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Comment by roymurdock | Hacker News Reader

Facebook is a publicly traded corporation, therefore its goal is to maximize shareholder revenue.

Facebook generates revenue by selling ad space on its website.

Ad space that is surrounded by attention grabbing content will generate the most revenue, thereby maximizing shareholder value.

At the lowest common denominator, negative emotions such as outrage and fear draw attention.

Facebook has no incentive to remove or alter this content in any way, other than to avoid illegal content that could produce lawsuits.

Fake news is not illegal.

If you don't want to consume the same questionable news as the lowest common denominator, pay for a subscription to a news service. Otherwise don't use Facebook for anything more than a photo sharing/messaging platform.

Dis-aggregate the pieces of the platform. If you can't do that, then avoid the whole service. There are plenty of alternatives for each piece.

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> Facebook is a publicly traded corporation, therefore its goal is to maximize shareholder revenue.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/01/myth-maximizing-share...

The article you site claims the maximizing shareholder revenue is not a legal obligation of corporation. It further observes that "we evolved from a society in which corporate interests were largely aligned with those of broader public purpose into a state where crony capitalism, accounting fraud, and corporate predation are predominant characteristics".

So the article you link to strengthens the point of the parent that facebook is not in business for the public good but for private interests that are strongly at odds with public interests.

Interesting quote from your link:

> Lazonick discusses how we evolved from a society in which corporate interests were largely aligned with those of broader public purpose into a state where crony capitalism, accounting fraud, and corporate predation are predominant characteristics.

On the contrary, aligning anyone's interests with those of the broader public is often against the natural state of things. There are many ways for groups of people, whether they're corporations or marauding bands of knights, to benefit at the expense of the broader public. In fact, straightforward theft, fraud, violence, oppression, slavery, monopolization, deception, sabotage, and other anti-competitive practices are historically among the easiest and most common ways to profit.

"Businesses thriving by creating value for everyone" is not a natural system. The only reason capitalism works at all is because we have a strong government that enforces laws and regulations to make most alternative forms of profit illegal. So of course we should expect an arms race, where businesses attempt to find loopholes where they can profit without creating value. The monetary incentives are too high for people not to try.

Lets not forget that in the natural state of things, I get to kill you and your family for the stuff you have, because I'm stronger and meaner than you. Then someone else does the same to be.

Nature doesn't love us, that's why we've spent so long killing it and getting away from it.

Avoiding WWIII is in both companies and the publication intrest. Small companies tend to align closely with public interests except a few unique areas per business. It's really only large companies that have lots of points of divergence.

The major difference is a tiny company interacts with other companies largely the same way individuals do. Large companies have far more complex relationships.

> Avoiding WWIII is in both companies and the publication intrest.

So is avoiding ecological collapse e.g. by depleting all natural resources. Yet, for each actor individually, person or company, there are higher incentives to harvest from the commons. This is a called 'tragedy of the commons'. Most popular economic strategies and certainly most corporations act in their own interest.

In the case of Facebook and fake news, that means doing whatever yields more advertising revenue.

This logic only holds if you take an extremely narrow view of what constitutes self-interest. If you broaden that understanding to include the benefits we receive from wider social progress, then doesn't this chain of reasoning fall apart?

Can you explain further? I don't quite follow.

Aligning one's interest with the broader public makes sense because we are part of the broader public. What benefits the broader public benefits us individually, too.

Yes, but the inverse is not true: what benefits oneself doesn't necessarily benefit the broader public. And that's what matters when looking at individual behaviors.

Great for someone like you or me who know not to trust everything you read on facebook. Not so great for my 60yo dad who still believes pretty much everything he sees online, and doubly so when he reads it on facebook because it was a "forward" from someone he trusts.

This is a complex question and there are no easy answers.

answer is actually easy, execution is complicated...clearly too many people don't have the required IQ to participate in their own governance, as such maybe it's time to prevent them from doing so

>too many people don't have the required IQ to participate in their own governance, as such maybe it's time to prevent them from doing so

^The mantra of every authoritarian dictatorship. If the people lack the information to manage their own well-being, it is our job to inform them, not subjugate them.

Of course, one man's school is another man's government re-education camp.

I'm not sure why you jumped to conclusion of subjugating them. Have you heard of epistocracy? Give people a chance to participate but make them earn it. I don't believe voting is a right. When my decisions affect the lives of others I should be held to a standard.

Makes sense, except in practice. It results in rigged tests, poll taxes, and generally racist bigoted systems that keep some classes down. We don't have a 'one man - one vote' system in America by accident, but in response to a wide understanding of how prevalent such rigging was back then.

With all due respect I don't even think America has a "one man one vote system" in practice. The idea of super pacs and an easily manipulated populace combined with a bipartisan political system seems to me like America is living the illusion of democracy. The current system already keeps certain classes down. Blacks and Hispanics don't tend to have the same voter turn out as wealthy white folks do. Besides, does the current system even address their needs? It seems biased towards helping the wealthy. So I'm not sure in practice democracy is doing a great job.

>many people don't have the required IQ to participate in their own governance, as such maybe it's time to prevent them from doing so

Subjugate: to make someone or something subordinate.

Does your statement not fit the definition? Forcing someone out of their inalienable rights because they don't pass an arbitrarily dictated exam is to make them subordinates or untermensch. Epistocracy was a common method used to prevent blacks from voting in the southern United States.

You made the incorrect assumption that voting is an inalienable right. By who's standard? We've lived most of our history without the right to vote and survival of the fittest was the way humanity and nature functioned (I.e. the strongest rule). And no, episitocracy wasn't used in the south. Blacks weren't considered human. That's not the same as episitocracy. Those are two very different issues. It's not quite episitocracy if the same standard isn't being applied to the entire population. In the south the literacy tests were being given ONLY to black people even though alot of the white people who were allowed to vote simply for being white probably wouldn't have passed those tests. http://www.wpr.org/georgetown-philosopher-right-vote-defect-...

>It's not quite episitocracy if the same standard isn't being applied to the entire population.

What about the people who get to determine what the test questions are? Are they not by default held at a higher standard than the rest of the population?

I think there is another option you might have missed.

What's that?

Yeah... perhaps something like an electoral college, except functional?

I think the electoral college is probably the worst approach. The original intention behind the electoral college was basically to overturn the decision of the people if the wealthy elite didn't like it. That's translated into "preventing mob rule". Why not just make sure the mob is actually capable of picking their own leader, or even better teaching them to lead themselves?

>This is a complex questions and there are no easy answers.

What precisely is the question?

How should we handle the phenomenon of fake news being virally circulated in social media

The vaccination that provides herd immunity from viral nonsense is instruction in critical thinking skills.

The treatment for misinformation and disinformation is genuine, accurate information.

Censorship and regulation of information is absolutely the wrong way to handle it. If you ever grant any government the power to be final arbiter over what truth is, you deserve what will surely happen to you next.

I believe the question is whether "news" is similar-enough in kind to "food" or "drugs" that it would make sense for the state to regulate it a bit, with the goal (like the "food" and "drugs" categories) of protecting people from their own mistakes.

In the "food" and "drug" cases, the state does this because large corporations have far more resources available to be applied to the goal of fooling people into consuming something that might be harmful to them, than people have available to figure out they were fooled.

The "news" case, though sometimes being similar to that, is also often very different: private individuals can be sources of news, news is often delivered without cost to the reader, and even news that is sourced from commercial institutions often reaches the majority of its readers through redistribution, without attribution, by private individuals (e.g. word of mouth; posting paraphrases on Facebook; etc.)

So, leaving alone whether the same principle could apply to "news" (or whether it's consistently trumped by free speech concerns, etc.), the implementation of such a policy would be quite different, perhaps different enough as to make it unfeasible. That is a complex question.

It's also complicated by the fact that news/journalism is the process we use to hold the government/powerful accountable. There are serious agency problems that would develop if the government (or any group) were to regulate it. This is why freedom of speech is such an important part of the constitution.

Also the USA would not exist if it were not for fake news. It was the arrival of printing presses in Boston which allowed political groups to create fake news to inflame the revolution[1], so it's not always clear fake news is a bad thing (I'm English but I think the creation of democratic America is one of the greatest common goods the world has seen, though i'm sure we can debate that).

[1] Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Penguin_History_of_the_Uni...

Yes! We could call it the Department of Truth, seeing as we don't have government ministries in the US.

As Abraham Lincoln once said, "Don't believe everything you read online."

This is different from what 60 year olds were doing with e-mail a decade ago in what way, exactly? As someone who grew up around AM radio and gun show culture, the sudden pearl-clutching is amusing, but also disturbing since it's so coordinated and with clear political motivations.

The question is this: Do you support fake news or do you support the construction of a censorship apparatus? For me, there is a very easy answer.

False dichotomy. You can have a censorship apparatus that allows only fake news.

At the same time, it's also clear that fake news is being used to justify all sorts of political things that are leading to intensified divisions and hatred (on /both/ ends of the spectrum) which is leading society down a different slippery slope, but one that's slippery all the same.

I expected the cry of false dichotomy. Here's the thing: all simplifications are inaccurate because they involve a loss of fidelity. Simplifications that are tolerably inaccurate but useful are the basis of clear thinking. When you resist simplification, ask yourself whether you are seeking to avoid inaccuracy or seeking to avoid clear thinking. People tend to resist clear thinking when it leads to difficult decisions.

I'm not sure what you mean by bringing up a hypothetical "censorship apparatus that allows only fake news" -- my contention is that you cannot "beat" fake news without a censorship apparatus. Of course you can have a "good" censorship apparatus that only allows things you believe are good and true or you could have a "bad" one that only allows fake news. I'm sure yours would be very, very good indeed. But I think it's much better not to play that game at all.

Upvoted you for the civil response.

I think you are viewing censorship apparatus as on a good -> bad spectrum. There is also the spectrum of the scale of censorship. For example: HRC's "sex ring" (obviously false facts misrepresented as the truth) is fake news that should be suppressed. But on the flip side, we obviously don't want a USSR-style control of the press, where the wrong word/opinion can land you in the gulag.

You seem to think that because any kind of censorship apparatus can be subverted for nefarious means, you should have no censorship apparatus at all. But I'll counter that that in itself is a form of intellectual laziness: Should we not explore the possibility of building a decentralized apparatus with appropriate checks and balances, that keeps the bare minimum of "fake news" out of general circulation? The answer may be no, but we should at least explore it.

I'm glad I was able to come across civilly. I'm at the limit of my patience on this topic with people who on the one hand claim that the freedom of the press to speculate wildly about Russian hooker piss is "vital to the functioning of our Democracy," while at the same time claiming that the Pizzagate rumors are "undermining the foundations of the Republic."

You're right, I do see censorship as categorically a bad thing and not worth exploring. I think if you did manage to create some sort of light-touch, objective, fact-based system of fake news suppression it'd be hijacked by ideologues faster than you could believe. But that's a place we can agree to disagree.

I would like to point out that "censorship" is, strictly speaking, an instruments only governments can employ.

So, we're talking about government regulation of speech. And that already exists, for good reason. Incitement to violence, threats of violence, defamation, child pornography are all instances of it.

All of those regulations exist because the damage done to society by these forms of speech has been deemed outweighing the benefits to society that would result from inclusion of it.

If that is true for fake news is arguable. I happen to believe it is, you seem to think the right to speech outweighs the damage.

But I'm not sure if that's what we're talking about here. Are you arguing that the value of being able to have fake speech outweighs the damage it does, or are you arguing that all forms of speech, including the currently outlawed ones, should be free and no restrictions whatsoever should apply?

Related, the question of a "censorship apparatus" is also open to interpretation - we're settling current restrictions mostly through courts & law enforcement. I would guess the answer if you consider that a censorship apparatus is influenced by what you think about current speech regulations.

I guess I'm using the Wikipedia definition of censorship which diverges from yours somewhat. To quote, because it's short:

Censorship is the suppression of free speech, public communication or other information which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by governments, media outlets, authorities or other groups or institutions.

I think suppression of public communication by a monopoly corporation like Facebook does count here. And to be clear, yes, I am arguing that the value of being able to have fake speech outweighs the damage it does. As soon as you begin on the mission to suppress "fake" speech, you have to elevate some person or institution to the role of deciding what is fake and what is real, and that's far too much power to give to anyone. That power must remain with the individual, as imperfect as we all may be.

Ah. I'm looking at the first amendment definition, which is indeed somewhat different :)

And even there, we have made that determination e.g. for speech inciting violence. That's a fairly well-defined case, so I assume that's why we all agreed we're OK with that.

As a thought experiment - or, really, to help me understand - what if we declared "fake news" as "intentionally wrong in substantial facts" and had a very clear definition of substantial, and what counts as intent?

Second thought experiment: What if you could still say whatever you wanted, but "fake news" simply wouldn't be content that's promoted into people's streams? Is that still censorship? After all, you can still say whatever you want - but individuals won't have to hear you when they haven't consented?

(I happen to believe that the core issue isn't the fact that there are fake news, but the fact that the various social media ranking algorithms violate consent by injecting things they deem interesting. I.e. it's not about speech, per se - it's about the fact that the platforms allow third parties to inject themselves into conversations unasked)

Amendment I:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

That is not a definition of censorship. Nice try, though.

Regarding your first thought experiment, we already have that in the form of libel law. If you have standing to show that you are harmed by what is said and can show it to be intentionally and substantially wrong, you have a good case. Who brings the suit against general purveyors of fake news in your thought experiment? The United States Government?

The bigger problem is that when you move beyond the trivial, the dumb garbage that some people believe because it suits their biases and they don't care to find the truth, you quickly get into territory where people simply cannot agree on the facts. I believe that the truth can only be arrived at in an environment that allows free inquiry and open discussion. If you really think that the truth is a clean thing, and can't name at least a half dozen "open questions" in current world affairs, then you are not paying attention.

I'd appreciate it if we could leave the slights and barbs at home. I really think we can have a conversation without.

As for the definition of censorship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_State...

First sentence: "In general, censorship in the United States, which involves the suppression of speech or public communication, raises issues of freedom of speech, which is protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution". I apologize if my short-hand of "first amendment definition" was misleading - it's not defined in the 1st, but the 1st is definitely the basis of legal handling of censorship.

So now we have two competing wikipedia definitions. Looking at the National Coalition Against Censorship, the first amendment still seems relevant: http://ncac.org/resource/what-is-censorship

I think the case can be made, at least, that there are different definitions of censorship, none obviously invalid.

"If you really think that the truth is a clean thing"

In many cases, no. In many other cases, yes. There are things that are verifiably true or false. I'm not interested - for the purposes of discussing fake news - with the open questions. But for the purpose of experiment #1, I am interested in verifiable falsehoods. The dumb garbage. What if the government could and would sue for that? (N.B.: It's a thought experiment. I'm not advocating for that approach)

I also still think that experiment #2 leads in a better direction. Falsehoods will always exist, but there's nothing that says we need to make it easier to propagate them, under your or my definition.

I disagree that we have "competing wikipedia definitions," I don't find that argument convincing and think you're just refusing to admit to being mistaken about what a word means. I hope that's not too sharp of a barb.

One reason I want separate the easily proven falsehoods is that the people who fall for that stuff are not very persuadable anyway, and the damage to the body politic is not very great, and I think that the real goal of the censorship crusaders is to shut down competing worldviews.

Being sued or prosecuted by your government for "propagating falsehoods" would be awful obviously. What else is there to do with that thought experiment than to recoil and place it in the bad outcomes bin?

The thing about recommender systems really is an interesting question and a legitimate gray area but I'm personally not interested in pursuing it at the moment. In fact I'm going to stop replying to this thread, but if you think theres a way to incorporate some sort of unbiased veracity estimate into such a system, by all means go for it.

> This is different from what 60 year olds were doing with e-mail a decade ago in what way, exactly

volume, perhaps.

> Do you support fake news or do you support the construction of a censorship apparatus?

in one sense, there isn't really any difference.

Volume, I doubt it. Every small town Fudd I ever met had an AOL account. The difference is that all this activity is now visible to the liberal intelligentsia.

To your second point, that's just nonsense.

"The difference is that all this activity is now visible to the liberal intelligentsia."

I do think that's a big part of it. However, there is some aura of authenticity that comes from social media postings that link to official looking sites. Not for people that are somewhat internet savvy, but there is a group that's being somewhat fooled in way they weren't in the past.

I've seen a huge amount of complete and utter bullshit spread on social media by people who are both internet-savvy and media-savvy - indeed, even by journalists from mainstream online publications - despite not having the supposed aura of authenticity provided by a link. Indeed, I reckon that in some circles an obviously fake link harms the credibility of a claim compared to no source at all or even to one that contradicts the claim.

> Every small town Fudd I ever met had an AOL account

having grown up in small towns, no fudd i knew had a computer, much less an aol account. (and this was in the era of aol discs clogging the mail system.)

> To your second point, that's just nonsense.

"fake news" is censorship through displacement and delegitimization.

censorship is "fake news" by virtue of providing incomplete or distorted information (eg, lies of omission).

Don't use face book don't watch tv don't listen to radio don't use the internet - there's your safe space right there

If the only way to remain objective about the populace is to remove one's self from public, that includes making a living off others. Those (other) people who are to become your cattle, your cash crop, your money tree. Then MarkZ has become the anti-theses of objectionable and to top it off I really don't follow his line of thought, except as far to see it's all about his little cash crop of humans.

And then the real fun begins for us

> If the only way to remain objective about the populace is to remove one's self from public

Well, the opposite is true as well, and more likely I think: By removing yourself from public, you lose any true bearing on what it's like to be a member of the populace. How can you be objective about something you don't understand? How can you be objective about a society you have no real understanding of?

Hijacking your post to ask if you have a suggested news service that posts multiple sides to every story & avoids persuasive opinion pieces. I don't want late breaking news. I want well researched news that tries to understand multiple viewpoints. I also don't want to have to filter through articles to find the good ones. I would pay for this.

That requires a subscription, and your subscription to a service which produces long form journalism will be inherently biased.

I am unaware of a service which really aggregates multiple view points in a fair way because such a thing is impossible.

I can link you to a few longer form journalism papers/magazines, but any conservative would decry them as biased.

We could link to some traditionally conservative outlets, but they'd be decried as neo-conservative, out of date and biased.

As offensive as it might be to you, in society and news, opinion is all there is.

"But facts MATTER" you might retort, but no, they don't. Only opinions about facts matter.

Because what power does a fact have if it's not accepted as true? None. What power does a falsehood have if it's accepted as true? All of it.

There is no fair and rational way to separate opinion and fact.

After a fifteen years of using news aggregators, RSS aggregators, aggreagtors like memeorandum.com and polurls.com, and social aggregators like digg, then reddit, and social media services, I have not found what you want.

I have thought about making it, and I have ideas on how liberals and conservatives can use a single website to organize the news into strands and voice their opinions on the validity of that organization WITHOUT the normal animosity and viciousness that is normal, but I've never sat down to really create it.

If you're able to categorize news sources as conservative, or liberal, then couldn't you aggregate news by grouping the conservative and liberal articles about a specific topic together, and presenting them side by side?

For instance, lets say Trump creates an executive order demanding that a wall between Mexico and the US be built by 2018. Both the right, and the left, will write thousands upon thousands of articles about how this will be great for the country, and terrible for the country. The truth like most things, may lie somewhere in between the extremes. Your news aggregator would allow you to read articles about the wall, as written by both conservatives, and liberals.

Then, you'd at LEAST be reading the differing opinions. The problem is, I doubt many people would want a service like this. Like it or not, human beings seem to enjoy the comfort of their solidified beliefs. It's far easier to digest your right wing, or left wing news, rather than digesting BOTH. People don't really want to change.

>If you're able to categorize news sources as conservative, or liberal, then couldn't you aggregate news by grouping the conservative and liberal articles about a specific topic together, and presenting them side by side?

See, the thing is, people aggressively self-bubble so if you natively show them both sides, they will stop using your service.

There may be a minority of less-political and more-rational folks who want that, but I've discovered trying to get people to use polurls.com that people don't want side by side.

If you do side by side, you create cognitive dissonance when "their side" "appears" "wrong", and the easiest way to solve that cognitive dissonance is to close the tab and not return.

>Then, you'd at LEAST be reading the differing opinions. The problem is, I doubt many people would want a service like this. Like it or not, human beings seem to enjoy the comfort of their solidified beliefs. It's far easier to digest your right wing, or left wing news, rather than digesting BOTH. People don't really want to change.

Exactly, which is why I envision a system of silos where you can have your biased lunch and eat it too, but whose tools allow us to measure opinion and biases, and which can attempt to bring down some of the barriers between bubbles through a variety of surfacing techniques.

Give people what they want and the tools to classify THEIR bubble, and in the process, keep other bubbles and ideas just on their edges, visible in the periphery...

Combatting cognitive dissonance self-preservation is a problem worth solving though, ugh.

One solution can be to show the news that conform to one's bias, but have some sort of "score", measuring the sentiment of those of the opposite view, and the general public. There should also be the option to dig deeper on that if desired.

Says I'm liberal, I may get articles that criticize Trump's immigration plan, and the articles would show how well received the plan is to the right.

Again, that's what realclearpolitics.com appears to be doing... listing articles from both sides of the isle, twice daily.

I don't work for them, I've just found their published lists useful.

I agree that both viewpoints will be opinions based upon facts or theories. There is a saying that goes something like "Don't argue with someone unless you know their side better than they do." I feel an author who understands both sides of an issue could write to an audience in a way that is meant to purely inform them about both sides opinions.

You could also do it as a debate where two respectable, well-informed and well spoken people debate following strict rules. Pretty much the opposite of a US Presidential debate. Without it being a live debate, both would have time to give their statements plenty of thought and consideration. They could then take the time to make sure it is well written.

If you want factual reporting of events that have happened, i.e. news, then Reuters or AP will give you this, without any of the other crap.

The problem is that most people rarely want just raw data.

Given any particular topic, people typically want is to know what to do about something, or at least (it's lazier cousin) how to feel about it. Ideally, we would all individually start at raw data and end on drawing our own conclusions about how to feel about issues. The vast majority of us rely on some type of 'packaging' stage where raw facts get bundled in an easier to understand manner i.e. news orgs.

This is the mechanism that modern media has really thrown a wrench into. We've achieved a level where we can go from start to finish, turn that firehose of data directly into emotions without any need for thought. The old speed bumps: rational discourse, verification have not been able to scale in the same way.

I don't think any one organization will fairly report without bias, though I do appreciate visiting realclearpolitics.com from time to time to get a list of links that appears to be from both sides of the aisle.

I would love to hear how others are tackling the difficult job of being informed in this particularly contentious time

> Facebook has no incentive to remove or alter this content in any way, other than to avoid illegal content that could produce lawsuits.

In the short term, you're right. In the long term, you aren't. The long view is that people will get tired of reactionary content, and as that happens the credibility and utility of Facebook as a platform will drop, as will its profits. Since Mark has control of Facebook, he has the advantage of being able to operate on long time horizons (and has demonstrated his ability and willingness to do that). So he (and Facebook) have every incentive to fix this issue, and it seems like they're working hard to try and get it done.

>Fake news is not illegal.

a) Depends on your country

b) Even if it's not, it's highly immoral.

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