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>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.

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...

Yes yes yes. I am saving this comment I can quote it again in the future.

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.

You are missing the whole point. Facebook (and Youtube etc) do not simply show you all opinions in the world at the same time with equal weight. They select things for you to view based on your prior interactions with the website. So they can emphasize and deemphasize articles and videos to show you next. Across their entire userbase selecting articles that are based in reality will have a large effect.

>So they can emphasize and deemphasize articles and videos to show you next.

Maybe they should stop doing that then.

I mean, that's their vastly lucrative model to engage the attention of people on their websites, but sure we could ask them to stop I suppose.

This is the real point: Facebook's "Ministry of Truth" is currently a "Ministry of Clicks and Ad Engagement" and Facebook is happy to interfere in the free flow of information if they can make a quick buck off it. Likewise with Google searches, Twitter feeds, and so on. There is no such thing as a for-profit internet content platform which truly engages in some competitive free market. Reddit is sort of close, at least in principle - Google and Facebook aren't even on paper.

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.

I agree that I don't trust anyone to tell me what is true, but there is a base level of fact-checking that is beneficial: Remove anything that is completely fabricated and makes claims without a single shred of evidence. There is absolutely no need for this type of "news." No organization can definitely curate the truth, but almost any can sweep out the garbage.

The problem is that many of the things shared on Facebook et al are subject to debate on what the actual truth of the matter is, subject to one’s political biases. We’re not necessarily talking about content stating that the sky is green but say, the accusations Tara Reade made against Joe Biden.

That is ridiculous. Nobody is asking FB to takes sides on the Reade vs Biden issue. We are asking them to remove QAnon level insanity.

As you have no proof "Q" is not real, you would be censoring people's speculations based on your own speculations.

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.

...and you go to Facebook for your scientific and world news?

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.

>Facebook is a toy.

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.

> You should let them know their livelihood rests on a toy.

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're right that many people's livelihoods depend on toys, but it's a social network, not a toy. Are netflix twitter and google time pass toys? Hacker News must be a toy/social media site too, then. All social media sites are toys, then?

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.

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.

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.

I'm afraid the reality is different with an enormous amount of people consuming their news through Facebook. I wish it wasn't so and people would think harder, but nevertheless here we are with enormous amounts of fake news spreading through these platforms. I do think that some form of fact checking would be better for some people their own protection.

> They could never be a Ministry of Truth or whatever you're implying, because it's a toy.

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.

Politicians continue to be technologically-illiterate. More news at ten.

People do go to Facebook for their news. Whether you like it or not, or think those people are fools, it's true. What Facebook decides is deserving of censorship matters because we have to live with those fools.

If you believe that Facebook is something more than a toy, then it seems reasonable that they'd have freedom of expression, press, speech, so on. As such, if people choose to get their news from Facebook, it's no different than them getting their news from Reuters, FOX, the New York Times, or Bloomberg. Surely you wouldn't imply any of them wouldn't have editorial control.

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.

Legally im sure they can do almost whatever they want in terms of filtering/censoring/etc, so I don't think talking about their legal obligations or rights is very interesting.

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.

The difference between Einstein working in the patent office and the 'armchair physicist' isn't that we live in a more cynical era. The difference is that Einstein submitted his work to be published in a reputable journal. If you have some ideas and don't want to be called an 'armchair scientist,' you are free to publish in a preprint journal and it will probably get accepted if the work is good. It has never been easier in history for an individual to share their scientific ideas with the world.

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.

I've made this point a bit in my other comments, but largely I would say this:

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.

Not only do experts disagree, but the prevailing wind of expert advice can change dramatically. In less than a month we went from being told coronavirus wasn't spread from human contact and masks kill you, to now it's highly infectious, you should wear a mask everywhere and the ventilators we'd been putting you on might be killing you faster. If FB thinks they can figure out how to censor counterfactual posts in that kind of climate, they are fools.

So the enormously popular post telling parents to make their kids drink Lysol should not have even the slightest warning next to it because the poster could be like Galileo or Einstein?

On the internet it's your god given right to shout fire in a theatre.

You are not arguing in good faith. You are making a caricature of the opposing argument, presenting in the worst light possible.

I'm pointing out a problem with a real post that actually exists right at this very moment.

It is easy to pick one clear-cut case that supports one's viewpoint. The question is how to handle the more murky cases.

Sure, but by answering the clear-cut cases you've at least defined boundaries for your problem space.

But the clear-cut cases aren't actually the problem. You don't need to censor things that are so obviously stupid. The bottle of Lysol says things like "Hazard to Humans and Domestic Animals" and "call a poison control center" etc.

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.

Indeed you are.

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?

Maybe he is, but if a system is to function properly it must work in the worst-case scenario.

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.

Posts telling parents to make their kids drink bleach or disinfectant is, sadly, not actually a caricature. See, for example, how "Miracle Mineral Supplement" (aka, chlorine dioxide, aka bleach) gets pushed by malign quacks as a cure for HIV, malaria, hepatitus, autism, acne, cancer, COVID-19, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_Mineral_Supplement

That’s not even the worst light possible. The whole antivax movement has done a lot more harm.

Lysol has warning labels on the bottle. You can't fix the failure of the education system by coddling people and putting blinders on them.

No. Kids of such parents should be rescued from their tormentors. Stupid people will not go away just because you install some sort overload truth provider.

If the Lysol post was never made, do you think the parents who would have fallen for it will be safe for the rest of the duration of children's lives? Point here is that in your scenario the problem isn't the Lysol message, it's the low intelligence of the parents. If they fall for a post telling them to give their child Lysol, it's just a matter of time before they do something equally as dangerous and it should be surprising that they haven't yet done so. Are you going to monitor their interactions with the world 24/7 for the entirety of their lives? That's the only way you're going to accomplish what you're asking for here.

it's the low intelligence of the parents

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.

I think you're begging the question and using reducto-ad-absurdum here.

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.

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.

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.

Facebook is not the web, it is a toy devoted to advertisement.

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.

You can't save people from their own stupidity. I'd rather have stupid thoughts said out loud so they can be analyzed and detected rather than repressed inside ones own mind. I think that the non-sense that a lot of people are preaching online shows how much our education system is failing us. If this was covered up I might be able to delude myself into thinking differently about that.

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.

I've used this analogy in another thread, and I'd like to post it again to understand better the differences between public health and traffic laws.

"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.

Nah not snarky.

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.

Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. We're trying to avoid the tedious, nasty, predictable road to hell.

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."

It might seem that way but, as the many posts bellow show, that is literally what is being advocated. There should be no disclaimer on posts advocating drinking Lysol because: the parents would have hurt the kid anyway, there are already warnings on the bottle and, the sole remedy should be punishing the parent. It is Poe's law incarnate.

I know (we all know) how hard it can be hard to let go when other people say wrong or otherwise bad things on the internet, but it's a skill we all need to develop. If you simply foment against the badness and wrongness, it only adds more badness. HN is an experiment in trying to co-create a place on the internet that doesn't collapse into rancor this way. Maybe you don't owe the person you're arguing with better (though maybe you do), but for sure you owe this community better if you're posting here.

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.

Free Speech is the foundation of western democracies. Having #BigTech censoring and grading free speech is antithetical to this. If I want to verify the veracity of ideas and opinions I am currently free to browse the internet and do my own research. I don't need to be policed by a commercial website with highly dubious surveillance capitalism goals and have them tell me what to think.

I've sent a message to my district representative, encouraging a change to the law:

> 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.

I have no idea why you're being downvoted. The legal background on this problem is useful, and highlights the real problem with platforms like Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook engaging in content moderation in any capacity beyond preexisting legal mandates (e.g. removing illegal content). The key to judgment in favor of AOL was their "hands off" approach. (https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/green-v-america-onli...) As soon as today's social media platforms give even the implicit guarantee to their end users that they've vetted content to some "standard", they're just asking for liability. Once they get into the politics game as per Hawley's bill seeks to prevent, they're gonna face FEC regulations and a host of state and local election law issues as well. Is this really the road they want to go down? I don't think the execs smug in the certitude of their vision of what their communities "should" be seeing and not seeing are thinking this through.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

- Upton Sinclair

This is an excellent summary, and I fully agree with it. As a modest addition: - In many important cases, there is no fact, just differing viewpoints and opinions. One man's terrorist is another one's freedom fighter. Violent insurgency for one, legitimate fight for liberty and justice for the other. In fact, reasonable people will even disagree on whether in some topic there are facts or only opinions, let alone about their truth value.

This is absurd. There is an objective reality and things actually do happen. You can observe, record, and measure these things. Whether or not we say someone is a terrorist or a freedom fighter doesn't change the fact that they e.g. drove a truck bomb into a government building.

Yes, "they drove the truck ..." may be a fact, but why they did it, what they wanted to achieve with it, what effect it actually had, are opinion-based, and are far more interesting than the underlying objective fact.

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.

I think a better analogy is 'one man's investigative journalist is another man's conspiracy theorist'. We don't need #bigTech telling us which is which. Most of us can figure out who is dealing with real facts, events which have happened etc. The current crackdown on free speech is the equivalent to digital book burning. Free choice and free speech was ultimately reinstated after the european events during the 1930's.