relaxed policy on fake profiles too.
• EasyMark 2y ago
  It would have been a perfect opportunity to -add- community notes and study which worked side by side and choose the better of the two, instead evidently Musk and Drump pulled Zuck aside and told him to shape up and join the billionaire oligarchs club or face the consequences of a partisan DoJ and SEC.
• quotemstr 2y ago
  Great news. It's further evidence that the zeitgeist has shifted against the idea that platforms have a "responsibility" to do "good" and make the world "better" through censorship. Tech companies like Meta have done incalculable damage to the public by arrogating the power to determine what's true, good, and beautiful. Across the industry, tech companies are rejecting this framework. Only epistemic and moral humility can lead to good outcomes for society. It's going to take a long time to rebuild public trust.
• lakomen 2y ago
  My door to Meta is closed and will never reopen, no matter what. Facebook has cost me all my friends. WhatsApp sells my phone number. Threads banned me for commenting too much without giving it my phone number. Facebook keeps or kept censoring my posts. Fuck Meta forever.
• hsuduebc2 2y ago
  It's just cheaper. That's the most important thing for corporations. It's also harder to accuse them of bias. Personally, I'm a little dubious about the effectiveness of fact checkers on people's opinions. If someone is a dullard who is willing to believe the most absurd propaganda or every conspiracy theory that exists, a fact checker won't solve the problem. They are used to being told that they are wrong. Of course they just can shadowban this content but in the end they profit from that.
• maxehmookau 2y ago
  "Our fact checking wasn't good enough, so we're outsourcing it to the public." This is insane and clearly a political move. Maybe we just don't require social media as a species. That might be nice.
• Animats 2y ago
  News story about Zuckerberg sucking up to Trump.[1] News story about other CEOs sucking up to Trump.[2] News story about Bezos stucking up to Trump.[3] "The Führer is always right" [4] [1] https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/04/business/zuckerberg-trump-musk-tech-nightcap/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/04/business/zuckerberg-trump-mus... [2] https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/kevin-oleary-explains-why-ceos-want-suck-up-trump-very-big-way https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/kevin-oleary-explains-why-... [3] https://newrepublic.com/article/188170/jeff-bezoss-shocking-suck-up-moment-trump-alarm-us https://newrepublic.com/article/188170/jeff-bezoss-shocking-... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%BChrerprinzip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%BChrerprinzip
  • zahlman 2y ago
    I've only been here about 1/30th as long as you, so I fully accept that I could be wrong here; but this really doesn't seem to measure up the standard of discourse that I understood to be expected on HN.
    • Animats 2y ago
      It's not great, but it's unfortunately relevant to the article topic.
• ozten 2y ago
  Facebook is virtual reality, whereas VRChat is inhabited by humans.
• insane_dreamer 2y ago
  The fact-checking that Meta is ending, which put "misinformation" disclaimers on posts, is NOT the same as content moderation, which will continue. A lot of comments in this thread reflect a conflation of these two, with stuff like "great! no more censorship!" or "I was once banned because I made a joke on my IG post", which don't relate to fact-checking.
• mdp2021 2y ago
  The piece on Axios: # Meta eliminating fact-checking to combat "censorship" https://www.axios.com/2025/01/07/meta-ends-fact-checking-zuckerberg-trump https://www.axios.com/2025/01/07/meta-ends-fact-checking-zuc...
• linuxhansl 2y ago
  Regardless of what you think about this step I find it disconcerting that we can now disagree on facts. For example: - whether crime is up or down - whether the earth is warming or not - how many people live in poverty - what the rate of inflation is - how much social security or healthcare costs - etc These are all verifiable, measurable facts, and yet, we somehow manage to disagree. We always used to disagree and that is healthy, we avoid missing something. But in the past we could agree on some basic facts and then have a discussion. Now we just end a discussion with an easy: "Your facts are wrong." And that leads to an total inability of having any discussion at all. Fact checking is not censorship. Imagine math if we'd question the basic axioms.
  • jjulius 2y ago
    Because social media has virtually eliminated peoples general ability to have constructive, level-headed conversations that take nuance into account.
    • sneak 2y ago
      I think the idea that a) people lack nuance now or b) that it’s simply social media’s fault is the exact same kind of lack of nuance that you seem to be objecting to. Nothing I’ve seen suggests that mass media or mass propaganda contains less nuance now versus any other time. Propaganda of all forms (regardless of whether delivered by newspaper, radio, tv, or facebook) has always been a blunt instrument.
      • jjulius 2y ago
        I'm talking less about propaganda and more about the average person's ability to discuss the merits of climate change with one another online.
        • sneak 2y ago
          The average person doesn’t discuss, they repost. The things they repost are propaganda (be it true or untrue).
• tqwhite 2y ago
  The discussion here is painful to read. The 'neutral' discussion of product features and how Austin, TX is more liberal than the rest of Texas are grotesque. Zuckerberg says Facebook is going to be more "like X" and "work with Trump". It has changed its content policy to allow discussions that should horrify anyone. "In a notable shift, the company now says it allows “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird.’” "In other words, Meta now appears to permit users to accuse transgender or gay people of being mentally ill because of their gender expression and sexual orientation. The company did not respond to requests for clarification on the policy." But Zuck himself says that they are also dialing their algorithms back in favor of allowing more bad content. It's not right. https://www.wired.com/story/meta-immigration-gender-policies-change/?fbclid=IwY2xjawHqZORleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHe6Vw5_IvNDmHnL6YFWM0oo-dY-ArxYXHu648JxHw6tmupOBf1OGjK1vPQ_aem_98L5b7WL6qc-u_6sAJiYjQ https://www.wired.com/story/meta-immigration-gender-policies...
  • jiriknesl 2y ago
    [flagged]
  • collinmcnulty 2y ago
    The timing also pretty clearly signals that this should be interpreted by bigoted individuals as a green light for harassing speech.
  • Eextra953 2y ago
    I feel the same way and I think the writing is on the wall for the near future of the world. It is disheartening to see people on a forum like HN who I assumed have values similar to mine fall right in line with conservative propaganda and try to act like this isn't an overtly political action. This decision is political, and it goes a lot deeper than left vs right - its about attacking support for a baseline scientific 'truth' and fully accepting a post-truth world where reality is what the powerful deem it to be. This has always been the case to some extent but it has gotten so lopsided in the last decade that its hard to see how we come back from this.
• paxys 2y ago
  I use Instagram and Threads specifically because of the relative lack of political content on them. If they also start to become cultural war grounds like everything else then RIP.
  • pesus 2y ago
    Instagram comments seem hell bent on bringing culture war nonsense in. It's probably only a matter of time before it's exactly the same as Facebook.
• etchalon 2y ago
  I assume the data is showing that conservative users are growing either in raw numbers or in aggregate interaction on Facebook, and thus, will now be catered to. Meta, as a company, doesn't have values beyond growth.
• londons_explore 2y ago
  I am concerned about the community notes model they're moving towards. Community notes has worked well on Twitter/X, but looking at the design it seems super easy to game. Many notes get marked 'helpful' (ie. shown) with just 6 or so ratings. That means, if you are a bad actor, you can get a note shown (or hidden!) with just 6 sockpuppet accounts. You just need to get those accounts on opposite sides of the political spectrum (ie. 3 act like a democrat, 3 act like a republican), and then when the note that you care about comes up, you have all 6 agree to note/unnote it.
• mhh__ 2y ago
  Community notes is maybe the only good thing to happen to the microstructure of social media in years so I'm vaguely in favour of this. The official fact checking stuff is far too easily captured, it was like the old blue checks — a handy indicator of what the ancien regime types think.
• nojvek 2y ago
  "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'" Isaac Asimov - Hitting the high notes even after 30 years from the pulpit. Mark doing what Mark needs to do to keep that Meta stock elevated.
• interestica 2y ago
  It would be hilarious is somehow Elon/X claimed some kind of ownership or trademark or patent on the model.
• annoyingnoob 2y ago
  A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
• postepowanieadm 2y ago
  Don't worry, there will be community notes and some form of eu/us/state notes. The paradigm has changes, moderation has to be separated from censorship and transparent. I would love to hear/read Audrey Tang's take on this, as CPP has been heavily involved in manipulating Chinese public opinion.
• guax 2y ago
  Community notes and enforcement might help meta in the long run as being a step into more organically managed content that can scale better than simple moderation. I have my serious gripes with how Instagram currently manages reports. I've recently reported a clear racist post promoted to me on Instagram that did not get removed or acted on. They seem to go the route of "block it so you cannot see the user anymore but let everyone else see it". So as far as I can tell the only thing that Instagram actually moderate at the moment are gore and nudity, regardless of context. So barely dressed sexualised thirst traps are ok, black and white blurred nipples are not, everything else is a-ok.
• justinl33 2y ago
  this is good. the automated systems were getting increasingly byzantine, with layers of rules trying to patch edge cases, which just created more edge cases.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• chambers 2y ago
  > When we launched our independent fact checking program in 2016, we were very clear that we didn’t want to be the arbiters of truth. We made what we thought was the best and most reasonable choice at the time, which was to hand that responsibility over to independent fact checking organizations... That’s not the way things played out, especially in the United States. Experts, like everyone else, have their own biases and perspectives. This showed up in the choices some made about what to fact check and how. This frustration with fact-checkers seems genuine. Mark alluded to it in https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-says-hes-done-apologizing/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-says-hes-d... which squares with how the Government used fact-checkers to coerce Facebook into censoring non-egregious speech (switchboarding) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41370516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41370516 Alex Stamos pushed this initiative pretty hard outside of Facebook in 2019+, seemingly because he wasn't able to do inside of Facebook back in 2016/2018. But I haven't dug into his motivations.
  • llamaimperative 2y ago
    If only they had lawyers to defend their free speech rights
    • xvector 2y ago
      Then the government sics the FCC or European Commission on you, who make trumped up charges that they push through a kangaroo court to fine you billions. There's no fighting a government, and all governments are corrupt if they see an opportunity to rent-seek from you.
      • llamaimperative 2y ago
        Examples of the FCC doing this? Europe has way weaker free speech protections so I have no interest in defending them.
• Seattle3503 2y ago
  > As a result, we’re going to start treating civic content from people and Pages you follow on Facebook more like any other content in your feed, and we will start ranking and showing you that content based on explicit signals (for example, liking a piece of content) and implicit signals (like viewing posts) that help us predict what’s meaningful to people. We are also going to recommend more political content based on these personalized signals and are expanding the options people have to control how much of this content they see. IMO the concerning part is hidden at the bottom. They want to go back to shoveling politics in front of users. They say it is based on viewing habits, but just because I stop my car to watch a train wreck doesn't mean I want to see more train wrecks. I just can't look away. FB makes theirnacrions sound noble or correct, but this is self serving engagement optimization. Social media sites should give users an explicit lever to see political content or not. Maybe I'll turn it on for election season and off the rest of the year. Some political junkies will always have it set to "maximum". IMO that is better FB always making that decision for me.
  • astolarz 2y ago
    >Social media sites should give users an explicit lever to see political content or not Facebook does sorta have this, under Settings & Privacy > Content Preferences > Manage defaults. Note that the only options for "Political content" are "Show more" and "Default". The other categories listed also include "Show less". There is no "off" option for any of the categories.
    • _thisdot 2y ago
      IIRC, Political Content is by default restricted on Threads. But if someone you follow engages with or posts content that is political in nature, fb doesn't hide that for you
      • edgarischatting 2y ago
        Just fyi, this is no longer the case on Threads based on this statement from yesterday: https://www.threads.net/@mosseri/post/DEk65TJTXcQ?xmt=AQGzmIeokO10BAC-hrX7cWo8NGstgrVOuNeVOdOF3LUoDw https://www.threads.net/@mosseri/post/DEk65TJTXcQ?xmt=AQGzmI...
• someonehere 2y ago
  In summary, FB was pressured in 2016 to act on “foreign influence” the press hysterically parroted by politicians and leaders. FB bowed to the pressure. Now that the press lost all validity along with the X purchase, the press can no longer persuade Meta to “fact check.” FB is in a better spot to follow the X model of moderation. People arguing this is a bad move are ignoring the fact that FB was a censorship hotbed for the last four years.
• smeeger 2y ago
  [flagged]
• isx726552 2y ago
  This is happening because Trump threatened to put Zuckerberg in prison for life (not an exaggeration): https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-warns-mark-zuckerberg-could-165321790.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-warns-mark-zuckerberg-c... Trump himself confirmed this today: https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lf66oltlvs2l https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lf66oltlvs2l I cannot believe anyone would actually be okay with this situation.
  • zahlman 2y ago
    >This is happening because Correlation is not causation, and coincidence definitely isn't. Trump is politically incentivized to take credit for this. But he cannot in principle "confirm" anything about Zuckerberg's mental state.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• arghandugh 2y ago
  [flagged]
• aylmao 2y ago
  It was evident that Mark Zuckerberg / Meta would have to once again "adapt" to another Trump presidency, but this is much more explicit than I expected, wow.
• ConanRus 2y ago
  oh no what happened?
• yieldcrv 2y ago
  They should have never gotten into that business in the first place
• rapatel0 2y ago
  So lets take one of the most expensive, labor intensive parts of our business and replace it with crowdsourced notes. As of 2022, Meta employed 15000 content moderators. Expected salary of 70K to 150K per person (salary + benefits, plus consulting premiums) so lets assume 110K. This implies $1.65B in workforce costs for content moderation. Meta is more likely to make their earnings.... Though I wonder if they will redeploy these people to be labelers for LLMs?
  • insane_dreamer 2y ago
    Again, conflating moderation within Meta, with fact-checking by third party orgs, which is what this is primarily about. In reading the comments, it's clear to me that "community-based fact-checking" will not work since not even HN users can get basic facts straight (not due to any lack of intelligence, probably just didn't read the article or understand the context), how do we expect the FB userbase to do so?
    • jeromegv 2y ago
      It’s not conflating. They also announced that a lot of content that was moderated won’t be any more. For example labeling someone trans as having mental health issues was forbidden and it won’t be anymore. So they are reducing moderation too.
• lorddoig 2y ago
  The litmus test of this is whether they roll it out globally. If they do, Meta truly has seen the light; if they don't, this is just a cynical attempt to butter up Trump in case he regulates them into oblivion (as one could argue they deserve). Zuck is making the right noises. Time will tell.
• andr 2y ago
  I know some of those fact checkers. They are career journalists and the bar to tag a post as disinformation is extremely high. To tag a post, they need to produce several pages of evidence, taking several days of work to research and document. The burden of proof is in every way on the fact checkers, not the random Facebook poster. Generalizing this work as politically biased is a purposeful lie.
  • insane_dreamer 2y ago
    Did they even have authority to take down posts? That was always Meta's call. The fact-checkers -- which were separate news orgs -- would tag posts.
    • andr 2y ago
      Yes, you are right. I believe tagging significantly reduced the chance of seeing the post in your feed, so it was similar in effect.
      • insane_dreamer 2y ago
        > was similar in effect Not really. Because if you make the argument that it was censorship then you have to say that any feed that is generated by an algorithm is censorship because the company is determining what, among what all users post, you should see, allowing certain posts to bubble up to the top and others to fall to the bottom.
  • zahlman 2y ago
    >...the bar to tag a post as disinformation is extremely high. To tag a post, they need to produce several pages of evidence, taking several days of work to research and document. Why was the Hunter Biden laptop story thus categorized? As I recall, "several days" did not elapse between the New York Post publication of the story and its suppression on social media.
  • emtel 2y ago
    Even granting all that you say is true, it would be trivial for there to be bias in such an apparently rigorous process. All that is required is selective application of the rules.
• hahahacorn 2y ago
  Unpopular opinion: I would rather just be on a global-entry-esque kyc'd social media platform at this point. Bots and gov-psyop trolls are certainly (hopefully) like 95% of the gross misinformation, right? I'd give some reasonably trustworthy platform my Passport and identity to speak to only other people who have done the same.
  • clubsoda 2y ago
    Not at all! It’s been talked about before. The problem becomes, do you trust the company implementing it?
    • Seattle3503 2y ago
      It works in banking.
• kilroy123 2y ago
  I think the way to deal with this is to just opt-out: don't use Facebook, Threads, X, etc. I gave up on Facebook years ago.
• jimmydoe 2y ago
  Good thing if they won’t abuse people in third world country with rubbish from social network. Also I wonder if they will be federating with truth social and gab.
• lobito25 2y ago
  [flagged]
• unethical_ban 2y ago
  Off topic but related to holding communities to account: I wish there were a way to metamoderate subs on Reddit. The Texas subreddit has been co-opted by a moderator that bans anyone who criticizes their editorial decisions or notices antagonism trolls taking over the sub.
• autarch 2y ago
  Asterisk just published an interview with the folks behind Community Notes at X (Twitter) - https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/the-making-of-community-notes https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/the-making-of-community-no... I don't use Twitter so I hadn't seen it in action, but the interview convinced me that this is a good approach. I think this approach makes sense for Facebook as well.
  • steveoscaro 2y ago
    Thanks for sharing this. So many people commenting on this topic have no idea how community notes even works. Today's New York Times article also failed to explain it, while just giving a general negative tone to the idea of switching to this model.
    • nrlucas 2y ago
      I have seen so much on Twitter that demanded a community note I had to leave. It's a terrible solution.
• joshdavham 2y ago
  It’ll be cool to see what a self-regulating social network looks like as opposed to a more top-down approach for meta.
• kissgyorgy 2y ago
  The very fact that he is admitting they are doing this because of Trump and that there will be "more bad stuff" is pretty fucking crazy.
• PaulHoule 2y ago
  The median news article has something wrong in it. Often I live through events and read about it in the daily paper and then read about it in The Economist and read a few more accounts of it. 5-25 years later a good well researched history of the event comes out and it is entirely different from what I remember reading at the time. Some of that is my memory but a lot of it is that the first draft of history is wrong. When someone signed their name "Dan Cooper" and hijacked a plane a newspaper garbled that to "D B Cooper", the FBI thought it sounded cool so they picked it up, but it happens more often than not that journalists garble things like that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Armies_of_the_Night https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Armies_of_the_Night shows (but doesn't tell) that that a novelized accounts of events could be more true than a conventional newspaper account and similar criticisms come throughout the work of Joan Didion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Didion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Didion If anything really makes me angry about news and how people consume it is this. In the age of clickbait everyone who works for The New York Times has one if not two eyes on their stats at all times. Those stats show that readers have a lot more interest in people like David Brooks and Ezra Klein blowing it out their ass and could care less about difficult journalism that takes integrity, elbow grease and occasionally can put you in danger done by younger people who are paid a lot less if they are paid at all. The conservative press was slow on the draw when it came to 'Cancel Culture', it was a big issue with the NYT editorial page because those sorts of people get paid $20k to give a college commencement address and they'd hate to have the gravy train stop. Seen that way the problem with 'fake news' is not that it is 'fake' but that it is 'news'.
  • motohagiography 2y ago
    > Seen that way the problem with 'fake news' is not that it is 'fake' but that it is 'news'. salient point. as a writer, the essential condition for any story is a conflict because it's the source of tension or dissonance that people engage with for resolution. the issue with the "fake news" wasn't the facts, it's that the conflict that brought them together as a story was manufactured cheaply from ideology. this had a compounding effect where the absurdity of the resulting conflict with reality drove further outrage from the other "side." it's a pan-partisan problem. fine observation anyway, I'm provoked. to get better news, the conflict it expresses needs to be more organic. imo using community notes is way more organic than the governance model FB and formerly twiiter used.
• PaulHoule 2y ago
  If you want automated fact checking you need to create a god. (... and creating a human team that does the same is playing God) If you want to identify contagious emotionally negative content you need ModernBERT + RNN + 10,000 training examples. The first two are a student project in a data science class, creating the second would wreck my mental health if I didn't load up on Paxil for a month. The latter is bad for people whether or not it is true. If you suppressed it by a large factor (say 75%) in a network it would be like adding boron to the water in a nuclear reactor. It would reduce the negativity in your feed immediately, would reduce it further because it would stop it from spreading, and soon people would learn not to post it to begin with because it wouldn't be getting a rise out of people. (This paper https://shorturl.at/VE2fU https://shorturl.at/VE2fU notably finds that conspiracy theories are spread over longer chains than other posts and could be suppressed by suppressing shares after the Nth hop) My measurements show Bluesky is doing this quietly, I think people are more aware that Threads does this; most people there seem to believe "Bluesky doesn't have an algorithm" but they're wrong. Some people come to Bluesky from Twitter and after a week start to confess that they have no idea what to post because they're not getting steeped in continuous outrage and provocation. I'm convinced it is an emotional and spiritual problem. In Terry Pratchett's Hogfather the assassination of the Hogfather (like Santa Claus but he comes on Dec 32 and has his sleigh pulled by pigs) leads to the appearance of the Hair Loss Fairy and the God of Hangovers (the "Oh God") because of a conservation of belief. Because people aren't getting their spiritual needs met you get pseudo-religions such as "evangelicals who don't go to church" (some of the most avid Trump voters) as well as transgenderists who see egg hatching (their word!) as a holy mission, both of whom deserve each other (but neither of whom I want in my feed.)
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
  https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/11/1020600/facebook-responsible-ai-misinformation/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/11/1020600/facebook...
• grahamj 2y ago
  So much for the supposed zuck rebrand; it's still him
• surume 2y ago
  Zuck still dreams of his despotic dictatorial empire where he can enslave millions and make them all trans via Police enforcement. This move is just to stop bleeding users to X.
• envirogis 2y ago
  Removing the politics from this is rather impossible because it was so deliberately timed and explicitly positioned as political. But as a PM addressing the pure product question, I’d say it’s an unnecessarily risky product move. You’ve basically forgone the option to use humans professionally incentivized to follow guidelines, and decided to 100% crowdsource your moderation to volunteers (for amplification control, not just labeling btw). Every platform is different, but the record of such efforts in other very high volume contexts is mixed at best, particularly in responding to well financed amplification attacks driven by state actors. Ultimately this is not a decision most any experienced PM would make, exactly because the risk is huge and upside low. X’s experience with crapification would get any normal PM swift and permanent retirement (user base down roughly 60%, valuation down $30B - how’s the look on your resume?... So I go back to the beginning - this is plutocrats at play and not even remotely in the domain of a carefully considered product decision.
• calvinmorrison 2y ago
  [flagged]
• lifeinthevoid 2y ago
  It’s funny to see these tech moguls bend the knee for the new king. All their values, their so called care for the community, everything they say, everything, … is just all a big play in an effort to make as much money as they can. It sickens me to watch this stuff unfold.
  • lotsofpulp 2y ago
    It’s not just a new king, it was the fact that the other party won the popular vote resoundingly after all these years meant that the 2016 elections weren’t just a fluke. Repubs have all 3 branches for at least a few years now, and there will be enormous changes in tax policy in legislation that will be passed this year, due to many popular provisions of the 2017 TCJA expiring at the end of 2025. And Dems will basically be left out of the conversation as their votes are not needed.
    • intended 2y ago
      They won on the backs of decades of efforts to prove that the culture wars were unhealthy for America. That worrying about climate change was a hoax. That evolution itself is controversial. That universities and authority figures are not to be trusted. That somehow, Fox News, the biggest media corp in America, is not the main stream media. They got here, by destroying our ability to fight disinformation. They beat climate science in the 90s, by giving air time to cranks, and then senators used those specious arguments to stall climate bills. When scientists came onto Fox to try and reach the audience, they were thrown to the lions for the entertain of the audience. Derided and mocked with gotchas and rhetorical arguments designed to win the perception game. This is a continuation of that game. Because it works. The idea that free speech is at risk because of moderation is amazing, because it is being revived after being tested by everyone online. We started the internet without moderation, we believed that the best ideas win. We have moderation everywhere now, because we know that this fact is empirically untrue. The most viral ideas propagate. The ones most fit to survive their medium - humans. I agree that they won, because they played the game to win. But we should not miss how they worked hard, to set up the conditions for this type of a win.
    • 2y ago
• jheriko 2y ago
  hopefully i stop getting trouble for reposting things verifiable in the public record that other people spoke about in 2018, and not being banned for supporting capital punishment, a thing legal in the US, the native state of the brand.
• est 2y ago
  CN was like a crowd-sourcing disagreement sticker that gets attached to some content. Yes it will be abused.
• Gud 2y ago
  What fact checkers? In the last one year or so my feed has been filled up with conspiracy theory garbage. Not even plausible stuff.
• qmr 2y ago
  What a crock of shit. Freedom of speech is anathema to Facebook. Free expression my ass. Freedom of speech is not about protecting speech you agree with.
• Glyptodon 2y ago
  TBH I had assumed FB was just penalizing all political content or that people just tried like hell to avoid it because all I see on FB anymore is either stuff related to the few FB groups that keep me on the platform or endless reposts of basically pirated Reddit content for engagement.
• throwaway48476 2y ago
  The solution is to be a culture of primary sources and to make it easier to link to primary sources.
• smolder 2y ago
  I was recently browsing FB for the first time in months, and didn't see a peep from fact checkers, despite all the garbage-tier content FB is forcing into my feed including things like "see how this inventors new car makes fossil fuels and batteries obsolete". I spent most of my time on the site clicking "hide all from X", where X is some suggested page I never expressed interest in. The "shorts" on the site are always clickbaity boob-featuring things that I have no interest in either. The site is disgusting and distracting from any practical use, i.e. keeping in touch with friends, which is what I used to use it for.
• DrScientist 2y ago
  The challenge here is three fold. Companies like Facebook pretending they are not publishers, people posting content believing they should be able to publish anything without consequences, and professional weather makers ( PR/comms/lobbyists etc ) using this confusion to get around traditional controls on their dark arts. In the end I think the only solution that works in the long term is to have everything tied back to an individual - and that person is responsible for what they do. You know - like in the 'real' world. That does mean giving up the charade of pseudo-anonymity - but if we don't want online discourse dominated by bots controlled by people with no-conscience - then it's probably the grown up thing to do.
  • HPsquared 2y ago
    If it's worth doing it should happen naturally, verified accounts having more weight in the eyes of readers etc.
    • DrScientist 2y ago
      I'd like to think so, but I'm not so sure - doesn't it depend where the incentives come from? Optimising simply for demand without any principles leads to things like street fentanyl, and junk food and mass shootings ( there is a demand to own assault rifles ). Online right now there is a heady mix of large monetary incentives and the ability to rapidly optimise objective functions. Let's not pretend Meta's recent change isn't simply about Zuckerberg maintaining his power.
  • DecoySalamander 2y ago
    The only thing that removing anonymity would do is make it easier to harass people with dissenting opinions. Professional bad actors can switch to posting under "real people" names, just as spammers now post from home IP proxies.
    • DrScientist 2y ago
      I share your concern - however harassing people is illegal and if you can't be anonymous to do it then that's also much less likely. I don't buy favourite argument of the US gun lobby - that only criminals ( yes by definition ) would have guns/anonymous accounts if you banned it therefore we shouldn't do anything. You could apply that to anything that's illegal - by definition only criminals are outside the law - so why any laws at all? I'd also be concerned about repressive governments - but I think you could distinguish between mass/public communication and private 1:1 communication. Just like in the real world there is a whole world of difference between saying something in private and publishing something in a national newspaper.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• leokennis 2y ago
  Leaving Facebook, Instagram and Twitter a few years ago (and never joining TikTok) has been the number one top decision for my mental health. I wish everyone and society as a whole to make the same decision.
  • TiredOfLife 2y ago
    HN is no different to those places.
  • ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
    All I have on my Twitter feed is porn and jk Rowling tweets. I don't know what y'all are doing but my feed is exactly what I want.
• roxyrox 2y ago
  wow so many warnings for the future.. They didnt intend to but FB now has some responsibility about whats generated on it as one of the most massive source of info in the planet...