Facebook says Pages that regularly share false news won’t be able to buy ads
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
This is not a partisan issue, when you start down the road of handing the keys to shaping public thought to a powerful party, you're there when the power changes too.
This is no different than being able to tell when someone is bullshitting just as you walk through every day life, and thinking we need to shield the poor naive populace from harmful ideas is borderline stereotypical paternalism.
This is all obviously a big deal to old media, who have made an art not out of sharing incorrect truths, but of very selectively sharing truths, to the point that what emerges does not really represent the truth at all. They didn't lie, but they aggressively shaped. Of course democratic access to the pieces they'd rather suppress (on both sides) threatens that model. They'd love us to toss out this particular bath water.
Well and empirically demonstrated in the 80's by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky.
Knowing the tactics of people behind fake news, it's good that Facebook is responding accordingly to punish and get rid of bad actors on their platform.
It's once again showing that we can't have pure anarcho decentralization. It would be a haven for bad actors that goes unpunished.
We can absolutely set definition for what is bad and what isn't bad. What is clearly bad is writing fake news about certain group of ethnic group you hate and manipulating others into believing your twisted idiosyncratic views about Jews, Hindus and Moors.
edit: there is some heavy downvote brigading going on here. I've alerted the mods.
(inb4 1st amendment is only for the gov - that is a selective truth. the principles of free speech exist outside of government.)
Facebook can absolutely kick out people who don't behave on their platform. Playing the freedom of speech card doesn't work when you actively try to oppress other's freedom of speech through tactical manipulation.
Punishing individuals and groups who willfully and knowingly engage in spreading information containing false facts concocted to support their intolerant views is absolutely necessary to protect freedom of speech.
Punishing people for spreading information you don't like in the name of protecting free speech is double speak
Thinking a group of people is lesser than you because of the arrangement of their skin color pigmentation, and crying freedom of speech is being attacked, is not going to get you a lot of sympathy, especially when you now try to actively shut people up who are calling you out on it.
> freedom of speech means freedom to mislead
sure, but don't get all up and mighty when you get called out and shut down.
But it clearly has. Only in the past 5 year did it become possible for one guy in Romania to pose as a small town Ohio news agency (or 4) and spread nonsense to millions of people.
Do you feel that academic journals violate the principle of free speech? If not, why is what facebook is doing any different?
If so then yes I agree. Government censorship is unacceptable. But that's not really comparable to private entities censoring on their own private whims.
In what way is Facebook at all comparable to a government? Is there some social contract that all people are entered into with Facebook? If so, what are the rights and responsibilities of that contract? And do note here, I'm talking about an implied social contract, not an actual contract (like an EULA).
What large portion of the internet do they "govern"? As best as I can tell you're arguing that any sufficiently large entity is essentially a government. That's ridiculous. So please, please explain what you do mean.
They have written community rules (don't know the exact name) that members are expected to comply with.
> What large portion of the internet do they "govern"?
The Facebook website (duh). Which, for a surprising amount of people, is literally "the internet" (or at least the part of it that they most interact with).
> As best as I can tell you're arguing that any sufficiently large entity is essentially a government.
No. For instance, Toyota is not a government because it does not set rules under which I can use their cars. Facebook does set rules under which I can use their platform, and it enforces them (which is the entire point of the submission). Setting rules and enforcing them is governance.
In fact, every moderator on any public forum is in the governance business. Since Facebook is so large, I find it reasonable to liken it to a government in terms of influence of its governance.
Just to be clear, this definition also makes Walmart the government of all Walmart stores, and me the government of my bedroom. Neither of those are in any way related to how the President is (a part of) the government of the United States.
[1] Edit: Within the boundaries of the law. But if that were a problem with your definition of "governance", then state governments (which operate within the boundaries of federal law) would not be governing either.
And to be clear, what we mean by "fake news" are stories that are demonstrably false with incorrect information that's never corrected even when it's revealed to be false. We're _not_ talking about what Trump calls "fake news," by which he means any narrative that doesn't paint him in a positive light.
Irrelevant. Limiting speech doesn't solve that contradiction, it only guarantees the worse outcome. More speech solves your proposed "contradiction" just fine.
People couldn't manipulate millions of others as easily. You couldn't even REACH millions of people easily. And you had to be an actual authority figure to be given that power (perhaps a corrupt practice but still).
The communications landscape is quite different from 2000, remarkably different from 1980, extremely different from 1960, a world away from 1920, and bares very little resemblance to 1820.
How do things in the 1500s and 1600s say that thins aren't different?
You said thousands of years, how do the lessons of 2000 BC show us things haven't changed?
I'd love to see examples of unfettered free speech from the 1600s or much MUCH easier.
399BC - Socrates speaks to jury at his trial: 'If you offered to let me off this time on condition I am not any longer to speak my mind... I should say to you, "Men of Athens, I shall obey the Gods rather than you."'
1516 - The Education of a Christian Prince by Erasmus. 'In a free state, tongues too should be free.'
In the 1600s, Galileo was executed for mere speech.
Based on the post I was expecting examples of where free speech overcame the kind of 'there are my kind of lies so they must be true you liar' stuff we're seeing now.
1) No strong sense of "norms" in the culture
2) Manipulation of "Free Speech" into "Equal Speech"
3) Manipulation of a populist movement entirely built on nostalgia, the-jews-backstabbed-the-kaiser mythology, and "Germany First" so that they were far enough from Hitler that he could claim to not control them directly, but everyone else feared touching him would start a nationwide riot.
4) Political violence was normalized
5) Everything (churches, tennis clubs) had political party variants (ex: the socialist democrat Protestant church vs a communist one)
6) Terrorist attack on the Reichstag was a huge opportunity and turning point
There's a world of difference between the Internet of 2017 and Germany of 1932 that I really do suggest keeping them apart, and pick up the book.
Totalitarianism has emerged in societies lacking free speech as well. it's usually a lot more complicated than that.
Regulating free speech is indeed a slippery slope. But it might need to be regulated, I don't have no idea to be honest. A free market works best for the common good when it's regulated though, and I could see it being the same way for free speech. But a slippery slope it is.
You say this as if it isn't a perfectly valid point. You have the right guaranteed by law to express an opinion. No one, no matter what size corporation or platform, is expected to give you a podium from which to do so.
More to the point, freedom of speech has never been an absolute, not in the way most extremist activists would have you believe. There has always been exceptions, but the common theme of them is incitement, either incitement of panic that endangers safety (yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre), incitement of hatred against a group of people, or incitement of a riot, on and on. There are all kinds of ways the Government limits your speech.
Since your use of Facebook is effectively using their network to promote your speech, Facebook is basically speaking for you to a certain degree, that means Facebook has a vested interest to not speak hateful nonsense so it by itself does not become the subject of either lawsuits from the Government or public outcry, the latter of which has already happened, the former entirely in the scope of possibilities if they continue to act like the typical tech bro and try not to take sides in the name of "Free Speech" a.k.a maximum audience numbers.
The intersection of people arguing that ISPs are common carriers and also that corporations can deny you a platform.
I definitely accept the need for that intersection for the USA at this point.
Please read up on this concept. It does not mean what you think, and is so frequently voiced as part of a case advocating restrictions on speech, it's become something of a hot-button topic.
https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha...
Money quote:
After Holmes' opinions in the Schenck trilogy, the law of the United States
was this: you could be convicted and sentenced to prison under the Espionage
Act if you criticized the war, or conscription, in a way that "obstructed"
conscription, which might mean as little as convincing people to write and
march and petition against it. This is the context of the "fire in a theater"
quote that people so love to brandish to justify censorship.
You might even want to reconsider your position.
The principle of free speech is that actors who are not exercising the monopoly, coercive power of government are free to choose which views to express or relay, and that persuasion not obligation (legal, moral, or otherwise) of some actors to neutrality will determine the success of ideas in spreading.
The concept of free speech does not involve some private actors being entitled to other private actors’ resources.
(There is a legitimate issue with some “private” actors being really public actors where the structure of property rights and natural features of the market for certain infrastructure creates monopolies or oligopolies on essential mechanisms of communication.)
If this is the world we're headed into, by treating free speech as an absolute and inviolate, then I'm not sure it's a world I want to live in.
When nazis start inciting riots against my friends and loved ones, and quislings defend that speech as ok to disseminate because free speech, is this the world I want to live in?
I'm lucky, I don't look like anyone who's a target for white supremacists. Most of my friends and loved ones aren't that lucky.
I have a little bit of a different perspective because of that--the violence is already coming to our door and no amount of talking is going to cool white supremacist or nazi heads when they're out there.
So, universal, absolute free speech...is this building a world I want to inhabit? Increasingly, no. And proponents of an absolute and inviolate principle of free speech have no answer to the violence that's coming.
I'd love to be able to say I supported that principle that thoroughly, so if you've got one besides "just talk them out of attacking your friends and loved ones," I'm all ears.
They're talking about social media and the definition of "fake news". As I've come to experience in my life a lot of people don't even realize how biased their points of view are.
Data and statistics can be manipulated to support certain points of view. Lots of fallacies are regularly exploited by articles of all types on both sides of the spectrum. If you leave a group of conservatives to define what is fake news and what is not, you'll get quite a different list than if you left a group of liberals to do the same.
There's a real slippery slope here. Free speech is as much a social convention as it is legal protection from the government. Facebook has a near monopoly on social media. Google has the same for search. If Facebook and Google get to be the arbiter of truth, then free speech is lost.
Except they don't. You should have said "inb4 John Stuart Mill", one of the founders of free speech philosophy who said that that the harm principle trumps freedom of speech (i.e. if an expression causes harm, then that expression can be silenced).
This idea of freedom of speech "as a principle" being a blank check to express whatever you want without consequences, is a new development.
I know the 1st amendment protects Americans from the government but today's free speech advocates, warriors, or whatever they are called look a bunch of angry men.
But that's besides the point. Freedom of speech has always been an imperfect principle. At anytime we are and have been censored in any society. In the west we probably have fewer censorships, but still we censor child porn, financial cheating / insider trading as well as "hate speech". And that is good. Other societies such as china do exactly the same just that the goal post has shifted a little more.
The point is this: freedom of speech is a relative term and has changed between societies and in time. It's never been free in absolute terms.
It's also recently not revealed the truth and made us less just, which is what it's only real purpose is.
The goalpost needs changing to make it achieve that again.
'Origins of freedom of speech and expression' section found here suggests otherwise (unless you want to be particular about the term 'constitution', rather than what it represents):
Socrates was sentenced to death for "corrupting the youth" - an act of speech. Considered by some to be a final nail for ancient athens - who had adored free speech before so much as to name a warship after the concept.
You'll likely attract down votes with this edit regardless of whether members agree with the sentiment, as it's counter to the guidelines:
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
I hope hn has some anti state player routines in place...
however, tattling to the mods because you are being downvoted and dont like it? good lord
trying to manipulate the naive herd of sheep who blindly follows whatever people like on Facebook
I realise you genuinely do believe that there are vast numbers of people who are literally programmable through their Facebook news feeds as if they were a television set, and that your own vastly superior intellect would ensure that this never happens to your good self, but it's a fantastically offensive, trollish and flame-o-riffic position to take ... every bit as awful as outright racism/sexism/whatever (except your views of intellectual and moral superiority are a lot more common than actual racism or sexism in the HN community). Moreover you provide no actual evidence that such people exist in vast herd-like numbers.
When your entire contribution to the debate is "the world is full of sheep and Facebook must herd them for their own good" are you really surprised that this is considered not particularly helpful? It's like starting an argument with "people with low IQ should be affixed with ankle bracelets to ensure they don't wander around and cause trouble".
Your faux outrage is irritating. You're really going to debate that fake news on FB and elsewhere has had a real impact shaping beliefs and attitudes?
Again I'd like to ask, what's the free speech answer to nazis and white supremacists raising their fists to my friends and loved ones? How do we free-speech our way out of the violence that's already coming?
I'd love to be a free-speech absolutist but, right now, I can't square it with the suffering and violence being brought down on the most vulnerable.
You realise - I hope! - that seeing large populations of other people as weak, inferior, morally defective, mentally limited and generally in need of being controlled or removed from public life is exactly the attitude that led to the Nazi horrors, don't you? It wasn't an excess of free speech that led to the concentration camps, which were secret inside Germany and their existence did not leak to the allies until troops actually found them. It was a set of beliefs that de-humanized entire chunks of the population. Those considered immoral or stupid by the Nazis were sent to the gas chambers ... but only after years of much lighter harassment and suppression.
Especially note that a key part of Hitler's rise was the belief that Germany's defeat in WW1 was somehow partly the result of some sort of conspiracy by people with Jewish beliefs.
So now what do we see? A strong conviction by some parts of society that other parts are mentally weak, that their belief systems are morally defective, yet that people with these beliefs are organised and dangerous and thus they must be suppressed.
The risk here is NOT coming from "free speech absolutists", as you put it, but rather people like yourself who look around and see a world full of people who cannot ever be persuaded or redeemed because they're just too stupid or evil, and thus must be prevented from organising. In the exceptionally rare case that genuine, actual Nazis do "raise their fists" the solution is the same as when anyone does: arrest them and send them to trial.
It's impossible to respond to such a rebuttal without using the N-word and I specifically said at the start I was doing so only because of that argument.
I understand why people bring up Hitler in discussions about free speech. Some people do believe that Nazis are some sort of harmful side effect of free speech and if only people with views tending in that direction are prevented from speaking, there will never be a re-occurrence. That's a reasonable view to hold, but one that many people believe to be wrong (I didn't see Congress delete the first amendment post-WW2 after all).
Now if someone is going to take a position of "I'd love to support X but it leads to Hitler", a rebuttal of the form "actually it's not X that led to these bad things, it's the opposite of X" is a completely reasonable response. If you really believe that's sophistry I'd be interested to know how you'd argue that free speech is the solution to and not the cause of Nazi evil, if you genuinely did believe that, without it being sophistry?
OP: People are susceptible to manipulation. We should think carefully about the ways our institutions allow violent and intolerant ideologies to spread.
You: You know who else thought people were susceptible to manipulation? The Nazis.
A hypothetical non-sophist: Our institutions are indeed helping to spread violent and intolerant ideologies, but any attempt to prevent their spread will only make things worse, because #{reasons}.
One, you respond to violence with violence, but that's not what we're talking about. And two, the best way to hurry along the violence you think is coming is to close down other people's free speech. Speech is the substitute for violence - what do you think will happen when you take speech away from people who feel marginalized?
>I'd love to be a free-speech absolutist but, right now, I can't square it with the suffering and violence being brought down on the most vulnerable.
Sure, "I support free speech but...". You'd love to be a free speech absolutist, as long as the people talking agree with you.
I'd love to be a free speech absolutist but where that's been taking us, my friends and loved ones are at the receiving end of fists, guns, and cars.
So... just to clarify, you're telling me I should be a free speech absolutist and say, "yes, let's just talk that car out of plowing into us"?
Serious, honest question. The violence is already here. Is that--more talking in the face of violence against vulnerable communities--where you see free speech absolutism leading us? Is that the place we, as a society, want to be headed?
(If it's easy for you to say, "yes," then I'm assuming you feel safe knowing you'd never be at the receiving end of a car plowing through a crowd.)
Is a moving car "speech"? You seem to keep trying to blur the line between speech and violence. Why is that? Is it that you don't recognize the difference, or is it that you realize there hasn't actually been much violence, and most of it's coming from your "friends and loved ones" on the left?
>Serious, honest question. The violence is already here. Is that--more talking in the face of violence against vulnerable communities--where you see free speech absolutism leading us? Is that the place we, as a society, want to be headed?
Who are you talking about when you say "vulnerable communities"? The communities with all the institutional protection, from colleges to employers to the state?
And it's not free speech that's turning up the antagonism, but rather the opposite, as more and more pressure is put on people to refrain from, you know, speaking their mind.
>(If it's easy for you to say, "yes," then I'm assuming you feel safe knowing you'd never be at the receiving end of a car plowing through a crowd.)
Again, that was one incident. One. By a guy who'd most likely just been assaulted by communists. To make policy based on what one person does is idiotic.
But if that's what we're going to do, shouldn't we look into yanking MSNBC's broadcast license? I mean, the guy who shot Scalise was a big Maddow fan.
If quoquoquo had supported their viewpoint with something other than his own enormous contempt, perhaps studies or statistics on the extent to which people are sheep like I'd have let it be or maybe even voted it up. But they didn't.
You're really going to debate that fake news on FB and elsewhere has had a real impact shaping beliefs and attitudes?
"Real impact" is meaningless beyond meaning "an impact more than zero". It's surely had more than zero. Is it significant in scale compared to other sources of manipulation, like what ordinary newspapers routinely engage in? Does it have huge impact on individuals or trivial impact? That's absolutely debatable and worth debating.
If there's a difference it's akin to the change from animal power to internal combustion: a difference of degree and mechanic, not the fundamental operation being carried out. But like the change to internal combustion, this change can be pretty revolutionary all the same.
After all they care only about profit and keeping the users in their walled garden. So when you are talking about manipulation, do you consider that Facebooks actions as a company are very manipulative?
There is a huge difference.
If someone is bullshitting you in real life, you don't give them a giant microphone so they can reach millions of people. You ignore them, or politely engage in conversation with them, or maybe even try to help them see the errors of their ways.
Why should Facebook be obligated to amplify deceptive messages? I don't see a reason.
What BS specifically do you disagree with? Do you realize your own bias with that statement?
For example, Trump has spread so many falsehoods but people still attend his events.
Yes, and the fact that they are free to buy a printing press doesn't mean that the New York Times is obligated to print their material on the Times’ press alongsode content that meets the Times’ editorial standards.
What happened to the traditional liberal distrust of big corporations?
What about if Facebook decides discussion of privacy violations online is "fake news?"
Anyone that runs a business has the responsibility to consider the ethical ramifications of their business activities, and to respond in a way that aligns with their ethical values.
FYI –– Y Combinator does exactly this on Hacker News: "selectively censoring (or at least hindering) communication it disagrees with"
I also don't use facebook at all.
It would worry me if an ISP or other group that should be a common carrier were censoring things. Or if the government censored things. But people on facebook are willingly buying into whatever facebook is providing.
For me, FB, TW, etc have become unreliable sources of news.
Here, FB is trying to limit ads from pages that share false news, but who will decide that??
1. FB - Leads to a dangerous slippery slope of putting too much power into a single,private, profit-seeking entity.
2. Users - It alienates sections of society.
3. Other sources - Inherently unreliable.
Seemingly, FB getting into the media distribution business itself is troublesome for a society, especially when you have a platform whose algorithms prioritize profit, consequently leading to construction of powerful echo chambers.
The trouble with these echo chambers is that they nullify efforts of the society to promote meaningful debate and discussion.
Even before the era of FB, the world was struggling with misinformation, lies, subversion of facts, etc. Now we have reached a point where Presidents can lie, often within a span of a few hours, and it's essentially forgotten and things move on. These echo chambers are the primary culprit for this IMV. When efforts to educate constituents is taken head on with echo chambers, the echo chambers inevitably win.
Reminds me of the novel where the speaker in a press conference is denouncing country A, and is handed over a note from his aide, and the speaker immediately switched the narrative denouncing country B, all the while the press simply accepts what is told.
'Candidate X comes out as gay.' 'Secret photos reveal candidate X at KKK lynching.' Are both rather over the top, but also the kind of lies that influence elections.
So you're saying that we should let these organizations lie as much as they want, because people lie in your day-to-day life? The people you meet in your day-to-day life and lie to your face are much more limited in the number of people they can influence with lies.
Why shouldn't we make enormously more powerful institutions more accountable for lies?
PS: There is a huge difference between blowing things that actually happened out of proportion to support an argument and saying anything that someone might believe.
The tragedy now is that there are sites that aren't neatly packaged as entirely false but are. The Internet has empowered people like Alex Jones and other people spouting pure falsehoods.
This isn't new.
People, whole communities of people believe, non-sense today. Not small groups like Flat-earthers or chemtrail theorists who number in the hundreds or thousands (per their website/forums sign-ups). There will always be some people on the fringe.
We avoided truly ridiculous ideas for decades. Things like "911 was an inside job" or "Obama was born in Kenya" are believed by tens of millions of people. This is a new thing in my life at least. The last issue this big and this false was prevalent was McCarthyism.
Thankfully we have a word for that, and it even has a relatively well agreed upon meaning: lies.
The problem with the label "fake news" is, as has been pointed out, that it can mean different things to different people.
Weekly world news can have 'Batboy returns' as a headline and sure it's false. But, bookstores also have fiction sections...
I really don't care how it actually compares to Obama, and I really don't see why Trump cared so much, but the fact is the pictures are clearly not "facts" either. Yet disputing them is still held up as a common example of "deniers".
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/03/06/...
Really - there are stronger arguments against Trump.
There are people who are good at estimating crowd sizes and I'll let them do their job. But, once again, this picture in no way contradicts the others.
And yet the parent seems to believe that pointing out optical perspective differences means we're calling those pictures "right-leaning".
The parent is asserting that the truth is merely a compromise between two different opinions, when in reality there's evidence enough to assert the truth, without making it a matter of 'right' or 'left' opinion. Their inability to provide their credible sources ("high def video") is because their opinion doesn't align with the reality of the situation.
You said 'high resolution video' which the gigapixel is not. Can you link these reliable sources you keep eluding to?
edit: knock yourself out then if you really couldn't find it from all my other comments on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nieiu8tmLIM.
I'm beginning to agree with you about this being "a clear-cut case of people being willfully ignorant."
Edit: The video you linked in your edit does not show the crowds. Why did you edit that video link in? Where is the high-def video you eluded to proving the NPS photos were fake news?
Yes, some stuff is arguable, mostly when it involves politics, but there is a ton of stuff on facebook like "Bolivia expels McDonalds and Coca-Cola", or "check this video on why positive ions released by salt lamps can cure cancer".
The funny thing is Zuckerberg has repeatedly used the line that "Facebook isn't a media company" which is either delusional and naive or Littlefinger doublespeak.
In the past you shared and discussed news at gatherings of all kinds, and unless its a cult (which are easy to identify, and if required, outlaw) you had a fair chance of atleast coming across differing opinion. You had a face, a body and a mind attached to a differing opinion, a great humanizing factor. That is missing in FB echo chambers.
That's the problem. We're ALREADY THERE. It happened years ago. It's not a slippery slope, it's the thing behind us. And that's not even mentioning Google.
At least they're trying (VERY late, if you ask me). They could have chosen to let it continue and profit off it. After all we know it makes lots of clicks and ad revenue.
We can't pretend his is something that's about to happen. It HAPPENED.
IMV their response is very late, very weak and a half hearted attempt.
For specifics, look at entities in the world that are already known to spend lots of money in advancement of their narratives. We don't even have to look to Russia first. Try the fossil fuel industry.
I'm pretty sure the notion of a 'marketplace of influencers' through buying idea distribution on Facebook (with or without pseudo-grassroots camouflage) almost defaults to those who are up to no good: that's who has the money, in 2017.
For me, it has shown that a large chunk my social network is incapable of detecting bullshit. Last year I tried linking to Snopes or Politifact when people would post obvious falsehoods, but most people just don't care.
What I want from FB is a feed that doesn't include shares or likes of any external content. Seeing and reading about life events of my friends and family is what got me hooked on FB, but right now that's all lost in the torrent of bullshit.
Most people didn't have to. When they heard something, it had been filtered. We switched context on millions of people without warning.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jul/... http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2016/jun/20/do...
Bernie's saying its 50%~, Trump is saying its 60%~. Sure its a 8 percent difference at most, but that difference reveals how they got their number. The gist of both articles is that Bernie is inflating his number with people that have part-time work but want full-time while Trump is inflating with high school and college students.
The rulings on both articles basically point to this: Sander's number has more issue with semantics than actually including people that are not actively seeking a job like Trump's number. Trump doesn't get POF because of your objection: while derived wrong it's "decently" close. Quotes because an 8 point difference is very large when talking unemployment numbers.
The inaccurate thing about Bernie's statement was that he cited U6 as a measure of "unemployment" when it would more accurately be called a measure of "underemployment". It includes people who want a full-time job but can only find a part-time job even though they aren't fully unemployed.
Trump cited 100% - labor force participation rate as a measure of unemployment, which is complete nonsense because it counts people who are full-time students or who are disabled as unemployed.
Perhaps the point here is that what is "true" and what is "false" aren't entirely black or white. Depending on how you look at it, full-time students aren't employed; they are therefore unemployed. In some contexts, people who currently do not hold a job are an accurate representation of unemployed. And therein lies the rub: context is incredibly important.
I saw this coming years ago. So did others:
You can't trust user reports. They will say a story is fake when they don't like it.
You can't trust some worker in Bangladesh to determine this either just as easily as you can determine if something is NSFW.
You still can't trust AI.
So how? It hires specialists in each field to determine what is real and what is not?
How the hell are they going to measure this?
If they're good, they get enough depth to explain what SMEs are talking about and to understand the difference between a huckster and an expert. And, amazingly enough, the SMEs themselves will disagree on fine points and big issues.
There is too much specialized information and knowledge for social media companies to be reliable arbiters of truth for any controversial topic.
If Snopes/AP tells me something is false, I'm perfectly willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps this will change in the coming decade, but for now, this seems like a perfectly reasonable heuristic.
These are not wealthy or powerful entities.
Also, it's nice to see Facebook implement a feature solely for the user that could be costing them ad money.
I don't think the current situation is all that different from 2005, when Poe's Law was coined.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/faceb...
Not to mention the cadre of other governmentalistia that work there...
I first learned of the page in 2013, and I noticed that Facebook had removed it for Community Guidelines violations some years later. The page appears to be back now, but they now have very clear disclaimers that the content is satirical.
> The Macedonians may still be at it, because our Republican supporter, Todd White, was flooded with partisan posts. Worse, over a little more than two days, we counted 10 such posts in his feed that were fake, most accusing Democrats or their supporters of illegal activity. In all, White was clearly exposed to more spin than his Democratic counterpart, Chris Smith, who saw exactly zero fake news stories.
There may also be a structural issue (in the USA). If you lean Democrat you probably trust mainstream US media sources like the NYT, Washington Post, CNN, ABC etc. These sources all very openly pushed Clinton and her policies. If you hear a story that sounds initially dubious, you search Google and you don't find anything to support it, you probably will conclude it's not true.
However if you lean Republican and already don't trust these media sources, searching for a story and not finding it will not tell you anything, because you are already expecting those sources to try and suppress information that makes left-leaning causes look bad. So you might find a bunch of YouTube videos or right wing blogs or whatever and conclude that is sufficient.
The US media does publish a lot of biased unfactual garbage, including lots of opinion dressed up as fact, but it's usually quite skillfully done and they avoid pushing stories that are trivially false like "Putin issues arrest warrant for George Soros".
On the other hand, we could attempt to build systems whose purpose is to remove fake news, so defending ourselves against a particularly aggressive form of attack on our institutions, but at the same time creating a situation in which that system is given the power to decide what is fake and what is not.
Are highly speculative opinion pieces which make accusations far from the main stream fake? What about when a complex event takes place and there are numerous 'takes' on how the event played out. Whose version of the events - whose version of reality reality - does the system use to make judgments on the veracity of news?
The situation is complex and we must tread carefully.
Facebook can easily just tag stories they think are false, and give people a button to hide or show such stories (or even show ONLY such stories to make it easier for people to build trust in the system). It would be a kind of spam filter for news stories.
Facebook could then stay neutral, could avoid claims of censorship, people who want to only see "true" news could be happy, people who don't trust Facebook's friends to filter their news feed could also be happy, and everyone wins.
They aren't doing that because their goal is not to help people detect fake/false news. Their goal is to suppress it entirely. They do this because like quoquoquo above, they believe their userbase contains vast numbers of sheep who are incapable of rational thought. Just tagging things won't be the "solution" to the existence of such people, which is why their tactics are controversial.
Are they right about their users? It's a big world. But rather than try to help people spot BS and learn from it, their view appears to be that such people are irredeemable.
I'm tempted to call this an iron law and suggest it's why we've never spotted alien intelligence in the so-vast universe. Perhaps intelligent species inevitably turn to expanding communication, and drown in it very quickly—their efforts turned to zero-sum gains, eventually triggering their destruction one way or another.
Some of those ways are even easy. Can the claims be tested, sometimes this can shortcut you strait to the truth. Knowing how to check sources gets you one step closer. Knowing how to assess the quality of sources, helps. Knowing how to understand the original source material is crucial. Checking that a multitude of sources agree. Determining if the sources are trustworthy (in the web of trust sense). In the case of claims about the natural world being able to duplicate experiments is the ultimate source of truth. There is more but much of this can be done with just a few web searches.
Many Millions of people don't or can't do any this. How many times have we fixed someone's else's computer with just a google search?
Now for the part where I get downvoted. I blame religion. If you do even the most basic checking into most religions they start seeming off. The sources are often unverifiable books. They make claims about the natural world that don't line up with evidence if they are even testable, worse they often contradict themselves. They often have a long history of actively covering up the truth of reality as best they can. What chances does a mind have at navigating a potentially nuanced modern political landscape when its critical faculties have been dulled to the point of accepting as literal truth some or all of the stories about virgin birth, miracles, resurrection, denial of evolution, implausible claims of the earth's age and many other manners of objective non-true things. Religion damages critical thinking. Demagogues and autocrats have always like reduced critical thinking.
Articles is a pretty charitable term for them I guess but headlines like:
"Tiffany Trump's IQ will shock you" "You won't believe what she looks like today" "Plastic surgery nightmares"
and so on... does Salon get docked for Outbrain's lack of integrity? Does Salon's "organic shares" get penalized? What about sputnik news or Russia Today (RT.com)?
I think it is a great step in the right direction, but they have far more responsibility than just refusing money from them for ads.
Bots on the Hamilton 68 dashboard http://dashboard.securingdemocracy.org/ clearly work together to amplify the voices of antidemocratic forces. FB & twitter should (in my opinion) detect and prevent fake-viral root and branch.
-Zuckmeister
There is a definite life cycle to social media sites. Those reaching the "too big to fail" stage are usually about to. AOL, CompuServe, MySpace, etc were all indominately massive juggernauts reaching to take over the media world - and vanished almost overnight. The sudden influx of editorial censorship in Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc is a clue that a large number of legitimate users (who just happen to hold differing expressions of differing views) are facing the option of leaping to another up-and-coming site. Between that, boredom with format limitations, and an otherwise growing sentiment of malaise, I'm seeing the signs that FB etc won't be with us much longer.
And no, it's not "different this time". It's the same this time.
The vast majority of people couldn't care less about whether Breitbart gets to advertise on facebook. They aren't going to uproot their presence there to make a political point, either. Most of the people on the site who hold those views are 50+ year olds who want to see photos of their grandchildren. They can still get all the nonsense they want by watching Fox News in the evening, which is their preferred method anyway.
Not stories. Not shared posts. Ads. They will still get all the ads they want to their hearts content from right-wing sources should those companies buy ad space, it just won't be from knowingly bullshit sources.
Breitbart? No. Rebel Media? No.
WSJ? Yes. The Hill? Yes.
It's not difficult to understand, and it isn't going to change anyone but a handful of nutball's facebook habits. There's no alternative platform in this space that isn't app-first, which eliminates it from consideration for generations that are and will continue to be desktop-first.
Scale may differ, but principles remain exactly the same.
I know people are scared of 'censorship', but they probably will end up just targeting those crazy conspiratorial pages that clearly share the most bogus stuff to prey on people to later sell bogus products to. You'd be surprised at what's out there..
When fake news passes from the spotlight, and something else takes its place, what will they do then?
Even if fake news is a larger business threat to facebook, they can't justify it to the public: "they are allowing horrible thing XYZ, but blocking fake news?!".
What about the billions of page views for spammy bs on all platforms and sites, shouldn't those be taken out?
Blocking it to be advertised might - just might - slow its viral expansion. Is that the best FB can do about this?
But if they can cut down on Pizza Gate and 'Bannon runs down liberals in his car for fun' style obvious nonsense, that's an improvement.
Not really. The entire Valley is beside themselves over Trump being elected and Twitter, Facebook, etc. feel partially responsible because Trump and his supporters were able to use the platforms to their advantage. To be outplayed by Republicans through the use of technology was previously thought impossible, so they're going to "fix the glitch" that made such tactics possible.
There was plenty of relief content that would have defected the election. The fake stuff may not have actually changed the outcome.
But to realize your 'keep up with my friends' business has the power swing elections? That has to be a terrifying prospect.
Real bias, but moving on...
> But to realize your 'keep up with my friends' business has the power swing elections? That has to be a terrifying prospect.
I really doubt anyone at Facebook, Twitter, or Google would have said "oh my God, what have we done???" if some insidious bit of "fake news" helped Hillary be elected.
I wasn't trying to talk to these specific cases, but I would agree the valley leans left.
> I really doubt anyone at Facebook, Twitter, or Google would have said "oh my God, what have we done???" if some insidious bit of "fake news" helped Hillary be elected.
Really? If my choice got elected because of my site I would be happy I didn't lose but I would be TERRIFIED that I had so much accidental power. What if I'm not a good steward? What if I accidentally misuse it? What if someone else takes over and REALLY misuses it?
I think (hope?) people would understand the power involved and not want to mess with to much.
Scary times ahead. It's straight out of 1984.
Just saying “A may be harmless but will lead to the unintended consequence of B” is just not at all convincing, as are most of the times slippery slope arguments are used.
Make no mistake, slippery slopes do actually exist, but that’s not some kind of automatic mechanism that always kicks in. If someone makes a slippery slope argument I want them to show me that those consequences are actually plausible.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/feb/...
Trump's statement is: "The National Debt in my first month went down by $12 billion."
Politifact's explanation begins thusly:
> The numbers check out. And in fact, the total public debt has dropped another $22 billion since the Gateway Pundit article published, according to data from the U.S. Department of Treasury.
Care to take a guess as to what the "Truth-o-Meter" rating was for Trump's statement? True? Mostly True? How about "Mostly False".
They make a valid point that it's hard to read into numbers like this after such a short period of time, but that's not what's being evaluated here. Was the single statement Trump made true or false? It was obviously true, but if you play enough games and dig deep enough you can somehow make the argument that he made a false statement (oh excuse me, they were quite generous by calling it "mostly" false).
Now the question you have to ask yourself is this: if I have a Facebook page that shares a site that simply reports Trump's statement, would I be subject to Facebook's new policy? I mean after all, a fact checker said this was a "false" statement, does that make this fake news?
That is to say (although it might not be the case now) that these websites/accounts are not dependent on ads for funding or growing their audience. This might cut down on lazy journalism (or churnalism as it's called) but as soon as the free proxies for the disinformation dry up, a couple of 'funded-behind-the-scenes' will take their place.
As for stopping the growth of the respective perpetrators audiences, likely also ineffective. There's a bunch of alternative platforms that lend themselves very well to fud spreading, twitter or a google search come to mind. Ultimately people, once converted, want to read and talk about the latest and greatest evil of <target>. No need to take out ads, your friends will want to tell you.
How about you can't monetize your page? How about every time you do this you get shut down for X time (hours?) and it doubles every time you reoffend within a short amount of time. One or two free strikes.
At least we would know what facts they believe and what facts they don't
There are efforts by David Mikkelson to regain control after Proper Media bought half the company from Mikkelson's ex wife and business partner.
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