Facebook to Exempt Opinion and Satire from Fact-Checking
wsj.com
wsj.com
The problem with trying to moderate this is that you can only do so from what your idea of which is the orthodox truth, and “propaganda” simply becomes any political speech that you disagree with.
We’ve seen plenty of attempts to regulate the truth throughout history. It was one of the most corrupt elements of the soviet system, and it quite literally Orwellian. The only person who can discern the truth is the individual, and any attempt to take that responsibility away from them can only ever end disastrously. This isn’t something we should be happy with Facebook doing.
By your definition any news would always be false because they didn't include the entire history of the world in their story.
You aren't being realistic. There are people and organizations that are just spreading completely false information with the intent of deceiving people.
> There is a pretty big difference between a lie by omission and just spreading false information.
I don’t see how there is, and I don’t see how you’d be able to prove one over the other in many cases. Pick any mainstream media outlet, and you’ll find a significant group of people who claim they’re “just spreading false information”. Pick any truth that you personally hold to be unassailable, and chances are you’ll find a significant group of people who will describe it as “just false information”.
Trying to regulate the truth is an incredibly dangerous rabbit hole, which if done effectively, can only possibly end up with a central authority (or group of authorities) imposing their own views on others.
The only reason anybody could think this was a good idea, is if you think that people should not have the right to think for themselves, form their own views, and come to their own conclusions about the truth.
This project assesses the factual accuracy and political bias of a large number of articles (and by extension, the publishers of those articles).
It seems to me that we have always had the ability to verify whether a given statement is factual or counterfactual, and that's a big part of what good journalism is.
A verifiable fact is a verifiable fact and no matter how many people believe otherwise, it's still a fact.
Certainly this is not the whole issue and publications may introduce bias through selection, presentation and opinion, which is why it's important to scrutinize the publications.
I don't think Facebook is the right place for any of this to happen, but it's where the eyeballs are, so it's impossible for it to _not_ happen on Facebook in some form. I think Facebook will fail because there is no way to do this algorithmically. At Facebook scale you can only do things algorithmically.
We should dismantle Facebook and get our news from a federated set of relays which syndicate content from a diverse set of publishers whose objectivity is audited by independent third parties who publish clear and transparent guidelines and findings.
A web browser in which you've bookmarked the Associated Press, NPR, the WSJ, and the BBC is a decent start for the average person, as long as you don't also bookmark Wonkette or InfoWars.
If you report a story, using only the facts that support your narrative, and omitting only the facts that don’t support it, have you lied? Have you reported propaganda?
What if you report a story, without reporting anything as a fact? What if you report “anonymous sources claim ___”, or “___ is being criticised for ___”, or “a verified document describes ___”. None of those reports involve any facts at all, nor any verifiable fictions.
What if you simply disagree on what the facts are?
What if you intentionally misinterpret something, in an effort to debunk it. If I make a mostly true statement, but use an obvious hyperbole, or get a minor detail wrong, am I “just using the English language as intended”, or “just spreading false information”.
> What do you think of the Media Bias Chart?
I think if you tasked 50 different research teams with producing their own chart with the methods they deemed best, that you’d get 50 different charts.
> It seems to me that we have always had the ability to verify whether a given statement is factual or counterfactual
We have always had the ability to enforce authority on others. That doesn’t mean we have had any success in creating authorities to be the arbiter of truth. In fact, we have a long history as a species of failing miserably at doing that.
Easily verifiable outright lies in the media do happen, but the cases where this is so black and white are incredibly uncommon, and that’s not what these systems are trying to deal with. I mean, recently “conspiracy theories” have become a target for moderation. Do you know what a conspiracy theory actually is? It’s any theory that two or more people conspired to do something. How much recent news reporting would fit that definition?
Any system that attempts to strip people of their right to critical though (which is what this is) is doomed to fail in the exact same way that every such system implemented throughout history has.
We're all postmodernists now.
Acting as an authority on which instances of political speech are true and which are false may be easier in some cases than others, but there’s no clear place to draw that line, and there’s no way to avoid imposing your own opinions on others.
What would it mean to prevent bias in TV broadcast? Bias can show up in all sorts of subtle ways. You can't really demand people don't have opinions. You also can't ask people to be totally free of bias given limited broadcast minutes, and so many news stories to cover.
Given this starting point, you might begin by expecting people who make TV news to not publicly tell everyone about their own extreme political opinions. You might expect TV journalists not to belittle and insult major political parties.
You might expect these things, but you'd be disappointed because the Ofcom fails to enforce even this most basic of standards.
https://www.nme.com/news/channel-4-jon-snow-respond-claims-c...
What was also reported was that during one Glastonbury’s many, many chants, Jon Snow joined in to bellow “Fuck the Tories” before noting that he was “supposed to be neutral”.
You might expect supposedly neutral journalists not to openly compare political decisions to drug epidemics:
https://order-order.com/2019/09/24/bbc-compare-brexit-drugs-...
Presenter: "At times there can be a perception that most of the headlines surrounding Stoke-on-Trent have a negative connotation, whether it be Brexit or the drug monkey dust"
You might expect broadcasters not to hire political candidates to referee complaints about political bias:
https://order-order.com/2010/04/19/labour-candidate-is-bbc-b...
Ever wondered why your complaint of left-wing bias against the BBC wasn’t upheld? It could be because you were speaking to one Chris Summers on the phone. Via his Facebook we learn that Mr Summer’s isn’t too keen on his “dull, boring, grey, miserable, crap job – dealing with election complaints!” Would this be the same Chris Summers who is the Labour coucil candidate in Ealing?
You might expect that government enforcement would reduce allegations of bias to the status of supposition - they may not appear biased in public, but who knows how they are in private? But the UK doesn't even begin to approach this standard of enforced neutrality. All you have to do to prove it is read the Twitter feeds of the journalists themselves.
Worse, I don't think "fairness" is the correct standard - that leads to bringing in AGW deniers and anti-vaxers as "balance". The standard has to be Reithian: has this discussion contributed to the viewer's understanding of the situation? Repeating two opposing sets of talking points doesn't achieve that.
*satire passing as news with fine print is garbage meant to mislead.
What do you mean by this? Most new organizations have a separate, opinion section.
Does your statement include the news department, too?
Highlighting or minimizing demographic information of victims and assailants in crimes is a huge way news organizations insert their biases while still reporting factually accurate information.
Presumably the sentence that followed your quoted one:
> The editorial decisions about what to report, what to not report, what to report as important or credible, and what to report as irrelevant or non-credible, can all be used to mislead the audience and misrepresent events.
An amusing example of that phenomenon is the so-called "Summer of the Shark"[0], where a particularly shocking attack followed by a slow news season led to disproportionate reporting on shark attacks. There wasn't actually any more shark attacks than any other year, but try surveying people around then and they might think otherwise, even if all the reporting was only non-opinion, true statements.
It's related to the Chinese Robber fallacy. Here's a great blog post[1] which demonstrates the fallacy using news stories about cardiologists.
These are fun examples, but I'm sure you can think of it with a partisan bent about your favorite topic and news source.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_the_Shark
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chin...
For instance recently I saw these headlines (paraphrasing):
(WSJ) Unemployment Drops to Lowest Level in 60 Years
(NYT) Unemployment Drops, Continuing the Trend of the Last 8 Years
Are these headlines necessarily editorialized? No, but I do notice this trend somewhat regularly in major publications
On August 3, 46 people were shot in El Paso, Texas. [1]
That same weekend, 51 people were shot in Chicago, Illinois. [2] [3]
One statistic gets hours and hours of national press cycles, Wikipedia page, etc.
The other statistic gets a passing mention in local channel and papers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_El_Paso_shooting
[2] https://abc7chicago.com/49-shot-6-fatally-in-chicago-weekend...
[3] Later updated to 68, if you read Breibart https://www.breitbart.com/crime/2019/08/05/many-el-pasos-day...
One is not like the other.
The El Paso shooting was the result of one person, armed with semi-assault weapon, going into a Walmart and killing more than 20 people within a couple minutes.
The Chicago shootings resulted in seven deaths but were spread out among multiple cases and days.
Both are tragic obviously.
But the El Paso got wall-to-wall coverage because, in essence, it was a domestic terrorist attack.
?
> The Chicago shootings resulted in seven deaths but were spread out among multiple cases and days.
Naturally, smaller events have less coverage. But even totaling up the coverages for each Chicago event in less coverage than El Paso.
Most new outlets bias their reporting disproportionately. IDK what the relationship is. Cubic, probably. An event that is 2 as big gets 8 times the coverage. Three times as big gets 27 times the coverage.
---
In any case, media frequently shows an unrepresentative perspective on reality. It is very easy -- indeed expected -- to change report reality based on the opinion of what should and should not be reported.
The El Paso shooter used a semi-automatic rifle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASR-series_rifles
> Naturally, smaller events have less coverage. But even totaling up the coverages for each Chicago event in less coverage than El Paso.
Huh? The El Paso shooting was a big deal. Hence, the wall-to-wall coverage.
> Most new outlets bias their reporting disproportionately. IDK what the relationship is. Cubic, probably. An event that is 2 as big gets 8 times the coverage. Three times as big gets 27 times the coverage.
You don't seem to understand how reporting works. Journalists reporting on breaking news situations do not inject their opinions into the situation. They report what happened in a digestible and comprehensive way. Go and read the first coverage of the El Paso shooting and let me know if you see any opinions injected into the pieces.
> In any case, media frequently shows an unrepresentative perspective on reality. It is very easy -- indeed expected -- to change report reality based on the opinion of what should and should not be reported.
Again. You don't seem to understand how reporting works. I'd love for you to message the Texas reporters who covered the El Paso shooting your statement above and see how they'd response to your accusation that they, as well as other people who on the ground when shit hits the fans, shape their coverage based on opinion.
Newspapers have their own section for expressing the opinions of a writer and they are clearly labeled Editorial or OpEd.
It's bizarre to me that you want to be critical yet seem to lack a fundamental understanding of the thing you are being critical of.
Which is why drudgereport is often the top of the list of sites D's want to regulate, even though Drudge rarely prints any original content.
And he links to way more left-leaning stories than you would expect, but grabs a buried right-leaning fact to re-title the link. Suddenly you're reading the story with the opposite expectation of what the reporter/editor often intended.
Equally effective is grabbing an over the top, inflammatory left-leaning fact (or quote or claim) to prime the reader with anger.
Both are extremely persuasive, without needing to change so much as a word of the linked text.
Edit: And of course the feed on fbook accomplishes much of the same for the opposing view, with slightly tweaked tactics, but the same overall strategy.
Fivethirtyeight lists Fox News/Anderson Robbins Research/Shaw & Co. Research polling with an A rating. Their polls are generally unbiased and accurate. It even has slight Dem favor-ability.
They then list Fox News/Opinion Dynamics Corp. with a B rating and slight R favor-ability.
Source: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/pollster-ratings/?ex_ci...
I'm no fan of Tommy Robinson but this is worrying as FB has become more of a utility for online discussion and publishing. The problem is partly technical, but ultimately it is caused by the fact that Facebook doesn't have a value system of it's own. They need to follow the bidding of the powers that squeeze them the most.
Both corporations and governments have a history of bad behavior. But I warrant the government ledger has much worse capacity to do me harm, as well as a few orders of magnitude more deaths caused by their decisions.
But I can also assure you this happened to the moderator of a group I'm in (he did it as a test to check the veracity of the claim). He typed "test Tommy Robinson" in a post to his friends. His account was disabled for 3 days.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/kallkritik/permalink/6131282... (in Swedish)
The example in the article seems like it could be handled:
> That op-ed argued that global-warming climate models have been inaccurate and that the risks of climate change is overblown.
Included in that sentence are an assertion of fact (yes, climate models have been inaccurate. This is not controversial, and it's also not really as useful to the argument as the author thinks it is) and an opinion that, while I disagree with it, is still an opinion. For purposes of discussion, assume the article contains no other information. There shouldn't be any kind of "false" designation assigned to it, because nothing in it is provably false.
However, imagine the article said something like "Atmospheric CO2 has declined since 1978, global-warming climate models have been inaccurate, and the risks of climate change is overblown." The first statement in that sentence is provably false, yet the article would still constitute an opinion piece. Is there a framework for handling that?
To be honest, setting a rule that anything that purports to be "BREAKING" will be fact checked at least to the extent of "the contents of this article cannot be proven entirely factually correct" would be a pretty big step forward and potentially reduce the virality of outright disinformation.
The truth is that you should be aware of the general bias a publication has. Also how they can be linked together via parent companies. If you have multiple sources with different bias, you should be fine.
The WSJ for example belongs to the Murdoch conglomerate. There are a lot more of those. Of course it is unknown how much influence there is on their editorial board. But still important to keep that in mind.
I genuinely believe that many just have been played, but that could have been mitigated by providing at least a somewhat believable perspective.
I rather have no fact checkers at all personally. I'd prefer to live in a world where everyone distrusts the media than a world in which everyone trusts a few bias reports claim to be the arbiters of reality.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/03/us/snopes-babylon-bee.htm...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-fact-checker-declares-war-on-...
We put labels at the bottom of cigarettes to warn people. Why can't we put a header at the bottom of such programs: "Satire, Not News, Not Factual".
Btw, I would love to see that banner on the bottom of The Daily Show as much as I would on The Rush Limbaugh Show, as both sides of the Red/Blue divide are guilty of this to some extent.
Not flagging these articles with an appropriate label pretty much ensures that this whole facebook-based fact checking feature is nothing more than a vaporware PR campaign.
I'm all for personal responsibility, but particularly when unwitting consumption can have society-wide negative effects, the responsibility lays on society to take steps to mitigate the consumption and damage.
Separately I don't think we should equate mental health with mental hygiene here. Mental health might make the difference between "believing untrue things" and "showing up somewhere with a gun and no particular plan", but it's hardly a precondition for accepting wildly improbable and untrue claims.
If certain sources are being excluded from the system, mark them as such. It doesn't have to be a value judgement or dismissal. Just tagging "opinion or satire, not fact-checked" would be a huge step up. Beyond any topical debate, it's general good practice to make that sort of distinction. "Evaluated, nothing found" and "not evaluated" are fundamentally different: one is false, the other is null. Failing to distinguish them is either a serious oversight or an intentional weakening of an evaluation system.
Perhaps Rush's (or to use a more current example, Tucker Carlson's) viewers are so twisted that they no longer recognize what a comedy show is. That doesn't mean we become just as unreasonable as they are. It's not The Onion's fault when someone "eats the onion".
Watching the Daily Show when you follow the news is like watching an observational stand-up focus on weird contradictions in everyday life when you already know the un-intuitive aspects of the matter that cause the discrepancy they're riffing on. Except a bit more depressing, because it means either their writers are bad news consumers, or are just changing shit to be more convenient to their joke structure.
There may be some overlap, but the comparison is mountain vs molehill level unfair.
If it is true, and I think he may have a point, there would be some value in labelling humour or satire as such. It sounds ridiculous, but like it is ridiculous to have a label “not suitable for your pets” on a microwave!
[1] - https://theintercept.com/2016/01/26/ha-ha-hillary-clintons-t...
[2] - https://politics.theonion.com/hillary-clinton-tries-to-woo-v...
[3] - https://politics.theonion.com/why-don-t-people-like-hillary-...
Satire, snark, and sarcasm have to be least effective way you could possibly choose to communicate. You are absolutely begging to be misunderstood and misquoted, either genuinely or maliciously, and then it's nigh on impossible to explain yourself as all your excuses just sound like like it-was-a-prank-bro.
Another huge problem is that satire is often used as cover for telling not-quite-truths. I listen to satirical radio programmes (we have a lot of those in the UK) and sometimes I think they're really bending the truth quite a bit to get the joke and their criticism isn't really fair. That'd be fine if these people weren't simultaneously actual political activists who the next night are saying they're making genuine political arguments, and if people didn't think it's-funny-because-it's-true. I'm pretty sure some of them do satire just to get away with attacking without having to back any of it up, and so they can absolve themselves from responsibility when challenged.
Quite often, I think really I'm just listening to some nasty bullies.
All-in-all, I think satire is a bit toxic for everyone involved.
Not many people have the fortitude to resist their charms or the self-awareness to police themselves indefinitely. I know I don't.
In the US The Daily Show established satirical ha-ha as effective method to deliver news and discuss politics for younger generations.
It started as pure satire but turned into real institution people used to learn about the world. The spinoffs like The Colbert Report and related shows from people who worked in the show is impressive: The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn , Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, The Break with Michelle Wolf and Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj all continue using similar framework.
In the right the effective satire seems to come mainly in the form of internet trolls. It's more hostile, less intellectual. It's for people who see hostility as funny. Despite being very crude, this kind of satire can have huge influence.
I think the satirical shows do a better job of being more subtle and not just being cynical at everything
However, by pointing out absurdity in a way that invokes a positive state of being, welled crafted humor can not only get the point across more efficiently but propagate more effectively if people choose to retell the joke.
Like the comedian in the UK who said she wanted to throw battery acid at politicians. It was (probably 90%) satire. But when challenged if she said she thought you should throw battery acid all she can say is yes with a weak-sounding defence of 'but it was just a prank.'
Scott Adams became world famous writing a cartoon full of snark and satire. These are perfectly valid ways of communicating and in fact they make up a significant chunk of human communication.
Reading comments like yours is somewhat bewildering to me. It seems like you're pushing philistinism as a virtue.
[0] https://jezebel.com/dilbert-creator-deletes-misogynist-rant-...
Let's see some actual research supporting the notion that a third of the population reads and interprets satirical content as straight fact.
> Let's see some actual research
which I find ironic given that you present your personal opinion about that person as if it were a fact. Maybe we should all start cleaning up in front of our own doors first whenever we feel an urge to not criticize (which would be okay) to bad-mouth other people.
In addition, you also do exactly what the comment you replied to ask you not to, seemingly without having given its content any thought whatsoever.
More, Scott Adams didn't say anything here. You merely read a comment from someone making a claim about what he said, in a short sentence. So you don't even have anything from the person you talk about himself. On top of that that claim would not be worth any severe criticism in the given context. Even if it were shown to be wrong, so what? It does not seem to me like anything substantial hinges on it, even if you took it as just a tongue in cheek kind of comment. Anecdotal evidence from reading online forums and discussions seem to indicate that the described phenomenon indeed exists, how many people are involved and if it's always the same ones or not don't seem to me to be of great importance since no quantitative predictions are involved.
Indeed. Who cares whether anything is true or not when discussing policy on websites with billions of users? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
"X seems pretty bogus."
"Who cares if X is true? Anyway, Y Y Y"
When the statement is as outlandish as "30% of people don't understand humor", the burden of proof lies squarely with the person making the claim.
Even if Scott Adams wrote something legitimately offensive, that article, like everything on Jezebel, has an obvious agenda and uses language that rip-snorts while tip toeing around the points Scott was making. If anything, it's made me more sympathetic to him because the obviously bigoted author can't stand the fact that a "white male" said something contrary to the women-are-wonderful stereotype.
In the case of Scott Adams, it's especially not fair to say that he's wrong without actually providing a reason why because, as a person who has been writing humorous comic strips for decades, he's in a position to provide his intuition as to how many people don't understand humor. Whether his belief is actually correct is a matter for discussion. It might be one thing if Joe Dirt off the street was shouting that 30% of people don't understand humor, but it's not unreasonable for someone who writes humor for a living to provide his judgment on how people respond to humor. Scott Adams doesn't write the funniest stuff in the world, but at least give the guy some credit for his experience instead of just pointing out that he doesn't have proof.
On one hand, I used to follow Scott Adams' blog when he made that assertion and a couple other ones. His point, if I remember correctly, boiled down to "I'm going to present an obviously wrong idea, argue in favor of it, and see where it takes us". In this context, his assertion about people not "getting" humor referred to people taking his hypotheticals for a fact even though he clearly labeled them as "but what if...?". The example that comes to mind is when he argued "What if we assumed that men are rapists by nature, and modeled society around this fact?" and people attacked him for "affirming" that all men are rapists.
On the other hand, he has become one of the stronger Trump supporters I've ever seen (which is not necessarily bad), pointing out how everything he does is a great calculated move to what I consider a delusional extent (which is kind of bad - his POV currently seems to be "by asking Ukraine to investigate his opponent, Trump was doing the country a service"). By reading his blog, I got more and more the feeling that his "what if" questions were not an academic thought exercise, but rather a way to push some toxic beliefs he holds while having the plausible deniability of "it's just a hypotetical".
So my point being: this quote by Scott Adams can go both ways. Maybe he's right and humans are very bad at understanding humor and/or satire, and my two points are in no way related. But I wouldn't rule out the other possibility: that humans are actually very good at spotting what's behind the mask, and that those 30% of people are those who didn't fall for his trick and rightfully called him out for it.
Given all opinions are based around what you would do in a hypothetical circumstance, the limits should be pretty low.
Also, there's a strong difference between satire and hypothetically asserting that rape is innate.
Maybe I'll put up genuine commentary, I just don't have the time or inclination to deal with it.
Facebook to Exempt The Onion and Satire from Fact-Checking
I'm not a doctor, this is not medical advice, just my opinion. Now onto how to heal cancer with a crystal.
I'm not a financial advisor, this is not investment advice, just my opinion. Now onto how to make millions with this one simple chart pattern.
And that's a fact! ;)
https://www.snopes.com/news/2019/08/16/readers-think-satire-...
Well, there's really nothing to prove. You didn't make the claim that 'the earth is flat'. Instead you made the claim that 'My [papito's] opinion is that the Earth is flat'. There is no reason to disbelieve the latter. It is clear from your own statement that your opinion is that the Earth is flat. There is no reason to counter that statement.
This is why facebook has no obligation to do anything. Facebook's entire platform is to allow various entities to self-publish their opinions. If it is clear that this is your opinion on hacker news (where the anonymous username is actually relatively obscured compared to facebook's real name policy and name placement), then it is extremely clear on Facebook.