Comment by flexie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by flexie | Hacker News Reader

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I chose to believe that this is a side-effect of facebook trying to combat fake news with some lame algorithms and an understaffed department of reviewers, not facebook actively trying to please the Romanian authorities.

But even so, this shows how utterly unprepared facebook is for its role as a de facto news business. A bunch of engineers thinking they are smarter than they actually are unwillingly facilitate the election of Trump, Brexit, genocide in Myanmar, and apparently the suppression of opposition in Romania. And who knows what.

At the end of the day, relying on a social network run by a bunch of college kids, with absolutely no editorial board, no knowledge of any of the news they show, no local presence anywhere, no income except what they generate on advertisement, and worst of all, an incentive and an ability to show every individual exactly the news he wants to read in order to keep his eyeballs for another ad, is a really bad for civilization.

But that's what we have.

> this shows how utterly unprepared facebook is for its role as a de facto news business. A bunch of engineers thinking they are smarter than they actually are unwillingly facilitate the election of Trump.

All of our "respectable" news sources fell into clickbait journalism. You can thank the NYT and NPR for doing their part to elect Trump. Reporting on the latest Trump scandal during the campaign drove far more clicks than "oh, Bernie cares about income inequality. Still. Yay"

When Bernie had his largest rally yet (larger by far than anything Hillary had by then), NPR spent 8 minutes of the Newshour talking about something Trump said, and the reactions people had on Twitter.

They chose not to cover Bernie and while I could only speculate why, I agree with you that they helped elevate Trump’s candidacy.

I don't want to give facebook a pass, but I hate seeing the issue framed as "facebook sucks at news because young engineers" vs the implied adult in the room of traditional journalism.

Facebook has failed at news, but traditional journalism is still in the dog house and is not the default credible alternative. I'll admit they don't do the whole "fake news" thing which is nice, but even without outright lying the bias in what the choose to cover and what public figures they ally with is disappointing. They can grandstand all they want about "editorial independence" and "separation of church and state" but for the most part their bills get paid the same way facebook's bills do.

> but for the most part their bills get paid the same way facebook's bills do.

Yes, and they have a set of checks and balances to deal with that fact. I'm completely stumped why you would discount those checks and balances. Media outlets are all biased in different ways, and I share your disdain for some of those biases. That said, if they are a legitimate news outlet, those biases have little to do with their advertisers, so not sure what your point is.

Care to expand on your complaint?

> if they are a legitimate news outlet, those biases have little to do with their advertisers

I don't believe this to be true. Or at least under that definition I think that there are few if any "legitimate news outlets". I'm not trying to be edgy. I just have zero faith that all of these businesses that make money by advertising have internally created a system of checks and balances such that they write whatever they want even if that will directly lead to layoffs of journalists because they've pissed off advertisers who will no longer fund them.

Maybe a simpler analogy is that newspapers are junkies shooting up heroin (advertising dollars) and telling us "don't worry, we got this under control, it won't affect our decisions".

I agree with your main point.

I would go a step further. Mainstream media outright lies. You're willingly covering your eyes if you think otherwise.

We have our own false truths that we tell ourselves--you probably look at other counties or back in history and think we are somehow different from all of those people in this respect.

The problem they have is that Facebook did not control the narrative as well as mainstream media--as your examples of Bernie and Trump illustrate. However, the "Fake News" campaign will change that and get them in the club with other media outlets.

You can already see media's attitudes towards FB start to change. Today, this article in the NYT seems to tack on a high five to FB at the end--even though FB was not even really (primarily) what this activist was blogging with[1].

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/11/27/world/asia/vietnam-ngu...?

It is those opposed to the demonstrations tapping the "Report" button, and shunting those posts off into Facebook Review Oblivion. The "Report" button on Facebook means the reported post (and by implication, the reported party) is guilty until proven innocent.

Zuckerberg's Switchblade: Make it look like a side-effect of trying to combat fake news.

"unwillingly" should probably be "unwittingly".

It should, thanks!

Or are they playing along to change the story around how much less time people are using facebook but still checking in and how users are counted. It feels like content generation has slowed and most people are only absorbing.

Change the headline.

This is valid but what can Facebook do? What steps should the company take to ensure this doesn't happen? Do they have the capability to fix the status quo? Is there an algorithm that can prevent this from happening? We don't know if this is an issue stemmed from lacking reviewers.

They could quite easily just stop filtering news and give the users the tools to filter things for themselves.

Could ordering posts by "most recent" first by default be a part of the solution?

Interesting idea. I'd love to be able to twist the dials of the algorithm for what I see... But I can't imagine FB would. That would defeat post-boosting.

Every time Facebook has stepped in to "fix" something they have been criticized by one side or another. They have learned that it's safer for them to do nothing and then blame the algorithm when enough people complain. No one gets fired when the algorithm does something wrong.

> They have learned that it's safer for them to do nothing and then blame the algorithm when enough people complain

When Facebook does that, people need to call them out on their bullshit. "The algorithm" and Facebook are exactly the same thing.

Huh. Could you elaborate more on the relationship between Facebook editorial policy and the plight of the Rohingya?

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