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Comment by emodendroket | Hacker News Reader

This is a frankly awful idea. I do not want Facebook acting as some sort of arbiter of what information is truthful. The cure is worse than the disease.

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This is worse than that. Imagine your Trump-supporting extended family voting down CNN news stories as "not credible."

Expect mass brigading by The_Donald.

The problem isn't that simple. Most mainstream news, including CNN, have traded in objective reporting for idealogical dissemination. You can very often, legitimately call CNN "not credible". Just in the last couple years they have:

1. Told their viewers that it was illegal to read the DNC emails leaked to Wikileaks themselves, and to just listen to what CNN has to say about them.

2. Got caught posing one of their cameramen as a protester/rioter for an interview about why he was "in the streets".

3. Deceptively edited a video of Trump dumping fish food into a koi pond to omit the fact that he was following the Japanese PM's lead, then spent a whole day talking about how disrespectful it was.

4. Spent a whole morning talking about how Trump drinks diet coke, while there was an active terrorist attack in NY.

That's just what I pulled off the top of my head, too.

Edit: to the user that downvoted my comment: which of the four bullet points was false? It's easy to protect the liars who benefit our goals. It takes intellectual honesty to criticize one's allies.

to the user that downvoted my comment: which of the four bullet points was false?

Didn't downvote (and I don't have CNN), but your complete lack of links to back up any of the things you mentioned makes it very hard to judge if they're actually true or false.

I was under the assumption that most of these were well known. Links:

* "‘Remember, it’s illegal to possess’ WikiLeaks Clinton emails, but ‘it’s different for the media,’ says CNN’s Chris Cuomo": https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

Fake protester is a CNN cameraman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s57pKCRcuF4

* Snopes: An image showing President Trump dumping fish food into a koi pond was shared with misleading statements about his behavior: https://www.snopes.com/did-trump-impatiently-dump-fish-food-...

* "CNN mocked for airing segment on Trump's soda consumption while NYC faced terror attack": http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2017/12/11/cnn-mocked-f...

The story of CNN misreporting the fish story is true.

I won’t bother linking to CNN directly because they’ve probably edited their original article by now, but here’s a link from WAPO:

https://washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2017/11/06/c...

I suppose that's possible, but I expect that, like Google's attempts to address the same issue[0], the biggest loser in this change is going to be independent news sources.

[0] https://medium.com/@evanpopp/google-changes-its-algorithm-to...

From the article, it weren't independent sources which were punished, but far-left and far-right sources.

> However, in addition to AlterNet and other left-wing news sites, Rosenfeld said right-wing, alternative media outlets have also seen a reduction in viewership due to the change in Google’s algorithm.

So? Independent news sources almost always have a non-mainstream political bent; that's why the writers aren't just writing in the New York Times. I don't think most people understand "weeding out fake news" to mean "only allowing a narrow spectrum of respectable opinion." And these sources do real reporting and break real news.

So that, unlike what OP mentioned, independent sources aren't being "punished", heavily biased sources are.

Which is fine, IMHO.

Notice that Mother Jones (independent, leftist) and Fox News (non-independent, large) have not been "punished".

Please read the article. This isn't how any of this works.

It is a randomised sample of their user base. It will not be possible for any group to gain an advantage.

Bots! Bots! Bots! Bots!

A random sampling of shit is still shit.

You think CNN is 100% honest and credible? The same could be said of liberals or any arbitrary group of people.

I don’t think that was the point.

The point is that even credible sources are going to be voted down as “idealogically biased“ no matter how neutral the story is.

Headline says candidate Johnson lost by 15%? Better vote it down. After all, you hate candidate Johnson. Doesn’t matter if he actually lost.

That's true but that seems like the easiest issue to deal with, considering how much information you have about user's political preferences if you're Facebook.

Yeah, I think "I can turn my brain off and just trust anything this source says" is probably the wrong approach to news.

No they are just incompetent and pointless. The Kardashians of news

This is worse than that. Imagine your Bernie-supporting extended family voting down Fox news stories as "not credible."

Expect mass brigading by /r/politics.

yeah only one side routinely falls for russian propaganda, downright lies and breitbart.

Really? Here’s a paper (PDF) showing some of the most active & influential #BlackLivesMatter tweeters were linked to Russia. On BOTH SIDES.

http://faculty.washington.edu/kstarbi/examining-trolls-polar...

This matches similar research I saw in the last few days on some other political topic (can’t remember which) were some of the most important and active tweeters were Russian on both sides.

Russia wasn’t trying to get Trump elected (though they HATED Clinton). They were trying to get America to fight with itself and sew division. They did a really good job.

Certainly people on both sides were accused of that but the idea that Black Lives Matter was actually just a Russian plot is frankly pretty repellent, and that paper in the end just defers to Twitter's ideas of who's a Russian troll, and how did they decide? We've seen a lot of really shoddy work in this department.

No, I’m not saying it was a Russian plot at all. It’s a real thing.

I’m saying they seized on it as something they could use to push division between people.

I find that incredibly unlikely. I used to work in bot fighting on Google. Claims of Russian bots on Twitter and especially claims by academics are invariably riddled with methodological errors that render the "research" useless. I wrote about this problem here:

https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f...

These studies are seeing patterns in noise. That's why the narrative changed over time - it used to be "Russian twitter bots got Trump elected!" and now it's "they're supporting both sides .... to sow division!".

The former claim was extremely implausible but at least it had some sort of inner logic to it, in that Trump was more friendly to Russia than Clinton. The new spin doesn't even make logical sense. However it makes perfect sense if you're just picking random Twitter users and trying to explain their behaviour through the prism of some convoluted conspiracy.

>the new spin doesn't even make logical sense.

Sure it does. The appearance of a wide division in our political landscape leads to a wide division in our political landscape. People tend to "pick sides" in political fights and when something gives the appearance of a serious political dispute, people are motivated to pick sides and entrench their opinions. This is in keeping with getting Trump elected, as a large part of his support was due to the fear created by the appearance of growing civil unrest. None of this is particularly hard to understand.

The logic makes no sense because it specifically fingers Russia, yet any adversary of the United States could conceivably benefit from "sowing division". Once you've left behind the specific support for Trump the underlying logic linking it to Russia collapses but the conclusion has been kept, which indicates motivated reasoning.

There's a deeper issue here too. It paints the posting of political talking points from both sides of a US election as generic "sowing division". That is a world view that is quite totalitarian. I could describe it equally as "invigorating the democratic process by increasing interest in the election" and be no less accurate.

a large part of his support was due to the fear created by the appearance of growing civil unrest

You haven't shown that, you haven't even laid the groundwork for that. It's actually the first time I've ever seen such a claim. Most analyses of why he won point to the weakness of Clinton, his policies in immigration and trade deals, his opposition to political correctness and so on. Not "the appearance of growing civil unrest".

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/charlottesville-and-the...

This link goes into detail about the perspectives of some whites on the BLM movement and how Trump played on those fears and represented a solution to growing minority influence (presumably at the expense of whites) in the wider culture. This also needs to be understood in the context of disruptive BLM protests as well as the white nationalist protests in Charolettesville.

>yet any adversary of the United States could conceivably benefit from "sowing division"

This is just so obtuse on so many levels.

I'm not sure what's obtuse about the second bit. If the goal is just weakening the US Russia is not the only actor with the motive.

The point is only reasonable when divorced from all context of Trump's Russian contacts, Russia's interest in getting sanctions overturned, Russia's known past disinformation campaigns, DNC hacking, wikileaks, etc. Within the proper context it is entirely unreasonable to even posit some other actor working to influence the election.

But the claims are no longer that Russia manipulated social media to get votes for Trump specifically. Therefore any Trump/Russia link is irrelevant to the current narrative, which is that "someone" is using "bots" to generically "sow division".

None of these claims have any actual evidence backing them, and when claims can be sourced the sources collapse under examination; see my article above.

But we shouldn't need to deeply analyse academic papers to see that this narrative is nonsense. It is just not internally consistent. Putin had clear reasons to want Trump to win, that I accept. So why would his staff post things supporting Clinton? There is no logic to this idea whatsoever, and it's not where the narrative started.

The DNC/WikiLeaks stuff is thinly sourced and the rest of it not that compelling.

I mostly agree with your perspective, but Trump repeated "law and order" like a kind of mantra at the debates and I think a fear of lawlessness is a real motivator for his base.

Maybe it makes sense, but Vladimir Putin has superpowers if everything people blame on him is true. And Mr. Hearn's article nicely illustrates how shaky the foundation is for a lot of claims of Russian influence.

This is one of the most absurd talking points of this whole thing. It doesn't take "superpowers" to zero in on existing rifts in a society and magnify them. It has been well documented that Putin has a well-oiled disinformation machine that is adept at exploiting existing social issues.

Please read my article. The sources you believe are "well documenting" these things are junk - see the paper that generated stories about 100,000+ Russian bots and how its analysis simply doesn't support their conclusions at all. Their definition of "bot" was equivalent to any human who happened to use Twitter slightly more than average, so not surprisingly they identified huge numbers of "bots".

I've looked into these stories about Russia repeatedly. They never survive basic fact checking, and I'm not a journalist with special sources or access.

Who doesn't? The US has those too and they don't just operate internationally.

But more to the point, there is a moral panic going on where the bar is drastically lowered for what information is considered credible of it involves "Russian collision," and it seems to mostly serve domestic political purposes. How else can you explain a raving crank like Louise Mensch appearing in mainstream news sources?

The article linked is excellent. Thanks.

Charges of being Russian tools have been hurled at everyone left and right of the DNC (for instance they were going after Jill Stein).

To be fair, nothing on CNN is credible. They are not partisan, they are simply the "off" cousin your family ignores

Aren't they being forced into this role? Facebook is routinely cited as a vector for supposedly democracy wrecking Russian propaganda. There has been a stream of threats and deadlines imposed by European governments demanding that Facebook et al "stop" "hate speech."

Forgive me but if the Powers That Be were breathing down my neck 24/7 I think I might start to believe I'm expected to "do something."

Do you think the Trump administration's regulatory apparatus is going to go after them for that? That seems unlikely. Certainly some people have called for them to get involved but I'd say those people are also making a serious misjudgment.

> I do not want Facebook acting as some sort of arbiter of what information is truthful

Facebook isn't the arbiter. Their users are.

And if a substantial percentage deem a website to be untrustworthy then Facebook simply won't display it as often.

Well, sort of. The votes give them raw material but interpreting the results and then demoting content is Facebook's job (and almost certainly nobody will be able to see how they do it). And getting demoted by Facebook, Twitter, and Google (all of which are involved in similar initiatives that mostly serve to demote independent news sources) makes a huge difference in our increasingly monopolistic media landscape where those platforms are how many people get their news.

“I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how.” - Stalin (though the sentiment was not original to him. Variations on the same theme have been recorded as far back as 1880, at least).

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