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> 1) There's an irony that Vox of all companies is complaining that Facebook rewards click bait and punishes thoughtful pieces that require time to read and digest.

Yeah I had the same reaction. It was also somewhat rich that they cited a BuzzFeed article as evidence people are gaming our predilections for clickbait. Though, now that I think about it since it is clickbait, BuzzFeed would certainly be an expert there. And in a way, Vox also takes advantage of it. Here's a short selection of my favorite "Vox [explains x] in [<=500 words]" pieces.

http://www.vox.com/2016/8/29/12692546/obamacare-whats-wrong

http://www.vox.com/2016/7/15/12204172/turkey-coup-erdogan-mi...

http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/10/4/13155916/201...

http://www.vox.com/2016/9/7/12817566/donald-trump-immigratio...

Last one for kicks. To be fair to Vox, they do produce some long-form stuff and often link it at the bottom of these shorter pieces, but these explainers are not helpful and, I think, produce a rather shallow understanding of extremely complex issues.

The ideal article for Vox to write on these lines would actually be something like "don't expect to get any meaningful understanding of issues from articles that go viral through Facebook or other social media, and wait at least a couple months or years until a current event has played out so you have enough context and expert analysis on it to come to an informed opinion."

Unfortunately, that'd sort of undermine their entire business model.

You don't have to wait months or years. I've moved most of my media consumption from daily news broadcasts to a single weekly newspaper, which to me provides the most adequate balance between currentness and classification/interpretation.

I do similar via The Economist, may I ask what source you have found that you feel serves you on a weekly basis?

I'm subscribed to "der Freitag", a German weekly leaning on the left side, but with a healthy amount of internal debate. http://www.freitag.de

I got curious and read through these "less than n-hundred words" pieces you linked, and to me, they appeared very well executed. I cannot comment on the factual correctness of domestic American politics as I'm looking at this from Europe, but at least the summary of the Turkey coup is very much on the spot.

A single humanbeing cannot possibly digest long articles on every newsworthy topic. Therefore the short form is an important staple of news coverage. Of course you will be left with a "rather shallow understanding of extremely complex issues", but the point is that you are made aware that the issue exists at all.

> and which are evil and duplicitous. For some reason I strongly suspect that the set of stories they want deemed good are those that align with Vox's editorial philosophy.

Not "evil and duplicitous", but false and sensationalistic. I expect that Vox's opinion of what counts as both is biased, and you might think that Vox's own articles tend to fall into those categories. Certainly it is not always possible to assess truth in politics in a completely objective manner; I frequently read PolitiFact, and while I think they're decent, their fact checks often boil down to judging how accurately a short and necessarily imprecise statement describes a complex reality, leading to subjective rulings I sometimes disagree with. But some stories are just complete nonsense, like the "oversampling" example from the Vox article, and any reasonable observer really ought to agree on that...

So my question is what kind of thread model we're trying to design against.

Vox here seems to think that right-wingers generating click-baity bullshit is the big threat to democracy to design against. I agree that Breitbart et al. generate plenty more than their fair share of transparent bullshit. But I need strong evidence that that's actually a significant threat to the world.

What I see as the real threat is a cabal of the powerful defining strict limits on discourse to help generate consent around decisions that are toxic to most of the public and beneficial only to a small segment of it.

We've seen the latter happen recently: the Iraq War. You can get me to agree that the extreme nutty right believes lots of nutty, false things, but I don't see evidence that it has killed nearly as many people. Maybe if somehow Trump wins, and can attribute his win to false right wing bullshit, and he's actually as bad as the MSM says, it would work as evidence that that's a realistic threat model.

Then again, half a million dead bodies is a hard mountain to climb.

Yeah. It's not as though supporters of the other major presidential candidate haven't been spreading false stories on social media regularly. Some of them even spread to HN. Remember the non-existent dating service which claimed to be a UN member and accused Assange of pedophilia and the UN of conspiring with him? Remember the server sending out emails promoting Trump hotels that was mistaken for a secret communications channel with Russia? (That claim got tens of thousands of retweets; the debunkings got much less.)

Nope. I dutifully sent that debunking right down the memory hole.

>Remember the server sending out emails

Interesting 'fact' to cite. How many emails did that server send again?

The fact that two reasonable people like you can argue about it proves his point that Facebook shouldn't censor people's posts because they don't fit the mainstream narrative.

Do reasonable people argue that Clinton is a satanist who enjoys spirit cooking?

But they should not censor posts under any circumstances, even that one. The problem is the way stories trend and the order in which the feed is presented. The current algorithms and 'like' counting maximize shocking statements that confirm world views exactly because that will maximize user retention. Accuracy is completely deprecated.

Facebook knows this and is well aware that nudity (let alone porn) would overwhelm their site because it would be overwhelmingly favored by their systemic selection process. So rather than fix the process they censor that. This leaves things like accusing people of satanism or other false inciting statements to bubble up instead.

Unfortunately, facebook has no fiscal incentive to fix this. And it may not be a coincidence that UKIP, Trump, AfD, Le Pen expanded greatly after the emergence of facebook.

We obviously don't know, beyond the fact that it was communicating with a far wider group than just some Russian bank. (I wouldn't be surprised if no-one in the Trump Organisation knew either since it was outsourced.) That was the other problem with the original story; how could someone have access to a complete list of all the DNS lookups for that server? They'd have to have access to Cendyn's DNS server's logs.

The reason I count the story as false is that all the available evidence points to it being an ordinary mass mailing system: the horde of similar domains owned by Cendyn for the other hotels they do business with, the e-mails from it that have been found, the long trail of evidence showing Cendyn have been in this business for two decades and have had the Trump Organisation as a customer for 9 years, the existence of numerous DNS lookups not in the original logs offered by those pushing the story... When the only evidence is misinterpreting ordinary, boring activities, then it's a conspiracy theory. This is why it hung around for months without any of the publications that were offered it taking the story.

Though, a thought: it's possible in principle for Facebook to design an algorithm that is able to predict whether Vox editors will like or promote a particular story with high accuracy. What if FB did that, instead of using an engagement-driven metric of story quality? Would that be better or worse in their minds?

I'd be happier with it than human editors promoting Vox-approved stories, because 1) at least it'd be transparent what FB was going for and 2) it would be more fault-tolerant to an individual editor going off the reservation, by hook or by crook.

First of all, there's a difference between "Vox-approved" and what this article envisions Facebook's editorial standards would be. The article suggests "ensuring that conservatives are well represented among the people making editorial decisions" at Facebook; this is certainly not true at Vox itself.

But regarding your main point, about using algorithms rather than humans: it might work to some extent against clickbait or low-quality articles, which is part of what the Vox article is complaining about, but another part is false information, which isn't always possible for a human to distinguish at first glance, let alone a computer. It often requires a bit of research or context. 'Real' news organizations often rely on asking experts in the subject at hand, who can contextualize the information much better than any computer; Facebook's hypothetical editors might not be expected to do that, but they could at least do some cursory Googling, which it's still pretty unlikely a computer could do effectively.

some cursory googling would yield 'reputable' mainstream media sources calling Donald Trump the next incarnation of Adolf Hitler. So I really don't want my fb posts being censored by fb because a wapo article disagrees with me.