Facebook Isn’t Just Allowing Lies, It’s Prioritizing Them

The NY Times isn't just allowing lies, it's prioritizing them. By allowing a certain law professor to publish opinion pieces that contain hyperbole, innuendo, and other misleading rhetoric, the NY Times is increasing the reach of this law professor. If it had not been for this opinion piece, millions of readers would otherwise have been unaware of this law professor, but are now exposed to his rhetoric thanks to the NY Times.

Man the NYT editors must really hate FB to post an article like this every week. It’s not like I like Facebook or anything but this is just exhausting.

They’re a forum with user generated content and ads. They’re undertaking a huge moderation effort already — trying to have their army of underpaid moderators also police facts is just a problem that can’t solved because lies are cheap to spread and expensive to refute.

You could say something snarky like “well FB just shouldn’t exist then” which doesn’t take into account any replacement someone on HN would approve of would have worse moderation than FB.

The format of massive scale public square social media is the reason this happens. And unless you want to tell the world to get off Twitter and eat their vegetables there’s only so much you can do to keep fights from breaking down in a huge public meeting of people who are addicted to arguing and 0 distance away from every conversation.

Mass media in general has been profiting off rumors, gossip, and falsehoods for a long time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

The difference here is FB is doing it algorithmically on a much larger scale.

> By refusing to stay out of politics, the company is building the case for its own breakup.

Wouldn’t this be an unconstitutional basis for breaking up a company?

A popular jab at Zuck/FB is that the First Amendment doesn’t apply to private corporations, but only to the government.

Once a government decides that Facebook’s maximally permissive view on speech/ads is unacceptable, and goes on to pursue punitive action against it, isn’t that within the realm of the sort of government action that the First Amendment prohibits? How is that any different from the government applying punitive action against CNN or the NYTimes for publishing ads it deems dangerous/unacceptable?

At least the authors of paid ads and their intent can be reasonably sleuthed out by those interested in learning their origin and truthiness. The mass of ad agencies that put their content out through fake accounts with every attempt at hiding their content's true source(s) are more worrisome for me.

Maybe, if Facebook doesn't require an ad's content to be truthful, just placing a disclaimer such as "CONTENT IN THIS AD NOT GUARANTEED TO BE TRUE" will be enough to dissuade its consumers to believe everything they read.

This kind of bla bla is getting boring.

> By refusing to stay out of politics, the company is building the case for its own breakup.

What does NYtimes think will change if FB and instagram separate?

All things already mentioned in the comments here aside, it’s somewhat personally infuriating to see headlines like this. Facebook recently disabled my account because they can’t make sense of who I am (I wrote about it and posted here earlier). I don’t know what’s going on with their algorithms but they whacked my very legit account while allowing unfiltered political news. Seems the priorities are all out of order.

What about traditional media lying all the time? By citing "sources" journalists can say whatever they want without any kind of accountability. This is just old media crying for losing to new media platforms.