Facebook's only Dutch factchecker quits over political ad exemption
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Also can you back up your statement about not fact-checking before anyone claims otherwise ?
Unfortunately more people consume Facebook than others, so its a prime target.
Also I would point you towards another article :
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-advertising-...
The ones in Australia and in the UK come to mind and have serious bite in confronting offenders.
Add to that that ads in newspapers are clearly identifiable as ads, while this is much more intermingled in social media.
I think (suspect) the trick FB is using is not unlike Uber / Airbnb where they fall just outside regulation. Meaning that sponsored content on FB is just "self-regulated"
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/03/hyundai-and...
Have Facebook ever actually given any solid reasons for this decision?
"Trump is racist" a statement of fact. But it's entirely subjective.
no... It's not.. Thats the point.
Things are not marked (legitemately) as fake based on opinion..
People are worried about things that are illegitimately marked as fake based on opinion.
https://ifcncodeofprinciples.poynter.org/
Its not a bunch of opinion based socialists with flower based triggers.
If you're going to do it as a company, I don't know why you have two standards..
Generally I think those companies are making a huge mistake if they slightly deviate from absolute neutrality in the area of politics/geopolitics. Any deviation is seen as taking sides by both sides, and from that point onward everyone will basically judge those companies as taking part in partisan divides. Nothing to gain from that.
It is not neutral to let foreign powers interfere with elections (in any country, whether it be the US in a Russian one or Russia in a US one).
No it's not. Doing nothing is the opposite of action. Please don't twist the language like this - if doing nothing is an action then everyone is engaged in action all the time and the entire concept loses all meaning.
Inaction is not what neutrality means
Not intervening in a situation is practically the definition of neutrality. That's why Switzerland is described as neutral during World War 2 - they had a policy of no action taken.
Our democratic policy is resilient against a certain level of deliberately-induced stupidity, since stupidity does tend to be self-defeating. But at sufficient levels, it can do a lot of damage to everybody else before it finally defeats itself.
I'm not saying that this can be fixed by the trivial addition of fact checkers. But I don't think that "it's your money" is sufficient reason not to try various solutions. Your right to swing your money around ends where my nose begins.
Why do you need to ban it?
As for disagreeing with it... I can disagree with it until it takes on the force of law. Then I'm required to agree with it, or at least, to live with the consequences. Political speech takes on an aspect of force in a way that other speech doesn't.
What do you mean by 'permitted'?
Facts within the political sphere need to be interpreted with the lens of your political ideology because politics are not a rational game. Political beliefs are emotional even if the proponents claim otherwise. For example, take the statement "Homelessness in San Francisco is due to rising inequality, cost of living, and gentrification." .. How does Facebook apply a truth value to that? What do you think the truth value of that statement is? What do you think your ideological opposite would claim?
>Have Facebook ever actually given any solid reasons for this decision?
It's obvious. Politics are toxic, divisive and emotional. ANY decision you make is guaranteed to piss off a large segment of your users.
Let me ask you the classic; "When did you stop beating your wife?"
You don’t think people call things ‘fake news’ just because they disagree with it?
Calling things fake news is a common type of fake news these days!
https://ifcncodeofprinciples.poynter.org/
There are methods and proceedures in place to fact check.
I'm really surprised people think facts are opinion based.
Not everyone follows methods and procedures to fact check properly... that’s... the... problem.
When InfoWars calls things fake news, they ain’t carefully going through your policy.
2. "When did you stop beating your wife" is a an example of a completely unrelated fallacy.
The company insists that it does not want to be in the position of judging what is true and false, with its head of communications, Nick Clegg, saying that it was not an “appropriate role for us to referee political debates and prevent a politician’s speech from reaching its audience and being subject to public debate and scrutiny”.
The reasoning does not stand up for ads, which are very obvious, proofable lies and which they still refuse to withdraw.
Let anyone, politician or not, make any political speech and, again, voters will ultimately decide.
Very good point. It should also be noted that some things are a matter of fact (1+1=2), and some things (like whether Brexit is worth doing) are a matter of opinion, based on a complex array of facts, factoids, memes, rule-of-thumbs, gut-feels, lived experience, etc.
Take even something that you would think no one would disagree with, some of the most non-controversial standards which we use to build laws from, and you will find many of those 'facts' are actual opinions and have edge cases that people aren't aware of.
Try this one: Lowering the drinking age is harmful to minors.
Is it? We know alcohol in general is harmful to the one consuming it. But would a lower drinking age result in less binge drinking and thus be more healthy on average? We see this a lot with prohibition, where if we ban something harmful but the ban itself causes more harm. How can you say, as a fact, that the ban will or won't make things better or worse?
So while we can easily scoff at the idea that "Hillary is controlled by aliens." banning falsehoods is far more troublesome than just wiping out the obvious falsehoods. And in some cases, even the obvious falsehoods aren't false.
This is a hard problem and I'm hesitant of any solution on the level of 'ban lies'.
So can you convince me you didn't just spread a political falsehood? If I were the one making true/false decisions and you put something like what you just wrote in a political ad, I'd deem it misleading and punish you. See the problem now?
Of course I see the problem of trying to separate truth/false stuff and you can get all philosophical about it but at the end of the day just trying to remove the blatant lies like "Hillary is an alien" and "Vaccines cause autism" would give a better outcome than doing nothing at all that is what Facebook does right now about it.
This guy can explain it better than I do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/8841347/Steve-J...
The MMR autism scare originates in the early 1990s so it predates widespread usage of the web, let alone social networks. Vaccines are an especially difficult case that are structurally guaranteed to produce something like the modern anti-vaxx movement, no help from Facebook needed. It's a classic tragedy of the commons. The logic goes like this:
1. Vaccines are complex and new, and involve injecting my kids with some kind of modified viruses. I heard from other parents that there might sometimes be side effects.
2. Medicines frequently have side effects so I can believe that. Even if it's very rare, side effects are bad. I don't want to take the risk of harming my kids. Keeping my kids safe is my number 1 priority as a parent.
3. But I could opt out. I'm allowed to, and I learned about herd immunity. If I quietly avoid vaccinating my kids I eliminate 100% of the risk because other parents are taking it for me.
4. Why would I not opt out? Even if I think the risk of taking a vaccine is only 0.1% that's still more than zero, and my child's welfare is the most important thing in my universe. If I gambled and lost I would never forgive myself. Opting out is the responsible thing to do.
In other words being anti-vaxx only looks stupid from a society-wide level. From the perspective of a parent who doesn't care about wider social trends but only their own kids, opting out appears to make sense for as long as they believe herd immunity exists, and it doesn't matter how often you tell people there's no real risks: nobody sane believes experts are always right and it's hard for someone to know what the risk "really" is, they can only go on what they themselves have heard from various sources of differing reliability.
The fix for tragic commons is usually a law and that'll be the fix here too. Facebook is really just irrelevant. Trying to suppress anti-vaxx speech will just make the problem worse because it looks like a coverup. Censorship is the last resort of people who lost an argument after all.
If you pay attention to snopes you will see on some of their fact checks of politically controversial topics they will take this line where they will either weak man a position or strong man a position depending on what result they want to produce.
Example: You live in a group A (party, country, etc.) echo chamber where every day you’re bombarded with news on evil thing X group B just did, which is a fact. What they don’t tell you is that group A is also doing X, or doing some more egregious thing Y. They didn’t lie to you, they just omitted the full picture. After a while, you’ll inevitably believe group B is the root of all evil, and even if you’re then presented 100% facts about how group A did all the evil things from a group B publication, you’ll probably dismiss those.
In short, not necessarily agreeing with gp, but it’s certainly very complicated.
Here's a common set of "subjective facts": "Policy X will help group Y in manner Z." along with "Politician A voted against X and therefore hates Y." As I've commented before, even the apparent objective fact that "Politician A voted against X" isn't necessarily as factual as it may seem since it's a common tactic to have X bundled in with a whole bunch of other things, and you don't know whether A voted against X, or voted against boondoggle B buried in the bill, or if X was in fact the only thing the politician agreed with in the entire bill and was forced to vote against it because everything else was worse, or if they agreed with X and voted against it as part of some other political deal, or what. Even the "bare fact" "Politician A voted against X" can be treated in a way that turns it into an effective lie, even if it is nominally 100% true. That is the sort of "fact" we deal with in the media environment all the time, and it isn't as objective as we'd like it to be.
That's just a logical fallacy. By definition a fact can only be objective, otherwise it's simply an opinion.
Which is presented as a fact by the media.....which is consumed by readers and mentally filed under "fact", and subsequently used by subconscious heuristics in future evaluations of reality, producing more "facts" which are transmitted throughout their network of acquaintances, infecting more subconscious heuristics, and round and round we go.
It's interesting that many here at HN expect the general public to up their epistemological game, when all of us here have the same infected heuristics as them (if to a lesser degree), and routinely behave in similar ways.
The question on my mind lately is: how might this situation be improved, first here at HN, and then maybe later throughout the rest of society? We've got a bunch of bright minds here, it might be interesting if we acknowledged this problem and set our collective minds to finding a solution.
> The question on my mind lately is: how might this situation be improved, first here at HN
I would first suggest not applying such a broad brush stroke to all players in "the media". It's a false-equivalence to say the least.
Granted, this is not entirely their fault, not by a long shot. They are tasked with conveying extremely complex information to the masses, at a level that is understandable to some sort of lowest common denominator, using human created languages that optimize for pragmatism (and are therefore flawed in various ways: nuance, accuracy, bandwidth, etc), across various mediums that each have their own limitations, all in a limited time frame that must also make room for other pressing topics. It shouldn't be too surprising that the end result is less than perfect.
While true that conditional statements about the future ("X will help") is not falsifiable, it is still a well formed if-then statement. The statement must be either true or false even though we can't derive a proof one way or the other. I disagree that we have to just throw our hands up and accept belief in unfalsifiable "subjective facts". I can easily fix your statement. Watch me:
"Relevant organization W projects that policy X will help group Y in manner Z."
Now your belief in "X helps Y in manner Z" is no longer blind but derived from trust in organization W. If you don't want to trust W you can dig deeper into their methods and data. There is no link in the chain that can only be filled in subjectively.
>"Politician A voted against X" isn't necessarily as factual as it may seem since it's a common tactic to have X bundled in with a whole bunch of other things, and you don't know whether A voted against X, or voted against boondoggle B buried in the bill, or if X was in fact the only thing the politician agreed with in the entire bill and was forced to vote against it because everything ..."
If you looked closely you would see "therefore politician A hates Y" is a false conclusion from a true premise. Not to victim blame here, but if true facts are leading someone to false conclusions then that's on them for being bad at critical reasoning. The facts aren't subjective. The flaw is in the wetware. Human brains have exploitable bugs. We call them "fallacies". The hotfix was released in the education system. It hasn't reached everyone yet.
If the public can't be trusted to evaluate facts presented to them then the very premise of democracy is flawed anyway.
But that's missing the point. My point is entirely about what the media calls "facts" and what gets called "facts" in these sorts of discussions and by "fact checkers", not whether or not in some hypothetical universe the media could indeed deal in objective facts alone. The fact that it could be done correctly does not mean it is done correctly; or to go with a traditional philosophical formulation, ought does not lead to is. Correcting me doesn't help anything, you need to convince the media.
And you will not do that, because dealing in psuedo-facts suits them fine.
"Poverty causes crime"
"Women are neurotic"
"IPv6 is required to be implemented ASAP"
All of these are absolute facts To some people. And absolute falsities to others.
The meaning of "babies", "killed" and "late-term abortion" (or even if that term has any meaning) is completely subjective.