The risk here is not that the system will have bad goals, it's that it's easy for manipulation to redefine the core terms used to classify "bad" content. Even now, we regularly see even clear terms like "correct" or "incorrect" applied by fact-checking websites through a fairly biased lens.
This is not a partisan issue, when you start down the road of handing the keys to shaping public thought to a powerful party, you're there when the power changes too.
This is no different than being able to tell when someone is bullshitting just as you walk through every day life, and thinking we need to shield the poor naive populace from harmful ideas is borderline stereotypical paternalism.
This is all obviously a big deal to old media, who have made an art not out of sharing incorrect truths, but of very selectively sharing truths, to the point that what emerges does not really represent the truth at all. They didn't lie, but they aggressively shaped. Of course democratic access to the pieces they'd rather suppress (on both sides) threatens that model. They'd love us to toss out this particular bath water.
This is all obviously a big deal to old media, who have made an art not out of sharing incorrect truths, but of very selectively sharing truths, to the point that what emerges does not really represent the truth at all. They didn't lie, but they aggressively shaped.
Well and empirically demonstrated in the 80's by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky.
> This is no different than being able to tell when someone is bullshitting just as you walk through every day life, and thinking we need to shield the poor naive populace from harmful ideas is borderline stereotypical paternalism.
There is a huge difference.
If someone is bullshitting you in real life, you don't give them a giant microphone so they can reach millions of people. You ignore them, or politely engage in conversation with them, or maybe even try to help them see the errors of their ways.
Why should Facebook be obligated to amplify deceptive messages? I don't see a reason.
This is not true. Someone who bullshits in real life can still buy a microphone and can rent a stadium for his event. People can choose to attend or not attend and listen to him.
For example, Trump has spread so many falsehoods but people still attend his events.
> Someone who bullshits in real life can still buy a microphone and can rent a stadium for his event.
Yes, and the fact that they are free to buy a printing press doesn't mean that the New York Times is obligated to print their material on the Times’ press alongsode content that meets the Times’ editorial standards.
I'm neither a heavy Facebook user nor a fan of Trump, but doesn't it make you at least a little bit nervous that a many-billion-dollar company is going to start selectively censoring (or at least hindering) communication it disagrees with?
What happened to the traditional liberal distrust of big corporations?
What about if Facebook decides discussion of privacy violations online is "fake news?"
You'd be hard-pressed to find a large media company that doesn't selectively curate the media they distribute.
Anyone that runs a business has the responsibility to consider the ethical ramifications of their business activities, and to respond in a way that aligns with their ethical values.
FYI –– Y Combinator does exactly this on Hacker News: "selectively censoring (or at least hindering) communication it disagrees with"
Doesn't worry me in the least. I am surprised they weren't already heavily filtered.
I also don't use facebook at all.
It would worry me if an ISP or other group that should be a common carrier were censoring things. Or if the government censored things. But people on facebook are willingly buying into whatever facebook is providing.
So people who sell microphones should care about what's said on the microphone, otherwise they should deny the sale? That doesn't sound logical from a business perspective and would lead me to suspect an alterior motive.
The game has changed. There are people with intolerant and twisted views trying to manipulate the naive herd of sheep who blindly follows whatever people like on Facebook.
Knowing the tactics of people behind fake news, it's good that Facebook is responding accordingly to punish and get rid of bad actors on their platform.
It's once again showing that we can't have pure anarcho decentralization. It would be a haven for bad actors that goes unpunished.
We can absolutely set definition for what is bad and what isn't bad. What is clearly bad is writing fake news about certain group of ethnic group you hate and manipulating others into believing your twisted idiosyncratic views about Jews, Hindus and Moors.
edit: there is some heavy downvote brigading going on here. I've alerted the mods.
I very very rarely downvote anything on HN. I feel downvoting should be used for empty or "me too"-like comments that don't add anything. Your post isn't like that, but in your case I made an exception anyway because you started like this:
trying to manipulate the naive herd of sheep who blindly follows whatever people like on Facebook
I realise you genuinely do believe that there are vast numbers of people who are literally programmable through their Facebook news feeds as if they were a television set, and that your own vastly superior intellect would ensure that this never happens to your good self, but it's a fantastically offensive, trollish and flame-o-riffic position to take ... every bit as awful as outright racism/sexism/whatever (except your views of intellectual and moral superiority are a lot more common than actual racism or sexism in the HN community). Moreover you provide no actual evidence that such people exist in vast herd-like numbers.
When your entire contribution to the debate is "the world is full of sheep and Facebook must herd them for their own good" are you really surprised that this is considered not particularly helpful? It's like starting an argument with "people with low IQ should be affixed with ankle bracelets to ensure they don't wander around and cause trouble".
Reductive. You seem to be searching for a reason to disagree. He/she stated his point crudely, granted, but he/she did have one: There are certain forms of speech that are outlawed in certain places in the interest of preventing harm to people. For instance, countries with anti-Holocaust-denial laws. Yet they remain reasonably free and tolerant societies. CP is another example. Many governments and people operate without the idea (delusion?) that all speech should be allowed. Fetishization of free speech is a uniquely US-centric phenomenon.
Your faux outrage is irritating. You're really going to debate that fake news on FB and elsewhere has had a real impact shaping beliefs and attitudes?
I agree with what you said, but going from, "societies sometimes forbid types of speech" to "let Facebook decide what speech to forbid" is a step I cannot justify.
People who believe women can't be programmers or that it's impossible to be racist against white people also have points, and often put them crudely. Having a point is fine. Putting it crudely and then not backing up your position with anything is not fine - it's pretty much the definition of unconstructive criticism.
If quoquoquo had supported their viewpoint with something other than his own enormous contempt, perhaps studies or statistics on the extent to which people are sheep like I'd have let it be or maybe even voted it up. But they didn't.
You're really going to debate that fake news on FB and elsewhere has had a real impact shaping beliefs and attitudes?
"Real impact" is meaningless beyond meaning "an impact more than zero". It's surely had more than zero. Is it significant in scale compared to other sources of manipulation, like what ordinary newspapers routinely engage in? Does it have huge impact on individuals or trivial impact? That's absolutely debatable and worth debating.
Thank you. Fetishization of free speech is a good way to put it--and it's a position that I would say comes from people who lack perspective; the people who are going to be the last ones targeted by the actual violence that's already happening.
Again I'd like to ask, what's the free speech answer to nazis and white supremacists raising their fists to my friends and loved ones? How do we free-speech our way out of the violence that's already coming?
I'd love to be a free-speech absolutist but, right now, I can't square it with the suffering and violence being brought down on the most vulnerable.
You realise - I hope! - that seeing large populations of other people as weak, inferior, morally defective, mentally limited and generally in need of being controlled or removed from public life is exactly the attitude that led to the Nazi horrors, don't you? It wasn't an excess of free speech that led to the concentration camps, which were secret inside Germany and their existence did not leak to the allies until troops actually found them. It was a set of beliefs that de-humanized entire chunks of the population. Those considered immoral or stupid by the Nazis were sent to the gas chambers ... but only after years of much lighter harassment and suppression.
Especially note that a key part of Hitler's rise was the belief that Germany's defeat in WW1 was somehow partly the result of some sort of conspiracy by people with Jewish beliefs.
So now what do we see? A strong conviction by some parts of society that other parts are mentally weak, that their belief systems are morally defective, yet that people with these beliefs are organised and dangerous and thus they must be suppressed.
The risk here is NOT coming from "free speech absolutists", as you put it, but rather people like yourself who look around and see a world full of people who cannot ever be persuaded or redeemed because they're just too stupid or evil, and thus must be prevented from organising. In the exceptionally rare case that genuine, actual Nazis do "raise their fists" the solution is the same as when anyone does: arrest them and send them to trial.
Wow. So you're comparing the OP of this subthread to the Nazis because they think the electorate is susceptible to manipulation. That's some shameful sophistry.
Sigh, no. Look. I don't think bringing up "but Nazis" is really helpful to any debate but Frondo did so. His position is - quite literally - I'd love to support free speech but I can't because of Nazis. Also he thinks I lack perspective and am some sort of fetishist, which isn't very nice, but I can put that to one side.
It's impossible to respond to such a rebuttal without using the N-word and I specifically said at the start I was doing so only because of that argument.
I understand why people bring up Hitler in discussions about free speech. Some people do believe that Nazis are some sort of harmful side effect of free speech and if only people with views tending in that direction are prevented from speaking, there will never be a re-occurrence. That's a reasonable view to hold, but one that many people believe to be wrong (I didn't see Congress delete the first amendment post-WW2 after all).
Now if someone is going to take a position of "I'd love to support X but it leads to Hitler", a rebuttal of the form "actually it's not X that led to these bad things, it's the opposite of X" is a completely reasonable response. If you really believe that's sophistry I'd be interested to know how you'd argue that free speech is the solution to and not the cause of Nazi evil, if you genuinely did believe that, without it being sophistry?
OP: People are susceptible to manipulation. We should think carefully about the ways our institutions allow violent and intolerant ideologies to spread.
You: You know who else thought people were susceptible to manipulation? The Nazis.
A hypothetical non-sophist: Our institutions are indeed helping to spread violent and intolerant ideologies, but any attempt to prevent their spread will only make things worse, because #{reasons}.
>Again I'd like to ask, what's the free speech answer to nazis and white supremacists raising their fists to my friends and loved ones? How do we free-speech our way out of the violence that's already coming?
One, you respond to violence with violence, but that's not what we're talking about. And two, the best way to hurry along the violence you think is coming is to close down other people's free speech. Speech is the substitute for violence - what do you think will happen when you take speech away from people who feel marginalized?
>I'd love to be a free-speech absolutist but, right now, I can't square it with the suffering and violence being brought down on the most vulnerable.
Sure, "I support free speech but...". You'd love to be a free speech absolutist, as long as the people talking agree with you.
"You'd love to be a free speech absolutist, as long as the people talking agree with you."
I'd love to be a free speech absolutist but where that's been taking us, my friends and loved ones are at the receiving end of fists, guns, and cars.
So... just to clarify, you're telling me I should be a free speech absolutist and say, "yes, let's just talk that car out of plowing into us"?
Serious, honest question. The violence is already here. Is that--more talking in the face of violence against vulnerable communities--where you see free speech absolutism leading us? Is that the place we, as a society, want to be headed?
(If it's easy for you to say, "yes," then I'm assuming you feel safe knowing you'd never be at the receiving end of a car plowing through a crowd.)
>So... just to clarify, you're telling me I should be a free speech absolutist and say, "yes, let's just talk that car out of plowing into us"?
Is a moving car "speech"? You seem to keep trying to blur the line between speech and violence. Why is that? Is it that you don't recognize the difference, or is it that you realize there hasn't actually been much violence, and most of it's coming from your "friends and loved ones" on the left?
>Serious, honest question. The violence is already here. Is that--more talking in the face of violence against vulnerable communities--where you see free speech absolutism leading us? Is that the place we, as a society, want to be headed?
Who are you talking about when you say "vulnerable communities"? The communities with all the institutional protection, from colleges to employers to the state?
And it's not free speech that's turning up the antagonism, but rather the opposite, as more and more pressure is put on people to refrain from, you know, speaking their mind.
>(If it's easy for you to say, "yes," then I'm assuming you feel safe knowing you'd never be at the receiving end of a car plowing through a crowd.)
Again, that was one incident. One. By a guy who'd most likely just been assaulted by communists. To make policy based on what one person does is idiotic.
But if that's what we're going to do, shouldn't we look into yanking MSNBC's broadcast license? I mean, the guy who shot Scalise was a big Maddow fan.
Sadly, there is no difference between the 'clever' person who thinks they're exempt, and the masses of programmed people who (thinks the clever person) passively accept what they're being fed. It's just all people, full stop, so yes they do exist in these vast herd-like numbers, and yes they're vulnerable to being programmed, and yes this is happening and always has.
If there's a difference it's akin to the change from animal power to internal combustion: a difference of degree and mechanic, not the fundamental operation being carried out. But like the change to internal combustion, this change can be pretty revolutionary all the same.
sad to me that people are so quick to dismiss the principles of free speech on the basis that "the game has changed" after thousands of years of human history proving it hasn't.
(inb4 1st amendment is only for the gov - that is a selective truth. the principles of free speech exist outside of government.)
> ...after thousands of years of human history proving it hasn't.
People couldn't manipulate millions of others as easily. You couldn't even REACH millions of people easily. And you had to be an actual authority figure to be given that power (perhaps a corrupt practice but still).
The communications landscape is quite different from 2000, remarkably different from 1980, extremely different from 1960, a world away from 1920, and bares very little resemblance to 1820.
How do things in the 1500s and 1600s say that thins aren't different?
You said thousands of years, how do the lessons of 2000 BC show us things haven't changed?
Read "The Coming Of The Third Reich" by Richard J Evans to see how a very liberal democracy (Weimar Republic) was undermined:
1) No strong sense of "norms" in the culture
2) Manipulation of "Free Speech" into "Equal Speech"
3) Manipulation of a populist movement entirely built on nostalgia, the-jews-backstabbed-the-kaiser mythology, and "Germany First" so that they were far enough from Hitler that he could claim to not control them directly, but everyone else feared touching him would start a nationwide riot.
4) Political violence was normalized
5) Everything (churches, tennis clubs) had political party variants (ex: the socialist democrat Protestant church vs a communist one)
6) Terrorist attack on the Reichstag was a huge opportunity and turning point
There's a world of difference between the Internet of 2017 and Germany of 1932 that I really do suggest keeping them apart, and pick up the book.
Ancient Athenians adored freedom of speech. Naming a warship after the very concept.
399BC - Socrates speaks to jury at his trial: 'If you offered to let me off this time on condition I am not any longer to speak my mind... I should say to you, "Men of Athens, I shall obey the Gods rather than you."'
1516 - The Education of a Christian Prince by Erasmus. 'In a free state, tongues too should be free.'
In the 1600s, Galileo was executed for mere speech.
Based on the post I was expecting examples of where free speech overcame the kind of 'there are my kind of lies so they must be true you liar' stuff we're seeing now.
Totalitarianism has emerged in societies lacking free speech as well. it's usually a lot more complicated than that.
Regulating free speech is indeed a slippery slope. But it might need to be regulated, I don't have no idea to be honest. A free market works best for the common good when it's regulated though, and I could see it being the same way for free speech. But a slippery slope it is.
> "the game has changed" after thousands of years of human history proving it hasn't.
But it clearly has. Only in the past 5 year did it become possible for one guy in Romania to pose as a small town Ohio news agency (or 4) and spread nonsense to millions of people.
Do you feel that academic journals violate the principle of free speech? If not, why is what facebook is doing any different?
Benjamin Franklin, a runaway, started his own newspaper - as did his brother - which were called far worse than "fake news" in an "objective" way by the british.
my point is that anyone who explicitly refused to reprint Benjamin Franklin's writings on the realities of the US because they were declared fake and treasonous deserved to be called censorious and biased against freedom of speech. Mind you, more than a couple of his articles were actual fake news meant to stoke discussion on British policies.
But the fear of censorship is that truth will be obscured. If free speech is being abused to do what we're afraid censorship will do, doesn't that create a contradiction in your logic?
And to be clear, what we mean by "fake news" are stories that are demonstrably false with incorrect information that's never corrected even when it's revealed to be false. We're _not_ talking about what Trump calls "fake news," by which he means any narrative that doesn't paint him in a positive light.
> If free speech is being abused to do what we're afraid censorship will do, doesn't that create a contradiction in your logic?
Irrelevant. Limiting speech doesn't solve that contradiction, it only guarantees the worse outcome. More speech solves your proposed "contradiction" just fine.
That seems like a distinction without a difference. Would you be happier with a system that pushed disproportionately more "true" speech at the vulnerable (ignorant) demographic?
So to be clear here, it was the British government declaring his speech treasonous and attempting to censor him?
If so then yes I agree. Government censorship is unacceptable. But that's not really comparable to private entities censoring on their own private whims.
In what way is Facebook at all comparable to a government? Is there some social contract that all people are entered into with Facebook? If so, what are the rights and responsibilities of that contract? And do note here, I'm talking about an implied social contract, not an actual contract (like an EULA).
What large portion of the internet do they "govern"? As best as I can tell you're arguing that any sufficiently large entity is essentially a government. That's ridiculous. So please, please explain what you do mean.
> Is there some social contract that all people are entered into with Facebook?
They have written community rules (don't know the exact name) that members are expected to comply with.
> What large portion of the internet do they "govern"?
The Facebook website (duh). Which, for a surprising amount of people, is literally "the internet" (or at least the part of it that they most interact with).
> As best as I can tell you're arguing that any sufficiently large entity is essentially a government.
No. For instance, Toyota is not a government because it does not set rules under which I can use their cars. Facebook does set rules under which I can use their platform, and it enforces them (which is the entire point of the submission). Setting rules and enforcing them is governance.
In fact, every moderator on any public forum is in the governance business. Since Facebook is so large, I find it reasonable to liken it to a government in terms of influence of its governance.
This entire argument is predicated on a misapplication of the term "government". Something that sets rules is not a government in the same way that an actual government is a government, and confusing the two interpretations cannot lead to productive discourse.
Just to be clear, this definition also makes Walmart the government of all Walmart stores, and me the government of my bedroom. Neither of those are in any way related to how the President is (a part of) the government of the United States.
That's why I qualified "for all intents and purposes" in my first post, and used "governance" in the second one. Walmart very much does govern its stores [1]. And a government is defined as the entity governing a state. States, of course, require physical extent, which doesn't exist on the internet, so yes, there technically can't be a government over virtual space (only over the physical space that the people using it inhabit).
[1] Edit: Within the boundaries of the law. But if that were a problem with your definition of "governance", then state governments (which operate within the boundaries of federal law) would not be governing either.
>(inb4 1st amendment is only for the gov - that is a selective truth. the principles of free speech exist outside of government.)
Except they don't. You should have said "inb4 John Stuart Mill", one of the founders of free speech philosophy who said that that the harm principle trumps freedom of speech (i.e. if an expression causes harm, then that expression can be silenced).
This idea of freedom of speech "as a principle" being a blank check to express whatever you want without consequences, is a new development.
The problem is when certain groups take the definition of harmful speech beyond all reasonable limitations. Certain powerful groups spoke of favorably by the media would designate the Google memo as harmful hate speech that needs to be suppressed. Then they will go one step further and say sympathizing with the memo is also naturally a form of harmful speech. We've already slid too far down this slope. I expect in the future I will be mandated to clap and bawl uncontrollably while my great liberal leader makes a speech on pain of death for the crime of facism
No, that isn't a problem. JSM also defined the Offense Principle, which doesn't trump freedom of speech. You're free to whinge about future hypothetical scenarios of you crying in front of liberal leaders so long as it doesn't cause harm.
Can someone please explain to me what is the modern day freedom of speech?
I know the 1st amendment protects Americans from the government but today's free speech advocates, warriors, or whatever they are called look a bunch of angry men.
Thousands of years? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's really only been put into a constitution a smigeon more than 200 years ago.
But that's besides the point. Freedom of speech has always been an imperfect principle. At anytime we are and have been censored in any society. In the west we probably have fewer censorships, but still we censor child porn, financial cheating / insider trading as well as "hate speech". And that is good. Other societies such as china do exactly the same just that the goal post has shifted a little more.
The point is this: freedom of speech is a relative term and has changed between societies and in time. It's never been free in absolute terms.
It's also recently not revealed the truth and made us less just, which is what it's only real purpose is.
The goalpost needs changing to make it achieve that again.
> "Thousands of years? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's really only been put into a constitution a smigeon more than 200 years ago."
'Origins of freedom of speech and expression' section found here suggests otherwise (unless you want to be particular about the term 'constitution', rather than what it represents):
399BC - Socrates speaks to jury at his trial: 'If you offered to let me off this time on condition I am not any longer to speak my mind... I should say to you, "Men of Athens, I shall obey the Gods rather than you."'
Socrates was sentenced to death for "corrupting the youth" - an act of speech. Considered by some to be a final nail for ancient athens - who had adored free speech before so much as to name a warship after the concept.
> the principles of free speech exist outside of government
The principle of free speech is that actors who are not exercising the monopoly, coercive power of government are free to choose which views to express or relay, and that persuasion not obligation (legal, moral, or otherwise) of some actors to neutrality will determine the success of ideas in spreading.
The concept of free speech does not involve some private actors being entitled to other private actors’ resources.
(There is a legitimate issue with some “private” actors being really public actors where the structure of property rights and natural features of the market for certain infrastructure creates monopolies or oligopolies on essential mechanisms of communication.)
What do you mean? The thousands of years of human history have shown, if anything, that most institutions have heavily regulated speech and there's really no corrlation between institutional or societal success and free speech.
> (inb4 1st amendment is only for the gov - that is a selective truth. the principles of free speech exist outside of government.)
You say this as if it isn't a perfectly valid point. You have the right guaranteed by law to express an opinion. No one, no matter what size corporation or platform, is expected to give you a podium from which to do so.
More to the point, freedom of speech has never been an absolute, not in the way most extremist activists would have you believe. There has always been exceptions, but the common theme of them is incitement, either incitement of panic that endangers safety (yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre), incitement of hatred against a group of people, or incitement of a riot, on and on. There are all kinds of ways the Government limits your speech.
Since your use of Facebook is effectively using their network to promote your speech, Facebook is basically speaking for you to a certain degree, that means Facebook has a vested interest to not speak hateful nonsense so it by itself does not become the subject of either lawsuits from the Government or public outcry, the latter of which has already happened, the former entirely in the scope of possibilities if they continue to act like the typical tech bro and try not to take sides in the name of "Free Speech" a.k.a maximum audience numbers.
> [...] (yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre) [...]
Please read up on this concept. It does not mean what you think, and is so frequently voiced as part of a case advocating restrictions on speech, it's become something of a hot-button topic.
After Holmes' opinions in the Schenck trilogy, the law of the United States
was this: you could be convicted and sentenced to prison under the Espionage
Act if you criticized the war, or conscription, in a way that "obstructed"
conscription, which might mean as little as convincing people to write and
march and petition against it. This is the context of the "fire in a theater"
quote that people so love to brandish to justify censorship.
So if you think war protesters should be jailed, then you've found your precedent; carry on. But if you think that notion is heinous, you might want to think again about your example.
That intersection sounds like hypocrisy until you think about how being a common carrier is a government rule and it really is the government that needs to restrained to prevent censorship.
I definitely accept the need for that intersection for the USA at this point.
So do you support people manipulating and creating fake news but not the people who are trying to prevent it from happening?
Facebook can absolutely kick out people who don't behave on their platform. Playing the freedom of speech card doesn't work when you actively try to oppress other's freedom of speech through tactical manipulation.
Punishing individuals and groups who willfully and knowingly engage in spreading information containing false facts concocted to support their intolerant views is absolutely necessary to protect freedom of speech.
>Punishing individuals and groups who willfully and knowingly engage in spreading information containing false facts concocted to support their intolerant views is absolutely necessary to protect freedom of speech
Punishing people for spreading information you don't like in the name of protecting free speech is double speak
Punishing people who willfully concocts false information and disseminates for the purpose of spreading racist/intolerant views are very different than what you've highlighted.
Thinking a group of people is lesser than you because of the arrangement of their skin color pigmentation, and crying freedom of speech is being attacked, is not going to get you a lot of sympathy, especially when you now try to actively shut people up who are calling you out on it.
> freedom of speech means freedom to mislead
sure, but don't get all up and mighty when you get called out and shut down.
If this is the world we're headed into, by treating free speech as an absolute and inviolate, then I'm not sure it's a world I want to live in.
When nazis start inciting riots against my friends and loved ones, and quislings defend that speech as ok to disseminate because free speech, is this the world I want to live in?
I'm lucky, I don't look like anyone who's a target for white supremacists. Most of my friends and loved ones aren't that lucky.
I have a little bit of a different perspective because of that--the violence is already coming to our door and no amount of talking is going to cool white supremacist or nazi heads when they're out there.
So, universal, absolute free speech...is this building a world I want to inhabit? Increasingly, no. And proponents of an absolute and inviolate principle of free speech have no answer to the violence that's coming.
I'd love to be able to say I supported that principle that thoroughly, so if you've got one besides "just talk them out of attacking your friends and loved ones," I'm all ears.
You probably look like a target for other extremist groups (Islamic terrorists, gangs, etc...). No one is talking about speech that incites violence though.
They're talking about social media and the definition of "fake news". As I've come to experience in my life a lot of people don't even realize how biased their points of view are.
Data and statistics can be manipulated to support certain points of view. Lots of fallacies are regularly exploited by articles of all types on both sides of the spectrum. If you leave a group of conservatives to define what is fake news and what is not, you'll get quite a different list than if you left a group of liberals to do the same.
There's a real slippery slope here. Free speech is as much a social convention as it is legal protection from the government. Facebook has a near monopoly on social media. Google has the same for search. If Facebook and Google get to be the arbiter of truth, then free speech is lost.
i dont think a person should downvote because the other person disagrees with them, or even if they are factually wrong - thats what a reply + source is for.
however, tattling to the mods because you are being downvoted and dont like it? good lord
It also has 179 comments (as of this comment). As I understand it, high comment rates can trigger the "overheated discussion detector" which can depress a submission's rank. HN isn't intended for and actively works against creating a community where flame wars (discussions that create more heat than light) are encouraged and proliferate.
I thought it was clearly stated. It's just not one of those things that adds to the conversation, except perhaps by demonstrating the same principles of the direct action via the downvote. It's so rare I get something I both disagree with and which demonstrates immediately by its subject matter how to deal with it.
There is a degree of truth in what you say, and there are bad actors, what makes you think Facebook isn't a bad actor either?
After all they care only about profit and keeping the users in their walled garden. So when you are talking about manipulation, do you consider that Facebooks actions as a company are very manipulative?
People don't like this. Please respond and tell me why.
Can you defend Trump? As near as I can tell he doesn't have any actual stances. He contradicts himself constantly. He acts like a child instead either a politician or a statesman. He turns down expert briefings. He appears to be embezzling money by having his security stay at his properties. He takes far too much vacation. He has a curiously large amoutn of ties to Russia and appears to have at least some unsavory ties with Russia. Anyone supporting this idiot is not qualified to pick a leader. I say that having voted for democrats an republicans.
I think many people are having to face what their "side" has become, in a bit more clarity than they are comfortable with. The Republicans traditionally kept the fascism and racism hidden to some degree, but Trump simply isn't capable of that.
So they retreat into philosophical arguments about how you can't deny Nazi's free speech, because that's unamerican and a slippery slope. While Republicans continue their decades of voter suppression in plain view, which is apparently cool. What about "I may not agree with your vote but I'll fight to the death to ensure it gets cast and counted"?
No, they know they need the votes of Nazis and racists, they know they need to suppress minority votes. They know they need to tell horrible lies to get angry rubes to vote against their own interests. They know they need to demonise minorities. And they're slowly coming to terms with the fact that "their side" could never win without all this. But they still feel dissonance so they down-vote and try to think of a way to spin it so they have the moral high ground. As if Trump isn't going to remind us they don't, every single day.
I think you are correct in several things, perhaps all things.
I am cool with nazis voting and I even think nazis should have freedom of speech. What is not OK is calls to violence and any other form of speech that directly hurts people (doxing, revenge porn, etc...). This is already illegal in this country and is in no way a slippery slope. We just need to enforce existing rules and laws.
You demand that we "kill all XXX" go to jail, end of story. That is not censorship, that is how you build a society.
It is unfortunate that platforms like Facebook have become the beacons of pessimism. I am talking in the context of the usage of social media tools to harm society, rather than help it.
For me, FB, TW, etc have become unreliable sources of news.
Here, FB is trying to limit ads from pages that share false news, but who will decide that??
1. FB - Leads to a dangerous slippery slope of putting too much power into a single,private, profit-seeking entity.
2. Users - It alienates sections of society.
3. Other sources - Inherently unreliable.
Seemingly, FB getting into the media distribution business itself is troublesome for a society, especially when you have a platform whose algorithms prioritize profit, consequently leading to construction of powerful echo chambers.
The trouble with these echo chambers is that they nullify efforts of the society to promote meaningful debate and discussion.
Even before the era of FB, the world was struggling with misinformation, lies, subversion of facts, etc. Now we have reached a point where Presidents can lie, often within a span of a few hours, and it's essentially forgotten and things move on. These echo chambers are the primary culprit for this IMV. When efforts to educate constituents is taken head on with echo chambers, the echo chambers inevitably win.
Reminds me of the novel where the speaker in a press conference is denouncing country A, and is handed over a note from his aide, and the speaker immediately switched the narrative denouncing country B, all the while the press simply accepts what is told.
"Fake news" appears to be "news I don't like" and has no correlation with the accuracy of the content. Conveniently, Facebook seems to agree with many major media outlets about what news they don't like, so they can present their arbitrary definition of "fake" as objective and conveniently no one can break through the bubble to prove otherwise.
If anyone wants an example of this, look at the coverage of the crowd size at Trump's inauguration. That's still held up as the canonical example of the Trump administration's "alternative facts" (in fact that's when the phrase was coined, I believe). But there's high resolution video of the crowds during the ceremony that clearly contradicts the photos of sparse crowds. I also think the guy is a lying moron, but the fact that that photo is still the cover image for campaigns against him should give people pause...
I'm talking about images like this: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2017/01/20/us/politics/trump.... You can count the lanes that run across the mall before you see any open space, and the photo on the right was clearly not taken any time near the actual ceremony because my memory of live video and recorded video during the ceremony simply doesn't come close to matching.
I really don't care how it actually compares to Obama, and I really don't see why Trump cared so much, but the fact is the pictures are clearly not "facts" either. Yet disputing them is still held up as a common example of "deniers".
That's a photo by the National Parks Service, timestamped 11:51AM, according to the Washington Post. Frankly I trust high-resolution photographic evidence vetted by the National Parks Service and the Washington Post reporting staff, over your memory of unnamed, unsourced live video. But yeah both sides, totally.
Yea that picture definitely reinforces the original Parks Service one. You can see all the empty space and people milling around, not that far in the background. The Obama inauguration was shoulder to shoulder standing room only.
They're using an increasingly popular derailment technique called the common ground fallacy.
The parent is asserting that the truth is merely a compromise between two different opinions, when in reality there's evidence enough to assert the truth, without making it a matter of 'right' or 'left' opinion. Their inability to provide their credible sources ("high def video") is because their opinion doesn't align with the reality of the situation.
And that photo is from the opposite direction, focuses on a different part of the crowd, and in no way contradicts the smaller crowd shown in the other picture.
You know you can rotate the image, right? There are clear landmarks along the mall, countable rows of people, and but a single section where it even comes close to matching up.
Of course I rotated it. And my point stands. The perspective is still different. The rows of people are countable, and looking at some of the further sections there is no way I would be able to count as many rows as at the other. There are 2 sections filled with people at the Obama one that are completely blocked off on the Trump one. That can't be argued with at all.
There are people who are good at estimating crowd sizes and I'll let them do their job. But, once again, this picture in no way contradicts the others.
Great example. FB is becoming a tool to assault rationality of gullible people ( mind you, I am an engineer, good exposure to various news sources, etc and I too have fallen for certain news articles), its extremely effective at nudging people into a fantasy comfort zone, and hold them there. The strength of its algorithm increases as a person is nudged further.
Can you share this 'high resolution video'? AFAIK, those videos were debunked as fake news because the National Park Services photos showed sparse crowds during the ceremony.
Yeah - see the CNN Gigapixel linked to in another reply. I was watching ABC's live feed, which is 8 hours on YouTube I don't feel like sifting through. Much of the debate is over whether or not it was bigger than Obama's, which I really couldn't care less about, and I'm hardly defending Trump's obsession with the comparison, but there's reliable sources matching Trump at the podium with a good view of a very different looking crowd. It's just hardly the case I would make about how it's all just "alternative facts".
The Gigapixel is a 360 of the stage so you can see which politicians attended, and not of the crowds in attendance, which the National Park Service's drones captured.
You said 'high resolution video' which the gigapixel is not. Can you link these reliable sources you keep eluding to?
Nah I'm done commenting on this. There's clear imagery from both ABC and CNN I've referred to elsewhere in this thread. And it's a bloody 360 image - how hard is that?. If you want to pretend those sources are right-leaning and pretend this is actually a clear-cut case of people being willfully ignorant, whatever.
If you're going to claim something is fake news and elude to 'high def video' proving it, then why can't you provide that video when someone asks for it?
I'm beginning to agree with you about this being "a clear-cut case of people being willfully ignorant."
Edit: The video you linked in your edit does not show the crowds. Why did you edit that video link in? Where is the high-def video you eluded to proving the NPS photos were fake news?
Some groups flat out make up news stories to fit some narrative. What else are you going to call that than 'fake news'?
'Candidate X comes out as gay.' 'Secret photos reveal candidate X at KKK lynching.' Are both rather over the top, but also the kind of lies that influence elections.
If you don't like that, you're going to hate the physical realm, where anyone can make any claim and you're left with nothing but your wits to discern the truth
> If you don't like that, you're going to hate the physical realm, where anyone can make any claim and you're left with nothing but your wits to discern the truth
So you're saying that we should let these organizations lie as much as they want, because people lie in your day-to-day life? The people you meet in your day-to-day life and lie to your face are much more limited in the number of people they can influence with lies.
Why shouldn't we make enormously more powerful institutions more accountable for lies?
This misunderstands the way technology, social media in particular, have exacerbated problems with misinformation. No one is claiming the media was perfect before. Obviously hoaxes and false rumors have always been a thing. But social media has made disinformation scalable.
For as long as I can remember, National Enquirer and other magazines like that adorned the racks of every grocery store and book store I've ever been to. Yellow journalism was coined as a term over 100 years ago. There's nothing new about "fake news". And it has been scalable since the invention of the printing press.
No one believed bat boy and even the plausible stuff in those was never the subject of design making. The National Enquirer is as much News as the Onion is.
The tragedy now is that there are sites that aren't neatly packaged as entirely false but are. The Internet has empowered people like Alex Jones and other people spouting pure falsehoods.
Speed and scale of speech do not impact whether or not it's got an equal seat at the table. It just means you're cool with any expression as long as it's not threatening. Which there's nothing special about, it's how basically everyone is by default. There's no principle there.
Propaganda is used because it works and scale ends up changing type. Consider the difference from 1 dead cell vs 1 million dead cells at the tip of your finger vs 1 billion dead cells in your arm.
but look at how you're framing it. the undesirable speech isn't a disease the body has, it's a part of the body. we are the collective, even the gross parts. if we want to change what we don't like, we do it with competing ideas, not by cutting them off
These are not competing ideas, they are just lies. I have no problem with the Weekly World News being on a fiction shelf, but we have libel laws for a reason. The truth does not have a sign outside saying 'This is true' and lies repeated often enough get a following.
PS: There is a huge difference between blowing things that actually happened out of proportion to support an argument and saying anything that someone might believe.
I find it actually kinda worrying that many seem to have a perception that making up news is a new thing. The only thing that has changed is the volume of information, people in control of news sources have been lying since time immemorial.
People believing in such vast quantities does seem to be new. I don't know anyone who believed the non-sense in the National Enquirer, but I do know a few people who buy because they think it is funny.
People, whole communities of people believe, non-sense today. Not small groups like Flat-earthers or chemtrail theorists who number in the hundreds or thousands (per their website/forums sign-ups). There will always be some people on the fringe.
We avoided truly ridiculous ideas for decades. Things like "911 was an inside job" or "Obama was born in Kenya" are believed by tens of millions of people. This is a new thing in my life at least. The last issue this big and this false was prevalent was McCarthyism.
Yes, some stuff is arguable, mostly when it involves politics, but there is a ton of stuff on facebook like "Bolivia expels McDonalds and Coca-Cola", or "check this video on why positive ions released by salt lamps can cure cancer".
Yes, there was an intentional campaign to conflate news that people didn't like with sites that were literal fake news, not mistakes or biased coverage, articles made up whole cloth to smear people and such.
> For me, FB, TW, etc have become unreliable sources of news.
For me, it has shown that a large chunk my social network is incapable of detecting bullshit. Last year I tried linking to Snopes or Politifact when people would post obvious falsehoods, but most people just don't care.
What I want from FB is a feed that doesn't include shares or likes of any external content. Seeing and reading about life events of my friends and family is what got me hooked on FB, but right now that's all lost in the torrent of bullshit.
I'd be careful, both Politifact and Snopes have been caught pushing their own slanted narratives. Example: When Bernie says black youth unemployment is ~50%, it's true. When Trump says the same, it's false.
I've had similar thoughts on where they draw the line between "Mostly False" and "Mostly True", but in this case it seems reasonable to give more credit to the one who responded to request for clarification and pointed to a specific study the number was drawn from. Still, I think "Mostly True" is a bit too generous for Bernie's claim.
You know, I've not paid attention too much when this argument is made since I usually keep my pony on snopes, not politifact, but I'm glad curiousity got me this time. This is a bit misleading in itself.
Bernie's saying its 50%~, Trump is saying its 60%~. Sure its a 8 percent difference at most, but that difference reveals how they got their number. The gist of both articles is that Bernie is inflating his number with people that have part-time work but want full-time while Trump is inflating with high school and college students.
The rulings on both articles basically point to this: Sander's number has more issue with semantics than actually including people that are not actively seeking a job like Trump's number. Trump doesn't get POF because of your objection: while derived wrong it's "decently" close. Quotes because an 8 point difference is very large when talking unemployment numbers.
Bernie's statement was limited to people with no education past high school; Trump's wasn't.
The inaccurate thing about Bernie's statement was that he cited U6 as a measure of "unemployment" when it would more accurately be called a measure of "underemployment". It includes people who want a full-time job but can only find a part-time job even though they aren't fully unemployed.
Trump cited 100% - labor force participation rate as a measure of unemployment, which is complete nonsense because it counts people who are full-time students or who are disabled as unemployed.
"Trump cited 100% - labor force participation rate as a measure of unemployment, which is complete nonsense because it counts people who are full-time students or who are disabled as unemployed."
Perhaps the point here is that what is "true" and what is "false" aren't entirely black or white. Depending on how you look at it, full-time students aren't employed; they are therefore unemployed. In some contexts, people who currently do not hold a job are an accurate representation of unemployed. And therein lies the rub: context is incredibly important.
I find recently that on political issues you need to read Snopes carefully. Often the real answer exists in what they carefully avoid saying. There is no such thing in politics as pure "fact checking". There could be; but there isn't
> ...dangerous slippery slope of putting too much power into a single,private, profit-seeking entity.
That's the problem. We're ALREADY THERE. It happened years ago. It's not a slippery slope, it's the thing behind us. And that's not even mentioning Google.
At least they're trying (VERY late, if you ask me). They could have chosen to let it continue and profit off it. After all we know it makes lots of clicks and ad revenue.
We can't pretend his is something that's about to happen. It HAPPENED.
I agree COMPLETELY. All I can say is 'at least they're trying' even if it's years late. I'd hate to see what happened if they didn't do anything at all.
There's an argument people make, that they ought to seek profit wherever it lies, without questioning who's paying that bill. I can see a whole bunch of scenarios where adopting that course of action would lead to some ridiculously disastrous results, quite a lot worse than doing nothing at all.
For specifics, look at entities in the world that are already known to spend lots of money in advancement of their narratives. We don't even have to look to Russia first. Try the fossil fuel industry.
I'm pretty sure the notion of a 'marketplace of influencers' through buying idea distribution on Facebook (with or without pseudo-grassroots camouflage) almost defaults to those who are up to no good: that's who has the money, in 2017.
The lying isn't new, none of the dynamics are new, it's just the sheer velocity it all happens at. You lie about something 100 years ago and the press talks about that lie for weeks or months because information moves so slowly. You lie today and there's another tweet to cover in an hour and people forget about it (like you said).
The funny thing is Zuckerberg has repeatedly used the line that "Facebook isn't a media company" which is either delusional and naive or Littlefinger doublespeak.
Well, the echo chambers, or at least the effectiveness of them is absolutely new.
In the past you shared and discussed news at gatherings of all kinds, and unless its a cult (which are easy to identify, and if required, outlaw) you had a fair chance of atleast coming across differing opinion. You had a face, a body and a mind attached to a differing opinion, a great humanizing factor. That is missing in FB echo chambers.
This is the real issue. Sure, there's the whole thing about it being a slippery slope to straight up shadow banning or otherwise censoring users deemed as "purveyors of fake news", but that's further down the road.
"The company has already been working with outside fact-checkers like Snopes and the AP to flag inaccurate news stories. (These aren’t supposed to be stories that are disputed for reasons of opinion or partisanship, but rather outright hoaxes and lies.) It also says that when a story is marked as disputed, the link can can no longer be promoted through Facebook ads."
If Snopes/AP tells me something is false, I'm perfectly willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps this will change in the coming decade, but for now, this seems like a perfectly reasonable heuristic.
Honestly, the fact that you think snopes is unbiased is pretty shocking to me, and gives me little hope that Facebook would ever be able to properly determine what is "fake news".
If I had to guess, they will probably deploy a human assisted AI that barely works, and rely on public outrage to handle any outliers that turn into a PR problem. It's worked so far for other internet companies.
If they're good, they get enough depth to explain what SMEs are talking about and to understand the difference between a huckster and an expert. And, amazingly enough, the SMEs themselves will disagree on fine points and big issues.
There is too much specialized information and knowledge for social media companies to be reliable arbiters of truth for any controversial topic.
This is really interesting. I wonder how it will effect Pages that are known for sarcastic/satire type of content on purpose. Pages like The Onion, Hard Times, etc. I feel like there would have to be a lot of work in the fact-checking part of this. At what point will it be too manual of a process, or will the algorithm start to fail on these "grey" areas?
Also, it's nice to see Facebook implement a feature solely for the user that could be costing them ad money.
I see a lot of comments on satire links that clearly demonstrate that large numbers of people can’t always spot satire. That possibly says more about the current cultural and political climate than it does about people’s gullibility though.
Facebook has over two billion users. "Users expect" a wide variety of different things, and I suspect if you polled them there'd be plenty who expect Facebook to do some curation, particularly in the "trending topics" sort of area.
There was a fairly well-known Facebook page called The Disciples of the New Dawn. They purported to be a cult-like Christian Fundamentalist group, and the page served as a distribution channel for image-macros that seemed designed to get a rise out of people. Things like training children for the militia, eschewing medicine, interpreting pop culture as signs of the end times, etc. The page was also clearly satire, and to lovers of deadpan humor, frequently amusing.
I first learned of the page in 2013, and I noticed that Facebook had removed it for Community Guidelines violations some years later. The page appears to be back now, but they now have very clear disclaimers that the content is satirical.
> The Macedonians may still be at it, because our Republican supporter, Todd White, was flooded with partisan posts. Worse, over a little more than two days, we counted 10 such posts in his feed that were fake, most accusing Democrats or their supporters of illegal activity. In all, White was clearly exposed to more spin than his Democratic counterpart, Chris Smith, who saw exactly zero fake news stories.
Sounds like there is an untapped market segment. By the next US election, someone will have figured out what kind of content gets Democrats riled up, and makes a ton selling headlines to the highest bidder.
Er, that's easy. It's done already by large corporate news sources. Just go browse The Guardian or The Independent (both UK outlets) to find a constant series of clickbait stories designed to maximally upset people with Clinton-style views. Random Macedonians can't make money doing it because those advertising dollars are already sucked up by much larger and better known brands.
There may also be a structural issue (in the USA). If you lean Democrat you probably trust mainstream US media sources like the NYT, Washington Post, CNN, ABC etc. These sources all very openly pushed Clinton and her policies. If you hear a story that sounds initially dubious, you search Google and you don't find anything to support it, you probably will conclude it's not true.
However if you lean Republican and already don't trust these media sources, searching for a story and not finding it will not tell you anything, because you are already expecting those sources to try and suppress information that makes left-leaning causes look bad. So you might find a bunch of YouTube videos or right wing blogs or whatever and conclude that is sufficient.
The US media does publish a lot of biased unfactual garbage, including lots of opinion dressed up as fact, but it's usually quite skillfully done and they avoid pushing stories that are trivially false like "Putin issues arrest warrant for George Soros".
Having swung right in recent years, I'm now dealing with this very problem. It takes a ton of effort to get the full picture on a given story. The more controversial it is, the more google's search results will be dominated by rags like Vox, Slate, and HuffPo.
Unfortunately we are stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, we could have completely open and unfiltered platforms which guarantee freedom of expression but at the same time leave our institutions (public and private) vulnerable to malicious influence.
On the other hand, we could attempt to build systems whose purpose is to remove fake news, so defending ourselves against a particularly aggressive form of attack on our institutions, but at the same time creating a situation in which that system is given the power to decide what is fake and what is not.
Are highly speculative opinion pieces which make accusations far from the main stream fake? What about when a complex event takes place and there are numerous 'takes' on how the event played out. Whose version of the events - whose version of reality reality - does the system use to make judgments on the veracity of news?
The situation is complex and we must tread carefully.
Facebook can easily just tag stories they think are false, and give people a button to hide or show such stories (or even show ONLY such stories to make it easier for people to build trust in the system). It would be a kind of spam filter for news stories.
Facebook could then stay neutral, could avoid claims of censorship, people who want to only see "true" news could be happy, people who don't trust Facebook's friends to filter their news feed could also be happy, and everyone wins.
They aren't doing that because their goal is not to help people detect fake/false news. Their goal is to suppress it entirely. They do this because like quoquoquo above, they believe their userbase contains vast numbers of sheep who are incapable of rational thought. Just tagging things won't be the "solution" to the existence of such people, which is why their tactics are controversial.
Are they right about their users? It's a big world. But rather than try to help people spot BS and learn from it, their view appears to be that such people are irredeemable.
They're correct. People cannot spot BS and learn from it, including you and I. We'll put much effort into mastering a certain area of reality and truth, and find other horizons clouding over by the day: we cannot, as humans, reality-check everything we're confronted with, because it's too much. We're not shepherds or subsistence farmers anymore, with a world tightly constrained and comprehensible. Our world expanded, leaving us behind.
I'm tempted to call this an iron law and suggest it's why we've never spotted alien intelligence in the so-vast universe. Perhaps intelligent species inevitably turn to expanding communication, and drown in it very quickly—their efforts turned to zero-sum gains, eventually triggering their destruction one way or another.
We live in a single objective reality. There are ways to get at the truth.
Some of those ways are even easy. Can the claims be tested, sometimes this can shortcut you strait to the truth. Knowing how to check sources gets you one step closer. Knowing how to assess the quality of sources, helps. Knowing how to understand the original source material is crucial. Checking that a multitude of sources agree. Determining if the sources are trustworthy (in the web of trust sense). In the case of claims about the natural world being able to duplicate experiments is the ultimate source of truth. There is more but much of this can be done with just a few web searches.
Many Millions of people don't or can't do any this. How many times have we fixed someone's else's computer with just a google search?
Now for the part where I get downvoted. I blame religion. If you do even the most basic checking into most religions they start seeming off. The sources are often unverifiable books. They make claims about the natural world that don't line up with evidence if they are even testable, worse they often contradict themselves. They often have a long history of actively covering up the truth of reality as best they can. What chances does a mind have at navigating a potentially nuanced modern political landscape when its critical faculties have been dulled to the point of accepting as literal truth some or all of the stories about virgin birth, miracles, resurrection, denial of evolution, implausible claims of the earth's age and many other manners of objective non-true things. Religion damages critical thinking. Demagogues and autocrats have always like reduced critical thinking.
That's a good step, I wonder how that effects pages which host widgets from "Outbrain" and the like. So Salon (for example) has a block of "you might also be interested in" articles scattered around their content.
Articles is a pretty charitable term for them I guess but headlines like:
"Tiffany Trump's IQ will shock you"
"You won't believe what she looks like today"
"Plastic surgery nightmares"
and so on... does Salon get docked for Outbrain's lack of integrity? Does Salon's "organic shares" get penalized? What about sputnik news or Russia Today (RT.com)?
I think it is a great step in the right direction, but they have far more responsibility than just refusing money from them for ads.
Bots on the Hamilton 68 dashboard http://dashboard.securingdemocracy.org/ clearly work together to amplify the voices of antidemocratic forces. FB & twitter should (in my opinion) detect and prevent fake-viral root and branch.
This will be a massive time saver for me. It's a real comfort to know that, from now on, all stories on Facebook will be real news. No more reading the articles to spot the BS, just a quick skim of the headlines and I'll be fully informed on the important matters of the day. /s
I've followed social media for a long time (starting back when one could actually read every single Usenet post daily).
There is a definite life cycle to social media sites. Those reaching the "too big to fail" stage are usually about to. AOL, CompuServe, MySpace, etc were all indominately massive juggernauts reaching to take over the media world - and vanished almost overnight. The sudden influx of editorial censorship in Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc is a clue that a large number of legitimate users (who just happen to hold differing expressions of differing views) are facing the option of leaping to another up-and-coming site. Between that, boredom with format limitations, and an otherwise growing sentiment of malaise, I'm seeing the signs that FB etc won't be with us much longer.
And no, it's not "different this time". It's the same this time.
Yeah, no. The reasons that those other systems failed has nothing to do with this particular issue. People will still be able to share their bullshit to like minded people to their hearts' content, which is how the vast majority of information gets shared through facebook. All facebook is saying is that they will not take money from these bullshit mills.
The vast majority of people couldn't care less about whether Breitbart gets to advertise on facebook. They aren't going to uproot their presence there to make a political point, either. Most of the people on the site who hold those views are 50+ year olds who want to see photos of their grandchildren. They can still get all the nonsense they want by watching Fox News in the evening, which is their preferred method anyway.
Imputing & dismissing a large fraction of your audience, or friends of your audience, as "deplorable" is not a wise marketing move. They may be 50+, they may watch Fox News, but they consider Breitbart a canary in the coalmine, and may prove quick to throw their not-inconsiderable weight behind cheesy non-sequitur upstart quietly years in the making.
Again: grandparents aren't going to abandon a website en masse, a website they use primarily to view photos of their families, just because they certain ads are not being shown.
Not stories. Not shared posts. Ads. They will still get all the ads they want to their hearts content from right-wing sources should those companies buy ad space, it just won't be from knowingly bullshit sources.
Breitbart? No. Rebel Media? No.
WSJ? Yes. The Hill? Yes.
It's not difficult to understand, and it isn't going to change anyone but a handful of nutball's facebook habits. There's no alternative platform in this space that isn't app-first, which eliminates it from consideration for generations that are and will continue to be desktop-first.
None of those previous platforms had anywhere near the reach Facebook has, or the amount of control Facebook has over the private and public communications and content seen by their users.
Yup. Was astounding that AOL bought Time Warner Communications, no previous platform had anywhere near the reach, nor the amount of control over private & public communications and content seen by others.
Scale may differ, but principles remain exactly the same.
I'm not ready to say fail but Facebook is not what it was. I go to it out of habit now and think very carefully before I post anything...then usually decide not to. It's boring. I think it will hang around like that land line phone number you had growing up (yes, I'm old. What of it?) but eventually your parents move to Florida and that number is gone. Facebook seems likely to degenerate into an old people's online contact list app
And something tells me that the political party that will benefit may invest heavily in these information-filtering companies (if they are not already), closing the circle.
I'm an ad buyer on Facebook and sometimes Facebook gets very strict, and they ultimately come to a compromise between ad performance/advertisers and their policies.
I know people are scared of 'censorship', but they probably will end up just targeting those crazy conspiratorial pages that clearly share the most bogus stuff to prey on people to later sell bogus products to. You'd be surprised at what's out there..
There's nothing worse about fake news than many other kinds of bad content -- the only difference is the attention it is getting right now.
When fake news passes from the spotlight, and something else takes its place, what will they do then?
Even if fake news is a larger business threat to facebook, they can't justify it to the public: "they are allowing horrible thing XYZ, but blocking fake news?!".
I think it's kinda pointless. By definition, false news generate some kind of shock feeling that urge people to comment and share the link, creating a viral loop of people (a digital angry mob) fueling the false content as real.
Blocking it to be advertised might - just might - slow its viral expansion. Is that the best FB can do about this?
Part of the strategy employed by mainstream media to misinform the public is _selective_ reporting. That is, either the entire event is not reported if it doesn't fit the narrative, or parts that don't fit the narrative are simply omitted or deemphasized. Will FB detect and demonetize that as well?
Then it's just one-sided censorship in favor of narrative peddlers who run major media corporations, and it has nothing to do with suppressing "fake news".
false news according to "fact checkers" are not 100% accurate and depends on the statement in which they are checking. you can see this by the careful choice of words in which something may be claim to be true or false when all actuality its more complex than that. it is weird why facebook would be getting into the realm of censoring things at all.
> it is weird why facebook would be getting into the realm of censoring things at all.
Not really. The entire Valley is beside themselves over Trump being elected and Twitter, Facebook, etc. feel partially responsible because Trump and his supporters were able to use the platforms to their advantage. To be outplayed by Republicans through the use of technology was previously thought impossible, so they're going to "fix the glitch" that made such tactics possible.
Eve if you ignore theoretical bias it may have terrified them to realize that they may have unintentionally had a SERIOUS effect on the ruler of the free world by not only allowing but accidentally promoting obviously fake content.
There was plenty of relief content that would have defected the election. The fake stuff may not have actually changed the outcome.
But to realize your 'keep up with my friends' business has the power swing elections? That has to be a terrifying prospect.
> But to realize your 'keep up with my friends' business has the power swing elections? That has to be a terrifying prospect.
I really doubt anyone at Facebook, Twitter, or Google would have said "oh my God, what have we done???" if some insidious bit of "fake news" helped Hillary be elected.
I wasn't trying to talk to these specific cases, but I would agree the valley leans left.
> I really doubt anyone at Facebook, Twitter, or Google would have said "oh my God, what have we done???" if some insidious bit of "fake news" helped Hillary be elected.
Really? If my choice got elected because of my site I would be happy I didn't lose but I would be TERRIFIED that I had so much accidental power. What if I'm not a good steward? What if I accidentally misuse it? What if someone else takes over and REALLY misuses it?
I think (hope?) people would understand the power involved and not want to mess with to much.
If Facebook had existed in the 1960s, after the Warren commission report, would articles speculating that Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy who did not act alone count as fake news?
The phenomenon we're talking about here isn't one that causes profound ontological and ethical questions. We're talking about simple, obvious bullshit.
Trump's statement is: "The National Debt in my first month went down by $12 billion."
Politifact's explanation begins thusly:
> The numbers check out. And in fact, the total public debt has dropped another $22 billion since the Gateway Pundit article published, according to data from the U.S. Department of Treasury.
Care to take a guess as to what the "Truth-o-Meter" rating was for Trump's statement? True? Mostly True? How about "Mostly False".
They make a valid point that it's hard to read into numbers like this after such a short period of time, but that's not what's being evaluated here. Was the single statement Trump made true or false? It was obviously true, but if you play enough games and dig deep enough you can somehow make the argument that he made a false statement (oh excuse me, they were quite generous by calling it "mostly" false).
Now the question you have to ask yourself is this: if I have a Facebook page that shares a site that simply reports Trump's statement, would I be subject to Facebook's new policy? I mean after all, a fact checker said this was a "false" statement, does that make this fake news?
Slippery slope arguments are not particularly convincing. You need strong argumentative support to make it plausible and work.
Just saying “A may be harmless but will lead to the unintended consequence of B” is just not at all convincing, as are most of the times slippery slope arguments are used.
Make no mistake, slippery slopes do actually exist, but that’s not some kind of automatic mechanism that always kicks in. If someone makes a slippery slope argument I want them to show me that those consequences are actually plausible.
This is a non-issue, friend. Fake news is any news that goes against our benevolent allies at Google, the SPLC, the ADL.. basically groups that never have any bias or self-interest. We can let great guys like Mark Zuckerberg oversee which information we need to know on all levels. We are in good hands!
I really really doubt that this is going to have any effect at all. Although many are septic of the attribution of "actual cyber attacks", I doubt that that skepticism can be stretched to include the disinformation/fud spread by the West or Russia.
That is to say (although it might not be the case now) that these websites/accounts are not dependent on ads for funding or growing their audience. This might cut down on lazy journalism (or churnalism as it's called) but as soon as the free proxies for the disinformation dry up, a couple of 'funded-behind-the-scenes' will take their place.
As for stopping the growth of the respective perpetrators audiences, likely also ineffective. There's a bunch of alternative platforms that lend themselves very well to fud spreading, twitter or a google search come to mind. Ultimately people, once converted, want to read and talk about the latest and greatest evil of <target>. No need to take out ads, your friends will want to tell you.
So you can't buy ads to bring people to your page.
How about you can't monetize your page? How about every time you do this you get shut down for X time (hours?) and it doubles every time you reoffend within a short amount of time. One or two free strikes.
So they _can_ identify such pages. This is a really small penalty. Why not just outright suspend such pages for a duration that increases with every offence?
Why doesn't facebook come out with there own online wiki and only allow stories based on approved of facts that have been vetted by members of internal fact team.
At least we would know what facts they believe and what facts they don't
This seems to be the same idea that Google rolled out over YouTube. Demonetize videos that "may not be appropriate for all advertisers." However, the videos which are usually being demonetized are those simply expressing a dissenting opinion. It's going to be interesting what this system classifies as "fake" or "incorrect" news.
If anyone selects for you what to listen and what to ignore, then you are allowing forces you do not control to decide on how to nurture your discernment about reality. In mass. Think about that.
As noisy as it gets, if we loose freedom of speech we will be gone.
I often see this talking point come from a certain segment of people with particular persuasions. It is extremely peculiar that you chose to link to a Daily Mail (I cannot articulate how ironic that is) article that uses another talking point/myth that's been appropriately cast aside again and again. Just for an observable example of the nature of the people that hold these persuaisans and view points, you can gather a list of subreddits that have submitted this article on Reddit and compare which subreddits it garnered attention on and which ones, again, appropriately cast it aside: https://www.reddit.com/submit?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailymail...
Is there any record of Snopes not living up to their stated goal, or doing anything that should have damaged their reputation as an organization?
I deliberately and ironically linked to the UK Daily Mail - the largest online 'newspaper' on the planet- and their Snopes story as an example of a 'credible' news site (despite all the click bait Taboola style 'stories' on it).
You don't have to look far to find troubling criticism of Snopes and their ad agency owners online
You backed up your point with a website that is staunchly pro pseudo-science and fear mongering, which contains multiple sources from the Daily Mail yet again to make their point.
Of course you won't have to go far to find circular sources in an echo chamber, but finding qualified sources for your point seems to be difficult.
You are clearly debating based on perceptions of my being part of 'a certain segment of people with particular persuasions'. I gave up Facebook but I am very interested in who gets to decide what information I am allowed to see via the internet.
I don't think either the Daily Mail or Snopes are credible information filters. I would hope for something better.
'Pseudo science' is another case in point. who gets to decide what is 'real' science and what is 'pseudo'? It's the same censorship challenge as the 'news' crack down on free speech...
No, your evidence is just form ridiculous sources. The "FoodBabe" article repeats the same nonsense from the DailyMail, and throws in some Monsanto fearmongering.
If you were applying for a security clearance and the government discovered you had massive amounts of debt and lots of questionable history that's ripe for blackmail, you would likely be denied. That's because those things could be used as leverage against you to make you act immorally.
So yes, I'm quite interested in the personal lives of the people running a company about to be ordained as "the objective truth" by Facebook/Google/et al
The thing is, fact checkers like Snopes and Politifact don't just give an opaque true or false proclamation, they explain how they arrived at that conclusion, which I think is the key bit. You're free to check the evidence for yourself and decide if their reasoning holds up. The people behind it aren't asking you to take their word on reputation alone.
Everybody can be leveraged. It's a matter of how vulnerable or weak the one being leveraged is, who's doing the pressuring, and what the latter stand to benefit by doing it.
For that reason, I'm also interested in who's being made the gatekeeper, because I already know who's out there wanting what, and how much capital they have. None of this happens in a vacuum.
I'm personally unsure how their relationship status impacts the credibility of the service, but it bring brought up by you does make me question the validity of your statement.
Really, a down-vote for this? Go back to the 1950's, that's the only place where someone's relationship status belongs in your judgement. If you cannot accept divorced groups, no wonder we suck at gender diversity and LGBTQ rights/representation.
Before someone asks, I'm not divorced or a member of the LGBTQ community, I just believe in the rights of others.
This is not a partisan issue, when you start down the road of handing the keys to shaping public thought to a powerful party, you're there when the power changes too.
This is no different than being able to tell when someone is bullshitting just as you walk through every day life, and thinking we need to shield the poor naive populace from harmful ideas is borderline stereotypical paternalism.
This is all obviously a big deal to old media, who have made an art not out of sharing incorrect truths, but of very selectively sharing truths, to the point that what emerges does not really represent the truth at all. They didn't lie, but they aggressively shaped. Of course democratic access to the pieces they'd rather suppress (on both sides) threatens that model. They'd love us to toss out this particular bath water.