Facebook relies on editors' judgment for trending news feed, documents show
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
On two different occasions I've noticed a similar behavior on a "trending" news topic that was not trending anywhere.
Both cases (surprisingly) that caught my eyes, had to do with vilification of Iran. The first time, I assumed a certain organized PR effort or perhaps it was naturally trending.
However, the second time (May 9th) [0] it coincided with the Gizmodo's article coming out. That prompted me to search all major news sites (with the logic that if it was on some major news sites it will then circulate within FB and will explain why it was trend).
So I decided to document this, I checked CNN, HuffingtonPost, NYTimes, WashingtonPost...no mention of an "Iranian missile test" but there was a small blurb at the bottom of the FoxNew site [1]. Not enough exposure for it to get the kind of volume to be the top-3 trending story.
This is how the news media has operated in the US for almost all of its existence. I wouldnt be too concerned about it, just take news you read with a grain of salt.
If you're interested in Iran, you will probably see stuff about Iran that hardly anyone else sees.
I have zero interest in Iran and have never seen anything about it.
I also follow many people who posts news and information on Iran, and it's surprising none of them showed up on trending, except an article with intent of vilification. Seems unlikely.
Even if FB news is personalized, FB guideline indicates they can inject any news they want into this.
I noticed the same thing with the Yahoo News showing up on Yahoo email years ago and last time I checked continuing today. That source also rapidly became hawkish on foreign policy issues.
Your very small anecdotal evidence does not provide additional confirmation of the reported behavior.
We can argue about whether there's an ethical problem, but the assertion that there's any sort of legal problem seems completely arbitrary and partisan IMO.
"Fair and balanced" doesn't mean anything. Editorial control and algorithmic control are two different things.
> the assertion that there's any sort of legal problem seems completely arbitrary and partisan IMO.
I don't see any assertion that there's a legal problem in the parent.
It's also a meaningless distinction.
The point of contention is the bias, not whether the bias is imposed by an algorithm or by a human. People would still be complaining if Facebook had tweaked its algorithm to achieve identical outputs instead of employing humans to do it manually.
The truth seems to be somewhere in-between -- it was algorithmically generated and then the output was human-modified.
In general, I think the response to this post demonstrates the prevalence of magical thinking about computers, even by people who ought to know better. Bias is bias regardless of whether it's explicitly programmed behavior, emergent behavior from a carefully trained neural net, or enforced in human processes post-hoc. Distinguishing between these on the basis of where the behavior came from -- rather than whether or not there's a bias -- misses the point.
> I don't see any assertion that there's a legal problem in the parent.
The point of my post wasn't to contradict the parent post. There certainly are people who do claim it's a legal problem.
I know. I worked on the ranking.
Is there any method of validating this claim?
I don't think Zuckerberg is gonna call you and verify his employment.
All I can say, is why would I possibly lie to defend some minor product at a billion dollar corporation that I don't even work for anymore?
When you believe in a conspiracy theory, hearing "why would I lie" doesn't change your mind, quite the opposite. It's also not true that there's "nothing that anyone can say that would prove that any system works as described". There's no general statement that will convince everyone, because everyone has personalized doubt about it.
It's certainly possible to assuage the fears of a conspiracy theorist - take their examples, give a credible, particularized explanation(not a vague "it's algorithmic", but describe the steps in detail), and show some goodwill to address their underlying fears. What you perhaps wanted to say was that you don't really care about convincing conspiracy theorists, which is fine, but very different.
edit: wording
It has incredible reach and is quite effective in claiming attention. I actually had to use uBlock's element hiding function to keep myself from reflexively looking at it and reading a bunch of news stories. I would be surprised if that wasn't true for many people, as that's what it was designed to do.
I guess asking for proof is an unreasonable thing in this case as I can't think of what would actually constitute proof. I do think that additional questions are reasonable in this case as the editorial control of the ranking is currently a topic of national interest. I'm not really sure what that means exactly in this conversation, but I have a vague feeling that things that are big should be examined more closely. That's not super fair to facebook compared with a traditional media company, but this thing is new and isn't really like our models of how media companies like newspapers and magazines work.
It's a little scary because of the power a couple headlines sprinkled here and there have when they're seen be a lot of people. Something that was nothing becomes a scandal, lies become truths in the public consciousness and can't be fixed (look at the antivax movement). Of course, they also have the power to do great justice as well.
I guess, my point after all this text is still that what you've built isn't minor, there will be and probably have been real world impacts from it. Those impacts stem from public trust in FB's editorial position. If the public doesn't trust FB to show unbiased stories, they interpret the state of the world vastly differently than if they trust FB. This is why I think it's reasonable to have questions, even if they may be somewhat pointed at times.
That said, I really appreciate the fact that you took the time to respond to this thread. Talking to the people directly involved is a great way to disabuse one of falsehoods. :)
EDIT:
For an example of a reason why people are interested in this capability, imagine a rouge FB employee were to push the following headline to everyone: "US Nuclear Arsenal Almost Fired at Russian City" The world would see this post made by one person, and the fact that it was pulled nearly immediately would be seen as evidence by some of a cover up and could add tension and possibly instigate an international incident. Until this generation died, you would have people all over the world that would believe that the US nearly nuked a Russian city without provocation.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/12/facebook-...
If you really care, it uses a GBDT and the newly released Facebook Flow.
Facebook's employees repulse me.
Complex algorithms certainly do exhibit bias, and not only that - it's intentional. The whole point of a "trending" topic is to discriminate (i.e. inject bias) trendy topics from less trendy topics.
So you're talking about only adding the bias you want it to add - but I hope you can imagine that's an impossible cause to get 100% correct. There's no rigorous definition of trending; nor is there a rigorous definition of the topics to be selected from, nor are lots of other matters here rigorously defined. There's no way you're going to do better than some fuzzy algorithms trained on real data. Critically, that tends to mean real data generated by... biased humans.
Having humans involved will distort that process, thus meaning true trending does not exist. Well, on Facebook at least.
What make it 'horrible' in your view? An implicit suggestion that 'trending' is mathematically deduced a la Reddit's 'Hot'?
In other words, they are lying. 'Trending' should be calculated directly as topics of highest interest over all users. If it's not it's a manipulated figure.
Perhaps users on FB find it more interesting and they surface it. Why does news on FB have to mimic the mainstream media?
Many times we have to read the stories about the US as reported from other countries because the MSM misses them or decides they aren't important enough.
[0] - https://www.facebook.com/business/help/community/question/?i...
It's up to us, the consumer, to vote with our feet. I haven't used Facebook in years and I'm certainly glad not to be using it now that this comes to light as I disagree with it's agenda.
Does anyone have an alternative argument as to why Facebook DOES NOT have the RIGHT to suppress and promote information based on it's own agenda?
Rather than oversimplifying, I think the OP is more likely correct and I fully expect Mark and team to wake up in the morning wondering how they can use their privileged access to many millions of users to advance whatever agenda they are supporting that day (political or economic); within some limits of "seemliness", of course. I expect them to act on those thoughts, too.
Perhaps it is an oversimplification to bundle ideologies into a monolithic "left" and "right"; reality there is more complex than that. However, for the purposes of generalization it's not unreasonable to group people together when many of their ideologies bear resemblance to the archetypes of political division. To be overly literal about that is, itself, being overly simplistic.
[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/02/26/467...
He's been calling out people who vandalize messages they don't like - in particular, BLM.
His quote from that article explains it
"'Black lives matter' doesn't mean other lives don't. It's simply asking that the black community also achieves the justice they deserve. We've never had rules around what people can write on our walls — we expect everybody to treat each other with respect. Regardless of the content or location, crossing out something means silencing speech, or that one person's speech is more important than another's."
There may be other cases of him pushing the "left agenda" but I don't think the article you link shows it.
Ha! Yes, actually it does mean that. Otherwise you would not single out a single group as more deserving of life than others.
When you call out a specific thing in your argument, you do that to specifically exclude other similar items.
It doesn't say "Black lives matter more than others."
Everyone who understands why it's "Black Lives Matter!" instead of "All Lives Matter!" also understands why you think it should be "All Lives Matter!", we just disagree. There's no subtlety to your point, it's blunt and easy to understand.
The difference is, people who think it should be "All Lives Matter!" don't understand why we think it should be "Black Lives Matter!". There's a nuanced point that you don't seem to understand. When you suggest that we're saying black lives matter more than any other lives, you make it clear that you don't get it. This is fine, if you stop misrepresenting the intentions of others they might be willing to explain it to you.
Edit: And by the way, you don't have to agree with it the nuanced point in order to understand it. So Zuck insisting people not cross out "Black Lives Matter" is not him pushing that as an agenda -- it's just him showing an understanding that "Black Lives Matter!" is not the same as "White Power!"
Really? Didn't this slogan arise in the context of a black life trying to kill, or at least harm, another life? How can they possibly defend such a person? And to make him the center of this saying?
It's very clear they mean "Black life matters more than other life." If they meant anything else they would not defend attempted murderers and thugs.
>>> white_lives = {"matter": True}
>>> black_lives = {"matter": True}
>>> black_lives['matter'] == True
True
It doesn't work that way in English. If you call it out it's because you feel there is something distinct about it that is different from the other members of its group.
Saying "Black lives matter" implicitly says "and others don't", and even if you won't agree to that, at a bare minimum it says "black lives matter more than other lives".
It doesn't help that this slogan arose in a context of defending a black life that was trying to take another life, or at least harm another life. By defending such a person, as they have done, they are very clearly saying "that black life matters more than other life".
Context matters. Every time they use that saying it reminds people that these activists are defending attempted murderers.
Exactly. The thing that's distinct is that, in the US, it is necessary to assert that black lives matter. It's not necessary to assert that white lives matter because that's a given.
You may not agree with that view, but that's the view held by most people who say "Black Lives Matter!" You seem convinced that your alternative hypothesis is true, that we all think black lives matter more than other lives. Ask yourself honestly if your alternative hypothesis is just a convenient straw man, easy to argue against, easy to use to cast people who disagree with you as horrible people.
I'm curious what you think of the common advice of parents to little boys, "Treat women with respect." Would you start blathering about how you should treat everyone with respect? Obviously you should treat everyone with respect, but there's a reason to call out women in particular as deserving of respect -- because it's all too common for them not to get it.
You may not like this way of getting a point across, but if you pretend it doesn't exist you risk coming off as a person who doesn't understand nuance.
So, now that you understand this, could you please stop suggesting that people who support "Black Lives Matter!" think other lives don't matter as much?
No, I don't think all of you think that. I definitely think the founders of the movement think that.
> I'm curious what you think of the common advice of parents to little boys, "Treat women with respect."
Since you asked, I would find that quite sexist and I would never tell anyone that, because it implies that women are inferior and need special protection.
If in fact they do need special protection, then fine. For example the anti-discrimination against blacks laws of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.
Now, I know what you are thinking: Blacks do need special protection, so we need this slogan. Except that the heroes of the slogan are criminals who brought things on themself.
The fact that that is the origin story of the slogan is a big problem for me, and I have a hard time accepting that anyone would support it.
> You may not like this way of getting a point across, but if you pretend it doesn't exist you risk coming off as a person who doesn't understand nuance.
I understand it, I simply disagree with it. It's not the same thing.
> So, now that you understand this, could you please stop suggesting that people who support "Black Lives Matter!" think other lives don't matter as much?
I'll stop suggesting it, when they stop supporting criminals.
For example, I would routinely fire most employees who expressed sentiments similar to Donald Trump's in an office. I would not censor Trump from customer feeds though.
The power Facebook has. Power needs to be controlled. As a lefty-ish person I'm not up in arms about this, but I see the problem.
By whom? I'm legitimately asking this as a lefty-ish person.
It is controlled. You're suggesting that it should be controlled by different people.
The article specifically points out that human editors were introduced after Facebook failed to surface Ferguson protests—making it look bad because those protests were in fact trending on Twitter. Moreover, some theoretical perfect algorithm could have asserted that was a trending topic.
In fact, there is not perfect algorithm for determining what is "trending." Part of hiring human curators is to train an algorithm which can more effectively use judgement in figuring out topics which are truly trending/newsworthy/interesting instead of coincidentally used a lot without being valuable (ex. #FollowFriday).
Moreover, it seems clear that injecting stories is actually relatively rare. The primary reason to have human curators is to do filtering to prevent the junk from showing up in trending.
This is only biased if we can provide concrete evidence that similar tabloid-esque publications that happened to align "left" of the political spectrum in the U.S. were allowed to pass while their political counterparts were passed up.
If the standard for journalism remained constant, but the sources that were "suppressed" largely happen to be conservative that doesn't seem like a problem with curation, it seems like a problem for the conservative media ecosystem.
I fully expect, despite adhering to basic scientific principles, to be downvoted yet again in this thread, because I already see a lot of the same names from the last time this article was posted and politically charged rhetoric (i.e. "leftist agenda").
If Fox News had actually reported the truth all the way through the campaign, they would not have been surprised.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/blog/2012/nov/07/barack-oba...
Even if they were detached from reality, I'd say that was a huge punch in the nuts for the Democrats after re-electing their president to a second term, and holding a super majority for 2 years.
You wanna know why Donald Trump has swept the Republican establishment? Because after all the promises by the Republicans about what they were going to do after being elected, they've done almost nothing they promised and their constituents are pissed and sending a message - time for the establishment to go.
It doesn't matter if Trump wins or not. The message has been sent, and if the "establishment Republicans" don't get it, and get in line, then they might as well hand the Presidency back over to the Clinton political machine.
You seem to be calling holding a majority in the House and Senate a "super majority," that's not what a super majority is. Generally in the U.S. federal government a supermajority requires 2/3rds in the respective body (e.g. a party holding 67 seats in the Senate would have a supermajority there) [0]. Senate rules also make 60 seats a magic number to reach on many votes but one party hasn't held that many seats since 1979.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermajority#Federal_governme... [1] http://www.senate.gov/history/partydiv.htm
Facebook doesn't target a different population segment or a different political segment of the US, or even the US. It wants everybody to be on Facebook (if they're over the age of 13). That's how it got to $1.65bn users.
Its current "agenda" is based on reputable news sources, plus Fox News (1):
"We measure this by checking if it is leading at least 5 of the following 10 news websites: BBC News, CNN, Fox News, The Guardian, NBC News, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Yahoo News or Yahoo."
I'd say that was a fair reflection of mainstream media.
If you object to those, what's your personal agenda based on, and how mainstream is it?
(1) Fox News has specifically said in court that it is not required to be truthful.
(If you're gonna be That Guy and hurr about sports being entertainment, you can pass.)
As previously mentioned their sports coverage is superb.
Yahoo has at least experimented with original content but I am not sure if they still have it.
I don't see the need for you to put those digs in against Fox News.
I get people don't like Fox News. I'm not a fan. But everyone here (on the whole) seems to hold a similar opinion, so the digs aren't necessary.
They weren't even germain to your point. You were making a perfectly good argument that numerous sources from both sides of the spectrum were included. I felt your commentary and singling out of Fox News distracted me from that.
If this bothers you, contact Fox.
If you had editorialized about the quality of the other sources then the commentary on the quality of Fox would have fit in.
your comment seems like two disparate things in one. On the one hand it notes that Facebook appeared to try to balance things. On the other hand it felt like a slam at Fox News couched in the form of a comment that might fit in. Clearly you can't write "Fox sucks" as a comment because it wouldn't be in topic. But if you weave it in...
It just distracted me from what I took to be your point, harming the force/usefulness of your comment.
Secondly, I too won't claim that FOX News isn't uniquely bad. But the criticism of it that people toss around always feels kneejerk rather than pointing out they're leading the pack of disastrous "news" programming. After a decade of Jon Stewart vilifying FOX News, he didn't get actually people to think critically about news sources - just FOX. And it's not even critical thinking, he just managed to demonize the outlet away from being taken seriously.
What is the purpose of pointing out FOX is a bad news org to a left-leaning crowd? Or a mixed crowd that is smart enough to already know of the well-established criticism of the network? I can't help but see it as perpetuating demonization rather than elevating critical thinking applied to all news sources. In either scenario FOX News is trash, but only one scenario are you actually helping people become better news consumers.
Unless you're a publicly traded company, which Facebook is. Then you are beholden to the people who are invested in your company; some of which I would assume are probably conservative and right leaning.
If FB was still a private company, then yeah, your sentiment holds true. All bets are off when you're a publicly traded and funded company. At that point, it's the investors who tell you what the direction of the company is. Don't like it? Then buyout all the shareholders and return your company back to the private realm.
We all have legal rights to do things that are morally wrong. He has a resposibility to the world to be a responsible citizen, just as we all do.
Prior and current generations of responsible citizens are mostly responsible for Facebook: Without generations of people doing the responsible thing, even dying, for democracy, liberty, science and technlogy, education, infrastructure, law, etc. ... he'd be living in a country and world where there would be no technology, legal rights, literacy, or many other things necessary to Facebook.
What I would compare it to though are other deceptive business marketing practices like photoshopping before and after pics for weight-loss products, or marketing your dog food as premium, all natural meat based when it is in fact the same junk, bought from the same supplier, as another dog food brand that costs half as much (and is specifically called out as inferior in commercials).
At the least, even if not criminal, it would seem to open the door to civil lawsuits.
It may be a little nit-picky to point it out, but in the general sense this isn't true. As soon as the company went public it stopped being Mark Zuckerburg's business and enterprise, becoming instead the property of the shareholders who employ Zuckerburg to look after their company. Zuckerburg owns less than 30%.
http://venturebeat.com/2012/02/01/zuck-power-play/
But the point remains, even if it's kind of technical when he can always outvote everyone else. He can't treat the company as his personal fiefdom if it crosses the legal interests of other shareholders. If he goes too far they can probably sue successfully.
It wouldn't. Not for end users anyways. It would be a marketer's dream.
If you feel like that's the way things should be, write one. Make it popular. Sell it to Facebook. (And use the money to buy stock in your roommate's new online marketing firm)
"The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program." [1]
I doubt Facebook marketers have the same kind of standards.
Children believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Is it shocking that they're wrong?
Trending implies humanity cares about it, which to the lowly average-joe means humanity cares about it, so s/he should too. This is the part that feels disingenuous on Facebook's part.
Of course even average-joe knows (though probably can't express) that everything around him just wants to consume his attention, so I'm also not overly concerned about it.
That's true. The issue here isn't that Facebook tried and failed to implement an automatically generated news feed. The issue is they were called out for bias in the news feed, and then tried to deflect by blaming it on a computer.
Twitter also likely uses manual curation.
If Facebook improves an algorithmic system augmented with human consensus (that diffuses the editorial control among a group of curators), it will be the least biased of all the mentioned systems.
There's still a heap of people that cry foul about Murdoch, especially here in Australia. News Corp has a near-monopoly on the news here, and people do get vocal about it.
There is absolutely no evidence that you can pay to get into trending.
If there were, it would be a much bigger story than this flimsy article which is rooted in the editorial judgements of a few contractors.
It really annoys me when these drive-by insinuations about "promoted content" are made. Digital media companies—including news outlets, Facebook, and Google—all actually are careful to label anything which is paid placement as such. All these baseless accusations of unlabeled paid placement do is undermine the moral standards for labeling paid placement.
If you are going to make extraordinary claims, please bring extraordinary evidence.
Companies providing perks, quid pro quo services, pre-written news stories and other non financial advantages are part of the game. None of those would trigger any of what would be labled as paid placement, but are still promoted placement.
It is also worth noting that FB trending topics can be tuned.
Maybe they don't frame it very well but we should probably assume people are making decisions whether its the people who are building the algorithms or hand-picking the content... someone's bias is going to work its way into there.
And I'm no fan (or user) of FB.
This strikes me as interesting, if only because it says something about the audience of Facebook users.
Sense of community aside, the reason I keep coming back to HN is because I trust that the audience will upvote stories that are interesting to me.
I guess because Facebook has such wide community demographics, it can't rely on its users to do the policing.
Will there be hearings about Fox News and whether they are biased?
I do have a concern: Facebook isn't a journalism organization, run by professonal journalists with their priorities, values and expertise. They could be very manipulative; many News Corp / Rupert Murdoch publications already do this.
Algorithmic trending based on what is popular with human filters to weed out only NSFW stuff appears to be the way to go forward.
I cant blame facebook. We live in a world where if a company's experimental AI classified black people as monkeys we somehow think that is racist and make the company stop those AI efforts.
In reality a truly neutral platform would trend what is really trending, if it is racist slur so be it because then the media is truly holding mirror to the society. That is how we might get better. Else everything becomes one large safe space which is death of intellectual speech.
It's raison d'etre is to expose people to stories beyond the narrow bubble of their news feed. But apparently people don't like the idea of using human curation to get well-balanced stories in front of readers, so it would be much better if people only spent time reading cat videos in news feed.
Also, people need to make a clearer distinction between the trending topics view and news feed. They're separate products with different algorithms entirely.
I'm disappointed we don't have something similar for detecting authority, and measuring the opinions of those with authority.
For instance, if there were an article about chess, I would trust Bobby Fischer and Gary Kasparov to provide the most valuable commentary. If they say it's great, I'm more likely to read it.
But if there's an article about Jewish business owners, I don't want to see Bobby Fischer's opinion.
If there's an article about the government providing welfare and social services, I don't want to see Kasparov's opinion.
How is this not a thing for science, technology, news...?
"This technology article should scare you!" If I see that from Linus Torvalds, it's going to get my attention. From John McAfee? Not so much.
"Nvidia's latest drivers are terrible." If that's from AnimeFan2004, I don't care. If it's from John Carmack, holy crap does it deserve my attention.
More importantly, if John Carmack trusts someone about computer graphics, I'll probably trust them, too. If they trust someone else about computer graphics, there's a good chance I will, too.
We've gotten used to seeking out the opinion of Rotten Tomatoes, or the old Siskel and Ebert thumb-based-metric... It's a shame we don't have a browser extension that brings those metrics to everything we see on the web.
I'm watching the trailer for the new Marvel Civil War movie... and I see a Pop-Up-Video style bubble informing me that Kevin Smith really liked it.
I'm reading an article about how Facebook is bringing internet, but not really internet, to India, and I see EFF crapping all over it. Right there - right on that same web page, because my browser extension brings that content in for me.
I'm reading an arxiv about gene transfer in plants, and I see experts in the field saying they question the methodology.
It just sucks to me that we don't have a PageRank for authority on topics... And we don't have a way to show those scores and opinions, THAT WE TRUST, stuck to the content.
For instance, I trust Al Gore on Climate Change. Other people probably trust Donald Trump on Climate Change. It needs to be per-user to determine their authority-trust links.
Or helping determine our news feed. (To finally relate my comments back to the topic at hand.)
Genuine question.
I'll gladly take a little news from a source that's not obviously pitching me the Democratic talking points night in and night out.
Fox, like Trump, doesn't feel the need to tell the truth. MSM (1) generally does.
(1) For Facebook, MSM means: "BBC News, CNN, Fox News, The Guardian, NBC News, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Yahoo News or Yahoo."
Even if you don't agree with an opinion, that doesn't make it wrong. You may be even more biased the other way.
If you are not correct, then your opinion is not worth very much. See: birthers, anti-vaxxers, chemtrails, intelligent design, faked moon landing conspiracists etc.
Fact-checking cannot provide the kind of metric you talk about for rhetorical devices that are not drily descriptive, such as irony, hyperbole, allusion, etc. It helps that the readers have a way to look up the facts if they don't know them, but the analyses need to be read critically, same as the original statements. It's no good if you distrust one set of people and uncritically trust another. On what basis? You don't trust the politician, that's good. You don't trust some media, that's also good. But whoever in the media you choose, don't trust them blindly, they are just normal people, not superheroes.
Take, for example, this statement: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/may/... There is no clear-cut right or wrong. Same-day voter registration puts a pressure on the bureaucracy to be more forgiving and less thorough; that's a fact. But is that driven by the political elements who benefit from illegals voting, and do people on either side actually believe that it has an effect? That's not a factual question, that's a question for a political debate. Mr Trump's hyperbole captures this with a surprising pith.
The certainly do. You can see that Trump is telling the truth 2% of the time and is mostly true only 6%. Most of his claims are not true. http://www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/
For comparison, Hillary Clinton rates true (23%) or mostly true (27%) http://www.politifact.com/personalities/hillary-clinton/
> There is no clear-cut right or wrong.
Trump's claim was analyzed. Independent experts were consulted. It's obvious why the ruling went against him.
I don't think distinguishing between hyperbole and lies is Politifact's problem. It's simply calling a lie a lie.
I appreciate that Trump tells lies for political advantage, and that most politicians do the same. However, Trump is in a different league from Clinton, just as the NYT is in a different league from Fox News.
> Trump's claim was analyzed. Independent experts were consulted. It's obvious why the ruling went against him.
> I don't think distinguishing between hyperbole and lies is Politifact's problem. It's simply calling a lie a lie.
When I was growing up in the Eastern Bloc, we looked up to the U.S. for their people's ability to think critically and to have their own informed political opinions. I am horrified at your implying that you outsource your thinking. We used to say, "experts were consulted", "it's obvious", "the ruling went against him". That's totalitarian language, describing a totalitarian concept. Why would you throw away your freedom of thought, willingly to boot?
Let me invite you to analyse that statement by Mr Trump and its analysis by Politfact and my comment above. What is your opinion? Can you give good arguments for it, and anticipate counter-arguments against it?
> we looked up to the U.S. for their people's ability to think critically and to have their own informed political opinions.
Don't confuse opinions with facts. Opinions are personal and facts are (as far as possible) universal.
However, I'm unlikely to have a good opinion of someone who says too many things that are factually untrue, which is the case with Trump and Cruz.
> When I was growing up in the Eastern Bloc
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Eastern Bloc had rulers who could say things that weren't true and not have those things exposed as lies by the MSM. That's why we fact-check both Trump and Clinton. That's what democracy is based on.
> "the ruling went against him". That's totalitarian language, describing a totalitarian concept.
No it isn't. There's absolutely nothing totalitarian about it. It's exactly the reverse.
On the evidence presented by Politifact, what Trump said wasn't true. If you want to dispute that, you have to disprove the existing information or find more information that contradicts it.
Merely having an opinion about it adds nothing: it's not worth a damn.
Same-day voter registration puts a pressure on the bureaucracy to be more forgiving and less thorough; that's a fact. But is that driven by the political elements who benefit from illegals voting, and do people on either side actually believe that it has an effect? That's not a factual question, that's a question for a political debate. Mr Trump's hyperbole captures this with a surprising pith.
Politifact [...] is [...] not a[n independent] third-party watchdog. [... Further, f]act-checking cannot provide [data about speakers' telling the truth] for [statements using] hyperbole [...].
Your overarching position seems to be that this stuff is too complicated for you to reason about on your own, and you need to rely on other (presumably qualified) people to do some of your analysis (I disagree); Politifact provides a good unbiased, trustworthy, well-sourced, and most importantly impartial set of facts (I disagree); and the candidates that have the most fraught relationship with truth just happen to be those who you oppose politically (we may agree on that one). That's, I believe, at the core of a big problem with American journalism: the intellectual trepidation to analyse facts independently, based on all available evidence, and present a conclusion that is one's own; in a word, the pretence that a journalist can escape bias by simply choosing between what others are saying, without ever directly challenging their reasoning or assumptions.
That is not really important: all I'm asking of you is to present, preferably without swearing, your own reasoning for why you think Mr Trump gave anything but an honest answer on this particular occasion?
Now you're just being stupid. And insulting.
> preferably without swearing
Since I've shown no propensity to swear so far, I take it you feel your message is patronizing enough to prompt a swearing response?
Something far more meaningful than people I know who simply dismiss Fox News since they are right leaning. I'm actually surprised how many stories end up on Fox News that's never reported in the MSM.
If you're going to be myopic in how you get your news, why should I be surprised your views are just as narrow as the sources you get them from??
In the good old days of the Soviet Union, we could "read between the lines", because the censorship system was not very effective, and the journalists were pissed off. But we still failed horribly at understanding what the world looked like west of the border, and imagined capitalism was some lesser form of paradise, and were quite surprised when we had to start living it.
Personally, I am weary of reading people who I know try to manipulate me. I always suspect if they try hard enough and long enough, they may succeed. What is your method, and does it work?
So, in some ways they are a news feed monopoly because they have little competition in a space where for a significant proportion of the population it is their main news source.
On the other hand, I can see the attraction to curate/censor the news.
Let's say there is an event in some volatile country and there is news which if widely exposed would essentially pour fuel on a fire but the event which would stoke the fire is not incidental but you know could be used as an excuse for violence and result in numerous deaths. I can see the desire to keep people alive and protecting property by moderating the news, at least temporarily till things cool down.
[1] https://www.fcc.gov/media/program-content-regulations [47 CFR 76.205] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/47/76.205
I'm an investor in Facebook and no longer one in Twitter, but I can't think of anything more I'd like than to lose than my money on Facebook.
1. https://stratechery.com/2016/the-real-problem-with-facebook-...
You don't have to look further than Twitter for examples of all of the above.
If you want people protected from harassment and bullying, perhaps it follows that you would enlist the help of some of the more valiant SJWs. After all, who should know more about bullying than bullies themselves?
[0]http://www.vocativ.com/290811/twitter-accused-of-censoring-a...
There will be a day of reckoning for the social media giants where they face telling their shareholders that XX% of their users... don't exist. And then soon there will be a whole tech-point-o iteration of new social media startups who focus on ensuring their user base is real, and that their feed algorithms can't be gamed by money or teams of people working artificially (with bots or AI) to influence opinion.