Facebook, Reddit, Google, Twitter, YouTube joint statement on misinformation
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Independent media outlets that live on YouTube's advertising revenue are completely furious about it but powerless to do anything about it.
I don't think it makes the public better informed either. The most powerful propaganda tool is not misinformation but misdirection. Positive news gets boosted and negative news gets suppressed. Essentially that is happening when YouTube boosts mainstream media. One actors view is boosted and all dissenting views are suppressed.
My guess would be that Google is tailoring their search engine to ~80% of the queries and optimizing for those, so when you're searching for the 20%, it's really bad. But when within 80%, it works great.
I remember back in the day when you had to know how to search in order to find things. Some people were better than others and different search engines had different tricks. Nowadays it seems like trying to optimize your search query makes it worse, and most engines just deal with generalized queries.
I agree that the current state overvalues crappy media articles, but I'm not sure how much of it is Google's decision or richer organizations learning SEO themselves.
Or what is new and even worse, if there is a news article about a certain topic, Google will heavily drive the traffic their way, regardless of the quality of the article.
There are few topics left where search results aren't just shit.
Edit: Oh apparently it's just this paragraph (found it on about.fb.com):
> “We are working closely together on COVID-19 response efforts. We’re helping millions of people stay connected while also jointly combating fraud and misinformation about the virus, elevating authoritative content on our platforms, and sharing critical updates in coordination with government healthcare agencies around the world. We invite other companies to join us as we work to keep our communities healthy and safe.”
That's quite orwellian of them. Oh that explains recent lack of facebook hitpieces by the "authoritative sources". I swear everytime the "authoritative sources" attacked facebook, reddit, google, twitter, youtube, etc, they "elevated authoritative content by authoritative sources" and gave them preferential treatment and magically the hitpieces stop.
Also, rather than offering joint statements and colluding together, I'd rather these social media platforms compete to provide the best information. There is just too much collusion by big tech. We need competition.
I mean there are just so many reasons to do that because people are so bad.
Either they are publishers or platforms.
They can always put disclaimers by every “news.”
In some cases, it's the village idiot, in a village full of village idiots.
We are not talking about war related strategic information here, so I don't understand your position. I still don't know about any examples. There should be at least some if it is dismissed as necessary.
If the slippery slope were real and the control of information successful, you might still think this.
And misinformation about health issues leads to deaths
To be precise, social media platforms do not censor, but selectively grant certain entities a louder voice at a subsidized cost. Of course, these companies are out of the reach of the checks that the US government is laden with, and this should be managed by regulation or other form of checks.
The majority of the world does not live under healthy democracies. That the west is copying this failed model is concerning.
With respect to social media, it is clear that it is inappropriate and impossible to hold most laypeople accountable for spreading false information, and so it is responsible broadcasting to only amplify these voices to a limited extent.
I think that it is clear to you that I don't support unconditional free broadcast of factual claims in the Internet age, but one where one's reach must be matched by how much they have staked on the correctness of their information, proportional to the severity of the issue they are weighing in on.
The only people in the media fired for the debacle of the Iraq war were the ones who called the lies of the government out.
When we let everyone speak at least the average of all the lies is closer to the truth than when we let only one lie through.
And untethered fake news propaganda leads to world wars and butchery of millions of innocent people. There's a balance to be struck and right now, with unfettered capitalism and no social contract in USA, there's just too many people that wish to abuse news to hurt and even cause death of other people.
What are you referring to here? Wars and butchery have been reliably championed throughout history by regular news propaganda.
E.g. look at Bot Sentinel top 100 trollbots [1].
#1 @BrandonBeckham_ is (from my judgment) a fake twitter account [2]. He poses as a veteran Christian that loves everything Trump. All he posts is pro-Trump stuff & Donald J. Trump retweets him frequently.
This is the stuff that needs moderation for misinformation. But somehow this stuff is just ignored by Big Tech.
Publishing a piece of news/article used to mean hosting a website, registering a domain, writing html, running a web server. All require studying, the very action to battle disinformation.
Now all we have to do is make an account (or even not) and start typing on keyboard.
Opinion is like a-hole, everyone got one. But not every piece of opinion as useful as an a-hole. Lowering the bar of publishing is normalising the weighting of each opinion. Which I think is the root cause of today's internet
Here are some examples:
https://lightonconspiracies.com/ https://charlesortel.com/ https://truepundit.com/category/featured/ https://crowdsourcethetruth.org/
Those are just a few of hundreds, if not thousands.
"Don't believe everything you see or hear on the internet" - The Internet
This is the actual consequences of stripping down education on every front.
I will say though there is a certain decline in older people where they become highly gullible and susceptible to fake news, robocalls, scams, etc.
I know there’s a lot of disinfo and rumors out there. But I don’t want them shutting it all down. Put a warning over it if you must. But without some of these sources I would not have learned about the severity of the virus in time to prepare.
I don’t see social media companies making any dent on misinformation. Here are a variety of examples.
* Troll farms that deliberately seek to manipulate gullible people for unrelated motivations.
* Fanatics, which are the same as troll farms except their motives are aligned to what they claim.
* Cults which are also just like troll farms except their motives are centered around the desires of a central person or idol.
* Liars. People who deliberately mislead others for personal reasons nor affiliated with an organization.
* Stupid people are like liars except their deceit is not deliberate and they have primarily fooled themselves and want to share their foolishness, such as people who put their heads in the sand and twist themselves into knots to ignore evidence when pushing opinions onto people.
* Gullible people are those who spread any information they believe to be true where truth is only based on popularity, conformity, or social expediency.
I want to see how social media eliminates that.
If you ask me, constantly calling this SARS strain Corona, Covid-19 etc. can count as misinformation as well.
I don't think this is limited to those with issues of hearing health and I suspect that, while it's more common in circles where doctors often give unspecific bad news with no real resolution (something that many folks don't want to hear), it's not limited to them either.
Right now on Reddit there are scores of subreddits focused on COVID-19 and the Coronavirus, with really terrible moderation. If the admins were actually serious about dealing with missinfo they'd be shutting more than a few down.
Yes, it's important to reduce misinformation, but it's also important (and IMHO even more important) to allow challenging the official information. The issue of "truth vs misinformation" is orthogonal to whether the information is approved by some particular source. So what I'm worried about is when the official position of some nationstate conflicts with the truth, then they'll be able to label the truth "misinformation" and get it removed/suppressed because of that, and that is something we definitely want to avoid. Sure, politicians can call anything they dislike as misinformation or fake news, but it's imperative that they don't get the ability to remove/suppress that information just because of that.
Rumors spread in the absence of trustworthy, extensive, reliable information. If in some situation there's no trustworthy, extensive, reliable information provided (for example, about the early situation in Iran) and rumors is all we can get, then rumors don't need to be suppressed as they are the best source of truth available even if it's not perfect.
A raw feed plus a moderated feed with the option to toggle between them is welcome.
The notion of an Edenic situation where enlightened moderation can squelch the noise is bunk, and a cure worse than the disease.
The rest is absolute crap.
Of course there will be misinformation. That's not as big of a problem in Reddit because of moderation and voting, compared to Facebook and the likes.
Got to be joking right? Reddit is pretty much the battleground of misinformation. It's run by think tanks, ngos, intel, media, etc. Most of the threads and most comments are pretty much anti-china propaganda along with some pro-china nonsense. That's it. Every gilded and boosted thread and comment are of a particular propaganda bent.
> That's not as big of a problem in Reddit because of moderation and voting, compared to Facebook and the likes.
The problem with reddit is precisely the moderation. It's why you have garbage echo chambers like r/politics, r/the_donald, r/worldnews, r/news, r/china, r/atheism, [do I need to continue]. Even the coronavirus related subs are heavily politically driven.
Because of the rise of moderation, reddit has turned into hives of extreme echo chambers. Whereas in the past, most major subs allowed all viewpoints, now each sub moderates toward a particular worldview and you get the worst echo chambers.
You get the worst echo chambers due to moderation and censorship. Moderation and censorship doesn't prevent echo chambers and extremism. It promotes it. It's why nazi germany, soviet union, north korea, saudi arabia, silicon valley, etc love moderation and censorship.
I just look at the result and while efforts to manipulate content increases (malicious and manipulative, not moderation), the situation is far, far worse than 5 years ago. Additionally the content has become much more stale.
reddit probably has accurate date, but as a user the impression is pretty obvious.
Deciding who you trust or not is your call, but those news subreddits are invaluable to get updates from all over the world.
I have not claimed all are to be trusted or anything like that, so please do not make strawmen.
The easiest tell that you being deceptive is that you didn't list these subreddits. List them or should I say, go frantically search for them and list them here in a desperate attempt to maintain any sort of credibility. Or are you a major contributor to those subs and are embarrassed to list them because it would be obvious that the subs are part of the disinformation campaign to spread fear?
> I have not claimed all are to be trusted or anything like that, so please do not make strawmen.
You wrote "Reddit has been a very good source of information in this crisis." You are the one building a straw man argument, not me.
Also "so please do not make strawmen" is such interesting phrasing. Can I ask what nationality you are?
I am opposed to the view of some moderators want to paint the site as something different than it is. Reddit consists of user generated content. Users have a right to be wrong. And it is not a place for moderators to distribute their opinions or any official information.
Currently full of anti government propaganda, much of it unrelated to the virus.
I would really hope they would unite in a joint effort against the spread of propaganda from fake accounts instead.
As I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, take a look at Bot Sentinel top 100 trollbots [1].
#1 @BrandonBeckham_ is (from my judgment) a fake twitter account [2]. He poses as a veteran Christian that loves everything Trump. All he posts is pro-Trump stuff & Donald J. Trump retweets him frequently.
This is the stuff that needs moderation for misinformation. This is _dangerous_ - it affects people's minds and changes their minds. But somehow this stuff is just ignored by Big Tech.
For instance, I have read from official sources:
Vitamin C does not help. Garlic (powerful anti-inflammatory and antiviral) will not help. Black and green tea will not help. Chance of infection outside of China is negligible. Human-to-human transmission is unlikely. Coronaviruses don't survive on plastics and metal surfaces. Taking anti-inflammatory drugs is not dangerous. Face masks are not protective against the virus. Gargling and swallowing hot iodized salt water does nothing. The virus is not mutating and not creating more deadly strains. The virus can't be made by humans. The official statistics are real and not a gross undercount. Cities will not go in lockdown or quarantine. Longer than expected incubation periods are not impossible. Sauna's and hot showers don't help. Everything is under control and contained. The flu is more deadly. You should not avoid public transit or large gatherings. We have enough ventilators. We have enough protective equipment for medics. You should not be worried about COVID-19 if you got flu-like symptoms before the first confirmed case on 19 January. The CDC is and was not lying about the number of cases, and warnings circulating online reporting community spread are hoaxes. The virus can not pass the brain-blood barrier. The virus does not increase chance of triggering latent schizophrenia and psychosis. Some national from a different country did not die outside of China before the WHO called a world health emergency. This is not yet a pandemic. Fantasies about coronavirus are more contagious than the disease itself. Not eating in Chinatown restaurants is racist. When hand sanitizer ran out, it's not a good idea to make your own hand sanitizer. Countries in Europe won't follow Italy. The virus started in a wet market in Wuhan. You can't blame China for the pandemic, they did a great job and set an example for outbreak response. Papers discussing HIV inserts and gain-of-function infectiousness are retracted because they are completely false, not for fueling conspiracy theories. This virus is not a viable bioweapon, because the mortality rate is too low. The pope will not have coronavirus. Trump will not have coronavirus. Bolsonaro will not have coronavirus. The stock market is looking good right now. There is no reason for panic. This virus is not expected to calm down around June, only to pick up again in November. The government thinks that shaking hands is ok. Experts are right. Experts give correct projections. It is better to listen to public health officials and experts if you want to stay up to date and predict what will happen. There are no terrible long-term concerns of contracting COVID-19 for young people.
I can provide sources upon request if you believe any of these statements.
An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people! Stop managing panic and come clean: You all lost control of a SARS-like virus and containment is impossible.
Instead of quarantining subreddits, you may want to take a look at the immense sockpuppetry from China nr. 1 accounts and the trade war driven anti-China propaganda from U.S. intelligence. Even on HackerNews I get multiple downvotes on posts that are long on page 5. There is a gross information warfare going on, but hey, got to protect against my Facebook aunt trying to give (scientifically unproven) well-intentioned advice, in the absence of any certainty.
Google prioritizes information such as "How to protect yourself against novel coronavirus? Cough in your elbows!". They are arrogantly acting like the public can't handle the truth.
The main reason it wasn't escalated sooner is that through January China was still withholding and delaying the release of data. China only confirmed that cases of human to human transmission had occurred on January 10th, and froze reporting of new cases during a party congress that ended on January 17th. So the WHO escalated this appropriately within 2 weeks of the first indications from China that this was a serious issue, despite confusing and inaccurate reporting of data.
Also about 2% mortality was an early estimate, is 20x that of most strains of flu and is comparable to that of the Spanish Flu pandemic. So those estimates were as good as they could have been at the time, and are still not far off what we're seeing happen.
[0]https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/30-01-2020-statement-on...
[1]https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
The reason doesn't matter (especially when it's waiting for China's trafficked data), the institution knew about the very likelihood of pandemia and still denied it for longer than needed. That allowed various national governments to hide their own lack of counter-measures behind a "reputable" source. And finally the media gave voice (at least in France) to a lot of "experts" that implanted a false sense of security in people's mind. Fake news all the way down, and people are now paying the price for it.
They waited until a foreigner (Thai national in Kolkata) died and only then declared an emergency, saying that nobody outside China died yet. During the declaration they sounded more like the WTO than the WHO, stating that banning flights from China would do zero to help combat the spread.
The main reason for not escalating sooner was the tremendous pressure that China applied. In the initial stages the WHO was just a mouthpiece for the Chinese CDC, who was trying to save face.
Then they waited to call a pandemic, while everyone was annoyed with them for waiting.
Just, please don't.
Yes of course the WHO was just a mouthpiece for what the Chinese were saying in the very early days, because the Chinese were the only people with the data. I understand this is frustrating, it's infuriating in fact.
It's only an international emergency when it's international. It was a declaration of fact, not a prediction about the future. The same is true of calling a pandemic, they declared it when it reached the criteria to do so. That's their job, but there seems to be a popular misconception that they should declare a pandemic when there 'might' be a pandemic, but that's not the case.
I have seen this in my professional life. I've come under pressure to declare escalated emergencies because there 'might be' a high level impact, but the agreed SLAs were to declare those only when there is actual impact. There were specific agreed processes for potential high impact issues and we followed them and they worked, but still I've had pressure to break process and escalate inappropriately, sometimes by very senior management. Fortunately my current management are pretty well informed.
Then in the same speech where they say, they will be fighting a misinformation pandemic, they say nobody outside of China has died, when a Thai national had died in Kolkuta.
All countries complained about the data sharing from China, but when asked, the WHO replied with praise and that it was not time to point any fingers.
Their main concern was for countries with a weak healthcare system, while Italy has the second-best healthcare system of Europe, and India and Africa seem better of.
> they declared it when it reached the criteria to do so.
A pandemic is defined as: "an epidemic occurring worldwide, or over a very wide area, crossing international boundaries and usually affecting a large number of people." The fact was that it's an epidemic in China, Italy, South Korea, and Iran, and it is occurring in more than 80 countries, with some devastating effects. Public health experts were all talking of a pandemic correctly, while Ghebreyesus was still doing "an ongoing assessment" before making a decision.
Really, this is the level we're sinking to? The first death in India was on 12 March. The Thai case was not Coronavirus according to the hospital that treated her, she was tested negative and had been in India since November [0]. If you're aware of the case, surely you must know this?
[0]https://www.theweek.in/news/india/2020/01/28/no-chance-thai-...
Multiple regimes have intentionally manipulated facts during this crisis for political reasons. What is the cost of lies?
So how many did die of Coronavirus in reality? If someone is already suffering from life threatening complications would this still count as a Covid death?
The Western official media was strongly denouncing the Chinese authorities when they were doing similar things a month or so ago in Hubei. Following that same logic I guess cancer is not the number one killer in the world, it's either the respiratory failure caused by that cancer or the related infections. But this is just Western hubris in play, as in "our numbers can never be wrong, reality be damned", and I say that as a guy from the Western "side".
But you are not following the same logic. Mine was an honest question while you seem to pick a particular (mis)interpretation.
Complications of a particular illness are part of that illness. I'm talking about adding Coronavirus complications to already life threatening ones from other diseases. HIV/AIDS are considered the killers even if it's unrelated infections that cause the actual death.
Case in point, I was in the hospital when 2 patients with less that 1% chance of surviving (cancer, no immune system) contracted an antibiotic resistant bacteria. They both subsequently died and this was attributed to the cancer not the bacteria because it was pretty much a forgone conclusion that they would have died within days regardless.
So if someone with no immune system dies of Covid-19 can you reasonably say Coronavirus killed them? Or would any minor complication have done the same? If you have a heart attack while driving but it's the crash that actually kills you the cause of death is considered the heart attack.
Yes, especially if those persons were walking freely and minding about their own lives just a week or two before, as is the case with the majority of the people that have died in Italy because of covid. I highly suspect that only a small fraction of those that died were days or weeks away from dying of other causes. To put things into perspective, from somewhere that I just read now reguarding the situation in Bergamo:
> In Bergamo, normally, about 3/4 people die every day.
> Only yesterday 50 died. 50 deaths in a single day, in a city where 3 usually die.
Bergamo is one of the best developed cities in Northern Italy and as such one of the best developed in Western Europe, I fail to see how the Germans are very different.
Then as I said, we're not talking about the same people. I'm strictly wondering how do the patients already on the death bed count. Not about more or less healthy people who are struck down by Covid-19. There are plenty of terminally ill patients in hospitals and they have a good chance of being exposed to this (there are hospitals in Italy where 70% of the personnel tested came out positive).
Anything short of allowing misinformation, hate and propaganda to run rampant on all channels is an inevitable slippery slope towards an Orwellian fascist dystopia, no nuance can possibly exist. Either we let the trolls, cranks and Nazis take over or it's the camps for us all.
It's become the CMB of the internet at this point.