Why Is Facebook So Afraid of Checking Facts?
wired.com
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I’ll provide three arguments. First, how will Facebook or any other entity that takes on the responsibility to fact check stand up to coordinated misinformation campaigns like “Iraq has WMDs” where an omniscient fact checker could have literally saved thousands of lives.
Second, how will Facebook or CNN or Snopes or any other entity fact check disagreeing experts on a subject - for example Sweden’s epidemiologists vs rest of the world taking opposing views on quarantine measures - is anybody at Facebook or any other place qualified to fact check Sweden’s top government advisers?
Third, how will Facebook or any single entity fact check unqualified experts on subjects? When Albert Einstein submitted his paper on the Photoelectric effect (which eventually won him a Nobel Prize) he didn’t have a Ph.D nor was he enrolled as a student - he was just an anonymous clerk at a patent office. Today’s reddit would brand him an “armchair physicist” conducting thought experiments. How on earth will Facebook or any Ministry of Truth attempt to fact check anything like this?
So, if you rule out Facebook’s ability to fact check coordinated government propaganda, government policy advisors that are literally balancing lives and the economy and fundamental advances in science, what else is there to fact check?
A fact checker can only end up becoming a re-enforcement mechanism for popularly held beliefs. Let’s ask Galelio how that worked out for him.
Facebook is a toy. Relying on a platform with a built-in way to reply to posts with nothing more than a laugh-cry-smiley to deliver you accurate news in the first place is ridiculous. They could never be a Ministry of Truth or whatever you're implying, because it's a toy. If they want to fact-check posts on their site, it changes literally nothing of importance. They don't, which is fine, but even assuming they did they'd never be capable of anything resembling anything in Orwell's novels.
A toy, is that so? I know quite a number of people (engineers, marketers, companies) that exist solely due to Facebook advertising. You should let them know their livelihood rests on a toy.
>...and you go to Facebook for your scientific and world news?
Why do you frame it as some ludicrous idea? Is this more preposterous than getting your science and world news from an email chain, or from Fox/CNN, or your wonky neighbor next door?
I happen to have some intelligent friends who share thoughtful, measured news articles on Facebook. Perhaps these complaints of junk science and tabloids being passed around is actually a problem of an individual's circle and who they actively follow.
This post seems more about personal dislike of Facebook rather than the parent commenter's point about the dangers of appointing Facebook as a Ministry of Truth.
There is an entire global industry of physical toys. Many targeted at adults.
Facebook is only different in that it exists in the non-physical domain. It's still a pass-time toy.
You know as well as I do that the commenter I responded to attempted to use "Facebook is a toy" as a disparaging remark; this is an unnecessary semantics debate I won't continue further.
There are physical shops for LEGO, too. Even third-party ones! Ooh, and King & Supercell are billion-dollar companies! I love toys, I think they're great. I don't think you should be getting news from them.
Why do you frame it as some ludicrous idea? Is this more preposterous than getting your science and world news from an email chain, or from Fox/CNN, or your wonky neighbor next door?
It's just as ludicrous as the idea of people getting their news from Candy Crush, MySpace or a tabloid. Getting news from an e-mail chain is ridiculous if you don't know anybody on it, or who runs it.
I happen to have some intelligent friends who share thoughtful, measured news articles on Facebook. Perhaps these complaints of junk science and tabloids being passed around is actually a problem of an individual's circle and who they actively follow.
Then surely you'd get the same information say, in person. Or using e-mail. As such, Facebook censoring them would just mean you'd move somewhere else. No possibility of a Ministry of Truth there. There are people in Second Life that act as newscasters, too. Still a toy.
This post seems more about personal dislike of Facebook rather than the parent commenter's point about the dangers of appointing Facebook as a Ministry of Truth.
I actually love Facebook. It's a neat toy. I love the research that comes out of it. If you search my HN profile you can see a lot of sentiment to this end.
Well apparently not, politicians the world over are frightened of Facebook’s potential for spreading misinformation. Recall that the 2016 presidential election was apparently turned via $100K of Facebook ads that had little or nothing to do with the candidates in question.
Comment sections on news outlets can remove whatever they want, I don't see why it'd be any different for Facebook, if you genuinely consider them a news outlet.
They have behaved a certain way for their 15-20ish year history, and I'd argue that it was mostly as a neutral platform for communication, not really anything resembling a publisher, and they've gained an enormous userbase under this model. I think this is the correct way for a platform like facebook to operate, and that's in part why I use their platform.
I don't welcome them deciding to fundamentally change how they operate and begin filtering more content, especially due to what I view as partisan political reasons.
Otherwise, you could report the JFK assassination by focusing on the weather that day and the tire pressure of his car, and the angle in which sunlight reflected on the windshield.
> In Green v. AOL (2003), the court established:
> There is no real dispute that Green's fundamental tort claim is that AOL was negligent in promulgating harmful content and in failing to address certain harmful content on its network. Green thus attempts to hold AOL liable for decisions relating to the monitoring, screening, and deletion of content from its network — actions quintessentially related to a publisher's role. Section 230 "specifically proscribes liability" in such circumstances. Zeran, 129 F.3d at 332-33.
> There is immediately a question why this "quintessential relation" only works in one direction, i.e. why even when "monitoring, screening, and [deleting content]", a provider should not be considered a publisher, and thus ineligible for immunity under Section 230. The courts may not agree with that argument, but I would say that it highlights a serious deficiency, and the law needs to be changed in a similar manner as Josh Hawley's bill: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/191...
> In fact I would argue that his bill does not go far enough. Getting an FTC rubber-stamp certifying "no political bias" seems like a vague and squishy system that will be easy to game. Perhaps the law should state that any provider above a certain size which takes action to "monitor, screen, or delete content" that is not illegal, and does not respond to an appropriate claim by reversing this decision, should forfeit immunity under Section 230. This would be very controversial, because it effectively bans e.g. YouTube from having their own "code of conduct" independent of US law. But I think that is exactly what needs to happen - YouTube is far too big for a "community standard" to make sense, and any attempt to do this will be abused for censorship. These companies should be forced to engage with all of us in the making of laws about free speech, they should not effectively be able to declare what free speech is by fiat.
- Upton Sinclair
To the point that it's incredible that the few people who actually do it are even telling the truth about why, instead of being cases of insane parents looking for a cover story when they want to murder their kids, or Munchausen by proxy or something like that.
Meanwhile the same principle gets you absolutely nothing in all of the non-obvious cases, because when the answer is non-obvious (and therefore much more problematic if wrong) then Facebook doesn't have it either.
Enter "US-linked Australian church fined US$98,000 for selling bleach as coronavirus ‘miracle cure'"
citation: https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/australasia/article/3084250/u...
And thats just a single example of content that can get people killed.
We also already have FB playing MinTruth as well here with "Post shared incorrect number of deaths caused by respiratory diseases in Ceará"
citation: https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/scienceandhea...
This one gets harder as who has the better/right-er numbers? Is Bolosonaro lying? Probably. But how do you tell? Who's fact-checking the fact-checkers?
Therefore, I disagree that this person is arguing in bad faith and is in fact attempting to point out where the system fails in a worst-case scenario such as this.
I'm no longer convinced that this is about intelligence.
It's easy to dismiss dissenting thinkers as "dumb hicks" or whatever epithet is trendy at the moment. But looking at a lot of the people who are promoting these theories on social media, few of them qualify as "low intelligence." In my observation, they tend to be celebrities, college-educated yoga moms, and even some high-profile tech types.
I work with low-education people. My department works with thousands of adults with an average fifth-grade education. In my experience, these people are more likely to follow the health advice of their local government authority than any crackpot conspiracy theory that floats through the internet.
dilippkumar was highlighting that if people are prepared to believe extremely fringe ideas then simply telling them that a central authority thinks a fact is wrong will not effectively dissuade them. Your question elides that concern by simply re-pointing out that fake information is problematic. Fake information is problematic, but there is reason to believe that simply labeling the article about drinking lysol "false" is a sub-optimal strategy.
So the answer to your question is no, we shouldn't avoid labeling that post false "because the poster could be like Galileo or Einstein," but I also do not think that was what dilippkumar was saying. I think he was trying to point out the problematic nature of "fact checkers" for people who don't trust traditional sources of authority.
If you'd like an example closer to home, ask the crypto community what they think of NSA advice on ECC curves.
Maybe the goal shouldn't be to dissuade them. It doesn't have to be a conversion process. Perhaps if wrong-thinkers (for lack of a better term) can be convinced to look at all of the evidence, rather than the evidence that reinforces their existing viewpoint, that's a worthy goal. You may eventually convert those who are open-minded.
There are always going to be people who can't be swayed by anything, so maybe don't try. Perfect vs. good, and all that.
It is not were potential Einsteins or Galileos debut their big new ideas. It is not were cover ups about WMD or anything else are initially exposed. All of that is very sensibly on real sites. To the contrary, rather than being where good ideas originate, it's sole purpose is to attract eyes for advertisement.
The catastrophic problem is their algorithm that massively pushes conspiracy theories, outrage and demagogue's propaganda that would otherwise never be seen and would never get beyond the crackpot website they happened to be posted on.
Facebook is not were any valuable information originates, it is instead where failed ideas and advertisements are endlessly push on it's users. But any attempt to correct that algorithm, manually or otherwise is now portrayed as censorship by those who benefit form it to get support from everyone else. Likewise, it is very effectively used as a propaganda tool by some parties yet ironically any attempt to slow that is portrayed as censorship.
It is not remotely where ideas fairly compete. To the contrary: shocking but false ideas are given an enormous advantage but adding an annotation contradicting them is called censorship. To such an extreme that there is a warning on Lysol bottles not to drink it but if a meme on Facebook telling people to drink Lysol has a similar warning attached by Facebook, it is called censorship.
The notion Facebook could ever afford to bother with any but a tiny silver of the most conspicuously false and harmful posts, let alone judge every post for accuracy, is not reasonable. It could not remotely be picking sides on every tv debate, reading every user's post or reviewing posts about the photoelectric effect for accuracy. And at any rate, Facebook is not the web.
In modern times it's easy to only notice the loons and crazy people that use their freedom of speech to push bullshit. But a lot of cultural and scientific progress throughout history has been made by individuals that choose to go against the norms of their time. IMO you need allow the crazy to get the crazy genius.
"You can't save people from their own stupidity." Agreed, but how does that explain the rights-restraining acceptability of red lights and speed limits?
Red lights tell me, a law-obeying driver, that I must stop periodically while I drive through a city. Speed limits tell me, a safe driver, that I can't drive at whatever speed I deem safe. These are ostensibly done for "public safety," yet they place limits on what movements I can make. (For what it's worth, I have no problem with traffic laws.)
Note that these same laws limit pedestrians from movement such as walking on public freeways and crossing streets outside designated areas at designated times.
What makes limits on posting to Facebook different from traffic laws?
This isn't a snarky gotcha post, I'm trying to understand what the difference is between something with very little rights-related controversy (red lights and forbidding people from walking on freeways) and pandemic-related stay-at-home orders and Facebook moderation.
The difference is mostly that Facebook is a company creating restrictions for speech on their platform based on the views of employees and shareholders of the company on what speech should be acceptable on their platform. Rules of the road are determined by governments and all people have stake in the process.
For most publishers I don't mind them having their own rules on what speech they would publish because there are other publishers you can go to, but Facebook has almost a monopoly on social media. And because it's free for anyone to sign up it's almost impossible to compete with their network. If you want to post or publish social media content and have a lot of people view it you basically have to use Facebook's network. So you have to obey Facebook's rules.
It'd be like if a road company owned 90% of America's road and had rules you had to follow in order to drive on them. Sure there could be existing government rules of the road, but they wouldn't really matter because you have to follow the road companies rules on 90% of all roads.
It's fine to have restrictions on freedom of speech. We have them already. You can't lie under oath, you can't make death threats, you can't yell fire in a crowded room, etc. Now because of Facebook's monopoly they get to choose what speech is acceptable and what isn't at least for most social media. We don't really have any insight into what choices were made and why they were made either. I would rather have governments and their people decide this in courts and legal system. We at least we deserve more transparency into how Facebook chooses to filter and select content for people to view.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful. Note this one:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Even if your interpretation was accurate, no one is going to give their kids Lysol to drink because of any comment in this thread. Meanwhile you do actual damage to this place by posting in the flamewar style.
And since there is no objective proof of God, the supernatural, witchcraft, numerology, astrology, aliens, or the efficacy of communism, you'd better be ready to censor a lot of folks.
Maybe they should stop doing that then.
I would agree that this is gross and I don't personally use Facebook. But the idea that profit-motived filtering and selection is OK, yet additionally filtering out clear and dangerous misinformation is somehow 1984-level authoritarianism, is just dumb. Considering Facebook has been complicit in stolen elections and genocide, it's dangerously dumb.
The development of any number of now widely accepted truths went through periods where they were viewed incredibly skeptically.
It's inconceivable to me that anyone could even want to _have_ the argument of wanting a central censor again. Haven't we already had this battle enough times? Is the evidence not incontrovertible that societies where people are free to speak and exchange ideas are better than societies that are not?
It's rational, I think, to want our software to offer warnings and controls that let us, _as individuals_, choose to hide, filter, or shrink-wrap certain information. Completely surrendering that trust to someone else is utterly insane.
P.S. I'm the CEO of LBRY, and this stance is pretty core to what we do. Email me at jeremy@lbry.com if you want to say hi.
Personally, I could do away with all the armchair epidemiologists that have come out from the woodwork during this pandemic, and would much rather people and politicians be getting their information from experts who publish their thoughts for the scientific community.
If facebook could offer at least as much moderation as the newspaper stand of yore, the world would be a much less polarized place imo.
It gets worse. We did find WMD's in Iraq [1]. But those were Chemical weapons and obviously not the WMD's we were looking for in the first place. So even your omniscient fact-checker would be implicitly lying, as while the statement “Iraq has WMDs” is objectively true, it isn't precisely true that they have the WMD's which there was a coordinated misinformation campaign about. Even with objective truth, a fact-checker could be selectively used and misused for nefarious purposes.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/03/world/middlee...
As much as possible, you and others should consider their options.
If Facebook is as it is now, where individuals are free to spread misinformation (that is clearly convincing enough that it is spread), do you want to use Facebook?
If Facebook fact checks your information, which you do not want, do you want to use Facebook?
I know that depending on your use case, it may be difficult to find an alternative to Facebook. (I use it out of boredom!) But I think the ideal is that you continue to seek out better tools for interacting with people you care about, with finding and sharing information, etc.
The consequences of that action will be as follows: Most of these businesses AND charities will drown in the moral outrage and close their doors. And that will have a detrimental impact on society, because the good that those businesses/charities did will go with the bad.
Facebook has one powerful good use case. It makes it trivially easy to connect with relatives and friends far away from us. There are other platforms out there, but until Facebook, there wasn't much, and even now, Facebook is the simplest and most convenient of them all. If Facebook dies, this good use case goes with it.
That's a bit too cynical even for me. There do still exist businesses that simply produce a product or perform a service, selling it honestly without any tricks or subterfuge.
Try this thought experiment: The local mafia needs to eat, sleep, buy cars, equipment. Should local restaurants, grocery stores, rental complexes, dealerships, the local Home Depot, accept their patronage? Is that dirty money or clean money? Is Home Depot morally corrupt for selling lumber to the mafia boss for his new deck?
The answer to these and more is: no. Moral policing never works. We have laws and law enforcement to pursue criminals. It's their job, not Home Depot's.
Literally the first ad that Facebook shows on my "newsfeed" is by "Jellop", but when I search for Jellop in their ad library, I get no results. In fact, I can't seem to get any results at all, regardless of what I search for, or what I select as the country.
Perhaps I'm being cynical, but my impression is that FB is aiming to provide just enough information that people will say "they're doing that already", and not enough that people can really understand what's going on. But I might be wrong.
The Ad Library claims to show all active ads, not just political/social ones. That's presumably true, but hard to verify or make use of. The "Jellop" ad that I couldn't find was missing precisely because the page name was something else they'd created for that ad.
Meanwhile the social fabric of the United States is being torn apart by political polarization.
For example when I state opinions I don't expect everyone to take them as fact without doing their own research. But that's pretty much what a lot of people do.
Doing your own research should be the norm (your already using the internet!) with any opinions you read like on Facebook. But there are sources you should be able to take seriously like the government. However, there is one government official that straight lies on Twitter all day and a good majority of the country believes him. When you believe that it's a lot easier to make the jump to believe everything you see on Facebook.
One thing Facebook should do is make the news feed fully configurable and deterministic so you only see things from people you know in a non biased way. That will never happen since that's a big part of their business model.
Almost 10 years ago, I conducted an experiment. I watched an hour of CNN every night but it was never that night's coverage. It was from exactly two weeks ago.
It was amazing how much "breaking news!" was irrelevant or just outright wrong, how many large trend predictions were wrong, and how many "[person] will do X" were wrong. While the predictions could have been portrayed as opinions, they were presented as facts and the obvious next steps or conclusions.
I realized pretty quickly that avoiding CNN kept out the blatantly wrong information so even if I didn't replace it with anything, I was net ahead.
A few years ago, I discovered this article and realized that some portion of it was probably on purpose:
https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-...
This is no different from a company using cheaper (and perhaps less safe) parts, using the cheapest call center they can (and letting customer service suffer) or any other way of cutting corners to save a few cents.
IMO, for two reasons. First, because some facts, especially in news stories, are easily back-and-white: The car crashed. The person died. Some facts are greyscale. The trouble you incur from fact-checking the greys isn't worth the time, money, or effort.
Which leads to reason number two: Facebook is less Algorithms Will Save The World™ than Google, but in spite of its mantra of "connecting people," it's not all that interested in interacting with actual people. Wetware is messy, time-consuming, and expensive. And while there are plenty of companies that find success working with people, that sort of work doesn't fit into its SV Bubble mindset, or lead to hockey stick-style revenue.
Facebook's business model is fairly straightforward: they want you to spend as much time on Facebook as possible so you can consume as many ads as possible. Contentious, provocative content drives engagement. It's easier to provide an unending source of engaging content if you don't restrict that content to the set of things that are true. Truth has the unfortunate tendency to be boring in most cases.
If Facebook nuked all the lies, Facebook would be less interesting and ad revenue would go down.
Let's not worry about how that could backfire at all or the countless times that the "correct" opinion has turned out to be wrong. The truth is too flimsy to stand on its own. We must protect our inferiors from wrongthink.
So perhaps the question is - where is the greater risk? That they merely facilitate the spread of misinformation as a neutral party, or that they take a opinionated stance to reduce the spread of misinformation, but hold the power to bias that filter?
I don't like either option, but I also don't see the multitudes of individuals choosing to largely choose an alternative for their interactions any time soon either. An ideal for me would be a much more decentralized internet, but there are lots of initiatives to make that happen that are arguably much less successful than Facebook's grasp on the power it holds.
Do I think people "should" be individually responsible? Yes. Do I believe that's going to happen? No.
Forty years ago we got our news from a handful of networks that stuck to "the middle". It was no doubt imperfect, but if they would post crazy conspiracy on the nightly news, they would quickly vanish as a network. On the other hand, convince a few million individuals to share a far left or far right story full of misinformation, and it works. The individuals are not "shamed" into avoiding that mistake again.
>Forty years ago we got our news from a handful of networks that stuck to "the middle". It was no doubt imperfect, but if they would post crazy conspiracy on the nightly news, they would quickly vanish as a network.
I do not think that rumors and misinformation were less prevalent 40 years ago. Is there any consensus (not sparse data) on that? My hunch is that we're in a much better situation today than ever before. Aanyone with an internet connection and some free time has the ability to fact-check a piece of news. This was not available to people earlier, so they had to use their judgement and either choose to believe it or not.
Facebook sells ads and has a history of poor decision making with regards to their platform. Would facebook improve the credibility of their platform at the expense of their bottom line? I doubt it. Facebook won't solve this problem for us. This is a human issue, not a technological one.
No one has delegated "the arbitration of facts" at any universal or societal scale to Facebook, nor is Facebook attempting to arbitrate all "facts" or "truth" on their own platform. The principle with which you agree appears to be the principle Facebook is actually using, and I see no "dangerous territory" in them moderating their own platform. There are plenty of other platforms where Pizzagate and other such conspiracies are taken as fact.
> The inconvenient answer as it appears to me is that folks have to discern what is nonsense and what isn't, which leaves us exactly where we are.
This is not an inconvenient answer so much as a thought terminating cliche.
I also don't think that shifting responsibility from software to humans is a "thought terminating cliche" but a necessary step in how we orient the conversation about the mass dissemination of propaganda via tech platforms. There's a reason folks are eager to believe conspiracy theories and misinformation.
We'll have to agree to disagree.
The author then goes on to discuss how more recent studies (including their own research) and even some of the original authors of that pervious research had changed course and believe that fact-checking can indeed help course correct those misled by misinformation.
Therein lies the rub, according to the author Facebook's policies around the original research hasn't been updated to match more recent findings. This can be troubling given the stakes at hand.
Is the world better off without that opinion (or fact, depending on who you ask?)
You see how this can be sticky.
What happens when their moderation team decides some anti-vax nuttery is "a fact" and then bans anyone disagreeing?
As a reminder, this is a group that handed out punishments for pictures of infants being breastfed.
Now flat earth's think they are right like Galelio.
I’m positive that the company has conducted internal AB-test to check for those and has a far more nuanced view on those than Wired assumes.