Mark Zuckerberg Is an Arbiter of Truth–Whether He Likes It or Not

You missed the whole point of the article, which is that "building tech" at that scale is inseparable from widespread political implications.

I'm 100% with you. I actually think Zuck is showing incredible leadership and vision under all these pressure and my respect for him has grown enormously (BTW I've voted Democrat all my life).

My belief is Facebook is a tremendous challenge to the established media and their owners. What Facebook does, it actually democratizes ability of smaller publishers to have the potential to reach the same volume of audience as the corporate media. This is upsetting to the old guards and what I'm seeing is a chorus of pressure on Facebook to basically limit information distribution to the same old guards.

As a reminder, many people believe Trump was elected because of Facebook. This narrative is mostly created and pushed by the mainstream media (the old guards). However, data shows Trump rode on $5 billion of free coverage [0].

We also know that around 8.5 million of 2012 Obama voters voted for Trump in 2016 (about 2-2.5 million 2012 Romney voters vote for Hillary). [1]

The reality is my party, the Democratic Party has been moving economically to the right and socially to the left. That's great for many people in SF or NY, but it has impacted many working class people who were traditionally Democrats. Blaming FB is a very convenient way for the Party to brush off responsibility of failing the people and pointing the fingers at Zuck. Facebook has a lot of reach, don't get me wrong. But as data showed these claims of interferences by foreign powers, which implies we need to control Facebook were overblown as Nate Silver who best predicted the 2016 results summarized the best [2].

I'm of the opinion Obama would have not won without social media nor we would have gone to the disastrous Iraq War if we had Facebook or something as strong as the reach of Facebook back in 2003. There are some of us who remember the yellow stickers of "Support our Troops" campaign in parallel with mainstream narratives[3] that created the mass hysteria and momentum to build consensus to go invade Iraq and in the process killed a lot of innocent people.

The mainstream media not only didn't do much to challenge the Bush 43 administration it ratted out the person who was investigating the infamous yellow cake connection [4].

Years later everyone did a mea culpa, but it was too late. By some account close to 400,000 Iraqis were killed [5] and we're still paying the price of the Iraq War.

So I agree, there is decent chance the person replacing Zuck one day will have a completely different political views. Maybe a hawk (appointed by Wall Street) who will hire a new executive team around himself or herself and help push a narrative that favors the board members who put them into that position.

It is very shortsighted for Silicon Valley to push Zuck to control the narrative anymore than Facebook is already doing. It'll normalize censorship so when the next person takes over they can easily put more control and censorship without much resistance. So please stop. Zuck is right and we should really back him up on this (and no, I don't for FB nor I'm friends or connected with Zuck).

[0]https://www.thestreet.com/politics/donald-trump-rode-5-billi...

[1]http://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/just-how-m...

[2]https://twitter.com/natesilver538/status/1074833714931224582...

[3]https://billmoyers.com/content/buying-the-war/

[4]https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/truth/intervi...

[5]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3797136/

People are free to stop using facebook and move to a different site, as many have. This only requires a few clicks.

I overwhelmingly prefer the option of having many companies to choose from vs. having the government or laws determine what is truth. Switching governments often requires either a revolution or a decade-long immigration process.

Groups also use various forms of harassment to censor individuals which I think is a much harder problem online.

What was PC today may not be PC tomorrow depending on dynamics.

They don’t understand the same forces they want to use to muzzle someone today can become the force that muzzles them tomorrow.

They like Jack censoring twitter only because he aligns with them. They don’t like Mark right now because he doesn’t 100% align with them.

They don’t care one whit about data retention and third party selling, etc. all they care about is “are you aligned with my narrative today?”

> Off Twitter, viral text messages of screenshots of doctored tweets have circulated throughout the country. Some of the false text messages claim that extremist groups are plotting to move into residential areas this week.

> Bot researchers call this kind of disinformation distribution "hidden viral" text messages, which go undetected on mainstream platforms like Facebook and Twitter and can spread like wildfire without moderation.

Should SMS/MMS messages also be censored by the phone companies?

There is a difference between delisting stories completely, and removing stories in private messages, but once you talk about the feed itself, the provider is going to be writing some kind of editorial engine, that prefers stories that have more engagement, while at the same time trying to not uprank trash, spam, clickbait, and other types of bs that float to the top.

Spam has already crossed the line, where near everybody, in universal agreement, is ok with their email provider blanket censoring the bulk of it.

If I tell your neighbor that you are molesting his daughter, and he kills you, will your family find that acceptable?

If a politician tells your neighbor that you are molesting his daughter, and he kills you, will your family find that acceptable?

If that word is flagged maybe you'd still be alive because the neighbor would have some doubt as to your guilt.

If you come to my website to post and I delete it, thats just me taking out the trash as I see fit. You're not being censored. No one suppressed your speech or expression. In fact you said or wrote it and faced zero repercussions and ramifications. Me saying you can can't come on my property or giving you a time out isn't your rights being infringed on.

Not allowing me to delete your post would be the literal definition of censoring MY speech and expression and the SCOTUS has already ruled on this. You can't have it both ways bud.

If pg came onto this site and started trolling people, throwing around insults, and spreading lies, what would it do to this community? And if dang responded by doing nothing?

It's so bizarre to me how common the "pro free speech" argument is on this site of all places. There is valuable and interesting discussion here precisely because it's heavily moderated. Facebook and Twitter are moderated too, the problem is they do it inconsistently. And despite Zuck's commitment to "allowing all voices to be heard", Facebook will remain moderated, or else it will turn into voat or 4chan.

You can argue that you don’t like these rules and that everybody should be free to share their favorite videos, that people should be free to post anti vax information. There are plenty of platforms besides Facebook that you can go to (I recommend 4chan for the true freedom of speech experience). Those platforms might not be where the users are though.

What you are arguing, however, is that some people on Facebook should be exempt to the general rules of the platform and that applying rules to them in the same way it’s applied to others is censorship.

edit: typo

Today's world is vastly more complex than it was in our ancestral environment, and that makes assessing truth very hard. It's not possible for anyone to directly access all primary sources, so we have no choice but to set up some kind of division of labor in the assessment of truth. Scientific peer review is one example of such a division of labor. We trust peer reviewed publications not because peer review is flawless, but because we have to do something to triage the myriad firehoses of information that exist in today's world, and peer review is the best we've been able to come up with so far.

Handing over the arbitration of truth to unaccountable private corporations is, like peer review, far from optimal. But we have to do something or those who are out to deliberately deceive to advance their political agendas will win. It is always easier to destroy than to create, and it is easier to promulgate a well-crafted lie than the truth. Those are the facts on the ground that we as a society have to grapple with. It's a hard problem and none of the solutions that have been proposed are optimal. But that's no excuse not to try to do something. If we don't, society will descend into chaos and authoritarianism. Fact checking by social media platforms is far from optimal, but it's a hell of a lot more likely to advance democracy than survival of the fittest con man.

If they start editing and fact checking then that's their content and they'd be legally responsible for that. Which you would want because if Zuck was far right you'd want to sue him for his fact check errors.

They should also not prevent third party fact checkers from posting on their platform. I'd also love to see them allow for third party plugins of fact checkers which allow people to directly post snopes or something on a comment with the click of a button.

This would serve to keep Facebook as close to pure content host as possible, and still offer fact checking solutions.

The fact that there is even bias in fact checking tools shows how twisted this can be. Many fact checkers argue over semantics but still it's incredible that we think there is one view of the facts out there. It would be easier to have a falsehood finder than a fact checker. I digress. Anyway, I like the idea of third party plugs which directly push to these services.

I'd even be ok with facebook/twitter creating a special area for this and ratings for fact checks etc. But they still need it to be user driven content or they're at risk of being liable.

Are there really though? Perhaps there are said to be, but can you give me an example of this supposed system working?

2012: Facebook (via an open, neutral platform) helped Obama win the election. They are wonderful. E.g. “Obama, Facebook and the power of friendship: the 2012 data election” (The Guardian, February 2012)