Zuck's response | Hacker News Reader

Zuck's response

facebook.com

15 pointsamazedsaint7 comments

FB moderators already affects 'politically undesirable' content too much.

Two weeks ago, FB blocked an event page of Independence March, which traditionally takes place on November 11th (Polish Independence Day) in Warsaw. This is the biggest mass event of Independence Day, having more than 100k participants each year.

FB also blocked or removed pages of NGOs and political parties, which are organizing or support the march (some of them had 80k or 170k followers) and personal accounts of people involved in these organizations.

Then FB went full rage and started to block personal accounts of everyone who invited or even positively mentioned the Independence March, including for example the personal account of editor-in-chief of the second largest daily newspaper in Poland (https://twitter.com/sjastrzebowski/status/793001362070052864).

The most extreme case was the personal account of a MP, who wrote on his timeline: "I will be [on the Independence March] along with my family, whether FB likes that or not." (https://twitter.com/jakubiak_marek/status/793497135954202625...) His profile was blocked for 24 hours after that.

Another case was a personal profile of a retired Intelligence Agency officer, who revealed in a FB post, that a local coordinator of an anti-government liberal-left protest movement during the communist period was a colonel of Soviet-dependent military intelligence agency.

All of this happened just within the last month. FB actions generated a huge pushback and hit the headlines. Deputy Minister of Justice qualified FB actions as "censorship". Minister of Digitization tweeted that she "asked FB management for a talk". Many people started deleting their FB accounts in protest.

FB got frightened and reactivated the event page of Independence March, but many nationalist/conservative organizations profiles still remain blocked.

I'm sorry but spend 5 minutes with just about any Facebook user over the age of maybe 50 and it will be immediately clear how much "fake news" they consume--often indeed from Facebook. This seems like a no-brainer to me.

That said, I can understand Facebook not wanting to be the news police here. Not only is that an extremely hard problem, but it's also antithetical to their business from a platform and politics perspective.

> "Of all the content on Facebook, more than 99% of what people see is authentic. Only a very small amount is fake news and hoaxes. "

You've lost me at this 'Zuck'.

@ Facebook scale, w/ more than a active billion users, this is disingenuous, @ best-- what are the raw numbers? If the average user posted 100 articles during election season, then, less than a billion article postings were hoaxes? That is definitely NOT comforting...

With an estimate of 20/30% of bots/fake profiles (and it could be more), at least 31% of Facebook posts are fake News.

I suspect that the 99% number is a reflection of "unique number of fake content objects" rather than "number of times all fake content objects were shared or viewed".

Also, since we all have a tendency to build our intuitions through confirmation bias it's best to discount our anecdotal intuitions since they may not align with the actual numbers.

Are people are just fucking with him because they saw an opportunity do so?

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