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Comment by bilekas | Hacker News Reader

I just can't get my head around why political speech is permitted to be false..

Have Facebook ever actually given any solid reasons for this decision?

Because truth and falsehood are not so clear cut. Many scientific studies are needed to even begin to understand an issue, and even if we can say things like 'climate change is happening' with the weight of massive studies backing up, saying things like 'policy X will fix climate change' will be lucky to have a single study backing it.

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.

Using this rationale we are condeming ourselves to letting the worse parts of societies to use the propaganda machine -known as facebook- to influatiate people in a scale never seen before, equaling freedom of speech with freedom of reach is taking this society off the rails by letting anyone with a big enough wallet influentiate a gigantic part of the population; even outright banning all political ads would be a better alternative.

You're talking about a social network that's in decline. Most users are moving to Instagram and WhatsApp which don't have any equivalent of politics on the news feed. The idea that people are reprogrammed on a mass scale by Facebook is itself a falsehood: I don't believe this effect exists, nor do I believe social scientists have any credibility, for good reasons.

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?

I can convince you in the same degree you are willing to understand any evidence I give, a similar challenge arises with anti-vaxxers, a group that few years ago was just a laughing stock but now thanks to the online fear propaganda through social media now has created some focus of kids without vaccines creating disease risks believed to be long gone, such risks of social network are measureable, but there are things that are practically harder to measure like if the "pedophile hillary pizza place" changed what people think about that political candidate; in general the way people are influenciated by propaganda is not immediate but take years to slowly aggregate with other falsehoods or uncorrelated facts in order to disrupt society.

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

I think anti-vaxxers and people who reject modern medicine in general predate Facebook. You know, Steve Jobs managed to get himself killed by trying to cure his cancer using homeopathic/spirit medicine and I don't think he was brainwashed by random people on his Facebook news feed. His fatal attraction to 'alternative medicine' can be traced back to his hippie roots travelling through India:

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.

The core question, and one that has existed long before Facebook even did, was how do we protect a population against propaganda. As psychology and marketing improve their ability to manipulate the mind, we have to get answer this or else democracies will fall into the hands of those who have control over these tools.

This is a hard problem and I'm hesitant of any solution on the level of 'ban lies'.

With all its problems the solution of "ban lies" seems better than the current behavior: Meaning doing nothing at all.

Could you please be specific about which part of the reasoning given in the article you think is not solid?

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”.

This is, in my opinion, no solid reasoning. It's more like the weazeling out, which is so very typical for Facebook.

The reasoning does not stand up for ads, which are very obvious, proofable lies and which they still refuse to withdraw.

In the general case, judging obvious vs non-obvious isn't much easier than judging true vs false.

Voters decide what is good or bad political speech (at least in democracies). It's already bad enough with concentrated corporate media and giant web corporations, we don't need to have another unelected group of "fact checkers" mess with this any further.

Let anyone, politician or not, make any political speech and, again, voters will ultimately decide.

Voters decide what is effective and ineffective speech. This is entirely distinct from good/bad, or true/false. It is easy to produce effective political ads that are entirely false, such as was done in the Brexit campaign.

> This is entirely distinct from good/bad, or true/false.

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.

Because people say any idea they disagree with is false.

Not really. Have you ever heard of "Unsubstantiated claims" ?

Let me ask you the classic; "When did you stop beating your wife?"

1. The existence of unsubstantiated claims does not contradict the statement that people call any news they disagree with fake.

2. "When did you stop beating your wife" is a an example of a completely unrelated fallacy.

> Not really.

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!

Thats fine, but those people are not under the fact checking standard :

https://ifcncodeofprinciples.poynter.org/

There are methods and proceedures in place to fact check.

I'm really surprised people think facts are opinion based.

I'm sure there's a neutral, disinterested fact checker somewhere in the world. But my experience with political fact checkers is mostly composed of people posting Snopes articles with similar keywords to what I said. I'm not sure I trust Facebook to hire the right kind.

> There are methods and proceedures in place to fact check.

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.

Where would you draw the line? Mostly true? Some true? Mostly false? 100% false? What if there are facts surface later and this changes the truthiness?

Yes, a grey zone exists. That's not a reason for inaction in other cases. Where to draw the line between murder, manslaughter and unfortunate accident ? Where to draw the line between fair use and piracy ? If anything, start with policing obvious falsehoods ("Obama and FEMA will take all your guns").

>I just can't get my head around why political speech is permitted to be false..

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.

Some things like "we've spent X over the last 5 years" are (sometimes) obviously false though.

So you want Facebook and other social media companies to pick and choose which facts to fact-check?

I'd argue that paid political ads probably ought to be banned entirely on social media platforms. It's an unfair advantage to those who can afford to pay.

People should be allowed to be wrong. It's that simple. If you disagree with this you're not a very good person (fact).

Water is not wet. It's that simple. if you disagree with me you're not a very good person(fact)

I don’t have a problem with you advertising that water is not wet on Facebook using your own money.

I'd have a problem with it if it was part of a campaign to replace all water with Gatorade. People spending their money to be publicly stupid is not a problem, but people spending their money to make other people be stupid in ways that impact my life is.

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.

Can you not just disagree with it?

Why do you need to ban it?

I didn't say "ban it". I said that a variety of options were on the table.

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.

It is easily verified to be false. Vaccines causing autism, is more difficult, and requires expertise. That's the problem with fact checking; the material is vastly complex. One way to tackle it is to go after specific claims. Doing that sometimes means quotes are taken out of context.

Well why fact check anything then ?

If you're going to do it as a company, I don't know why you have two standards..

That's a good point. I think Facebook made a mistake by doing this. They should only vet ads for legality in the target jurisdiction (to some extent, false advertising is a crime, so they might need some minimum fact checking there).

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.

Doing nothing is an action. Inaction is not what neutrality means.

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).

Doing nothing is an action.

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.

Because truth is subjective.

"Trump is racist" a statement of fact. But it's entirely subjective.

> Because truth is subjective.

no... It's not.. Thats the point.

Things are not marked (legitemately) as fake based on opinion..

> Things are not marked (legitemately) as fake based on opinion.

People are worried about things that are illegitimately marked as fake based on opinion.

You do realise there is a standard to bear when fact checking ?

https://ifcncodeofprinciples.poynter.org/

Its not a bunch of opinion based socialists with flower based triggers.

I hate to bring you some devastating news here... but some people don’t follow journalistic best practices.

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