Comment by whybroke | Hacker News Reader

Comment by whybroke | Hacker News Reader

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Authoritarians will do everything in their power to replace fact based journalism with messages that support their ideology with no concern to accuracy. The very definition of authoritarianism means the public doesn't need to know what's going on and all paths to victory are acceptable.

It is a problem we have not faced in free societies but do now. It is the suppression of information and its replacement by propaganda with no connection to reality. It is the world of Putin's Russia, a world we in the west have not experienced.

And it is not necessarily driven from the top down although casting doubt on what constitutes a fact is core to the maintenance of power in a dictatorship.

There is pretense that changing Facebook's algorithm from favoring profitable self confirming nonsense to being balanced with factual posts is some an obscene from of censorship rather than a fix for a broken algorithm. This as absurd as claiming Google is censoring when it changes it's search to give results the user wants because no user wants to be fed inaccuracies by either Google or Facebook.

Incredibly we're now saying it's censorship just to adjust a ranking such that propagandist nonsense (that the user didn't want) is no longer quite the top result.

Indeed the argument has now deteriorated into the surreal position that no-one (e.g. Snopes) should dare even post corrections to politically motivated lies because that is somehow censorship. And certainly no-one should promulgate those correction let alone use them. This is exactly the Kafkaesque logic that reveals the underling motivation is actually the exact opposite of free speech.

Allow me to correct your corrections about what is actually going on.

In other words, let me fact-check your fact-check.

You beg the question by claiming that only "self confirming nonsense" and "propagandist nonsense" will be hidden from the public, calling any position that sees cause for concern about censorship "a pretense." However, you offer no evidence for your claim that only these types of content will be affected. In fact, Snopes and many of the other fact-checkers have been shown to be politically biased themselves, and they certainly don't limit themselves to debunking propagandist nonsense. If we take their past performance as evidence of what is likely to happen moving forward, we will see, just for example a conservatives shut out of the public conversation for saying exactly the same thing a liberal is given a pass on. For claiming that nothing but truly egregious content could possibly ever be filtered, you receive 2 long noses.

Your claim that "the argument has now deteriorated into the surreal position that no-one (e.g. Snopes) should dare even post corrections to politically motivated lies" is blatantly false and receives 3 more long noses. Pretending that the fact-checkers have never told politically motivated lies themselves—only corrections—gives 1 extra long nose. Your claim that the argument goes so far as to say that nobody should promulgate corrections to political lies is exactly the opposite of the truth, earning you 4 more long noses. The whole goal is to leave every lie open for correction, by anybody who is able to offer a compelling case and back it up such that people trust the correction.

The objection is against setting official truth-setters, because that divides people into two classes: 1. people who are allowed to think for themselves and check facts, and 2. everybody else, who must, for their own safety and well-being, have the first class filter what they read.

> If we take their past performance as evidence of what is likely to happen moving forward, we will see, just for example a conservatives shut out of the public conversation for saying exactly the same thing a liberal is given a pass on.

There are definitely examples of fact checks of very similar claims being resolved very differently, and the further left person in question being the one given gentler treatment. I'm not sure how you'd effectively test the dataset to determine whether this is just statistical noise, though.

On the other hand - whether you can test it or not, the question at hand seems to be about perception of bias rather than actual bias. I wonder if an adversarial style system wherein, say, both supporters and detractors wrote up their best cases for why something was true/false and then the best arguments were presented as some sort of a ... duel? ... would provide better information. Crowdsource the arguments well enough and the classes go away at that level, and using the resulting information to filter might be rather more useful.

The only things I'm really sure of here, sadly, are that doing nothing doesn't seem to be working particularly well, but every time we attempt to do something we find that doing nothing looks increasingly like at least a local maximum.

Your whole post is a huge straw man. You say 'the objection is against setting official truth-setters' but nobody was proposing that and the post you're replying to to never even mentioned Snopes.

The reality is that Facebook - responding to consumer demand - is partnering up with several commercial fact-checking outfits, in addition to tweaking its algorithm to select from something other than sensational content that generates lots of reactions (not an easy problem). IF those research/fact-checking service suppliers don't do a good job, market theory suggests they'll be displaced by a competitor.

divides people into two classes: 1. people who are allowed to think for themselves and check facts, and 2. everybody else, who must, for their own safety and well-being, have the first class filter what they read.

How does some 'possibly fake' tag on a shared article on social media prevent anyone from thinking for themselves or checking facts? They can still do that by choosing to ignore the 'possibly fake' tag and clicking through to the source and researching it further. You're crafting a narrative here in which people in group 1 restrict the freedom of people in group 2, but that's not actually happening because in reality nobody is being forced or has to give up any options. I'm oddly reminded of the meat industry objecting to country-of-origin labels on the grounds that consumers don't need to know that stuff.

You adopted a very high handed tone to the poster above, saying that you would fact-check their fact-checking, but then you made multiple misrepresentations of that poster's argument, interspersed with groundless claims of your own.

Can you prove facebook is really responding to consumer demand ?

The whole fake news narrative popped up over night to explain Trump winning at impossible odds.

Id say people were fine with filter bubbles truth be damned as long as the outgroup got smeared.

Its also disingenious to say its not hard to see how the fake tag could be abused. Oil companies have spent fortunes trying to get climate change labeled as fake, and look how successful it was.

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