Facebook’s Walled Wonderland Is Inherently Incompatible with News | Hacker News Reader

Facebook’s Walled Wonderland Is Inherently Incompatible with News

mondaynote.com

369 pointsdrallison229 comments

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Simply incredible. They are asserting themselves only as a business and not emotional influencers. The emotional influences that facebook brings in people is very powerful. I have seen so many of my friends just vanishing from my feed and almost all of my feed is filled with a couple of pages that I see/interact often. The bubbles are getting incredibly smaller that its very worrying.

A very good example that I saw is the `demonetisation of higher denominations` in India. I was shocked to see the amount of ignorance my close friends showed on how the poor people of our country were left to suffer. So many never read any sort of arguments against the govt's move. They read only pro posts. They were quite visibly upset when being told about how 70+ people have died because of this and all that. I saw a bubble being burst with my own eyes. When there is no way to argue then its not a democracy at all. It favors fanatics because hate/fear spreads faster than love/acceptance.

Facebook simply kills democracy for their own benefit.

It's not just Facebook, but also Twitter and Reddit.

The Republican guy that shot the pizza place in DC today was driven by a conspiracy theory marketed on Reddit.

These social-media sites are literally dangerous.

I dont see this kind of influence from twitter and reddit. The personal feeling in facebook is far far higher than twitter and reddit. I have never used reddit. The active user share is no where close to facebook. Their reactions buttons are very much reflective of people's views.

Trump tweets lies to 16 million people at a time.

The Pizza shop conspiracy was heavily marketed on Reddit, and I'll bet the shooter today got all his info from there.

These platforms have a HUGE problem.

I follow him but i have never seen his tweets though. They are big but not as big as facebook especially in the emerging markets.

My mum uses FB everyday but she has no idea about reddit whatsoever. She has heard about the name twitter from some news channel. Do you understand the difference?

> My mum uses FB everyday

Facebook has 1.7 billion users; that is more than Twitter's 313 million and Reddit'a tens of millions [1].

I am agreeing with your point, in this limited case, albeit not with how you're making it.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...

Yo I'm from India.

I've read quite a lot about that and I have yet to see anyone advocating for violence. This guy would appear to be a lone nutcase.

Hardly any different than fanatic religions. Even the KKK gets freedom of speech and assembly. I think the problem with digital walled gardens is when the filter totally prevents critical thinking and sometimes even the ensuing cognitive dissonance. Most will resolve the dissonance via withdrawal, not changing their minds. But even withdrawal is better than escalation.

If the walled garden makes it easy for people to confuse belief and knowledge, it's a problem.

If people with kooky beliefs are repressed, it's also a problem.

> Even the KKK gets freedom of speech and assembly.

Yes, but their freedoms stop well before lynching people.

I think that the key difference between the human filter bubbles of old (in Germany we call that “Stammtisch“, after the table where the village pub's regulars meet to mutually confirm their shared beliefs) and the new filter bubble in social media is that the latter gives more of the appearance of professional journalism, with all the expectations we associate with that. And even if what we see in the social media bubble actually is professional, balanced journalism, it's still a much narrower selection compared to what we saw in the age of mainstream mass media.

When we watched TV news or skimmed a newspaper, we would also selectively focus on our favorite topics. But other topics at least momentarily grazed or attention while we mentally tuned out or skimmed for more interesting headlines. With highly personalized online media (and yes, the social media filter bubble is just one method to achieve that) we are losing that weak connection to out-of-focus topics. The worst part is that we do not even notice, because when our personalized digest contains a certain amount of content that would be on general news we feel our desire stay up to date already satiated.

If real news (as in what would have made it into mainstream mass media) would somehow disappear from our personalized feeds (leaving them with only the necessarily personalized stuff like niche hobbies, friends and very local content), we would go back to consuming more mainstream news channels again, making us less vulnerable to viral fakes and the like. Unfortunately, this is not anywhere close to a solution since there is no way Facebook could do this (and they would not want anyway).

Well, what's dangerous is that those sites operate in country where getting a gun is so damn easy

Did you know in France they allow people to rent trucks?

A lot of people don't share your irrational fear of guns.

What's the primary function of a truck?

Does it matter? Weapons are where you find them.

The Nice attacker used no firearms and killed eighty-six people. The DC attacker used a firearm and killed no one. Is it possible that firearms aren't really the problem here?

In Canada here we have a strange definition of a weapon (as opposed to firearm or otherwise). A object becomes a weapon when it is used with the intent to harm/kill someone. Or something close to that, prevents shenanigans trying to skirt the formal definitions.

For this reason some bikers carry hammers on their bikes, y'know incase repairs need to be done. In the case of Nice, a truck is inherently a weapon. Can't really regulate every truck though

As an American, I demand that you turn over this secret technology you undoubtedly must possess for inserting common sense into the written law!~

The idea that "tool" and "weapon" are separated by intent rather than construction is so simple and obvious that apparently no one in certain buildings of Washington, DC, is capable of thinking it.

I'm kind of surprised that the interaction between bonkers US conspiracy politics and actual shootings is so _low_. It's as if the beliefs have a sort of ritual status that "everybody knows" they're not expected to act on.

The biggest reason is that most of the Dale Gribbles of the world, just like the local college's Revolutionary Socialist club, are all talk. It takes a lot of commitment to actually carry out a shooting or bombing or whatever, and most people are happy to say "This is really bad. Someone oughta do something, and it's good thing that I'm aware of this unlike the rest of the sheeple" while doing absolutely nothing to effect that agenda.

The people who actually manage to commit these acts are on an entirely different level of nuts.

Pedestrian example: How many gung-ho teenagers talk about joining the military? How many of them actually go through with talking to a recruiter, going to MEPS, and signing on the dotted line? And that's for a cause that is widely accepted by society and confers actual benefits rather than guaranteed violent death or lifelong incarceration in an elaborate concrete box in rural Colorado.

Any proof it was a "Republican?"

The WaPo story made no mention of political party.

Do we say "Democrat guy" when referring to the Orlando shooter? He actually was a Democrat. James Holmes who shot up the Colorado movie theater -- also a registered Democrat and even volunteered for the Obama campaign. Andrew Stack who flew his plane into the Austin IRS building -- was a supporter of communism. John Patrick Bedell who shot police officers outside the Pentagon in 2008 -- registered Democrat and subscriber to the 9-11 "Truth" conspiracy, not to mention an extreme hater of Bush/Cheney.

My point is that assuming facts not in evidence is exactly the problem. Now everyone who tends to agree with anti-Republican sentiment has their view reinforced by your own fake news. It works both ways. Fake news isn't a 'Republican' thing any more than it's a 'Democrat' thing. Plenty of fake stories circulate in places like Marin County about the 'vaccine conspiracies' or how this political or that has secret deals with "big oil" or whomever.

Promoting an unproven narrative of a "Republican" shooter IS fake news unless there is actual evidence otherwise.

> Any proof it was a "Republican?"

Yes. His party registration. https://voterrecords.com/voter/49988317/edgar-welch

I understand your frustration, though I find statements like Facebook simply kills democracy for their own benefit frustrating as well. Facebook is attempting to police the community they provide. Online communities, while they've been around in some form since the usenet days, are still a relatively new phenomenon, especially at the scale of billions, and there's a lot of stuff to figure out.

What concrete steps would you have Facebook take? What should Facebook's goals be? What tradeoffs are worthwhile that ensure an overall positive experience? And still be a profitable business? Lots of things to balance, in my opinion. I think it's a very interesting and important challenge, but I'm not envious at all of doing it in public under the level of scrutiny that Facebook faces.

One concrete step would be to accept that they easily bring war/peace in any country they are allowed to operate. The moral responsibility of such a huge platform where people interact needs to be very high. Pointing fingers or giving sugar coated answers is not acceptable.

Facebook's motto should be changed from 'connecting people' to 'connecting people to show only what they like'.

See we both are arguing something here that is simply avoided so many times in facebook. That is the whole point. The tradeoff they should be allowing is to allow people to see/confront contradictions. Else its not a debate. Nobody gains knowledge or new thoughts. No one progresses apart from facebook.

So the bigger question as far as I've come to think of it: is a for profit company compatible with the role facebook is filling?

And if it's not for profit, it will still need income. Where will that income come from?

I simply dont know answers to all these questions!!

And quite frankly their top executives have to be worried about that. Not us.

And they obviously are. Facebook has been trying to address these issues, and has made missteps on the way. They wouldn't have issued the statements they have if they weren't concerned about it. I'd be really surprised if they're happy with the current situation and are going to just stop working on it.

Maybe they're not working fast enough or in the way you want them to. But it's helpful to recognize that they're human, too. The issues of free speech and privacy and business and how they inter-relate are not solved issues, and things that we've grappled with as societies for at least a couple hundred years. Coupled with the novelty of online communities, it's not something I expect them to figure out overnight.

It's good that you admit that you don't have answers to these questions. I don't either. Which is why I'm very slow to make statements like Facebook simply kills democracy for their own benefit. It just doesn't recognize the reality of the situation as I understand it.

> And they obviously are.

Don't you think they are bit late in the US? :D

>The issues of free speech and privacy and business and how they inter-relate are not solved issues, and things that we've grappled with as societies for at least a couple hundred years

But this time its much more hurting than before because we know more now and shouldnt let bad things happen because of a company's business decisions.

Obviously this is something you care about. I suggest you take some time, do some research, and spend some serious time thinking of concrete steps Facebook could take, and more importantly what you can do to help make the changes you want to see. At the end of the day, it's people that make changes. Expecting others to make those changes for you is likely to lead to more frustration for you. Be well, and good luck!

In my opinion, you have it backwards. It's not about what anyone can do with/about the platform. The center of the issue is that facebook/google et al are selling convenience to the public who assumes the platforms are to some extent trustable.

I think you might be reading too much into what I've said. When I talk about individual action, I'm talking about that in all realms: on the site, in person with other people, in their communities, what projects they work on, how they choose to engage in politics: How they can actually make the change they want to see. And that includes taking a stance on how to engage with Facebook et al. IMO the solution to "the public who assumes the platforms are to some extent trustable" has to center around peer-to-peer education of self-responsibility, critical thinking, and choice.

While I agree that its an extremely complicated problem to solve, I would be more inclined to believe they are trying to solve it if they took responsibility for (at least some of) them, instead of saying:

"We don’t favor specific kinds of sources — or ideas. Our aim is to deliver the types of stories we’ve gotten feedback that an individual person most wants to see."

Of course they could be working behind closed doors, while PR spins its yarn, in which case I wish them best of luck. It would be interesting to see how they solve it.

I understand the desire to have Facebook and others take a stronger or more explicit statement of intent or purpose. That said, no matter what they say, some are going to call them out as being disingenuous, that it's just PR. At this point I'm just interested in specifics of what they're going to do.

No, we all need to worry because the outcome affects all of us, whether or not we use Facebook.

Again, I was arguing that the company doesn't need to exist. They showed the public a new use of information technologies and executed their expansion admirably. However, since saturation of the initial (rich/western) target population they have been steadily removing value from the platform that got people excited.

Why should they be assured of revenue if their business is bait and switch?

[edit: typing is hard]

While it appears as though your question is framed to get the answer that a non-profit could do Facebook's task better, there are other options. The core question is: is a social network compatible with news? There are other for-profit models that can work. A simple variation is not to use algorithmic presentation of the news feed at all and allow users to select the news they want to see, and to show all the news about the topic in the feed.

This method has its own issues. For example, I run a bunch of of newsfeeds about entrepreneurs, (Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos etc) on LinkedIn and fairly often I get people complaining that they don't want to see negative news about the entrepreneur -- they only want to see positive news. They describe themselves as fans. I tell them that the won't understand the subject if they don't expose themselves to news they don't like.

But think about that on Facebook - this negative news does not get shared, and there's no proper way to say, "this is negative but interesting", the best you've got is the "angry" emoticon. And you only see what Facebook want you to see. They turned off the option to view your feed by most recent items, not because it was difficult to follow, but because it made more money for them.

So there are ways to fix these issues, but the cost is that you lose some readers and you lose some money. But for those who remain the experience is better - they are getting informed, not entertained. In its entire life Facebook has always put greed before user experience, so there's no way any of this will change.

> The core question is: is a social network compatible with news?

I understand the value of this question but it's not the core of the problem as I understand. Consider the progression of facebook as a platform. I hope my lack of eloquence won't hurt my point too much, not a native english speaker. Facebook was a valuable service when keeping track of one's social circle was still an analogic problem. Since we the public saw the value in digitizing the 'book keeping' of socialisation, we invested time into the platform to constitute a social group, architected as we saw fit. This at least was the experience of the early days of facebook for me and people I know. I imagine you share it to some degree. Compare that function to what the same company is pushing now. Their business is still acquiring user's time but they now have pivoted enough that the social book keeping aspect is quite secondary to most of the business layer of the company as far as I can tell.

I have no business analysing whether focusing on information diffusion control is a good strategy for Facebook the company, I have no idea. The point that concerns me is that the users are now chained along because of time invested in the past.

We as users should insist on having the social book keeping available as a low level (open source/GPL/WTFPL) platform on top of which one could choose to enhance that experience as is the business of information outlets. I have no issue with companies choosing profit over UX, but we the public should protest in some form or other while we still more or less have a choice.

Facebook needs to add the :thinking_face: emoji to its range of reactions.

Facebook's motto should be changed from 'connecting people' to 'connecting people to show only what they like'.

Is this what you think Facebook should be? Or what you think is a more accurate description of what Facebook is?

What would this look like in concrete steps? How do you manage bullying? Knowingly spreading misinformation and disinformation? What prevents Facebook from becoming one big flamewar? How do you decide how to confront contradictions? What about people who don't want to use Facebook for debate?

It's all well and good to make statements like The tradeoff they should be allowing is to allow people to see/confront contradictions. Else its not a debate. Nobody gains knowledge or new thoughts. No one progresses apart from Facebook. It's another thing all together to put in place the features that make this possible. I challenge you to put forth some concrete features that would address the concerns you have.

>Is this what you think Facebook should be? It was a metaphor.

>What would this look like in concrete steps? Taking social responsibility. I dont know the steps because I dont run that business only affected by it.

>How do you manage bullying? >Knowingly spreading misinformation and disinformation? >What prevents Facebook from becoming one big flamewar? FB should be deciding on these. They can if they want to.

>How do you decide how to confront contradictions? By letting people talk instead of hiding them from each other.

>It's another thing all together to put in place the features that make this possible. Yeah of course and its big time they accepted they should.

Nobody is asking you to take the steps, just describe them.

What steps would you take if you had all the resources at Facebook's disposal and it was your responsibility. Yes, I know it's not really your responsibility but it's all hypothetical.

Simple. Step back and let people listen to, and say, what they want.

The police will undoubtedly come and arrest a few of them for what they say, but that's not your problem. Let the legal system handle the issues.

The only thing making this a problem is Facebook's insistence on curating what you see so they can show you ads. They made this problem themselves and could solve it in an instant by stopping the interference.

This "hands-off, leave it to the police" approach is largely naive. There are sites more like this on the web and they're not as successful as Facebook because they're not the experiences many want when online.

Yes, Facebook is going to be managing/filtering/curating/policing the site to some extent and yes, they want to show ads, as that's how they make money, not only to make a profit, but to run the site where this activity is happening. And some of the site management is about maintaining some level of decency or decorum, which will likely be inviting to more users, which indirectly leads to more ad impressions. It's not all directly about ad funneling and manipulation. Facebook the company is made up of people, and assuming that everything they're doing is purely to maximize profit at the cost of all else. To make such an assumption would be similar to me assuming everything you're posting has some ulterior motive, something beyond having a civil constructive discussion. I don't think that's a fair assumption to make. Is it?

Perhaps you're arguing that Facebook shouldn't exist? If that's the case, just say so.

> Facebook is going to be managing/filtering/curating/policing the site to some extent and yes, they want to show ads, as that's how they make money

Right up until they're spending more time and money on policing that they're benefitting from increased revenue.

> And some of the site management is about maintaining some level of decency or decorum

Yes, in a world where they link everything to everyone's feed, that need that.

But if they didn't do that, instead only linking when specifically mentioned, they wouldn't need to censor anything because you'd just unfollow people who link annoying things.

> Facebook the company is made up of people, and assuming that everything they're doing is purely to maximize profit at the cost of all else.

Right, they have lunch hours, etc. But how do you suppose their work is evaluated if they don't have concrete goals such as 'increase readership', etc?

You think they're all paid just to fiddle with stuff for their own individual desires?

> To make such an assumption would be similar to me assuming everything you're posting has some ulterior motive, something beyond having a civil constructive discussion. I don't think that's a fair assumption to make. Is it?

I'm not a for-profit company. If I was I think it'd be a fair assumption.

> Perhaps you're arguing that Facebook shouldn't exist? If that's the case, just say so.

Nope. I'm arguing that they're making their own problems and could stop if they wanted to. I don't feel like making excuses for them.

A nit: the way you're quoting here makes it difficult to distinguish between quoted text and your own commentary. I encourage you to use another method, such as adding quotation marks or new lines.

It will have to decentralize, because it is not possible to run one community with one set of rules at this size. The contradictions are already intense and only going to get worse, even before I consider Facebook's most psychologically-likely reactions, which generally involve the short-term trap of gathering more power and exerting more control in an endless spiral. To quote a famous philosopher, "The more you tighten your grip, [Facebook], the more star systems will slip through your fingers."

The fact that this will kill Facebook is irrelevant. The fact that decentralization is observably very difficult is irrelevant. The hardness of a task does not affect its necessity. There is no solution for Facebook that leaves Facebook recognizably like it is now. It's arguably a fluke of politics and culture that got Facebook to where it is now.

(When I say "decentralize", I don't necessarily mean full on Diaspora-style decentralization. Decentralizing into multiple social networks that are still architecturally centralized is viable, though those social networks will face the same pressures at scale.)

Trivial. Stop policing facebook groups and curating feeds. Let everyone say what they want even if it's disgusting.

Also, let the police/etc read it, so that if you incite violence someone shows up at your door exactly as if you sent a postal threat-letter.

They already give people the tools to cope with this. You choose who to follow and who to block.

> connecting people to show only what they like

But should Facebook decide what I should be shown for my own good? Because I mostly just really don't want to see what Facebook doesn't show me.

> What tradeoffs are worthwhile that ensure an overall positive experience? And still be a profitable business?

Facebook is a business, and real life is not always profitable. When people interact with real life through facebook, they only get to see what's profitable for the company. So yes, fb inherently destroys democracy. Not necessarily on purpose (that's conspiracy territory), but because well-informed people go against their business model.

I don't necessarily agree with the comment to which you are replying however one concrete step is the newsfeed algorithm. As someone mentioned, Facebook becomes a bubble; I have a few hundred 'friends' of widely different politics and interests, yet my feed is populated with an echo chamber of my own inadvertent creation. I like stories I find interesting and agree with however that then results of me seeing more of the same so my feed now consists of probably a maximum of ten people's content, so the "inventory" of shareable content from my feed gets more and more focused to the point where there is no longer much diversity in my feed and thus the things I share.

For example: I "like" Mises posts, I like my "real" friends's music posts and I like the occasional post from The Paris Review.

However I follow a ton of people from interior design and architecture but I rarely see posts from those people/subjects. So my feed looks like a very narrow focus on Austrian economics and electronic music.

My point: the content isn't the problem with Facebook, the problem is the feed algorithm that decides the content I see. I would prefer no algorithm at all: just show me everything my 'friends' are posting. If I get tired of someone, I unfollow them. Facebook has made a conscious decision to behave as a de facto curator of content. I get it, it's my own fault for "liking" things. But I am a relatively sophisticated user -- I am aware of the echo chamber I create; but for hundreds of millions of users the newsfeed is their 'news' and it isn't transparent how their past likes are creating this environment.

> Facebook simply kills democracy for their own benefit.

Give me a break. It's not Facebook's job to tell the truth from the lies. They provide a social network, for profit. They are not a charity or a non profit. They sell ads. If "news filtering" aligns with their bottom-line they'll do it, if it doesn't, they won't, that's business.

Now to anybody who thinks he can control the internet and what people read/think/discuss I say good luck with that.

What kills democracy is people incapable of convincing others that they are being mislead/wrong without insulting them with all possible -ism . What kills democracy is people on both side being so extreme they just can't talk to each other anymore. Facebook isn't responsible for that. The lack of moderation on both political sides is, your politicians are.

People need to stop blaming Facebook for everything. Nobody is forced to use their platform , I don't have a Facebook and never go on Facebook.

Nobody is forced to use Facebook, but the fact is that for a vast number of people it represents the main source of news. Which, if this source can be easily gamed, is a problem. Since how do you “convince others that they are being misled” if the “alternative” media, plenty represented in their news feeds, discredit the traditional, trustworthy media first? There is a great Guardian Long Read about this very topic:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jul/12/how-technology...

Isn't it up to the viewer not the publisher to decide what is trustworthy?

Perhaps when major media get so many real stories about democracy wrong and the alt media get them right it's time to stop trusting the people getting things wrong and start trusting the people getting things right.

Fuck, even the NYT had to recommit itself to journalism their reporting this year was so bad.

'As we reflect on the momentous result, and the months of reporting and polling that preceded it, we aim to rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism.'

When you publish articles saying that the support of a candidate is more important than reporting the truth... well... people stop trusting you as someone who tells the truth no matter how politically unpopular it is, and start thinking of you as the political hacks that they are, and openly admit to being.

'In any normal election year, we’d compare the two presidential candidates side by side on the issues.'

Isn't it up to the viewer not the publisher to decide what is trustworthy?

That's difficult if the publisher (Facebook) only shows them untrustworthy material, and the viewer is not aware that this is the case.

If people in China can figure out that the state is lying to them, I'm pretty sure we can figure it out that random sites on the internet aren't trustworthy.

The alt-media links extensively to MSM to point out their lies and inconsistency, I'm sure someone has realized that CNN, and MSNBC, and NYT are a thing.

Even if you're not right wing, you'd probably at some point heard of Noam Chomsky who goes on similar rants about how even highly regarded NYT publishes articles that are pretty much propaganda. And then there's Jason Blair...

> 'In any normal election year, we’d compare the two presidential candidates side by side on the issues.'

You're lifting one sentence out of context. The rest of the paragraph reads [1]:

"In any normal election year, we’d compare the two presidential candidates side by side on the issues. But this is not a normal election year. A comparison like that would be an empty exercise in a race where one candidate — our choice, Hillary Clinton — has a record of service and a raft of pragmatic ideas, and the other, Donald Trump, discloses nothing concrete about himself or his plans while promising the moon and offering the stars on layaway."

The president-elect's walking back on so many of his promises since the election seem to be vindicating these comments.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/opinion/sunday/hillary-cli...

If they weren't publishing bullshit why are they rededicating themselves to journalism?

Shouldn't they instead be saying, 'We got everything right, we reported all the facts, like the polls sampling Dems and women @ 60%, and Hillary lost surprising absolutely no one with a rudimentary understanding that the population of the US is 50/50 male / female'

The context always was that this wasn't a normal election year and for some reason what they'd normally do wasn't an option (because the enemy is Hitler.) The reason why they got everything wrong is because they think that people care about things like 'well, so and so didn't exactly say this or that' rather than figure out what the overall gist of the message is. Alt-media is believed because it resonates with the overall feeling people get from the news, which is why the times had to do a mea culpa on the election because they lied so much that after Clinton lost even their base knew that they were just making shit up with no regard to reality which is why Trump won because proper defenses couldn't be put in place because the NYT was blatantly lying to everyone about Trump's chances in hopes that people would just believe Hillary was going to win and stay home.

> Alt-media is believed because it resonates with the overall feeling people get from the news, which is why the times had to do a mea culpa on the election because they lied so much that after Clinton lost even their base knew that they were just making shit up with no regard to reality which is why Trump won because proper defenses couldn't be put in place because the NYT was blatantly lying to everyone about Trump's chances in hopes that people would just believe Hillary was going to win and stay home.

I hate to sound like Grammar Clippy, but: consider using more than one comma or breaking all those subclauses into separate sentences.

>Alt-media is believed because it resonates with the overall feeling people get from the news

"Alt-media" convinced a man to go shoot up a pizzeria on no factual grounds whatsoever. This is not just dangerous to democracy, it's inciting violence against innocent people.

> Isn't it up to the viewer not the publisher to decide what is trustworthy?

If we want to have healthy democracy, it's up to all of us to figure out how to get every citizen to consume factual information and let them know when they're being lied to. That's a Hard Problem with an incredibly valuable solution. To me it seems like FB is well positioned to play a role here. They've figured out how to get a huge population to consume content on their platform - now they need to figure out how to get people to consume some knowledge along with the cat pictures and avoid outright lies (e.g. dead FBI director [0]). The question is whether that would be counter to their engagement KPIs (maybe some people only want "facts" they agree with). My gut says that eliminating the clickbait/propaganda (internet noise) would make it all the more indispensable as a resource/utility.

[0]: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/12/02/504155809/episo...

>> "If we want to have healthy democracy, it's up to all of us to figure out how to get every citizen to consume factual information and let them know when they're being lied to."

What do you do when the people don't actually care? IMO people don't want their views challenged. They're happier when they accept stuff they agree with and can get up on their high horse about stuff they disagree with (signing the odd petition or two). I've been shocked by people I know who are very well educated that don't know about major news stories, even ones that effect the field they're in. And when I explain the story to them, they don't care.

Isn't it up to the viewer not the publisher to decide what is trustworthy?

In theory, yes. In practice, a lot of people fail badly, to the point major contemporary decisions are now driven by intentionally false or heavily skewed information. That’s a big problem.

Here in the Czech Republic the alt media spread lies, hatred and propaganda, with no regard for the society. The state-owned and sane private media aren’t perfect, but are much better.

> When you publish articles saying that the support of a candidate is more important than reporting the truth

When did they do that?

>It's not Facebook's job to tell the truth from the lies.

No its not. They need to show all articles to the people that form bubbles is the point here.

> They provide a social network, for profit.

yes, but their influence on the world politics and emotions cannot be ignored simply because they are a for profit company. Business is simply not an excuse to separate people in bubbles. >Nobody is forced to use their platform

Do you really think that everyone decides on how they should use facebook before they do? No. People are not blaming FB for everything. Only about forming bubbles that can bring about significant social changes for humans.

I'm not really worried about Trump but for anyone dying or suffering because of his decisions, FB has a huge part in that. There's no denying in that.

> Now to anybody who thinks he can control the internet and what people read/think/discuss I say good luck with that.

Well Facebook _is_ doing that as we speak, but they don't consider it controlling what people read - they're just giving their users what they think they want. For their bottom-line. Which is their business.

But there's no harm in pointing out that a for-profit entity isn't behaving in a socially responsible manner. Even if you or I don't use the platform.

> They sell ads. If "news filtering" aligns with their bottom-line they'll do it, if it doesn't, they won't, that's business.

Yep, that's what is said when saying "Facebook [...] kills democracy for their own benefit". They provide a discourse perceived as the public discourse for a profit.

Some people are considering that this exercise is a threat to democracy, and even though you seem to imply that you are more versed / cynical / aware ("Give me a break"), that's precisely the for profit part that ruffles some feathers.

> What kills democracy is people incapable of convincing others that they are being mislead/wrong without insulting them with all possible -ism .

Offering a platform for misleading news does not help and actually plays an active part in this.

> What kills democracy is people on both side being so extreme they just can't talk to each other anymore. Facebook isn't responsible for that.

Building a bubble is the prime example of how you can stop separated communities from talking to each other. You can say that the separation existed before Facebook, before other online communities, it does not make it any less salient that these bubbles exists and that it is in the monetary interest of Facebook to further them in order to sell better targeted ads. They whole business plan, their whole point of existing is depending on practices and behaviors that are currently a problem in our democracies.

This means that as of now, Facebook will fight for these problems when they fight for their business. Even if you don't use Facebook or other social networks on the Internet, this means that as an individual citizen your country / nation is being influenced by these products. Even if you choose to not use them, it is perfectly reasonable to go out of your way to tell people to stop using them and to fight their influence in your country.

So, people can perfectly continue to blame Facebook for these problems. No one says that they should be alone in being blamed on this, no need to exaggerate the critics to make them appear ridiculous. But acknowledging these problems is absolutely critical these days.

> So, people can perfectly continue to blame Facebook for these problem

It's just scapegoating. It's useless and a waste of time. The time you spend blaming Facebook is the time you don't spend actually fixing what should be fixed : creating an healthy environment for debate.

Blaming this or that website is easy and it doesn't solve anything. Quitting the extremist views, quitting calling people morons,trolls,douchebags when they disagree with this or that political line and actually engaging them strictly on ideas instead of dismissing their concerns as -ism or -phobia is the only way you're going to make people listen to what you have to say.

If you filter people's news, they'll just go somewhere else that give them what they want. And then you'll wake up again not understanding the result of the last elections because you lived in your own, filtered echochamber.

On the contrary, I think it is crucial for us to fight against websites selling audiences.

Fake news exists because they are able to sell ads on their pages, and they are profitable because they attract people, creating feelings, outrage, unreasonable reactions that feeds the pre-existing bias in the whole population.

Fighting these should be cutting their revenue streams. Google did just that, but it is a survival move so as to avoid precisely being in the blast of defense move that ought to be taken by citizens.

However, Google can and will only do the bare minimum for them to show that they somewhat care and that they are in control. They are starting a play of cat and mouse with people that can easily switch platforms.

> It's useless and a waste of time.

Ad-blockers are pretty effective there. If everyone used ad-blockers, fake news website would not have any revenue left, beside some marginal subscription streams. Evangelizing for ad-blockers, against Facebook, against Google and against analytics in general is an effective way to fight against these parasites.

> The time you spend blaming Facebook is the time you don't spend actually fixing what should be fixed : creating an healthy environment for debate.

The time I spend blaming all social networks is a time spent to better the Internet and fight against populisms at large. As for how to foster a healthy environment for debate, I'd quote Sartre:

> Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.

Replace anti-Semites, which were the populists of the pre-45 era, to whichever populism you want today, be it from the left or from the right. You cannot win with reason against them, because they speak to the guts and then explain that since they have popular support, they have already won. You cannot defend measure and reason because their main weapon is bipartism coloring things in black and white, and this will always be more popular than trying to explain things, to have some critical thinking.

Mass-media in general will always push forward this kind of gregarian thinking. Internet ought to be a way for us to build other ways to consume and produce, to share information. Facebook and Google and Amazon are building empires upon the ashes of the old world, effectively cutting the disruptive factor that Internet was introducing in its infancy. Fighting those mastodons is not vain, it is time spent actually fixing what should be fixed.

Great comment!

> Give me a break. It's not Facebook's job to tell the truth from the lies. They provide a social network, for profit. They are not a charity or a non profit. They sell ads. If "news filtering" aligns with their bottom-line they'll do it, if it doesn't, they won't, that's business.

This is a technology forum, so I'll warn beforehand that my opinion, although it has political conclusions, is from a systems perspective and not meant to cause a flame war.

Your position, above, is a very common defense of capitalism. Each agent should act on its best interest, and disregard all else. Distilled like that, it's the purest form of capitalism.

While that position has its merits, we should understand its limitations. It prevents capture of companies by the power struggle. On the other hand, in this case, it is failing to act on FB's exploitation of a negative externality.

FB, by keeping users in their comfort zone is preventing society from improving. And is profiting from it. It gains the profit, sheds some costs to the society at large.

Capitalism is the best society optimization mechanism we know. It is not perfect, though. It creates local maximums, it is short sighted and we must always be careful about its limitations.

Is FB keeping users in their comfort zone, or have users clearly and regularly indicated they want their ideologically safe spaces?

If the latter, any attempts FB makes will be create an exodus, lose-lose.

> Each agent should act on its best interest, and disregard all else. Distilled like that, it's the purest form of capitalism.

No. Each agent should act according to his own will and believes, that often is in his own best interest, but that not always true.

Its a hard case to actually prove this assertion of facebook. I have not spent any time an it or read much research on it.

Is it really that different from all Americans reading the same newspapers that thought the Spanish American War was a great idea?

Did you even read his comment. He was talking about facebook already manipulating content to only give content people want without opposing viewpoints thus creating small bubbles around us. When it's their own algorithms causing the problem then it is their job to fix it.

i wouldn't blame them in the moral sense of the word. But looking at the world today, it is obvious that something has changed. From Erdogan in Turkey, to Trump, Brexit, today's referendum in Italy etc, the is a definite trend.

Now some people obviously welcome this trend, but lets just assume there are a few who see this as quite frightening.

I've been debating the causes of this with friends, and it's actually quite murky. The US is running with the "too much identity politics" and/or "economic stagnation for the white lower class" as explanations.

The problem is that these simply don't work in other places: Germany is doing better than ever, economically. And even if you're unemployed, your basic needs are not in danger. Britain was doing fine, as well. Same for Turkey.

Germany has 1 Million Syrian refugees. But the US only took 10,000 and the UK haa half that.

The one mechanism that's universal is the change in media consumption. The media used to be controlled by the elites, who generally remained within the narrow window that's sometimes called "reality". Now, it's a free-for-all and groups have started to coalesce around any possible ideological bend.

Facebook is probably the central mechanism. People always seek the approval of their peers, and it has become so much easier to get that gratification, even if it's from people you rarely see in person.

Of course it'd be possible to change all that by "not using Facebook". But we all know it's impossible to change human nature. That's why people are grasping at ideas of how to inhibit this mechanism.

Unfortunately, a large percentage of the world's population is on Facebook which means that a large percentage of the world's news is being consumed through Facebook. Many would argue that, simply due to the enormous amount of power it wields, Facebook has a responsibility to look past its narrow commercial interests.

Ignorance is killing democracy. And that’s not Facebook’s problem. It’s an educational problem. Our education system is failing to instill critical thinking into young people. So they go out in the world and become adults who are easily duped into this idea or that because they lack the skills and the mindset to evaluate opposing viewpoints. Sure the Internet has made things worse, and that’s a bit shocking for those of us who a couple of decades ago hoped that free information would help the world move forward, but it’s hardly the root of the problem.

Ignorance has always been a problem. But today it gets much more exposure, and is being manipulated along with anger to screw up democracy.

> Ignorance is killing democracy.

No it is worse. Misinformation is killing democracy. And that's exactly where Facebook is a problem.

Basically you might as well say that's why the internet is a "problem".

Yes, but internet is still decentralised and a pretty NEUTRAL technology. Facebook has a board of directors.

Not Internet, the Web. And not the web, but the way we have started using it.

We sell analytics and data about people. This data is more valuable the more people there are to sell. This popularity metric will thus foster popularity contests, where inane content and disinformation is put forward. This is the problem.

> Our education system is failing to instill critical thinking into young people.

I'm convinced this is the key.

However, media outlets (social or otherwise) also have a responsibility of, at the very least, not spreading stories that are demonstrably, factually inaccurate, even if it impacts their "bottom line". Naive and hopeful, I know, but there are two sides to it.

I hear you on the lack of critical thinking, instead it's being replaced by a defaulting to a conformist view of surrounding peers. In harder sciences this is easier to combat because of objective data but personal viewpoints have jack-diddly to do with logic/reason.

I was 'attending' a 400 level course on contemporary arts at my local university and the groupthink exhibited by the students was insane. With only 7 students in the class it was intimate and dialogue based. Just for the sake of provoking actual defences and backing to viewpoints I took up a contrarian stance on damn near every topic.

Sure I was labelled a racist, bigoted close minded hoser. But the conversations were integral to proper development of critical skills. The professor told me at the end of the year that the only reason she let me remain in her class (as opposed to booting me out as I wasn't a student or qualified) was because of this generated dialogue.

Shocking and ironic. I still remember spending my high school years reading philosophy and other topics of interest in the internet of the 90s. I had the sentiment that people will be so knowledgeable--they'll learn everything. The reverse is clearly true and now all tech breeds is greed.

> Simply incredible.

It is, but not only for the reason you provide.

FB is "inclusive of all perspectives and view points", only when it matches its own US-culture-centered-policy (breast-feeding, nudity is just a very obvious hint).

This. The US-centric bias (which, even worse, seems to reflect the bias of Mark Z.) of FB is ridiculous

> They are asserting themselves only as a business and not emotional influencers...The emotional influences that facebook brings in people is very powerful.

The same could be said of TV networks, Spotify, Twitter, Google photos.

We are the catalyst that turn stories, music, photos into emotional reactions. We control the dials. Facebook makes it incredibly easy to step outside our bubbles. Click the Like button on a Page that challenges your beliefs, interact with that information and you'll see more of it.

If we're not seeing it, it's probably because we don't want to.

My online shopping recommends groceries for me based on my past purchases. If I was to contract scurvy because it keeps recommending donuts instead of orange juice who is ultimately responsible?

Facebook is not a window to the world. It's a mirror of ourselves. Perhaps there should be guidelines on how to consume information - and I thought school served that purpose - but to expect a social network (a blank slate that you populate with your interests) to provide one a healthy dose of diverse opinion is to deny ones agency and responsibility.

I've been off of facebook for years now, but I doubt nowadays most people see the "like" buttons as an instrument for teaching the website algorithms to help keep themselves open minded. (Assuming this stratategy indeed works, since it's known this isn't the only variable they consider)

And I don't think this isn't the purpose of feed 'customization' either. It's about making money by assuring advertisers that their ads will be paid some attention to. In order to do that, they need to try and keep people's eyeballs glued to the screen as much as possible.

As a relatively heavy FB user, I use the like button as a "I've read this" button for my friend's comments and statuses, and not at all otherwise.

Perhaps FB would benefit from a check or looks-interesting reaction

It's a trap!

Instead of reevaluating how our simplified models damage discourse and complex thinking, further simplifying human interaction to better fit over-simplified models only further skews us from the complex reality that our fake world obscures from us.

Ex: many journalists "favorite" tweets to refer back to later for their stories, but an uninformed observer might draw the wrong conclusions from seeing a New York Times journalist's twitter profile "favoriting" incendiary tweets by white supremacists or ISIS propaganda outlets.

So basically you "Like" everything you read? I've heard this is overwhelming common behavior in some southeast Asian companies, like Thailand, if I remember correctly.

Like Uncle Ben once said: "with great power comes great responsibility."

Thank god for Health Canada enforcing accurate nutrition labels on his products

> If I was to contract scurvy because it keeps recommending donuts instead of orange juice who is ultimately responsible?

You? Your doctors? Jesus. What kind of world devoid of personal responsibility do you live in?

Congratulations, you have successfully answered a rhetorical question in the way that its author intended, thereby making the intended point. Well done.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_question

Himself, that's exactly what he's saying.

People aren't rational. We're riddled with cognitive biases and bugs, and prone to addictive/self-destructive behavior. This is true whether or not you think people are "responsible" for these flaws, whatever that means to you.

We should be talking about how our media, including the social kind, can best convey useful, accurate information and stimulate critical thinking. Throwing up our hands and blaming people for being manipulated by algorithms that are basically designed to put them in "bubbles" simply isn't constructive.

> My online shopping recommends groceries for me based on my past purchases. If I was to contract scurvy because it keeps recommending donuts instead of orange juice who is ultimately responsible?

If your online shopping kept erroneously labelling the donuts as 'low fat and sugar and high in vitamin C' who would be responsible?

Yes, in that case I have been deceived. The equivalent of this concept of 'fake news'.

That raises more questions still:

- were those donuts in the health aisle or the bakery?

- was I able to easily test the vitamin C content by comparing with other products?

- why was I trusting this unknown brand of malformed donuts with cheap packaging and flavors like 'purple' for my source of nutrients?

Or is the truth that I just wanted to eat donuts and so sought out the brand that made me feel good about doing so?

Nutritional information is one of those areas dominated by "fake news", or at least overhyped dietary advice in the popular press. See e.g. http://kill-or-cure.herokuapp.com/

I wouldn't blame people for giving up trying to make sense of what foods are currently considered beneficial or harmful.

Um, we are talking about the nutrition facts label printed by the manufacturer, not the various stories the media hypes up about the nutrients themselves.

Even when the manufacturer posts the claim on the packaging, they have to use specific language indicating the claims haven't been verified by the FDA.

> Page that challenges your beliefs

.. and doesn't insult the reader or insult their intelligence. That's the hard bit. The stuff that goes round on facebook is often both hyper-partisan and low quality, because people are sharing it for group-belonging purposes not for use as facts.

I'm having this trouble with some of the causes that I agree with; how do I say "I see what you're trying to do and we're on the same side, but this junk is not helping?"

> The stuff that goes round on facebook is often both hyper-partisan and low quality, because people are sharing it for group-belonging purposes not for use as facts.

This is only tangentially related.

This is why the pieces lambasting Tomi Lahran saying that views like here don't deserve a platform are, in my opinion, wrong.[0] It was the 2nd second result after searching for that interview, and I've seen it shared around the Internet.

When opposing views that aren't inciting riots, violence, etc. aren't allowed to speak, all you get in an echo chamber of things you want to hear[1]. If everyone agrees, there is no incentive for you to examine your beliefs[2].

[0]: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trevor-noahs-interview-w...

[1]: https://t.co/6lqMSTJNuj

[2]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freedom-speech/#JohStuMil...

> inciting violence

I don't think there's actually a clear dividing line for this, especially when we consider "dog whistle politics" and things like the notorious "blood libel", Protocols of the Elders of Zion, etc; there's definitely a category of material which is both false/misleading and intended to incite prejudice against a particular group - but stops short of mentioning actual violence.

I wrote a reply to this asking about the alternate category of material which is both true/accurate and also intended to incite negative feelings. That comment was flagged to death.

I guess that's the answer - it's not just "fake" news we want suppressed.

I read the post before it was removed. I don't agree with a lot of it (like declaring lists of things true and then qualifying individual items with "probably because"), but I get your point.

You have to tread very carefully. A better example would be a statement made by Trump's recent pick for National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn, in his book "The Field of Fight":

"I don't believe all cultures are morally equivalent"

Just that statement seems to bother many people, enough to have it included in Trevor Noah's Daily Show recently.

But why? Why is that statement such a big deal? I believe Western culture is better than, say, Saudi Arabian culture. I realize there is no objective standard to base this on, but even if it is the same nationalism/tribalism Saudi Arabians judge Western culture, so be it. If you make the argument that we can't judge other cultures, wouldn't it also be true that you can't say they're equivalent, since that is judging them?

The statement is a problem because it is so general that it is devoid of any useful meaning, but it rather works as a huge dog-whistle.

In the context of Flynn's other rhetoric, he's clearly referring to American Culture vs Islamic and other non European cultures. So why didn't he just state that directly, like you did? Why the "political correctness" around not using concrete examples of the "cultures" he is referring to? Probably because he is trying to maintain the thinnest possible veneer of plausible deniability of bigotry by avoiding making those references to specific cultures.

However, even if you take his statement in isolation, how do you measure the morality of something as large as a "culture" anyway? Do you take the laws of a country that represses a huge number of it's citizens, like Saudi Arabia? There are huge numbers of individuals who do not subscribe to the "morality" of the culture that the world associates them with.

Over-generalizing about cultures and denying individuals in those cultures moral agency is one step on the path to justification of terrible acts against them.

Flynn does go on in the book and explicitly state Islamic (don't recall if it mentions Islamist) culture is "evil", etc. I specifically mention a country rather than a extremist group. So he's not really hiding behind much.

> how do you measure the morality of something as large as a "culture" anyway?

Well, you can't. At least, not without being in terms of your own culture. That is, culture defines morals, in my opinion.

But I see no problem in pointing out these problems--as long as you don't go as far as pre-emptively accusing individuals or demanding they account for them. Eg., accosting Scientologists over Scientology.

> I read the post before it was removed.

You should be able to see the flagged comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13105342) if you turn on showdead in your HN settings.

It is disappointing that HN isn't able to discuss openly the ways in which true facts are (ab)used to create false beliefs.

The closest I've seen to something like that is when a country's merits or good deeds are being discussed and someone brings up past mistakes/atrocities. An example would be bringing up Unit 731 when discussing Japan giving aid to some country as a reason that Japan is evil.

As an aside, I frequently see your comments flagged to death and have used you as an example of how a community will create its own bubble. I happen to disagree with 99% of every post I have ever seen by you, but I've yet to flag a post just for being infuriating.

I get a little bit of exposure to white nationalist blogs since they are occasionally quoted by neoreactionary blogs. I don't agree with their normative conclusions at all, but their factual claims seem reasonably accurate.

There was a great article on this recently: http://hurryupharry.org/2016/11/27/who-gave-us-post-truth-co...

Some years ago, a friend sent me a shocking article. It said hundreds of British girls were being systematically gang-raped by Muslim gangs. It claimed this was being covered-up. I’ve never had time for conspiracy theories, especially when they look as hateful as those in the article....I wrote a curt reply to my friend: “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t send me made-up crap from neo-Nazi websites”.

Some months later, I read the seminal exposé of the (mainly) ethnic-Pakistani grooming gang phenomenon by Andrew Norfolk in The Sunday Times.

Of all the people pushing for Facebook to suppress "fake news", I've not heard a single one that had a plausible mechanism to make sure true stories like this don't also get suppressed.

The whole Rotherham grooming business is one of those things that really ought to have had a national inquiry to establish what happened and punish the guilty and the negligent. Instead it's seemingly vanished from mainstream public discussion. Can we even name any of the victims? Or even any of the perpetrators?

It's going to be like Hillsborough or Orgreave but for the right instead of the left: a historical injustice flag to wave for decades. Ignoring it is a massive disaster for race relations.

I agree with your point that theres not really a solution anyones putting forth that prevents false positives, but I wouldn't agree that its entirely necessary.

You are never going to get a system that is 100% accurate so I feel it would be better to focus on being as accurate as possible. This would involve false positives and negatives to some degree. What degree that should be isn't apparent yet, but I don't think that 100% accuracy is realistic

The solution to imperfect binary true/false decisions is to stop making binary decisions, and instead provide a probability and confidence interval (dressed in non-mathematician-friendly UI), with several references to verifications or refutations.

I think that the costs of giving back control to the mainstream media drastically exceed the benefits of stopping some misinformation. I'd prefer the whole truth mixed with lies to a partial truth that is also mixed with lies (what we had before when the mainstream media controlled everything).

And that's an argument I can understand

>I've yet to flag a post just for being infuriating

On the contrary, these are the posts you need to examine the most carefully. A strong emotional response is sometimes a defense mechanism against cognitive dissonance. Flagging something because it made you angry is just sticking your fingers in your ears. If it's objectionable, you should be able to articulate why.

to me at least, being infuriating means it just makes me angry. Lots of things that happen to be correct or worth discussing can infuriate me. If there's a problem with it that I can articulate, I would give it a different description like misleading, wrong, or fallacious

Well, there's "true" and there's "an accurate summary of events".

I could sift through arrest records in my city and publish a list of Group X (let's pick an established group, like Italians) and make them look like monsters. But that's just a framing exercise.

For instance, the immigrant rape issue. Yes, of course many immigrants have committed sexual assaults. But are they more numerous per-capita, or more vicious? I see sources saying they're rape machines, and others saying it's all made up, but I don't see anything believable that says "Yes, and 2% more than ..."

I could sift through arrest records in my city and publish a list of Group X (let's pick an established group, like Italians) and make them look like monsters. But that's just a framing exercise.

This is exactly what the mainstream media does in the US. The relatively small number of police shootings of black men get lots of coverage. The much larger category of black criminals harming white people get very little coverage, as does the biggest category of crime (white on white violence).

Stats quoted here: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/420565/shameful-libera...

What makes it a less "accurate summary of events" when a non-mainstream source chooses a different small subset of crime to focus on?

As for the "rapefugee crisis" in Europe it's hard to know. Crime statistics tracking these things are usually suppressed and the authorities seem to cover up major incidents. (Even in the US, the Bureau of Justice Statistics stopped publishing it's table of interracial crime stats when Obama took office.) So all we really have are anecdotes and incident reports. Given this level of suppressed information, how can you claim that the white supremacists are less "accurate" than anyone else?

Sometimes unpleasant people are correct about facts. Sometimes their views are just as accurate as anyone else's.

> black criminals harming white people get very little coverage

That makes sense though. It's not a competition between the two groups so the amount of black-on-anything violence is irrelevant to the issue of police shooting people when it can be shown that the people being shot weren't acting violently.

Talking about the black community when discussing police shooting is like blaming the prostitutes dressing badly down the block for your sister getting raped. Not only is it victim blaming, but it misses the point that these aren't meaningful groupings. (All black people, your sister and the prostitutes, etc...)

> how can you claim that the white supremacists are less "accurate" than anyone else?

Well, I don't claim that but I think I could, because I see them grasping at straws and forwarding the same tired stories around as if they prove anything. With no effort to dig into the facts behind the case and its selection as news.

Exactly the same as the anti-racist knee-jerk I see which posts the same set of "Immigrants don't rape" refutation articles with the same lack of critical inspection.

> Given this level of suppressed information,

That is a problem. When our government lies to us it throws all semblance of civilian oversight right out the window and instantly becomes a dictatorship.

I'm making a different point. Why discuss a few hundred innocent (and quite a few not so innocent) black people shot by cops when we can instead discuss the tens of thousands of innocent white people harmed by blacks?

I.e., why is police shootings of black men the topic at all?

The answer is the exact same framing exercise you (correctly) accuse white nationalist groups of engaging in. And it's also a framing exercise I find more palatable; I'm just pointing out that you can't distinguish between these based on truth.

Also, the levels of black crime are directly relevant to the topic of police shootings of black people. Assume some fraction of crime prevention results in people getting shot, regardless of race. Assume further that blacks disproportionately commit crimes. Given these two assumptions, you will get disproportionate levels of blacks being shot by cops, even though no one is being racist. That directly contradicts the narrative the media is framing.

Scott Alexander has a great blog post where he dives into the empirical literature on this: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-m...

> Why discuss a few hundred innocent (and quite a few not so innocent) black people shot by cops when we can instead discuss the tens of thousands of innocent white people harmed by blacks?

Three reasons.

1) I pay officers, and they aren't doing what I pay them to do and they aren't improving the things I want improved.

2) We can discuss both. But it's pretty obvious when this presumed black violence is trotted out as an answer to police violence rather than a conversation that just happened to be going on.

3) "Black" isn't a voluntary or revokable status. You don't choose your skin-color, nor can it be revoked when you misbehave. You literally cannot control people of your color. You also can't control other gamers, other men, other women, etc. Whereas "Police" is both voluntary and revokable. They can choose not to be police officers if they're upset with the behavior of other officers, and can revoke the status of bad officers. Even if we agreed with your assertion, black people cannot fix other blacks, officers can fix other officers.

> why is police shootings of black men the topic at all?

The discussion about police violence was already ongoing, but the police mistreat blacks disproportionally so it's not a bad place to focus. Fix the big leaks before the smaller ones...

Are you having trouble getting attention for your police violence complaints that you think this discussion is blocking, because you aren't black?

> Also, the levels of black crime are directly relevant to the topic of police shootings of black people.

Actually no, blacks suffer even in non-violent areas. The black professor arrested while breaking into his own house...

Also, it's just tactically not how it works. When police apprehend anyone they're actually afraid of they stay well away, call backup, bark orders through a bullhorn, and approach only once the person is laying down on the ground with their hands visible. Anytime you see an ongoing situation with an officer less than three steps from the person that officer is not afraid. That's intimidation, not safety, they're going for.

In many videos of police thuggery and shootings we see police going out of their way to put themselves in a tactical distance where they will be "forced" to respond by any slight movement. If they were really at all scared they'd be on the other side of their car, radioing for backup.

None of your three reasons are remotely related to truth or accuracy. That's my point - the racist blog choosing to focus on blacks killing whites is not publishing fake news. They're just journalists with a different criteria for importance than you prefer.

And again - I don't disagree with your criteria (1). Remember that a few years ago, the only people talking about the issue were Radly Balko and a few of his libertarian readers (e.g. me). But that doesn't mean that every journalist who had different priorities was publishing fake news.

...the police mistreat blacks disproportionally...

This is unclear. Again, read the Scott Alexander blog post I linked to which goes into the gory details.

You asked "Why discuss [...] black people shot by cops".

The reason is because I can fix cop shootings, a little at least. I pay for them, etc. Also, the police are a voluntary grouping and as such, can be fixed. It'd be irrational to try to fix anyone else, even if I agreed that they needed it too, which I don't.

Then you ask "why is police shootings of black men the topic at all", as in versus police violence in general.

As a non-black victim of police violence myself, I heartily second the notion that it's not limited to a racial issue. But I can clearly see in the videos that the blacks involved in these issues are acting more politely than I would and getting treated far worse.

> read the Scott Alexander blog post I linked to which goes into the gory details.

Apples and oranges. I have issues with his statistics as well, such as discounting of entire sets of stats that individually fall below a percentage threshold, etc. Also, being involved one of these incidents that my city minimizes, I'm not entirely happy with a statistical dismissal even if it was correct.

> None of your three reasons are remotely related to truth or accuracy.

No, they are. I'm putting my attention to the topics I can solve, in the areas that are most-in-need of being fixed. I don't care if something worse is happening where I can't see it, I can only prioritize my actions.

At that, I'm happy to ride along with the #BLM group to get the broader issue solved - our employees shooting innocent people.

Hardly - we can fix black people committing violence against whites (or even the much larger problems of white on white and black on black violence) by directing the police to focus their attention on areas where this is a problem.

The right question to ask - assuming you believe that all lives are equally valuable - is to ask the quantitative question of what policies will save more lives. That's a question to be answered with statistics, not values. If you don't believe all lives are equally valuable, that's a difference between your values and mine.

No, they are. I'm putting my attention to the topics I can solve...

The fact that you can't solve a problem doesn't mean it's a lie or inaccurate to say that the problem exists.

And the fact that you continue to pretend it is is exactly why I'm strongly opposed to these attempts to solve "fake news". It's pretty clear that the real goal is just suppressing information that might be politically inconvenient.

It's funny that for as much as you may have seen written about 'truthiness' (false statements that "feel" true to some people), I've yet to see anything about 'falsiness' which would be the inverse. That is, true statements that "feel" false.

Facebook wants to be a window on the world. But it's delivery is a takeout window that delivers Big Macs and potato chips.

its delivery

That's not a bad thing, but they've chosen to become a delivery truck for the id.

That's fine, but will ultimately kill the brand. Good riddance.

They're correcting your grammar.

> Click the Like button on a Page that challenges your beliefs, interact with that information and you'll see more of it.

That's precisely the problem with it. I'd like to read more on extremists groups and see how and why they exists, what kind of people they are, why do they think the way they do, what their fight is in our society. This is the first step to build a dialog.

However, "liking" their pages is out of question. I will not support them, I will not help them further their propaganda, their hateful rhetoric. I would like to understand them, but in no way do I want to support them.

In that sense, Facebook actively discourage dialog and openness to other ideas, because the only way to receive these ideas is also to make them more relevant than they ought to be.

There should be a way for us to navigate different bubbles, to inhabit different, neutral profiles to explore other niches of population, other ways of life within our own society. In that regard, Facebook is useless because it is not interesting for their business.

Reddit can work, but Reddit also has unpenetrable walls sometimes. However, it is already much better than Facebook or Google.

If liking is the problem, you can usually follow pages without liking them. You can also make your following list private.

However I think it's unclear what you will get from following a real extremist group, except if you like to see repetitive propaganda. Following a somewhat-reputable news source that's usually opposed to your views may be a better solution.

> There should be a way for us to navigate different bubbles, to inhabit different, neutral profiles to explore other niches of population

Twitter is the app for that. Set up lists of different individuals so you can switch between different viewpoints in two clicks. No need to follow anybody on your list.

It's actually fascinating to do so. Watch 'the reality' of a current or political event contort as you switch from 'Liberal', 'Conservative', 'Regressive Left', 'Alt-Right' streams of thought.

In fact, that would make an interesting website. A Twitter version of http://graphics.wsj.com/blue-feed-red-feed .

I'm surprised that more people don't know about lists, it seems like Twitter doesn't promote it as much as they should.

Weird, I don't even know about Twitter Lists, but then again I don't use Twitter much. It would be very convenient!

but still there is no conversation/debate on twitter with its 140 limit. For that you need a blog or medium. Where twitter can a poor rss feed reader.

> However, "liking" their pages is out of question. I will not support them, I will not help them further their propaganda, their hateful rhetoric. I would like to understand them, but in no way do I want to support them.

Consider the possibility that if you and your friends "liked" pages of "extremist" groups that you disagree with, then when they pay to boost a post, part of that money will be wasted on showing it to you. So while you are supporting them (by making it seem like more people like their page), you are also weighing on them financially. Not a huge impact in either case, but worth considering both sides of the coin.

I agree that there should be a way to follow-without-liking. That would make it possible for advertisers to use clickfarms to impair their competitors, by flooding them with fake followers who then suck up the competitors' advertising dollars. There's always an unintended consequence!

> If we're not seeing it, it's probably because we don't want to.

This is the big problem for me. I have struggled with Facebook for years because I really do want my friend's unfiltered feeds. In the end it just became impossible. I would have conversation after conversation where people told me they had posted something but I just never got to see it.

> Click the Like button on a Page that challenges your beliefs, interact with that information and you'll see more of it.

Yeah ... not gonna happen. I already use private browsing windows to read anything even remotely controversial. Not going to start building a publicly visible history of 'liking' things that could be seen negatively. Call me paranoid, but I can see that happening some day in a job interview or something similar. I love my freedom, and that includes being able to read whatever I want without being accused of wrongthink at some point in the future. Facebook isn't getting any data from me on that front.

> Facebook makes it incredibly easy to step outside our bubbles.

pfft. only if you don't compare it to any other non-walled-garden online communities.

it's places like HN (and many similar tiny islands of interest), I come for the comp.science news, and because of that it does NOT actively select for other criteria (just inherent bias) and I meet people with wildly different views than my own, and I can even expect to have a decent dialogue.

i don't even need to "like" their political values, but i can still upvote their tech expertise.

[ edit: LOL, I hadn't read dang's announcement about HN's political detox week, which pretty much runs exactly counter to what I just said, haha :) though I welcome the experiment and appreciate the irony of circumstance :-) ]

check out the "general discussion" subforum on any random webforum community on a topic that interests you.

it's all already intersecting by default!

and it's Facebook (Google too) taking a very active role crystallising the bubbles into walls. Don't just try to step outside your personal Facebook-bubble, for it's actively working against you. Step outside the big bubble of Facebook itself.

>> "Facebook simply kills democracy for their own benefit."

No, people and politicians are killing democracy.

People choose to get their news from unreliable sources. They act like they care about an issue yet only know the headline. But they can sign an online petition and post it on social media so they look and feel good.

Politicians can openly lie on the largest of stages. When called out on it (which rarely happens) they can stick to their lie despite opposing evidence. And they win because of it. A good example of this was the claim during Brexit that £350m per week would go to the NHS if we left the EU. After the referendum was over one of the leading figures admitted on TV that the claim was BS. When you can win by openly lying to the people, why wouldn't you? I think in situations like this elections/votes should be re-run.

My point is that Facebook has nothing to do with democracy. There are plenty of alternative news sources, some that are even reliable, and people instead get their news on Facebook because they don't actually care.

Indeed. Fake news sarts at the top. From today's Mail:

"Now for Italexit! Italian Prime Minister resigns after EU referendum loss" https://twitter.com/MailOnline/status/805670033875726336

.. except that the referendum has nothing to do with the EU, it was about internal constitutional change, and Italy is no closer to leaving the EU.

People read the Mail and Express because they don't care about whether their news is reliable, reasonable or democratic.

They read the Mail and Express because their counterparts are biased and devoted to pushing narratives, and have little interest in informing anyone when it's inconvenient to their worldview.

They read the Mail and Express because those papers are biased and devoted to pushing narratives, surely?

How can you tell one reputable source from others? Better: how can you tell when one reputable source has a hidden agenda to slight push one way or the other without people noticing?

Personally I look at multiple sources. I try to focus on the least biased ones and then look at where the reports differ and presume that's where the bias lies.

Just assume every source has a hidden agenda and use your brain to decide what you think for yourself.

funny enough, I have extended family in India that went through the entire process and had lots of issues, but even then, I only heard praises of the govt's efforts, nothing against it.

After you mentioned, I decided to look up news against the effort and I realized there was a lot of news against it but it not only didn't appear on my Facebook, but also on Twitter and Reddit (one of the few places where I expected to see opposing view points).

On the other hand, news (both TV and online) can often be sensationalist. This is from today (regarding Jayalalitha's death): https://twitter.com/krishashok/status/805686249927241728

Media is going through a severe credibility crisis.

>openly calling for censorship

appalling, you are.

> The bubbles are getting incredibly smaller that its very worrying.

I'd argue that most people did that before Facebook, and still do that outside of Facebook. It is your responsibility to get surrounded by different kind of people. It's not easy, and most people won't be able to do it, but if you're living in an echo chamber it has always been your fault.

(I'll admit that geography sometimes doesn't help. For example I live in Chicago and it's not the best place to meet Trump supporters.)

Hideo Kojima keeps getting proved right:

    But in the current, digitized world, trivial information is accumulating every second.
    Preserved in all its triteness.
    Never fading, always accessible.
    The digital society furthers human flaws and selectively rewards development of convenient half-truths.
    You exercise your right to "freedom" and this is the result.
    All rhetoric to avoid conflict and protect each other from hurt.
    The untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and value systems.
    Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum.
    They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever "truth" suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large.
    The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh.
    No one is invalidated, but nobody is right.
    Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in "truth."

Facebook censor news!

Facebook removes human censors

Facebook allow fake news on their platform!

One a serious note: Fake news is a different problem to news 'bubbles' designed to create positive emotions. Sure they're closely linked, but you can have either without the other. I read this article and it seems to switch between them both. I appreciate the viewpoint but I found it hard to follow.

I feel like this isn't talked about enough.

Facebook was curating trending topics! It had dealt with fake news! And we complained, and let the floodgates open.

I wonder what fake news traffic looks like when comparing to the date where FB stopped curating.

Not everyone complained, just conservatives who thought they were being censored.

It's interesting when Zuck says that "...We’ve gone from a world of isolated communities to one global community, and we’re all better off for it..." he's exactly wrong. FB has created much more stronger community segmentation.

Were you that weird guy in your village who believe aliens built the pyramids? Before, you'd have to interact with those villagers. They'd have to interact with you. Neither of you would like it, but they might be reminded to be more compassionate to others. You might be reminded that the vast majority of people think you're a nut. Both of these effects are socially worthwhile, yet unpleasant.

But not anymore. Now you can log into Facebook from the comfort of your house and instantly be in a community of ten thousand other people who think aliens built the pyramids. You can share videos, pictures, links, theories, and generally rant about how stupid most people are.

The villagers? Dude. You don't exist anymore. After a few years of that, most of the villagers probably wouldn't even believe people like you exist. After a decade or two the next generation would think of you as being sick, dangerous, and in need of societal intervention.

This is a really, really bad thing we're creating. Yes, you can make a cute and useful app that lets people communicate. But don't rationalize and bullshit your way into thinking that somehow you are changing the world. What you're doing is ignoring centuries of mankind learning how the species gets better over time in favor of making a few bucks with advertising. Dressing it up and trying to sell it like it's nirvana is evil.

> bullshit your way into thinking that somehow you are changing the world.

Yet in the paragraphs before that you are speaking about how facebook _is_ changing the world.

Apart from that minor (mistake?) thing, I do agree with you fully. Using facebook is a good way to surround yourself with people who think and do exactly as you do, which is not beneficial.

Same goes for other types of social media, but you can break it easier with for example twitter. You can follow people with different ideas than yourself and be challenged by their view, which is a healthy thing to do. I feel like the treshold to that is lower on twitter than on facebook. But then again, I am not a facebook user myself since a couple of years ago, and that experience might have changed.

Though on the flipside, it can also be used for good. Not because you are into some kind of weird belief that will be reinforced by others, but for example imagine that you want to learn esperanto, there might be facebook groups full of people doing the same and it might help you learn it with greater ease.

This is just getting more stupid everday. Facebook is no and never was a news platform. It is a crappy social network and only reflects your inner friend circle.

Why anyone and especially facebook should care about fake news is beyond me.

I think people who are so concerned about Facebook policies and practices are way too invested in it, and should focus on spending less time on it. It's just a platform for showing grandma pictures of the kids, providing ex's a means to stalk you, and check out the latest virtue signaling. Anyone using it as a primary news source is doing everything else wrong too. I don't expect Facebook to start restructuring just because people are still looking for a scapegoat.

Exactly. Lets assume the onion is suddenly the main news source for a majority even thought they are open about beeing fake. Where is the problem? If people choose to live in their bubble its their choice.

It becomes a problem if these people following the onion would affect the outcome of an election. Even a democratically elected leader can be a problem (e.g. Mussolini was democratically elected).

To function a democracy requires citizens to be well-informed and critical.

Half of the U.S. didnt even vote, the majority did not vote for Trump ether. Hitler was democratically elected too btw (at least in austria), but that means nothing because people actually wanted him.

I dont see how facebook is to blame here, there are obviously other things going wrong.

The set of citizens concerned by this stuff is not the same set as those taken in by fake news on Facebook. So the concerned types spending less time on Facebook won't solve anything.

And I think the Arab Spring shows your dismissive characterisation of Facebook is way, way off the mark.

You're right that people using it as a primary news source are doing everything else wrong too. They apparently are, including voting for ill-suited demagogues and regressive causes. That is the problem to be addressed.

This is valid.

Facebook might have a 'moral responsibility' on a civic level, to address issues within it's community, but ultimately, if people are choosing what they are going to read, well then so bit it.

Suppose someone invented an 'open ranking' system whereby news and content from various sties was socially ranked, but wherein there was no 'central platform' ... we would see the same thing but have nobody to blame.

If e-mail had bee designed just a little bit differently - and it was more identity/socially oriented, more conducive to 'sharing' ... then again, we'd have nobody to blame but that form of 'email' - not an organization.

Exactly. If you are in a specific subreddit for example it is also biased. Even the "all" page is biased because reddit is reddit, but no one complains.

I assume also because people on reddit realize reddit is just a tool and not build their lives a round it which seems to be the case with a lot of facebook users.

"I assume also because people on reddit realize reddit is just a tool and not build their lives a round"

Maybe they don't live their lives around it, but they are very influenced by it, and don't realize it.

I'm fully aware the 'Daily Show' is comedy and not real, but I found myself watching it almost exclusively as news for years ... and didn't realize how far down the rabbit hole I was.

I sure see your issue. But wouldnt you laugh as well if people would suggest to blame Daily Show for missinformation because they stretch the truth?

My point is the people are the issue and not the platform. The american election is a good example. Only about 50% went voting, they could have easily voted for a third party for example. From them who went voting the majority did not vote for trump ether. And still people try to find the issue with facebook other than themself and their government.

>Why anyone and especially facebook should care about fake news is beyond me.

I may be wrong but didnt the outcry against fake news and Facebook come as a result of the US presidential election? Many people are looking for someone or something to blame for the unexpected results.

Everyone is dressing it up as being about something else, but this is the central point. None of this would be an issue if Clinton had been elected. The left wants some self-flagellation now by those they thought were in their pocket.

If things had gone the other way, everyone complaining would be making Trump meme's right now to post in their favorite walled wonderland. Next we'll be hearing about how the expansion of Presidential powers is actually an issue now that it isn't their guy doing the expanding.

^ this. If you learn history in Austria today you learn how the bad nazis forced them into voting for yes. If you learn it everywhere else you realize they just liked the idea of work and a "german race".

IMO they are just trying to rationalize how this could happen and chance history by blaming facebook.

Well here's why someone should care about fake news: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2016/12/04/d-c-...

I won't answer whether that entity should be Facebook. But when people start getting shot at and transparently disreputable demagogues start getting elected I would say the conversation at least has to begin.

So lets censor everything that some entity thinks is false on the whole internet? This shit grew on reddit and 4chan, 2 of the last places i want to see government censorship.

Also nobody was shot, the other article i read in the morning clearly mentioned that he only shot upwards and was not trying to actually hurt anyone.

Seriously if people are stupid enough to do such shit there are different issues to be solved. If people are scared of people wearing and using weapons then they should no be so easily available for example.

The only solution against stuff like this without fixing our society would be complete censorship & government control. I hope this is not really what you suggest.

No one has mentioned the government here except you. Without giving in to totalitarianism, there's plenty of room for Reddit or Facebook to make some effort towards doing the right thing out of a sense of responsibility and decency. They're not obligated to let human garbage use their service as a platform.

It's in a site's best interest anyway. Imagine if normal adults weren't so embarrassed to admit using Reddit.

They did. Not sure if you followed the pizzagate laughfest. But they actually did, but they had a really hard time to net make it censoring. All they could really do was banning people that abused the rules, what they did (even 4chan did that mind you).

But why would Reddit be allowed to decide which conspiracy theorie can be discussed? Seriously, i dont want to live in a world where the few semi open platforms we still have decide what we are allowed to talk about and what not when no laws are broken anyway.

Maybe if the public trusted the mainstream journalists this wouldn't be such an issue. They've eroded that trust themselves. It's their job to clean up the mess by gaining that trust back through integrity. Everything else sounds dangerously like thought censorship.

This.

Mainstream journalism has to regain credibility.

The first step down that road is producing credible journalism, a difficult but necessary cost the industry is going to need to swallow if it expects to survive.

The alternatives are an expansion of thought censorship from the mainstream networks to its bubbling alternative competitors.

I understand the urge to misrepresent the world to garner public support. I really do. But nature abhors a vacuum. When the information available to the public is obviously compromised it will be filled by something or someone else.

The response to that isn't to censor alternatives and continue the misreporting. The solution is to recede from propagandistic instincts, and provide the kind of analysis you want to be recorded in history books for providing to democratic deliberation. If people really understand what's at stake in issues, and what powers, people and industries has what stake where, and when they understand issues to the point where they can make discernible political decisions - be they about representation or directly on issues - rather than being emotionally coerced at scale by every media platform above water; then, and only then, will the "information war" the State Department has been waging will really be won. It won't be won by the State Department, but by the people. And it will be for the people and by the people.

Truly: the alternative to this is to continue down this folly road of doctrinal misrepresentation of the world to the American people, and to play whack-a-mole with every narrative that challenges the useless and ill-predictive emotional appeal whose vacuum is being challenged.

(I speak as an American about my country).

Facebook is currently a news platform and has been for a few years now.

http://www.journalism.org/2015/07/14/the-evolving-role-of-ne...

Going on a tangent for a moment, please don't take it as a comment on Facebook, Facebook's culpability, what Facebook should do, etc.

Say we have a Facebook alternative X which implements no filter, makes no effort to garner views and shares (let's elide financials for now). Say X, like Facebook, has news published on it, which users may subscribe to and receive. Is it not true that most users will more often follow news sources they're interested in, effectively self-filtering? Is it not true that news sources are financially motivated to appeal to said users by self-filtering, or even manifesting as multiple brands with different biases?

And finally, say there's no X, and each news source has its own separate channel to its users - like websites or newspapers. Are both of the above effects not still true?

Back to Facebook, we need to figure out what a solution looks like before we tell Facebook which direction to turn.

Sounds like Twitter. We've seen this thought experiment play out!

The broader point is that this analysis applies not just to Facebook, but Twitter and Reddit as well. Engagement is a revenue driver and veracity isn't.

What's worse, the same applies to regular news as well as aggregators. It always has to a certain extent, but improving technology, changing social attitudes and razor-thin margins have weaponised this.

But we're not even finished there: the US and the UK are geographically sorting their populations by political affiliation. Want to see a political bubble? Look outside.

> geographically sorting their populations by political affiliation

Gerrymandering doesn't help; but the idea that "all politics is local" is very old, and the reason we have geographical representatives rather than national PR in the first place.

Yes, but it's getting much, much worse. Republicans simply don't want to live in Democrat areas and vice versa. They don't explicitly think that, they just see that certain areas make them feel comfortable and stay there.

It's heading to the point where these groups won't even meet.

"Trump campaign made use of fake news" NPR tracked down one of them - Democrat. http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/503...

The sickening thing this election, and elections prior, was the use of fake news by the Democrats and by the Republicans, in a media industry that gets paid by political campaigns to mass-influence audiences with pre-strategized series of stories.

The entire information industry is sick. It's extremely efficient at serving it's customers. It's customers are a maelstrom/cacaphony of interests trying to make broad base emotional and misrepresentative appeals to purposefully uninformed audiences.

The information industry does NOT provide a paid service to customers seeking to understand the world. The information industry provides a paid service to industries and parties seeking to influence the world.

Trying to run a partisan political line, blaming one political party (who spend incredibly SMALL amounts compared to the other strategically politicizing news) is looking perpendicular to the problem, and falling prey to its continuance.

Fake news? The Iraq War justifications. The Jessica Lynch stories. The fake army letters sent by Bush Administration PR firms. The echo chamber from the Obama Administration on the Iran Deal that they've BRAGGED about. The horribly inaccurate coverage of the Syria proxy war. The whitewashing of politically sensitive topics, like the genocide by our allies in Bahrain. Conspiracy theories about Putin and hogwash misinformation like "Putin and Trump are best friends." US coverage of the Chinese economy ("Will China fall?!") while they were slated, instead, to be welcomed into the Special Economic Basket at the IMF. The fake news coverage about the Snowden Documents.

It's just... so frustrating to see people promulgate on HN one-sided, politicized and irresponsible finger-pointing, as though propaganda and mass-media disinformation were a partisan issue.

To be fair, if an individual's primary source of news is facebook, it doesn't seem like such an individual would be all that informed about the world around them with or without facebook.

That makes a lot of sense. I wonder if facebook is a more or less effective force-feeder of perspective than traditional media. The instantaneous, self-affirming discourse that goes on, I think, is probably more compelling.

I think the biggest issue I have with fake/spun news isn't the election but the fact that many fake news articles are used as an excuse by those who believe them for their actions. For example, I've seen all kinds of people buy into the transgender women being sexual predators in public restrooms thing. And every time a spun or fake news article alluding to such shows up they just use it as a bludgeon to say, "see your kind are sick perverts that need help." What's worse is when it's a representative or some other government official that can submit legislation or regulation on such matters. I wish there was a legal obligation for all legislators to provide evidence for their suggested laws the same way police and DAs have to do the same for their actions. Maybe then this wouldn't be a concern for me but the fact that this isn't the case means either I or someone else like me has to constantly take the role as activist to talk these idiots out of the most insane laws they can cook up on such matters. Hell, the same happens to some extent with liberals who are scared of guns, looking for any excuse to submit total bans on firearms. Anyways, this is the real problem with fake/spun news and not the current excuse of Trump's win (dude won because he pulled a smart gamble on the Rust Belt, I just wish the DNC would admit it and move to fix their strategy there).

That's yet another reason why it's the next AOL.

How I hope this will come to be

How is this different from news sites? They also earn the most of money from advertisers and the main criteria for those advertisers are page views. We still completely lack a viable internet business model that would strongly encourage the quality and not quantity...

I suspect it's untenable, really.

You either enforce differing viewpoint and run the risk of: A) censoring news B) disapointing viewers C) give legitimacy to possibly damaging world views

Don't censor and allow fake news and filter bubble.

> How is this different from news sites?

I thought that was very clear from reading the article. FB tailors the feed to each user making sure that they don't see things that they may not like. In contrast to that, news sites cater to large segments of the population and they have to in order to be economically successful. The result is that news sites will always present us with some amount of material that is contrary to our personal world view.

> FB tailors the feed to each user making sure that they don't see things that they may not like

To be honest, they do a really terrible job at this. No matter how many times I flag the Kardashian-story-of-the-week as offensive or inappropriate, they keep showing up in the news feed.

Maybe it's paid for. Who the heck knows?

Only if you actively dislike the stories that you "don't like". I for instance often comment & discuss on news that I totally disagree with, and I keep seeing them regularly in my newsfeed. Also it depends very much on people that you follow. I follow many people with whom I don't share political views at all exactly because they share different stories with a different perspective than mine. That gives you a better understanding and also works very good to filter faux news, as one side will always approach it sceptically and debunk them quickly...

Newspapers and news television broadcasts had to do that due to the nature of the medium. There's no reason news websites couldn't tailor their content to the user in order to maximize views, engagement, or whatever other metric makes them the most money. Google News already does that.

Well, one 'difference' is that many 'real news' sites are going out of business :)

Another article that avoids talking about the root cause because it's too unpalatable. Blaming facebook is misguided. Free speech is inherently incompatible with news.

Care to elaborate? I'm willing to accept the idea that market forces / consumer demand is inherently incompatible with the news but free speech?

Most people have preferences for belief that prioritize other factors above truth. They are served by false or misleading news. Any attempt to distinguish this "fake news" from real news is contradictory to free speech.

In short, people don't want news. News has to be forced on them, which is anti-freedom.

In theory, you could also address this by making sure reality aligns with the ideal state of every person who consumes news, but come on.

Yeah I agree with this. The problem is people want their biases confirmed and don't actually want news. One solution is the gov't "regulating" the news to make sure the people get their informational vegetables which is clearly a violation of freedom of the press/speech.

A huge part of the story seems to be around confirmation bias (people like reading stuff that supports what they already believe).

While confirmation bias is a fact of life, reading fake stories to confirm your bias is not something that anybody wants to do, regardless of how irrational the bias is. Facebook obviously doesn't want to be seen as having influenced the election so they're unwilling to say anything that admits responsibility. But Zuckerberg has shown boldness and maturity as one of the best CEOs time and again, and I'd expect them to start filtering out fake news before the next presidential election. This is not an issue that's going to go away because it's going to get worse and it's going to get a lot more attention now that everyone knows about it.

A core part of Facebooks stand is that they don't want to be seen as taking editorial responsibility (they can't afford to). Part of the problem there is precisely defining 'fake news'. For example, if I am a conspiracy theorist and I write a blog about how NASA never landed a rover on Mars, should Facebook delete it? At what point does irrational writing turn to fake news? Anecdotally we know that the article that claimed an informer who reported on clintons emails was murdered was obviously false. Or that the pope didn't endorse trump. The key is to build a framework that allows a company like Facebook to flag these without being seen as editors.

It doesn't sound like a problem Facebook can't solve. And it has to. There's no escaping it now because political and public opinion are both going to pressure them. And it'd be unwise to ignore them.

UI wise, a clean way to do this might be to put a red banner on a corner of the article with the words 'possibly false'. So Facebook doesn't delete the article, but labels it and you can challenge it if you want. It's going to be hugely discouraging to fakers.

> But Zuckerberg has shown boldness and maturity as one of the best CEOs time and again

In what respect?

Facebook is the only social network (if you discount Linkedin) from 2005 that's not just existing, but thriving today. All the other social networks that succeeded (except for SnapChat - which also has an incredible CEO) are owned by Facebook. And he made bold bets by acquiring them for unbelievable amounts ($1B Instagram, $18B Whatsapp). While companies like Twitter and Pinterest have essentially stagnated, Facebook keeps growing and growing, and so do all their acquisitions. And they have incredible product momentum despite their size. They have incredible revenue momentum.

This is not accidental. Zuck has shown amazing maturity and judgement in not just making the right decisions but convincing those founders to accept his offer. He turned down a billion $ acquisition offer early on, and bought Whatsapp and Instagram in bold bets and tried really hard to buy SnapChat.

= boldness in making the right big move

= maturity/good judgement in making good decisions

My personal view is that low regulation advertising is simply not compatible with Western Democracy. If you don't regulate away emotive and brand advertising you're corrupting all the systems that are supposed to regulate our societies (for brevity "advertising" refers to brand and emotive advertising in the below).

The basic idea of how information flows & control works in western market driven democratic republics:

People -> Government -> Markets <- People

The People Elect their Government. The Government controls the rules of "The Market". The People decide what they want in their day to day lives, demand it from actors in "The Market". Those who fulfill these needs are rewarded and copied. Information moves from consumers to market actors rapidly, this information is hard to fake.

This is very much how markets that don't have much advertising work, take rice, wheat, logistics. Success demands you provide a better product at lower cost. People can easily compare products so you _must_ compete on price, the companies get very efficient they make stuff people want cheaply.

What does advertising do to the above system? Firstly your market starts rewarding the best liars and cheats. Make cheap crappy sewing machines whilst buying out previously good sewing machine brands and running their name into the dirt? FANTASTIC! HUGE REWARD! DO MORE OF THIS. Make soft drinks of dubious health value but persuade people that their consumption is necessary to their social lives? FANTASTIC! HUGE REWARD!

If this wasn't bad enough the advertisers are able to give away entertainment and news content for free. Most people do not want to pay for things and aren't aware how subtle and pervasive the lies are. So most people lap this free information up, so now the advertisers hold the purse strings on every media channel out there. The advertisers control the people, the advertisers control the market.

Adverts -> Government -> Market <- Adverts.

The final negative impact is the huge swaths of people who are working incredibly hard at a net loss for society at large. People who aren't working making things other people want. People who are working at making other people want things they otherwise wouldn't. Wonder why we aren't working 15 hour weeks as predicted by Keynes? Blame all the people making adverts and everyone who's making content funded by those adverts.

Fake news & Facebook are the latest and worst examples of this corruption. But really it's just a symptom of the underlying disease. After we've perfected mechanization and economies of scale large profits require you fool people into making bad decisions. Doing this is lucrative and since our markets are evolutionary optimizing machines we are going to see it get worse unless we take action to stop it.

> Wonder why we aren't working 15 hour weeks as predicted by Keynes? Blame all the people making adverts and everyone who's making content funded by those adverts.

Keynes was speaking relative to the conditions of the day, though. The real GDP per capita of the UK in 1930, when he wrote, was $5400. You wouldn't have to work for very long to make that kind of money, as an average UK worker. I've worked 20 hours a week at a below-average wage and considered myself quite a bit wealthier than your typical low-middle-class Briton of 1930. The big differences are that "normal" living standards have risen so fast, and so much unpaid work (largely housework and time-consuming chores) have been automated.

How do you actually know people are fooled? Your subjective opinion of their best interest? How can you usefully distinguish good advertising from bad advertising? How do you know that people are "persuaded" to act against their own self-interest - and not that they simply have preferences you don't like?

Just as a curiosity, the feeds shown through FBs various channels are different. I've switched to the mobile site after using the dedicated app and noticed much less random things-tangentially-interesting in my feed but with more of a focus on my immediate friends. It's surprisingly made FB a much more enjoyable medium for me as I can keep tabs on the personal lives of a few close members in a fairly chronological view.

Anyone know possibly why there is these differences or can explain exactly what's going on here?

I do not accept the author's premise that 'personalized curation' inherently implies 'false news'.

There really is an alternative - crowd curated news by Virwire - https://virwire.com - bypasses the whole media bias thing with good old wisdom of the crowds. (shameless plug, I'm the developer)

The urge to flag any post that has "Walled X" in it gets stronger every day.

Because the premise is invalid or because the ensuing discussion is low quality?

Arguments occur to be weak. Some reasons are given, but cannot be said to appear to be complete. Verdict: arbitrary gossip.

I have a huge problem with this article. I don't think anything it says cannot be applied to people using Internet without Facebook or Google.

Internet is the filter bubble. Facebook is just its latest upgrade.

Media is the filter bubble :-)

I am not a fan of FB but it must be understood that FB is not a news agency.

Another thing to consider here is: FB may be wallgardened, but what about the mainstream news organizations that are sold out to various parties? (e.g. Saudi Islamists have many huge investments/shares in many mainstream news organizations)

Many mainstream news organizations are worse than FB when it comes to spread lies and propaganda in the name of news. We can already feel the influence of Saudi money in the US mainstream media. The mainstream US media is suppressing any criticism of Islam under the flimsy arguments like racism and islamophobia. This is already creating a suffocating atmosphere for true liberals.

A factor to note here is even though the mainstream news organizations claim that they are liberal and left-leaning, they act like barbaric people when it comes to Islam. I do not see any criticism of Islam (e.g. horrendous treatment of women, homosexuals in Islam) in the mainstream media. Not even the discussion of problematic aspects of Islamic scriptures has any place in the mainstream media.

Why should a common man trust the mainstream media news media?

Then you see that it's the social media (FB, whatsapp, twitter, reddit etc) that gives the people what they think is needed to be reported/argued/discussed.

e.g. FB (along with many other social media sites) has helped lot of people to learn the dangers posed by Islamism.

How and why someone as lowly as Trump got elected? This may be very complex topic to analyze as there are many contributing factors but one factor played very important role in his win is the "outright dishonest approach by mainstream news media towards the issue of dangers posed by Islam".

Sam Harris has put it quite aptly: Liberals failure to talk honestly about Islam is responsible for the rise of Trump [1]

I have learnt over the years to not trust many of the pseudo-liberal news organizations like NY times, Guardian etc. e.g. When Charlie Hebdo people were killed by the Islamists, most of these left-leaning pseudo-liberal news agencies were/are very much partial and acted like outright sold-out to Islamists (Saudi funders) when it comes to deal with news related to the vicious and barbaric aspects of Islam and various Islamic cultures.

We must also understand that it's finally the reader's responsibility to filter all news, whether it's from FB or from other established news agencies/organizations.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YCWf0tHy7M

> am not a fan of FB but it must be understood that FB is not a news agency.

It doesn't matter what Facebook calls itself. It has power, and responsibility follows.

> The mainstream US media is suppressing any criticism of Islam under the flimsy arguments like racism and islamophobia

I believe there's plenty of it in the news. Syria has been a top story for three years running. Everyone knows how Saudi-Arabia treats women. Everybody knows who was responsible for Charlie Hebdo.

Beyond that, it's not in the news because (a) it's not "new" and (b) there is nothing gained from a collective mob against islam. Bombing doesn't help. Being condemned by Americans also doesn't change a single mind in the mideast.

Instead, you get the opposite. How many stories have we had about muslims being forced off airplanes because they spoke Arabic or "looked like a terrorist". Of course they're usually professors of philosophy who grew up in the UK and studied at Harvard.

Really good comment. I just wanted to thank you.

I think people are being unreasonably demanding of FaceBook.

Fake-news, I can see the problem.

However snobbishly trolling with risque art and historical pictures, and slamming FB because the overworked mods were not sophisticated enough to recognize them seems like bullying to me.

How can you find yourself at all sympathetic toward Facebook in this context? This is not about saying Facebook's moderators are doing terribly, the whole point here is to point out the fact that Facebook has a major conflict of interest when it comes to the issue of fake news, and they've avoided admitting that fact entirely.

As I said, I agree with stomping out fake-news.

But its like death with thousand cuts. I think the users should drop the demand for art and historical stuff.

"I think people are being unreasonably demanding of FaceBook."

Considering the amount of influence Facebook imposes on it's users I don't think so. It's very difficult even for the best of men to be constantly aware of ones cognitive biases. If facebook only shared friend's posts, I would have to agree. But the fact that it intertwines this reality based, emotionally meaningful data with effectively biased noise it gives that biased noise a terrible force. That noise will start to bounce around in ones social circles like in an echo chamber, thus giving it even more credibility.

"However snobbishly trolling with risque art and historical pictures, and slamming FB because the overworked mods were not sophisticated enough to recognize them seems like bullying to me."

FB feeds false signals from unvetted third parties, while censoring input from trusted parties.

Once again, if Facebook was a bulletin board, I would agree. But it's something far more insidious. The problem is that the whole point of Facebook is to convince users that any data they see from third party sources is meaningful and important - to create add based revenue. It creates this effect by utilizing ones friend network. Thus it twists something precious and important into a cognitive attack vector.

The problem is - this is not made explicit - and the more ignorant users are of this effect the better it is for their business.

I'm not saying they are evil geniuses. They just want to sell adds. It's probably the way it is through constant application of A/B testing. The metrics drive the interface to be ever more convincing. It's a system to create ever more convincing messages from unsolicited third parties.

The censoring then actively intercepts messages from vetted parties, adding insult to injury.

Social media sites always end up turning toxic. The problem is that they give a voice to all the mindless idiots of society.

These people should never be given a voice. There is no justification for that. Voices should always be edited and filtered by higher powers.

The common opinion is worth nothing, since we already know what it is, so why repeat it?

I think the ultimate issue specifically with Facebook is not that you shouldn't give people voices online, but rather that when the voices form small, tight-knit echo chambers with zero outside challenge, the outcome can be disastrous. I believe this is why the author calls it a "walled wonderland".

To me this is actually an argument against extensive moderation mozumder is suggesting.

Echo chamber is still an echo chamber even if you like the sound of the echoes.

Chill

Whoa bro, send your authoritarianism elsewhere please.

The people with power who try to screw over society for their own benefit always go with the same argument. I know best, so please give me all the power so I can use it to enrich myself.

You could make an argument that the elites of the past didn't do the worst job. The media was surprisingly independent (i. e.Watergate), and even the candidates for President were – for the most part – quite respectable even when they were decided on in smoke-filled back rooms.

I know it's fundamentally undemocratic. But pragmatically it wasn't the worst. Another example would be the trust people (used to) have in the Supreme Court. For most of the 20th century, it was the most rigorous intellectual and moral institution, even though it's the least democratic.

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