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Comment by x220 | Hacker News Reader

I really don't think you should remove information (or even be able to sue someone, except for defamation) for it being false, because it gives people the false impression that if information is printed or allowed on Facebook that it's probably accurate. We need to give everyone the impression that whatever they read might be false, because it actually might be false. Maybe that will make people think critically about what they read.

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Or you could use your critical thinking skills and keep in mind that they're not going to catch everything. This falls in line with the mentality of "don't let perfectionism get in the way of progress".

We need to focus more on teaching critical thinking in schools, it will lead to people who can call out bullshit way more reliably.

I think education in critical thinking would solve the problem, but I also think digital media literacy would help too and is probably an easier lesson to scale.

How do you think people practically learn critical thinking skills? Occasionally people need to be fooled, and shown that they were fooled.

An ability to trace the sources of the posts might be interesting. And connecting that to discourse about the typical accuracy of those sources.

"This content paid for by... here's the other content they paid for/posted, the trend of topics they discuss, and a weighted bullshit meter"

But Facebook plainly wants to moderate the narratives for themselves; until recently their entire news feed was human curated. Now they're just going to keep it behind the scenes, use some algorithms, and offer pay to play, so yeah, they'll get right on doing something that offers visibility.

I think that leaving information up on the website, but make plainly visible the sponsor (and a list of other items sponsored), would be a decent feature that Facebook would absolutely never implement.

That is a reason against facebooks business model.

Journalism requires citations. Otherwise it's just gossip.

It was clear the internet was full of lies long before the aol dial up days. If the message hasn’t sunk in by now I think people aren’t going to get it, ever. I’m not sure there’s even a positive way out of this for Facebook.

There are always new people learning old things about the Internet. Much like cleaning, you will never get to 100%, but without effort the problem will be far worse.

Agreed. Critical thinking is becoming a lost art that we should not use "workarounds".

Also, who gets to decide what is true? Silicon Valley tech employees lean overwhelming to the left. How do you remove this bias?

But really, this is a problem of society in general, not a tech problem. People are trained to take what they here with a grain of salt. Having official fact checkers lends authority to what is on Facebook which may or may not be true based solely on whether it was flagged / censored.

This logic would also have us stop prosecuting pickpockets on subways, for fear that people might stop being careful with their belongings.

Private social media platforms should both take steps to remove obviously false material and educate users as to how to recognize misinformation.

I don't know what sort of people you talk to, but I don't treat legal behavior in anywhere near a similar way to the way I treat illegal or directly harmful behavior. The idea of even making such an analogy feels wrong to me.

Pickpocketing physically damages you and your property. To draw a parallel with speech stretches my imagination too thin.

Conspiracy theories that circulate on social media are causing damage to our democracy.

Facebook is a private platform. It's not, and it shouldn't be, bound by the First Amendment.

This. Assume everything is false until proven otherwise.

I don't go that far. I tend to look at a few things:

* what is the source? do they have a reputable history?

* do they have conflicts of interest?

* do they have a history of faithfully printing retractions and admitting mistakes, or a history of exaggerating facts?

* do they have a history of writing accurately about subjects I am an expert about? (e.g. subfields of computer science)

If they score pretty well, I tend to believe in the facts (and evaluate the interpretation) they espouse until I come across something that contradicts it. So far the only source I regularly trust is the Economist, but I haven't researched the history of many news organizations. It's just a starting point for me.

That is terribly inefficient.

That is very effective.

Not really. There is a whole host of information that you'd never be able to operate on, mainly because you as a person do not have the time or expertise to discern what's true and what's not on every subject that comes up.

“Believe none of what you hear, and only half of what you see”

So every time you let your spouse take your car you do a DNA test to make sure they haven't been switched with a look-alike?

That's just a somewhat extreme illustration of how you, and everybody else, has to rely on heuristics to evaluate statements. It's impossible to even prove a tenth of percentage points of the facts you rely on daily from first principle.

information or dis-information?

"Lies spread around the world before the truth laces up it's boots" according to Mark Twain ... and that was before Radio, TV or the Internet.

Hard to inoculate your population when they're swimming in toxic filth daily.

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