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It's time to get back to our roots around free expression
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- agnishom 2y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42621627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42621627 https://about.fb.com/news/2025/01/meta-more-speech-fewer-mistakes/ https://about.fb.com/news/2025/01/meta-more-speech-fewer-mis...
- mrtksn 2y agoHere is a an article about the announcement, including the video transcript: https://uk.news.yahoo.com/mark-zuckerberg-says-meta-replace-131648384.html https://uk.news.yahoo.com/mark-zuckerberg-says-meta-replace-... Overall, IMHO, it is great news. Opinions should be faced with opinions, lies should be faced with exposes as it has been done since the beginning of humanity. I am sure that many people will see this in different light(like this Daily Mail article titled "Mark Zuckerberg's stunning censorship admission as he seeks to suck-up to Trump") but I think this is the only way to counter the rise of fascism. Why? Because when censors and fact checkers are wrong crooks become freedom fighters and truth seekers. What should be regulated, I think, is frauds like pretending to be multiple people to sway opinions, bots pretending to be people to give impression that something is popular or using algorithms to distribute opinions and content that favors a particular side without being explicit about it or falsifying data to give impression that something receives support. Humans are used to lying or horrible people and we have social mechanisms to deal with these. What we can't deal with is fakery. [0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14258989/mark-zuckerberg-meta-censorship-admission-donald-trump-inaguration.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14258989/mark-zucke...
- mpweiher 2y ago> Opinions should be faced with opinions, lies should be faced with exposes as it has been done since the beginning of humanity Yes they should be, but this is actually a fairly new invention. A fantastic one. Explained extremely well in The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth Hardcover by Jonathan Rauch. https://www.amazon.com/Constitution-Knowledge-Jonathan-Rauch/dp/0815738862 https://www.amazon.com/Constitution-Knowledge-Jonathan-Rauch... Not affiliated, just a happy and now more-informed reader.
- _cenw 2y agoIt feels like everything is up for debate now, yet it has never been less productive to debate anyone on anything. Truth is gone, conceptually superseded.
- mrtksn 2y agoI agree but I blame it on the structure. People are at different stages of understanding something and on the social media everyone at every stage debates at the same time. In real life, we we progress through a path and when someone who is just starting comes up with the same questions we debated some time ago we don't simply go back and do it again. That newbie is handled by appropriate group until they catch up.
- _cenw 2y agoI don't think it's a matter of experience, it's a matter of belief. I just engaged someone who was adamant that someone who said "Q is legit" and "It's okay to be white" doesn't have necessarily have a right wing drift because if you take the reasonable out of reasonable doubt, you can always doubt something.
- pandemic_region 2y agoYes, truth is gone. But, we should never lose hope that things will straighten out again eventually.
- Blurbion 2y agoIt should not be possible to blindly push clearly idiotic and false information through a system without saveguards. I can have a conversation with my friends without fact checking every single word they say. And no we as humans had and still have a system of trust and respect. Respect has to be earned but when you got it, people trust you more. We did this because its more energy efficient to be able to trust others and not getting scamed left and right. Your argument "Because when censors and fact checkers are wrong crooks become freedom fighters and truth seekers." is a 1000x times less important than not sharing all the garbage first and we never had a system like social media before. Did you forget that Elon Musk just bought himself his position?
- philipwhiuk 2y agoGetting your community to fact-check is certainly cheaper.
- auadix 2y agoBack to our roots of free work, sorry, expression.
- freehorse 2y agoAlso it opens a new field of commercialization in the social media space, in a time where troll farms seem like a legitimate business.
- UncleMeat 2y agoThis isn't about saving money on tooling or reviewers. This is about the incoming Trump administration and not wanting to have him decide to point his administration at Facebook because he is pissed at them.
- DougN7 2y agoThis is exactly right. All hail Trump. All bow and worship Trump. We’re watching in real time a phenomena that I think is not new to the world, but new to America.
- selectodude 2y agoOnce they go after somebody like Mark Cuban and Khodorkovsky him, it’ll all make sense.
- phatfish 2y agoOr rather, the anonymous hive-mind is now deciding if something is factually correct. Completely unaccountable, perfect for social media.
- mrcsd 2y agoSo, just like normal then? I don't disagree with being cynical about social media, but community belief is the overwhelming mechanism by which fact is decided throughout history, including now.
- linotype 2y agoMore like everyone under the age of 50 is abandoning Facebook and boomers are all they have left. “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. These policy changes may take a few weeks to be fully implemented.” Some of the things said by Congress members are wildly bigoted, Mark must really want to suck up to Trump.
- planb 2y agoThis applies to Threads and Instagram, too, I guess?
- tedivm 2y agoThreads is pretty much a flop compared to bluesky. A lot of people really don't trust facebook/meta.
- guappa 2y ago[flagged]
- eesmith 2y agoThat's silly. The Constitution says "Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behaviour, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a Member." For example, House Rule XVII ("DECORUM AND DEBATE") says "Remarks in debate (which may include references to the Senate or its Members) shall be confined to the question under debate, avoiding personality." If Congress is the reference, then Facebook gets to define what "disorderly Behaviour" is, just like the House and Senate get to define for themselves what "disorderly Behavior" means. If the House is the ideal for how to have debate, then Facebook debate must also avoid personality.
- nickpp 2y agoSounds like lots of ideas and principles copied over from the much-maligned X?!
- gkoberger 2y agoIt doesn’t mean it’s good. I’m happy to malign Facebook too.
- andrepd 2y agoThe "X" that shuts down speech its owner doesn't like, and that openly said they were going to "change the algorithm to promote positivity" now that the president he helped elect stepped up? Jesus
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoX is far less censored than any other social media platform of comparable size.
- ceejayoz 2y ago[flagged]
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoCool. Still, X is far less censored than any other social media platform of comparable size. And at least there are rules now, as opposed to the unaccountable chaos of the prior Twitter censorship regime.
- ceejayoz 2y agoThis seems more like unaccountable chaos than solid rules. https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5063009-elon-musk-defends-demonetize/ https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5063009-elon-musk-defe...
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- rwmj 2y agoI'd prefer they got back to their roots of having a simple, time-ordered wall of posts from only your friends.
- giancarlostoro 2y agoThere was a way to make a custom feed, I forgot what tab its under, but I would group friends and it was always chronological. The Facebook site is a massive beast of so many experiments. Kind of like Google products.
- jayknight 2y agoIt's there, you just can't make it your default view.
- mrtksn 2y agoDon't you think that the heat-based walls are good too? I'm big fan of HN because of it. The /new tab is available and I sometimes checking it but I love the home page of HN and I love that it's (mostly) what everyone sees at the same time.
- PedroBatista 2y agoThey are also good, but outside a more or less homogeneous bubble with no incentive for monetization it quickly becomes a cesspool dictated by "the algorithm".
- drawkward 2y agoHN doesnt have sponsored content that can be heated up via monetization.
- stickfigure 2y agoTurns out you can train the algorithm to go back to "just posts from friends" by clicking the little X top right corner of the posts you don't want. I had almost given up on the feed, it was turning into a bunch of posts from groups that I wasn't really interested in. I did a little searching, found this suggestion, and after a bit of clicking it seems to work. Now it's just friend posts (and ads, but I assume that's the inevitable price).
- aeturnum 2y ago[flagged]
- timmg 2y agoThis is interesting. I welcome it. The cynical side of me knows that the content review humans are expensive. “Community Notes” is (I assume) volunteer. So it may also be a bit of a cost-cutting measure.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y agoMaybe also a keeping Trump happy measure, given that he's been threatening Zuckerberg.
- NickC25 2y agoWhich is sad. All these centibillionaires kissing the ring is just sad. They have the money, economic might, and social capital to not have to engage with Trump. Instead, they kiss his ass. Why?
- masfuerte 2y ago* hectobillionaire A centibillionaire is worth ten million.
- drawkward 2y agoBecause they tacitly acknowledge that Trump is an authoritarian who will come after them, if they dont kiss the ring. They would rather keep their wealth and freedom than do battle with an authoritarian.
- NickC25 2y agoYes, and they willingly served him all the ability to become an authoritarian and handed him power. Mark could EASILY turn around and say to Trump "you know what, motherfucker? I got you in power, I looked the other way in '16, in '20, and I willingly allowed foreign actors to amplify you and your messaging. I own you. You want to play hardball with me? I'll release EVERYTHING. Watch me". Trump has a history of wanting to be a dictator, but he also has a history of backing down when people more powerful or wealthier than him have the ability to prove his ass is nothing but a fraud. He once tried to sue his biographer when his biographer claimed he wasn't a billionaire. When the biographer wouldn't back down, Trump was the one to back down when it became clear he would be subject to discovery. Turns out "I'm really a billionaire, believe me!" doesn't really work in a court of law if you can't prove it. Especially when several decades of your taxes won't be released because it would prove what we've known all along - Donald Trump actually sucks at business.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bjourne 2y agoHaven't they noticed what a complete cluster fuck "Community Notes" are on Twitter? Just way to easy to game and just way, waay to easy for hordes of trolls to "Community note" real accounts into oblivion. For example, a note on a story may read: "This image is likely AI-generated. Source: Some Random Post". Except Some Random Post is written by an idiot who is completely wrong. Doesn't matter one bit because the troll hordes can generate more clicks on the up button than the honest users can generate on the down button.
- stvltvs 2y agoYou're assuming Meta's goal is to prevent misinformation and disinformation.
- mike_hearn 2y agoCommunity Notes aren't simply voted on by counting clicks on an up button, it's more sophisticated than that. Go sign up and do some rating yourself to see how it works. CNs are vastly superior to the NGO swamp Facebook have been funding for the past decade: 1. The CN community focus on the ordinary boring stuff that NGOs ignore. A huge number of community notes are highlighting financial scams, obfuscated adverts, stuff faked for viral engagement and so on. They aren't political but this is the bulk of what needs fact checking on social networks. Because they're crowd sourced, CN posters are incredibly good at this and easily identify obscure videos or pictures that have been taken out of context (or indeed AI generated). In contrast the ecosystem that FB funded seemed to focus primarily on contentious political claims. 2. To go live a CN needs agreement from people across the political spectrum. The algorithm behind this decision is quite smart. It's reminiscent of the old Slashdot meta-moderation system, for instance you are asked to rate notes across multiple different criteria that come with objective definitions. The result is that CNs are almost always written in a neutral style that just briefly presents facts with sources, and the extremely biased "fact checks" of the sort that have been embarrassing Facebook for years are basically absent. By the nature of the system sometimes bad CNs appear briefly, but they get fixed quickly. 3. Because it's algorithmic and anyone can write notes, it doesn't discriminate in favour of the rich and powerful. Elon Musk gets community noted, he even sometimes just posts stuff and then asks CN specifically to check it. Facebook's "fact checks" were written by the sort of people who simply assume academics, civil servants and activists are always right, with the result that they never fact checked such people even when they were saying things that were completely wrong. 4. They are much more concise. 5. Even the name is better. They don't claim to be final judgements of truth, just notes created and voted on by an amorphous community. This is a much more defensible claim: much of the scorn towards fact checkers acknowledged by Zuck is because they claim to be "checking facts" but often just pick fights or try to block true facts they don't like.
- ChrisArchitect 2y ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42621627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42621627
- deadbabe 2y agoAnything that moves us in the direction of free speech and free expression is ultimately better in the long term even if it means a rise in some misinformation and undesirable topics in the short term. No tyranny can ever truly take hold in societies where information flows freely and generously. Edit: I don’t understand the downvotes, but I wish people would engage instead of just bury this post, unless of course you’re an advocate for censorship.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago[flagged]
- conartist6 2y ago[flagged]
- LightBug1 2y agoOutdated view, I'm afraid. I might agree with you regarding free speech and free expression if it wasn't, as is increasingly happening, shaped and manipulated either by algorithms or basic, out-in-the-open policy. For example, I took a look at X for the first time in ages the other day via xcancel ... it was even more of a cesspit than it has been where horrible voices were shown first because they had a blue tick (which is not a signifier of any form of quality) and many reasonable voices are drowned out. If this is the trend for all networks (and we see here Zuckerberg capitulating here unsurprisingly), then a time will quickly come where these billionaires will shape narrative quickly and easily. And, of course, that time is already here, "just not evenly distributed".
- deadbabe 2y agoWell it’s not enough to simply remove censorship, platforms must also not promote any one opinion over the other. So no more blue ticks getting priority.
- conartist6 2y agoIt's funny that you should bemoan no engagement when the engagement I gave you was so much rage-bait that it was downvoted and censored, because um, we still have ways of moderating speech in this forum
- pixelsort 2y agoRoots? FB's roots are frat boy pranks and backstabbing your actual friends. Better headline: Billionaire backtracks on freespeech after a private meeting with a much more powerful billionaire to discuss ways of making amends for his pesky commitment to a well-informed society.
- paxys 2y ago"Our content moderation team in California was too liberal, so we are replacing all of them with Texans, who will have zero bias of their own of course."
- consumer451 2y agoHe said he's going to work with Trump to fight against foreign countries censoring American social media companies? Are foreign countries not allowed self-determination? EU citizen here, what in heck is happening right now?
- ReptileMan 2y ago>EU citizen here, what in hell is happening right now? The EU chose themselves to be US vassals, to be technologically outdated and to move from GDP parity in 2008 to being half the US economy 15 years later. Every problem that we face can be traced to the technocrat idiots in Brussels.
- consumer451 2y agoAnd this relates to Trump, Musk, and Zuck shoving their politics down our throats how? Their GDP is bigger, so we just give up self-determination? Maybe in your country the people who fought for freedom are all dead now, not here. F all that. We are barely 2 generations free here. Not going back.
- ReptileMan 2y agoTheir GDP is bigger, their army protects us - so at any point in time Trump can say "I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it further" and we have to suck it up.
- consumer451 2y agoDo you really think that Europe cannot defend itself against Russia, a country with a GDP less than that of only Italy, whose military is currently so destroyed that it relies on North Korea to defend its own borders? Under Trump, I believe it is already priced-in that he would do nothing to uphold his NATO obligations. That ship has already sailed in sober-minded circles.
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- Blurbion 2y ago[dead]
- mupuff1234 2y agoCozying up to Trump and gang and making it easier to add AI features that hallucinate nonsense.
- QnagdHAT 2y agoThey all kiss the ring of Trump now. With success: Trump already betrayed his MAGA and sides with Musk over H1B visas: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/30/politics/trump-musk-h1b-visa-analysis/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/30/politics/trump-musk-h1b-v... Further expected betrayals: - Trump will not release the JFK files, which he unambiguously promised during the election campaign while standing next to RFK junior. - Trump will not finish the wall, because Republican farmers need their slave labor. There is still some hope that in foreign policy Trump will deliver. It is bad for Europe though, since Trump will perpetuate the LNG grift and the destruction of Europe's economy.
- NickC25 2y ago>Trump will not finish the wall, because Republican farmers need their slave labor. True, which is why he built a few miles of the wall for like $20 billion (and destroyed some protected wildlife lands in the process) and claimed it was a job done, while leaving literally thousands of miles of his wall unbuilt. And then had the nerve to campaign on immigration. Truth is stranger than fiction, sometimes.
- mojo74 2y ago"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." So say X, FB and the company they keep.
- lapcat 2y agoThe issue is not necessarily the policy changes by themselves but rather the context in which they are occuring, the very suspicious timing, which makes it look like Zuck is simply catering to the newly elected President. That's the opposite of "free speech" and eliminating bias. And the notion suggested by Zuck that Texas is somehow less biased than California is ridiculous. Perhaps if he had suggested a swing state like Wisconsin, for example (which happens to have some empty space available where a Foxconn factory was never built).
- gedpeck 2y agoIndeed. This is corporate America’s version of bending the knee.
- Yoric 2y agoYes, corporate America is bending the knee and paying for the coronation of Trump and/or Musk. Another reminder that we may end up, occasionally, on the same side as corporate America, but that their reason to be is profit, not some moral cause, no matter how they're painting it. That being said, if I were Zuck or Dorsey, I'd hate to have been involuntarily made arbiter of proper communication, and I'd jump on the first opportunity to pass the responsibility to whoever is willing to take it.
- jjulius 2y agoExactly, thank you. Between this "getting back to our roots thing" and this[0] development this week, it's obvious what this actually is. [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...
- maiple 2y agoA very smart business plan from a businessman
- jacknews 2y agoWhich reveals the lie that business serves people. Competition, free markets, best product wins, blah, blah, blah. It's all nonsense.
- aosaigh 2y agoI understand that fact checkers and moderators can have biases but surely this new direction needs to be coupled with some more robust bot detection and abuse systems to stop people gaming things like “community notes”
- TylerLives 2y agoI believe he is being honest. I remember him making similar remarks in the past, saying they don't want to be the arbiters of truth. Most tech companies were like this before, but they were pressured by some other force to censor. Glad to see that's changing.
- gedpeck 2y agoIt’s bad for society that peddlers of stupidity can do so at scale and for little cost. We now have millions of people doubting the benefits of the polio vaccine. This disinformation is spread primarily through a few websites. It seems to me that they ought to have some responsibility to restrict destructive disinformation.
- drawkward 2y agoFree speech should not include disinformation, which is an attack on society. Of course, the devil is in the details of enforcement: who watches the watchmen?
- TylerLives 2y agoWhen you suppress ideas in this way, they become more attractive to a large number of people. There is a problem with bad ideas spreading quickly on the internet, but censorship hasn't helped with this imo.
- chimprich 2y ago> When you suppress ideas in this way, they become more attractive to a large number of people. That sounds superficially reasonable, but I don't think that it's true. Turn the sentence around: "when you spread ideas more widely, they become more attractive to a large number of people". Repetition works. It's why trillions gets spent on advertising each year.
- gedpeck 2y agoAnti-vaccine sentiment didn’t arise due to suppression. It arose due to the ease of cheaply spreading a message on social media. We ran the experiment and see the results.
- jacknews 2y ago... blowing in the wind, the times they are a changin' ... (on January 20th) No coincidence this was announced a day after Trump's election victory was certified, methinks.
- conartist6 2y agoDid they make any distinction between allowing hate and lies and giving them the full force of viral engagement-baiting?