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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Yes. And the way it's often argued, it treats the status quo as some sort of natural given, like the weather. The line of argument seems to be that if Facebook and Twitter can't run safe platforms while maintaining their current revenue models and profit margins, well, we'll just have to live with that lack of safety.

I find this line of argument odd when it's about actual natural givens, like dangerous weather. I'm in a house right now, so it's not like technology to limit the effects of dangerous weather is unheard of. And a bit odder when it's about human inventions that have been around for generations, like guns and cars. But when it's used for something basically new in the world? I find it baffling.

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I find it ridiculous that text on random social media accounts is being associated with "safety".

If anything, it's the user's own misuse and mishandling of their own information, and their lack of understanding that anybody can publish anything, that makes their specific use of social media "unsafe". The trust and total integration of Facebook into people's lives is the actual unsafe component, which Facebook themselves actively promote; it all should be held at arm's length.

There is no reason that users should consider random words on random Facebook accounts any differently than words posted on 4chan.

> There is no reason that users should consider random words on random Facebook accounts any differently than words posted on 4chan.

You're right! They're both dangerous. If I posted your public address on both of those websites, how you would you feel about your own safety? Not your Facebook account mind you - just somewhere on Facebook.

That's unsafe speech. Other examples of text where being associated with safety makes sense:

1.) "Hey everybody! Let's kill all type of people who like X tomorrow. Like and share to get the word out!"

2.) "Hey here's the address and personal info of someone I disagree with politically. Let's organize an effort to camp outside their house with guns to scare them. Or lets "SWAT" them.

I am not misusing my information in either of these cases. Instead my information is being misused by others who use the space as an organizing ground. When people ask for Facebook to be regulated, they want hate speech like the above to be removed. People make the argument that this is a slippery slope, but that's a fallacy for a reason. It's trivial to regulate speech of this form on their platforms if they were willing to pay for it, but they aren't. Thus we must force them to regulate this.

You're conflating a regulation of speech one disagrees with, with hate speech. Hate speech is not simply speech I disagree with. It can be clearly defined in many cases (like above), and in the cases where it can't one can simply err towards allowing it.

> You're conflating a regulation of speech one disagrees with, with hate speech.

I'm not calling for regulation, nor labeling anything "hate speech" (ergo not conflating the two, either), so I have no idea where this particular statement of yours is coming from.

What I'm saying is that trusting sites where anybody can post anything is the core danger of the situations instigating this specific mess, and that trust is the fault of the reader, and of Facebook falsely positioning itself as a trustworthy information source.

This situation isn't about "hate speech", incitements to violence, or any other already-illegal acts. To quote, it discusses the "far larger problem, in which the platforms are gamed for profit or political influence." At its core is the observation that people let Facebook content influence their finances and politics; the demonstrable dump of people's unthinking, reactionary blurted opinions, and their personal or incentivized proselytizing/propagandist/marketing skews. These are the random words of random accounts, all unworthy of blind trust.

Facebook wants to discriminate "trustworthy" from "untrustworthy" somehow, and to do so algorithmically. To be very specific, what's at stake here is Facebook's desire to have a particular PR posture as "the" place to be online, for their own gains. There's no actual direct safety issue involved here driving these automated "trustworthiness" speech classifications. It is both unnecessary for the site to function socially, and ultimately unworkable as an implementation from its very concept.

What is necessary for a properly functioning mashup of the world's unfettered speech in one place, is more distrust by the users of what's posted, as there's no reason to trust it in the first place. Again, from a content perspective it's no different from 4chan.

Ah I slightly misunderstood your position - I apologize. Personally I find the topics highly related in my mind and so my mind made a jump in your argument I should not have.

I do actually still disagree with you though:

> At its core is the observation that people let Facebook content influence their finances and politics; the demonstrable dump of people's unthinking, reactionary blurted opinions, and their personal or incentivized proselytizing/propagandist/marketing skews. These are the random words of random accounts, all unworthy of blind trust.

Personally I don't think that people are actually putting blind trust into such sources. Rather, Facebook is instead creating a narrative about how the world is rather than what is truth and what is a lie. I don't think that Facebook is incredibly influential because people put blind faith into it. There's definitely a lot of people who do that, and they're dumb, but I think there's a larger problem at play.

Facebook is able to create a narrative about what "the world" is like. If you're liberal, you see a very different "world" on Facebook than if you're conservative. In this way, I don't think Facebook is influencing the world via trust, but by misconstruing what the world actually looks like. People have the perception that Facebook is an "unbiased" perspective on the world at large and especially your social circle. But we know that Facebook doesn't actually present such a world - it instead gives you a highly "biased" (think more of the statistical version than the political one) perspective on life.

In this way I think it's not necessary to make Facebook the arbitrator of trust on their network, but instead to require them to arbitrate the way information is disseminated.

To say it simpler: It's not a problem that Facebook has fake news, it's a problem that Facebook can create a fake world.

Again sorry for misunderstanding you.

It's cool.

I would further dig into the intentionality of who's creating what. Facebook creates a platform where people can be surrounded by very selective & similar feeds, fed by producers of content seeking to gain traction of their ideas as described in the article (ie seeking sales or political power). To say that Facebook creates these narratives can sound like people at the company are intentionally crafting these narratives, instead of it being a substrate where 3rd parties craft them.

However, let's contrast this with TV, since it also has the creation of narratives and the problem of getting too sucked into it. Different networks have their different slants, people pick their favorites and get wrapped up in the narratives presented there, be they from news or from consistent themes permeating entertainment programming.

But for some reason the response to getting too wrapped up in TV (your fault, watch less or get off it completely) is quite different than the responses to getting too wrapped up in Facebook (regulate Facebook and don't change our habits!). I think the responsibility of the info consumer is the same in either case, and a lot of that is related to how you handle trust vs skepticism regarding these commercial outlets.

This is not a very thoughtful response.

If Facebook and Twitter were no more useful or trustworthy than 4chan, then they wouldn't exist. It's like saying, "I can't believe people are trusting encyclopedias and cookbooks. There's no reason that readers should consider them any different than stuff written on a bathroom wall."

The problem is the gap between what they sell themselves as and what the actual user experience is. If Facebook were advertising themselves as the cloaca of the Internet, your vigorous user-blaming would have some merit. But they don't. They aim to be in daily use by every person in the world, a trusted intermediary. They either need to live up to that or quit.

You can generally trust your connections to your acquaintances, and companies/personas you know from elsewhere.

It's all the external feeds wanting your attention & commenters throwing in their 2 bits that are the random noise. This is the domain where the propagandists are working, and where there is no and should be no trust. There's no difference between some nobody posting from their personal account, and some nobody posting from their account that they've slapped a logo on. There's no distinguishable difference between 100 nobodies throwing in their heartfelt opinion, and 100 bots repeating the opinion of 1 nobody.

Note that you've gone from the dramatic "it all should be held at arm's length" to the somewhat less dramatic "some of it is ok to trust, but this other stuff isn't". That's precisely what I meant when I said your first comment wasn't well thought out.

Your new position is still too extreme; human trust is not binary. We could go another round where I point out exceptions and you come up with another model that is still too simple. And again, and again. Eventually, we might even get to a point where a useful discussion could be had. But it's not my job to force you to think past your taste for dramatic statements. It's yours.

This article isn't about "human trust" in general, nor how you socialize with your known peers. It's quite specifically about sources that are otherwise completely unknown to you affecting your finances and opinions by pursuing magnified exposure on Facebook. This isn't my distinction, it's what the article raises as a problem.

I don't buy it.

Facebook knows with absolute certainty if an account is legit or not.

Cambridge Analytics, Lexis/Nexus (nee Seisent), ChoicePoint (oops, bought by Lexis/Nexus), Palantir, NSA, and others have all uniquely identitied every person, living or dead.

Facebook has even more data. Facebook even has phantom profiles for people without accounts. Of course they know who's legit. They can't not know.

Just like Facebook juices their ad numbers, they're lying here too.

Frankly, I'm shocked, shocked that Facebook would lie about their culpability here.

Twitter might plausibly not know. So they can contract with any of the dozen of 3rd parties that provide demographic databases as a service.

But sometimes people create a second account or an account for some odd reason that isn't directly obviously them. But they'll properly use those accounts. Do you just ban these accounts too? Accounts not doing any harm and potentially being beneficial to certain things like FB group participation or posts.

Finally, if they act like real users since they are, it helps Facebook's bottom line. Booting them would hurt FB and piss off those people.

This is just one example of "fake accounts"

They could handle that use in a few ways. The easiest would be to tie the second account back to the first, so that FB knows but nobody else does. But presumably people are doing that for a reason, and the real solution is to create a feature for one's main account that accommodates that reason. And banning is not an unreasonable solution. Facebook is demonstrably ok with losing small amounts of marginal traffic, especially if that helps limit abuse. Their number one asset is trust, and anything that chips away at that trust is extremely dangerous for them.

Maybe people don't want the two accounts associated? Or then they might accidentally post in the wrong one? That can already happen but the blame lies entirely on the user right now.

I do agree there are likely solutions like you're saying. Pages already work that way. Linked to a personal profile. Multiple can be.

Though I guess it likely isn't in Facebook's interest to do a feature like you propose if they can help it. If they can ban enough actual worthless or hurting fake accounts without messing with fake accounts that are being used legitimately enough. Since that boosts their numbers.

Yes, I've always found the 'YouTube gets too much video to moderate it' a particularly shit argument. Maybe they not be allowed to have as much content then.

That doesn’t seem to be a useful solution, either. I mean, eat tool would you use to manage that?

Limit total videos per website? How do you determine who gets to stay? Money? Clicks?

Moderating all the videos is hard, but if the videos go to a different platform, they still need that same moderation, right?

There are plenty of ways you could do that. Off the top of my head: Every video-posting account must be validated with, e.g., a credit card. New accounts have clear posting limits. Accounts behaving badly get charged for cleanup. If you want to get paid by YouTube you have to go through an extensive validation process, including background check. If you are found to be abusing the platform, money will be clawed back, and if you can't prove sufficient resources to handle a clawback, you instead have to post a bond or find an insurer who will guarantee you.

Sure, some videos may go to another platform. And for most things, that'd be fine. A lot of videos people post on YouTube are just accidentally hosted there, and would be just as good posted on, e.g., Facebook, Twitter, or another personal account provider. But there's a whole class of garbage that YouTube has because one way or another it allows people to get paid. That garbage is a negative externality on the rest of us, and there's no particular reason for us to allow YouTube to profit from it.

So which videos (or people posting) would get the short stick with their content not going up on YouTube in this scenario? No way something like this can ever end well.

Why is moderation needed?

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