Facebook overrides fact-checks when climate science is “opinion”
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
And that appears to be exactly what has happened. This is terrifying. A handful of mainstream publications and a bunch of basically unknown facebook folks are now the censors. We've already seen well known EFF activists rated untrue for their arguments against warrantless surveillance, and now the censors already can't agree on climate change. I've seen arguments about Confederate generals rated as false because of modern news events - in ways that disagree with well tenured academic historians.
We seem doomed in this regard.
This is a very different scenario than a single company owning every broadcast tower in a town, pre-internet.
The ability to access Facebook strongly implies general internet access, which is a compelling argument against Facebook exerting any sort of authority over general truth.
Their popularity does not give them any ability to censor information widely, unless perhaps they collude with search engines to blacklist certain terms across all popular sites.
The fact that many people use Facebook is an indicator that those same huge groups also have access to every other website, which reduces the persuasiveness of the argument that Facebook gets to be the arbiter of truth, so long as all of those Facebook users have internet access that can access sites that are not Facebook.
If anything, the real arbiters would be the ISPs, who get to decide which sites you can even access, in real-time.
I can't read Chinese. So discount those sites.
Three of those are entirely Chinese and can be discounted from this conversation due to government. That leaves two sites run by the same company, all of which are headquartered in the same general area and have similar culture, and both have ongoing censorship/misinformation controversies.
So is “most people who have a Facebook account can also view almost every other site on the whole public internet”.
They're effectively a captive audience.
What specifically makes them captive? Why do you believe that? Are the audiences of other extremely popular websites also captive? Why or why not?
Perhaps you meant this hyperbolically but I do not believe it to be an exaggeration.
>What specifically makes them captive
They are captive because of a combination of their ignorance and the network effect. If all of your friends are on Facebook for example you'll have to leave them behind if you delete your account.
In fact, if your argument is "most people are ignorant" it's an argument in favor of not letting their primary source of news be dominated by wealth and network effects instead of grounding in at least some objective reality (imperfect though it may be).
People who want "the real truth" have few impediments to seeking it out on the modern Internet. People who don't want to do their own fact-checking are better served by somebody doing it (and then we can keep a close eye on the watchmen).
Facebook has literally billions of monthly active users [0], close to two billion daily active users [1] and very likely a number of total accounts that's 10+ billion [2]. Instagram has another billion mau, and half a billion dau [3].
I struggle to think of any other private entity with that much global reach into so many peoples lives, the only other example that comes to mind is Google, the two of them combined have direct influence over 70%+ of internet traffic [4].
Staying clear of their impact is active work because even if you don't use their services, chances are many and often even most people around you still do.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/346167/facebook-global-d...
[2] https://youtu.be/nmXACRrzLMA
[3] https://www.omnicoreagency.com/instagram-statistics/
[4] https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm...
I believe in climate change, but I am very skeptical why we need to censor people for speaking their mind. So if they had free reign, it would have been a net negative for everyone.
Why not?
This is no change, but business as normal. What has changed is that we actually have easy access to information outside of the keyholders. So when the government and some in society dismiss complaints about police brutality, we can have the retribution of actual video (an example with both historical and current examples), and it is so much harder to dismiss. Unfortunately, not everyone is willing to believe facts - but again, I'm not sure this is more true today either, since folks have been rejecting things like modern medicine and science and so on for generations if not centuries. We simply know about it more, thanks to - in part, for good and bad - facebook. And reddit and HN and every social place on the internet.
No single partisan local newspaper editor had the kind of reach that facebook has.
One is that you no longer need "physical access" to someone to manipulate them. It is so much easier to get your message to someone today. You don't even need to buy a costly newspaper or TV network. You can be individually targeted from anywhere in the world relatively easily. The scale is completely different.
Second is that attackers are able to target specific people in a specific way thanks to the data collected by us online (I mean, your clergy doesn't have access to your search history). Your local clergy has to put forth a message that both appeals to an entire congregation and also fits in roughly with what is expected to be heard from clergy. The congregation can then talk to each other and decide if the message makes sense. Attackers going after a specific person don't have to deal with either of these.
9/11 only happened once, and killed far fewer Americans than American police have since then. Therefore terrorism isn't a problem.
(This argument isn't false, but it's highly misleading!)
Neither position is an absurd one to take.
If you see a crack in a dam, and a rivulet of water coming through, you base your actions on whether you think it's going to become larger.
If a person is pretty certain that the dam is about to collapse, then talking about the water coming through right now seems palpably absurd, but reverse the assumptions and taking drastic action seems equally absurd.
There's no neutral way based on facts and independent of opinions to decide what's absurd, extreme, or hysterical. But at the same time, different views are different, and some are going to be severely wrong about anything controversial and important.
I don't know how you make a generic framework that tells you the right thing to do when people are talking about invading Iraq, and also tells you the right thing to do when people are talking about shutdowns for covid.
No institutional trust in policing caused organized crime to form long before prohibition was an issue. Police brutality is a seed of crime. It isn't like trolling where attention creates the problem but a tumor where ignoring it makes it grow from manageable to insurmountable.
Mechanically, they clearly aren't; they're passing through Facebook's servers and FB doesn't pretend to treat them as unfiltered content (in fact, the feed algorithm complaints are much older than the fact-checking complaints).
Another example are the videos of the collapse of the WTC7 building. Many people view those videos and perceive an intact building being intentionally demolished. I view those same videos and perceive a building gutted by debris and fire collapsing under it's own weight. We watch the same videos but come to opposite conclusions.
> "Facebook didn't say they would be moderating discussion in that way."
Sure, I'm responding more to the notion of "Unfortunately, not everyone is willing to believe facts" My point is that video doesn't always make it clear what the facts are. It's not merely a matter of 'some people don't believe facts' because in many cases different people can view the same video and, with a large degree of confidence and in good faith, have different opinions on what the facts are.
What is or isn't evident in a video is very often subjective. It's a mistake to believe that somebody who is certain of something which contradicts something you are certain of must be illogical or acting in bad faith. Two people can view the same video with different perspectives[0], perceive two sets of mutually exclusive facts, and from those contradictory perceived facts logically deduce contradictory conclusions.
[0] It's arguably impossible for two people to have the same perspective, since they have lived different lives and had different experiences.
If this is the case, it's a mistake to try to put forward a fact as objective based on something that is "very often subjective". To do so is illogical or acting in bad faith.
Pretty much. If such a thing as truly objective facts exists, I (and any other human) can only perceive and understand it through through the imperfect tools available to us. The mechanisms through which we perceive and understand reality are influenced by our lived experiences; nobody is immune to this. Of this, I am certain.
Incidentally, one of the various things I am certain of is that some of the things I am certain of are actually wrong.
> To do so is illogical or acting in bad faith.
I disagree, I don't think that logically follows from the former premise. It may be the case that somebody arguing logically and in good faith simply failed to perceive facts which, had they perceived them, would alter their logical conclusions.
As a concrete example: many people who view the video of WTC7 collapsing seemingly fail to notice that in the upper left corner of the building, sunlight is visible through the windows after the rooftop penthouse collapses, immediately preceding the total collapse of the building. That sunlight is visible through those windows is a fact, by my perception. When I point this out to people who believe WTC7 was demolished, the response is often that they never noticed it before I pointed it out. It doesn't therefore follow that they were previously arguing in bad faith or illogically; what it shows is that different people viewing the same video can acquire different sets of facts. Different sets of facts may lead to different good faith and logical conclusions. A fact that you are unaware of cannot be apart of your logical analysis of matters pertaining to that fact; the best you can do is maintain a general awareness that there may be relevant facts you aren't aware of.
Some examples might be:
What was the reason for the confederacy to declare independence.
What were General E Lees motivations for joining the war.
What was the motivation for most soldiers (who were not slave owners) joining the war.
You can find hundreds of books disputing these topics.
I'll be blunt: this didn't happen. They never fact checked a post about a confederate general, and if they did it was over some kind of obviously false thing that wouldn't be controversial.
Edit: OK, I found a situation: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/jun/12/facebook-p...
tl;dr: Facebook put a fact check warning on a piece that claimed in isolation that "Lee opposed both secession and slavery" without mentioning the fact that he led the confederate army in war against the United States or that he personally owned slaves. That seems about right to me.
I would argue that this is clearly in the realm of interpretive history.
The core statement "Lee opposed both secession and slavery" is too poorly defined to have an objective answer. It is a question of what a historical figure thought and felt comes with all the nuance of a real human being.
Part of what I object to with the "fact checking" is that it often tries to adjudicate questions that are matter of opinion. Perhaps "oponion" should be the facebook flag.
Does placing the warning imply that the inverse is true and "Lee supported both secession and slavery".
... ?
Doesn't the burden of factuality go the OTHER way though? It's an objective-sounding statement of what purports to be a fact. But it's belied by other obvious facts about the man's life. It makes him sound like a union abolitionist and not a slave-holding confederate, which is misleading.
I suppose you might (barely) get away with similar statements. For example "Lee opposed secession prior to the war, and claimed to oppose slavery later in life." That still leaves out context, but at least hints at its existence.
> Does placing the warning imply that the inverse is true and "Lee supported both secession and slavery".
No, it does not. But other statements might be: "Lee owned other human beings" is a clearly factual statement. "Lee fought against the United States" is another.
I totally agree that "Lee owned other human beings" and "Lee fought against the United States" are factual statements, and could be fact checked. So could statements that "Prior to the war, Lee wrote that slavery was evil" and "Both Lee and Lincoln would be considered a racist by modern standards, and had very similar opinions on slavery."
I agree that facts can lead readers to misinterpretations. Given how hard it is to verify actual facts, I don't think it should be Facebook's job protect readers from facts which are accurate, but could lead to undesirable world views.
In this instance, one group clearly wants to paint Lee as a moral man trying to navigate the political and economic realities of the antebellum south. Another group clearly wants to paint a picture of Lee as a symbol of southern racism and oppression. These are interpretations of history.
Of course not. Because you know the context and have made your own decision to excuse his slave holding and treason when deciding whether he should be celebrated with giant statues. Which is your call to make, I guess.
But the point is that not everyone knows that context. And for those who don't, this advertisement, which is designed to affect public policy, is prima facie misleading because it presents two facts that are (at best) subjects of controversy.
You'd never allow this about other stuff you care about. Imagine a Facebook story with "The constitution gives you no right to own an assault rifle". Equally true, by your standards. Not really acceptable though, right?
> In this instance, one group clearly wants to paint Lee as a moral man trying to navigate the political and economic realities of the antebellum south. Another group clearly wants to paint a picture of Lee as a symbol of southern racism and oppression. These are interpretations of history.
And Facebook wasn't labeling considered interpretations. It was labeling something that looked like a fact. I don't think it's so heavy a burden for those who want to write a defense of Lee not to engage in the kind of spin in that story, is it?
Ignoring the ad hominem, the context I had was the fact Lee was a confederate general and the article you linked. I approached it with skepticism, eg this is a nebulous and unverifiable claim. You it approached it assuming an uncharitable interpretation.
>But the point is that not everyone knows that context. And for those who don't, this advertisement, which is designed to affect public policy, is prima facie misleading because it presents two facts that are (at best) subjects of controversy.
This is only prima facie misleading if you ascribe to a specific interpretation and the facts challenge this this interpretation. You are starting backwards with a subjective opinion and then defining facts that do not lead to the same conclusion, as problematic. However, you will allow them if they are accompanied by enough additional facts for the reader to come to the same subjective interpretations as you.
My entire point is that if we want to control misinformation, limiting the presentation of "incomplete" fact patterns is a step too far.
>Imagine a Facebook story with "The constitution gives you no right to own an assault rifle". Equally true, by your standards. Not really acceptable though, right?
I have no problem with this. It looks like the title to 100 other garbage opinion pieces.
>And Facebook wasn't labeling considered interpretations. It was labeling something that looked like a fact.
Then it should be more careful to discern between verifiable facts and statements that look like facts.
This was a post about a topical issue of public policy. Not Lee the man of 1865, but whether or not to remove a statue of Lee in 2020. Isn't that exactly the kind of thing that Facebook's fact check policy is designed to regulate?
You aren't allowed to lie (though to be fair this was a lie of omission) to influence a contemporary policy debate, and if you do they'll put a warning on your post that points to a clearer exposition of the truth.
Before 230, there had been court rulings that said if a platform moderated user supplied content they were liable for that content. Section 230 was written to reverse those rulings.
I'm not sure why, but a myth has taken hold that under 230 you have to be neutral to get the liability shield.
230 was written for a bulletin board site in '96.
Twitter and other social media behemoths still enjoy this protection.
There's been proposals to hold these behemoths accountable by taking away their liability IF they do not act neutral and meet a certain criteria (X users, X income, etc.).
Facebook can defend itself in the court of public opinion by claiming to be neutral, but when they are in fact discriminating against certain viewpoints they end up facing critisism and potential boycots for that, regardless of whether it is legal.
Content moderation is something the US government very specifically can't do.
But I don't think a policy of "nobody can dispute the government's official statements" would fly, even with the enforcement done by Facebook.
Got a link about that?
* Patriot act is up for renewal
* Amendment proposed to not allow section 215 to be used to search internet history W/O warrant.
* Patriot act reauthorized W/O internet history protection amendment.
* PF rules "[Congress] voted for federal agencies to have access to your internet history without obtaining a warrant." is false because of semantic word games.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/may/21/facebook-p...
Thank you a lot. Do you happen to have a source for "I've seen arguments about Confederate generals rated as false because of modern news events - in ways that disagree with well tenured academic historians" as well maybe?
Do you have a source for this claim?
This isn't new either; the legacy version was the systematic denial that smoking caused cancer. This has been going on since the 1950s, and is still being litigated. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3490543/
The result of this is that any single point of fact-determination becomes a target. It's good of Facebook to take some kind of stand against the most fraudulent and racist articles that get circulated on there; the "blood libel" against Jews and so on. But now they're dragged into the other conflicts. There will be a lot of money available from Exxon-Mobil to deny climate change, for example.
Ultimately the concept of "fact" as something outside subjectivity will be destroyed. The rotation of the earth around the sun is really just your opinion, right? /s If heliocentricity were politically convenient or profitable there would be an astroturf campaign promoting it on facebook.
(A subgenre of this is libel lawsuits, which are much less of a problem in the US due to "anti-SLAPP" laws: https://www.medialaw.org/topics-page/anti-slapp?tmpl=compone... but may be a significant problem in the UK; e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/dec/17/bbc-trafigura and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLibel_case , lasting over a decade)
We can dissolve interpretations down as far as we like to leave as little room for bias and dishonesty (and that is a useful effort), but ultimately there will always be POWER in the hands of those who we abdicate arbitration authority to.
...and power corrupts.
The alternative is creating a diverse ecosystem of organizations/individuals who's analysis/logic people can choose to subscribe to and judge based on the reputation that they garner over time.
...and diversity of thought and analysis liberates.
Allowing people to "choose" to subscribe to certain things has the ability to get them and others killed. That's why I mentioned the blood libel, while desperately casting around for something that people on HN wouldn't pointlessly dispute as subjective.
The bar for "this is genuinely dangerous" should be very high, though!
(the question of "what is a fact" could easily absorb a large part of an undergraduate History and Philosophy of Science degree, but we can all agree that there are certain things which are provably not facts?)
Is it really that complicated? It seems like, at least if you subscribe to a certain definition of fact, it becomes straightforward.
Example Fact: I observed that in a sample of X smokers who smoked Y cigarettes a day, Z developed lung cancer.
Example non-Fact: Smoking causes approximately Z rate of lung cancer.
The fact is about an observation that definitely indisputably happened. The non-fact is an extrapolation which is probably close to accurate given sufficiently good studies, but is nevertheless an extrapolation from facts rather than a fact itself. "Gravity is just a theory" and all that.
By this definition of fact, there are actually relatively few facts of general interest. Most of what we're interested in are theories we derive from facts which is where interpretation comes in. There may have been other confounding factors in the study, but as far as the study results are concerned, those were definitely what was measured.
However, my question is genuine. Is this a simplistic view of what a fact is, and if so, why?
Finding out what is and what is not a fact can be extremely difficult. However, we've spent the last few centuries developing tools to tackle this problem in the for of the scientific method.
You're obviously correct that belief doesn't make something a fact, but what to do when a fact hinges on a study? Who decides if the study is good enough? Obviously there is an objective truth, but is the study enough to find it?
Good point. This is definitely not trivial or easy - but this exactly the problem that empirical science has been developing tools for.
Technically, a theory cannot be "proven" - at some point, there could always appear another Einstein and overturn everything - but there are still theories which stay consistent with all observations - i.e. "facts" - for an extensively long time. The standard model of physics is such an example: It's not "proven", but for decades any attempt to disprove it has failed and an enormous amount of working technology has been developed by assuming the model accurately reflects reality.
In a similar way, a single study is probably not enough to make a new theory credible - however if the claims of the theory can be consistently reproduced in additional studies, this gives more justification to rely on it. (And more justification to be sceptical of critics)
No, it's actually the ENTIRE meaning of "fact". Because "fact" is a word, and it has no meaning if we don't agree.
For more obtuse people, they might nitpick that the system should include the entire milky way (so the earth as well as the sun rotate around the centre of the galaxy).
1. Facts are propositions that are indisputable.
2. Facts are propositions we are certain are true.
3. Facts are directly observable.
4. Facts are empirically verifiable.
> Example non-Fact: Smoking causes approximately Z rate of lung cancer.
Apart from the specific problems we have ever proving causality. both these statements are still conclusions based to varying degrees on beliefs which may be wrong. The people in the study might have lied. The cancer test might have been flawed. Ultimately the feeling of knowing a fact is an emotion. In science all we can do is be as careful as possible in stating how an experiment or study was performed and what happened. People certainly gain in their confidence of these broader statements as the evidence piles up. But from the perspective of science this reliance on beliefs created by previous studies is a form of bias which can be a bad thing.
There is no person fit to play the censor. Power corrupts. What starts as an intent to stop climate change denialism ends with being false about warrantless surveillance. What starts with trying to limit hate speech frequently ends with picking favorites.
You've correctly identified a number of practical problems with combatting misinformation. However, this does not change the fact that misinformation exists and does real harm.
So if you can neither change a person's opinion, nor keep them from influencing others, what would you propose we do?
That is the first step. Most of the dangerous content online is visibly illogical, and driven purely on emotion.
There has been extensive research done in public relations, advertising and consumer psychology how to manipulate people emotionally and make them act against reason.
A bit of training in logical thinking is definitely not enough to counter this.
If people aren't free to believe false things and even to try to spread those falsehoods to others, then it's no longer a free society. And one day, a thing you know to be true will be deemed false and you might still think that the problem is just that the wrong people have this power.
Like, are you aware how high those costs can actually get? Who decided that the costs are worth it? Like, would you say the costs of leading someone into drinking bleach will be worth it?
I absolutely support the right for everyone to have an opinion, but we have to acknowledge that now all opinions are equally valid - otherwise, were regressing from several centuries of empirical science.
So at the very least, we have to give people the tools to distinguish opinions with a solid scientific basis from unqualified ones or ones given in bad faith. Fact checkers are one tool in this.
Not to take sides, but one could argue the costs of the statement you're talking about are insignificant.
The assumption would be that anyone who is that easily influenced to do something that severely harms themselves is subject to many such influences and therefore adding or subtracting a single one doesn't change the probability of disaster noticeably in the long run.
If a straw can break a camel's back, does that mean burning a million straws saves a million camels?
...but if it can save just one...
I shouldn't be allowed to choose what I think?
In the abstract, sure, presuming your interlocutor shares a common enough epistemic framework, but good rhetoricians can craft slippery arguments.
Instead of "anthropogenic climate change is bollocks and climatologists are all paid-off liars," how about "climate change models have been shown to have errors". The first statement itself is bollocks, but that latter is true (if also misleading).
It is unlikely but possible the moon is made of cheese. Cheese is delicious on crackers. If astronauts ate moon-cheese, it would be delicious on crackers.
> The bar for "this is genuinely dangerous" should be very high, though!
That is very gracious of you.
Which means promoting education and intelligence is critical to having a functioning government.
...and the first rule the consensus should pass is that experts in the field should provide the consensus within their domain area. ie. Climate Scientists should decide whether Climate Change is real (as a matter of policy) - not the general public.
I mean you've just declared your own opinion to be the consensus.
I too can design a system of governance that works via "have a spirited debate in which every opinion is valid, then do what I say" :)
This seems like an even stronger argument for Facebook to defer to the independent fact checking rather than overruling it
He’s smart enough to recognize that taking on the burden of what should be censored and what shouldn’t is a quagmire he’d prefer to avoid. No matter how “good” your filters are, you’re going to piss off a massive group of customers, despite all the effort.
It’s just a massive time sink with little to no benefit.
“The only way to win is to not play at all.”
But this is a complete nonsense! Facebook cheerfully and aggressively censors anything sexual, far over and above local concerns of legality. Even before FOSTA/SESTA.
(example list from 2018 of censored FB content rules: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/24/facebook-content-that-gets-y... )
zuckerbergs policy preference was no censorship of fake news, not no censorship whatsoever.
That's your subjective opinion. Different cultures will significantly disagree with you (and with the Zuck) on what the gray area for nudity and sexuality is.
For example, FB can make a policy that says no exposed nipples for females. There may be different opinions on the value of such a policy, but not the execution/implementation.
This is much more difficult for a policy stating that content must not be "misleading". Fact checking is much more problematic, because there can be support for either interpretation, nuance, as well as scientific uncertainty.
> Last week, however, ProPublica reported that explicit misinformation about voting remains rampant on the platform.
Voting misinformation is not ambiguous in the way you describe, yet Facebook doesn't care.
"Your democracy, your freedom is being stripped away from you, and if you allow that then everything this country stood for, fought for, bled for is all in vain"
"the democratic party wants to rig our elections by forcing all voters to vote by mail. Vote by mail WILL lead to fraud"
"“Flooding the nation with ballots that can be stolen, sold, discarded, and forged—THAT’s the path to Leftist victory in November.”
“You think coronavirus is a crisis, wait till you see the voter fraud epidemic we have here in California. And mark my words it’s heading to your state like a diseased bat out of hell.”
“If you mail in your vote, your vote will be in Barack Obama’s fireplace.”
[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/outright-lies-voting-misi...
Your policy is still ill-defined, though. Do you mean ALL female nipples, or just human ones? Does the ban extend to babies? Who’s going to police that, and how?
Radiolab did an episode on all kinds of Facebook rules, covering the nipple conundrum as part of it. There’s very little that is straightforward about implementing any of them.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/post-...
a) equally hard, given the common understanding of what “facts” mean nowadays, or
b) nudity is harder, given cultural contexts.
Culture makes a lot of difference for what’s considered nudity (e.g. women breastfeeding goats, as illustrated in the link), and it should matter less for statements about average temperatures for a given region, etc. But the “facts” as presented are contested anyway, since they are derivations based on data + interpretation, even if the interpretation is from >95% of scientists in the relative field.
That makes me lean more towards (a) even though I wish it was (b).
I think we still have a misunderstanding. I am saying that enforceable rules for nipples are easier to write, regardless of the cultural approval of those rules. A well written rule can be enforced by only looking at the content that is on the platform ( eg the image). That is not to say people might disagree (its Art!) or they might get it wrong (its a male nipple).
When it comes to statements of fact, this is not the case. The enforcers must draw conclusion based on off platform research, a presumed intent of the post, and/or a presumed interpretation.
In which case I’d have to agree! Thanks for taking the time to clarify it for me.
Is a trans woman's nipple OK? What about a trans man? What if the trans man has large breasts? What if a cis man has large breasts? What about the tattoo nipple of a cancer survivor?
Nothing is simple, there are value judgements at every turn. The implementation is absolutely making judgements.
In all above cases you could provide the reviewer with an objective yes/no answer. The reviewer does not need a PHD to know if there is a nipple in a picture.
This is not the case for questions of scientific truth, which other requires understand the scientific consensus with complex nuances.
"no censorship" apparently means, "don't anger American conservatives", not "everyone can speak and share".
Now they have a point with FOSTA - it was already risky when they don't know if a naked body is 18 or 17.
To be blunt stupid inputs be they customer norms or laws get stupid results - it is how systems work.
If my feed is going to have posts shared by others (even non-friends) or, worse, op-eds in it, then FB is vouching for whatever I see. If they share a link with 50 million people, they're certainly responsible for the consequences.
Worse is the ad side, where Facebook wants to continue to profit from well-funded wars against science while still claiming to be neutral.
If you get paid to broadcast a message and then broadcast it, you are not neutral.
I personally try to do my part by stomping on this dumb sentiment like a cockroach whenever it pops up.
And there is a fundamental difference between Google's algorithm and Facebook's: control. Google requires user input through search, Facebook decides what shows up when you open the app/site based on an algorithmic feed. In one case the user has some idea that what they're doing is interacting with an algorithm and they can change their search terms if they're not satisfied with the results, in the other the algorithm is in the background making decisions without making itself obvious.
There's no inherent contradiction when people say "this simple, transparent, obvious algorithm is better". Even if implementing it would in fact result in forgoing billions of dollars.
On hot-button topics, that's simply not true. Google maintains manual rankings for all sorts of things, and especially manually maintains search suggestions so as to not lead people down the "wrong" path.
Of course this is exactly how Facebook want it. To appear as the light touch impartial platform where "everyone is free" to communicate. Except in the background they play with who sees what to increase engagement and run experiments.
With the black-box of algorithms used to target content we can only guess what is really happening. But as every media company knows, controversy sells. So I'll need a lot of proof that generating controversy isn't exactly what Facebook is doing on their platform.
You can't have it both ways. This isn't a phone company.
There is arguably a large social benefit to preventing widespread misinformation being disseminated. Perhaps no great business benefit - indeed it is likely a massive expense. But someone somewhere is paying that cost, however it manifests.
The Rohingya massacre in Myanmar begs to differ.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
This isn't the hurdle - the reality of nuance is the hurdle.
Any one of us would have tremendous difficulty in parsing through the reams of various ways people can comment on the world around them.
It's an impossible problem. Not even a team of people watching your every post would produced consistent results.
"The earth increases in temperature by 0.1 degrees last year" - says John. Well ... there are a handful of different ways of indicating the 'Earths Temperature' so we're already dead in the water.
"The winters are colder where I am so looks like 'global cooling to me'" - says Judy. Well, if it is getting cooler where this person is, it would look like the Earth is cooling to a person with that narrow frame of reference.
If it was a war of 'scientific voices' with references to specific articles etc. this would be one thing, but we're talking about FB: casual discussion and propagation of 'water cooler banter'.
I don't think anyone has a solution.
We can only hope, pray, and take action[1] to try to prevent the same thing from happening with the government trying to force companies to build backdoors into encryption, a battle we have been fighting for literally decades[2].
[1] https://act.eff.org/action/stop-the-earn-it-bill-before-it-b... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
It's not much different than when the TV news was controlled by 3 networks.
Very different.
Ironically, this news is terrifying if you have a very inaccurate view of human behavior. The following posts about "mindless masses" is so dismissive that I have to question the voracity of the analysis. People who use facebook are constantly faced with the dissonance of things found on facebook that do not correlate with reality. Even if FB was your one source of truth (there are no people who "only use facebook" or FB+Google, etc) they cannot inherently trust everything they read from day to day contradiction with their own community realities.
Lets open a ministry for that, guess the name.
In a vibrant marketplace of ideas, a "Ministry of Truth" is just "quality standards."
Professor of history/analytical view of history may label Robert E. Lee a skilled tactician.
Someone on facebook posts a Robert E Lee post saying he was a skilled tactician.
'Skilled tactician' seeming to be positive stance on Robert E Lee running counter to the viewpoint that, as a confederate general, he was pure evil with no positive qualities, the story then gets flagged as false despite the historians assertions that he was a skilled tactician.
I share your concern. And, hasn't this been the case for as long as there have been centralized publications?
In other words, they're being arbiters of truth.
This is the kind of journalism that only serves to divide the people even further by empowering their tribalism instead of trying to discuss the matter at hand.
Even without active censorship, Facebook very much is a gate keeper invading your personal space. It's just rather than building up walls around you, it's merely giving you a shovel and showering you with dopamine bursts every time you dig yourself down into your own personal hole. The end effect is the same, though -- all you hear is echos bouncing off walls around you. You just think the echos are only your own.
I agree a free society shouldn't tolerate amending private citizen's conversation. However, that comes with the responsibility of recognizing the more insidious ways of doing that, such as when your attention has been hijacked with industrialized behavioral profiling. The "private citizen conversations" you hear bouncing off your walls are being algorithmically seeded by whatever brings in the most dollars the most efficiently. That's not a truly free society, that's just a very subtle form of mass indoctrination.
The devil already exists out there whether you think he does or not. And when you play with the devil, the only winning move is to not play his game.
"The secret to my success is that I do not really exist."
We desperately need some mechanism for correcting bad thinking based on falsehoods. You can believe whatever you want if your beliefs have no effect on me, but the world has become so complex and interconnected that it's very difficult to point to something and say "your opinion on this has no consequences for other people."
Vaccines? Herd immunity is effected. Not vaccinating your child has little impact on yourself, but if enough people do it, it effects the entire civilization. What should be done about this?
This article is about one of the biggest, climate change.
Every political issue is shaded with the brush of ideology, and that has come at the cost of actual facts and thinking. There is the old saying "strict adherence to rules is nothing more than an excuse to avoid thinking." The same thing can be said to ideology.
It is natural that the mediums we have for disseminating information should have responsibility for the integrity of that information.
But I am looking forward to hearing what you would suggest such a mechanism would be.
The first amendment, in addition to freedom of speech, was supposed to enshrine the idea of a free press so that the two could keep the government in check. The press was supposed to allow honest trustworthy people to become known and to inform the public about issues of the day, and allow their honesty to be questioned and put on trial. The press chose a different path long ago, favoring one political party to an extreme degree where instead of the public's ability to test the honesty of politicians and pundits, we are simply to be told without question, mostly along party lines, what the truth is. Simply adding more power to the press will without a doubt make every problem in America much, much worse in the long run.
Just as each individual member of "the press" has a responsibility and duty to serve that role well, we also have a shared responsibility to hold them to that standard.
What we are facing here is a not just a failure of "the press", but a failure across society as a whole. We mostly don't want to do the right thing, which means putting aside our egos and focusing on what is actually true. We want to do the thing that feels good, which is getting confirmation of our current beliefs as righteous. "The press" is not responsible for this feeling, but some of them definitely benefit from it.
>allow trustworthy people who can speak clearly and honestly about those ideas to do so
And who, exactly, is going to make these decisions about who is "allowed" to speak or not? What, exactly, is that mechanism?
Nothing that you described will fix that problem at all.
How, exactly, are we going to fix that problem?
Derangement is guaranteed in groups without full engagement of ideas and the media and universities (at large) are already at alarming levels of insanity in the ideas they're peddling, they've stopped engaging with critics long ago and now they want more power to silence those critics in their own homes. It's the definition of oppression masquerading as decency.
What are you talking about? They are constantly trying to engage.
Your comment about universities doesn't ring true to me either. Universities are where you're most likely to find free exchanges of ideas today. You can cherry pick counter examples, but that ignores the larger truth, and the reality of larger society.
People do not want to hear how they are wrong. People do not want to be wrong. Allowing people to speak does not fix this problem. It does nothing to this problem at all. It is, in fact, the current reality.
You speak of not engaging with critics, but what I've found is that the people who are ignoring basic facts about the world are the ones that are least likely to have honest exchanges about their own ideas.
Still, you have offered no such solution to that problem.
Anyway I've given what I believe strongly is the only solution, and ideas like that espoused in this article are dangerous and won't help you or me.
Thank you for perfectly illustrating the problem I'm talking about.
Let's burn the books promoting the bad thinking and then send the offenders off to re-education camps to be corrected.
Update: Edited for clarity.
None of those options have been particularly successful, have they?
You're editing your comment so much, it's hard to know what to reply to. The bottom line is that I don't know what the answer is, and lately I fear there is no answer.
https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2020/6/29/on-beha...
And here's a reasonable analysis of what it gets wrong: https://sciencefeedback.co/evaluation/article-by-michael-she...
Flagging it as misleading seems fair.
I cannot find the Washington Examiner oped in question.
This kind of stuff only serves to create more doubt about climate science and, unfortunately among some people, science in general.
> “Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003″.
> It is correct that the total global area burned has OVERALL declined over the last decades, BUT this is incorrectly used to argue that climate change is not affecting wildfires. The overall decrease is largely due a substantial reduction in flammable vegetation in African grasslands arising from human land use changes.
There's also a larger question here. If claims which dispute scientific consensus are fact-checkably false, what does that mean for scientific debate? If Facebook had been created in the 60s, would Freudianism have been forever locked in as an effective form of psychiatry?
However, that's not the context of the analysis. The question isn't "Does this guy have a point?" It's "Does this article spread misinformation?" The analysis rightly concludes it does.
It's a shame the issue is so polarized, because while the claims that the earth is warming and that the warming is at least in part caused by c02 and other forms of pollution are solid, some of the assumptions going into the models are questionable and can be legitimately debated.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/shellenberger-on-behalf-of-en...
Allegedly a postscript was added to the first article referring to the facebook fact checking, so I imagine this is actually the original article and not the updated one.
Unless these labels are ones that people apply to themselves, you're being pretty unhelpful by labeling people.
Here's a more helpful one: people who actually have expertise and peer-reviewed publications, people who at least pay attention to the above, and everyone else.
The solution is not to add another layer of "fact checking". That's super dubious.
Get rid of what got us here.
News feeds organized by engagement are evil. Dismantling them would solve both the production and consumption of emotion driven information.
The major publications do a better job at not sensationalizing everything, but this has been a problem since 1890 at least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
That social media naturally tends to become a tabloid magazine may be more a reflection on readers than the editor (whether human or machine).
The reason it became so pronounced is that social media got very good at it and then taught the lesson to traditional media. They, too, now use metrics of engagement to choose what they show.
It is true also that it is a weakness of people. But there are other weaknesses that we regulate in the interest of a healthy society.
I'm not a fan of regulation but a general awareness of the core issue would go a long way towards a solution.
Right now, the talk about the issue seems misdirected. I can only see the proposed solutions putting immense power of controlling narrative in a few hands.
Thank you for protecting me Facebook gosh darnit!
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/15/13960062/facebook-fact-c...
They want to have it both ways, to remain sticky but without having the world become a worse place for it. I'm sure they'd love it if schools didn't also contribute to the increasing gullibility of the US, but that's not something they can control. Their own feeds, by contrast, is something they have power over.
Facebook isn't making anyone dumb. They were already dumb; you just didn't notice before.
That Snapchat's (curated!) discover tab looks like that suggests to me that this content really is just popular with people and even human editors recognize that.
Facebook doesn't have control of any of those things. The only thing it can control is itself. But it can at least reduce its own part in the way the people and the media perform for each other to be even more extreme. And Facebook is in a rare (if not unique) position to be directly in front of that population: it can't make Fox News go away, but it can put a flag in front of Fox News stories.
The "cause" is ultimately the individuals, not the media or the politicians or the wealthy think-tank funders. They don't have mind control. All they can do is appeal to people with what they already want to believe and amplify it -- a process that's been going on for at least four decades. Reversing it will take at least as long. I don't expect FB to solve it, but I do think it's a good idea for them to not allow themselves to be part of it.
"The researchers found that the post by the CO2 Coalition was based on cherry-picked information to mislead readers into thinking climate science models are wrong about global warming."
This is not a logical argument. Facts are correct or incorrect, whether they're cherrypicked or not.
not defending Facebook actions, which are wrong for a different set of motives detached from the actual article quality, but this isn't the censorship smoking gun people want it to be
Could I sue facebook if their "facts" were proven wrong, and cause me damage?
The platform/publisher dichotomy is mostly just a right-wing talking point with absolutely no basis in law. As your example alludes to, a website can well be both at the same time.
For text that is Facebook’s own editorial content, the liability standard generally applied to any speaker, but historically tested in relation to news media and book publishers would apply, which is one of “malicious intend”: you need to prove that they wanted to cause the harm your suffered.
This is a rather high standard, but it follows from the US’s regard for free speech. You are likely to encounter additional difficulties trying to prove and quantify the specific damages you incurred.
But Facebook’s fact checking is set up somewhat differently, with third parties doing these checks. It seems almost impossible to make a case for intent against FB for a correction authored by any of these organizations.
My country bans propagation of certain ideologies, due to our history. For example Heineken can not use its logo here. It would be criminal offense, not civil lawsuit.
Another possible problem is anti free Hong Kong propaganda and lattest presidential decree.
I dont really care about politics. Just showing it is incredibly thin ice.
Eastern Europe?
Per the landmark ruling NYTimes v Sullivan — no, you'd probably lose that case.
GP asked:
> facebook as a platform is not liable for information it contains. However if Facebook would publish fact checking info, that is wrong or missleading, are they liable?
> Could I sue facebook if their "facts" were proven wrong, and cause me damage
NYTimes v Sullivan held that unless the "facts" proven wrong are specifically about a private individual, you can't sue for damages if a newspaper publishes information that are factually incorrect. If the NYTimes Editorial Board published an article that claimed that the sky is green, you can't sue them for that. More practically, if the NYTimes Editorial Board published an article that "climate change isn't real", you can't sue them for that either.
Likewise, if Facebook published fact checking info that's proven wrong or misleading, they won't be held liable unless the fact checking info directly defames a private individual.
Also note that this is US-centric. Outside of the US, this kind of publisher speech protection doesn't exist, and such nations can cause legal problems for Facebook. Either FB would have to hide the contents from citizens of those nations, or stop operating there altogether.
The oldest of newspapers struggle with these kinds of judgements (until they just decide to stop caring and cater to a certain political side).
It is not reasonable to expect Facebook to get it right with any consistency, if there even is a definitive correct answer to begin with.
Facebook has a policy that they put in place that's fairly reasonable, they have outside fact-checkers they acknowledge as experts. They deliberately set aside the mechanism they put in place to avoid this kind of nonsense.
It is entirely reasonable to expect Facebook to apply the policy that they themselves created in order to avoid having to make these kind of calls.
But on a serious note. It seems that the requirement of functioning Democracy is under the assumption that the majority is educated and know what is good for them. Information warfare like this spells disaster for Democracy.
Furthermore, they are designed to get you to consume as much of this stream as possible. They would rather have you shallowly engage 120 article in an hour than deeply delve into 2 articles.
(In fact, their stupid system actually penalizes you for going too deeply into an article, but I'll save the rant that would follow if I went into detail on that for another time...)
This results in their readers often failing at telling news, opinion, humor, etc., apart.
They should probably separate stuff out, like newspapers and magazines usually do. Then fact check everything in news, and perhaps have a disclaimer in the opinion section clearly stating that the articles are the opinions of their authors and have specifically not been fact checked.
Is this actually true? This sounds to me like a 2010s understanding of advertiser supported content, where the important thing was getting page impressions. The result back then was clickbait, because they were just trying to drive views. But basically most of those business models have died off. Advertisers are far more interested in accessing a strongly identified demographic and are willing to pay a premium to get their adverts in front of people. Which would sort of map to Facebook wanting you to deeply engage with specific topics, rather than to simply skim lots of pages.
https://www.worldcat.org/title/amusing-ourselves-to-death-pu...
The underlying criticism of news media is rather older.
Firstly, this article is about American issues, so it’s only the America issue “lens” that is being used to focus on issues. These same and similar issues must exist for every other country, many of whom have 0 ability to fund and afford individuals who can dedicate their time and lives to fact checking their Local power structures or narratives.
Secondly, even the constrained solution/issue space is too deep for Facebook to effectively police - leaving aside the philosophical arguments.
Removing statements which say “all minority people need to die” is easy,
Removing opinion pieces ? Suppose Kanye says he doesn’t believe in vaccines and that is his opinion. Remove ? Keep?
Is it noteworthy because a huge personality said it ? What about people who are B list celebrities. Or C list ?
What about an article which says “we find that the science on climate change makes claims that are not supported entirely by the data, here is why and here is research.” -
Now you need specialistS or have access to a network of diagnosticians who can tell you whether complex pieces of content are Trojans or not.
Facebook and social media enterprises are paying the price of the hollowing out of editorial boards. All those local newspapers and newsrooms where stuff gets filtered - that is the likely amount of (Skilled) manpower Facebook needs to employ to handle this.
This is where the social media model totally collapses - you can have issues with climate denial, fake medicine, voter suppression etc. - and sub divisions of these problem.
There’s never a shortage of problems and a fractal level of complexity.
How do you ever satisfy the verification needs at this point?
Therefore social networks will always have massive numbers of bad actors, subterranean cults, hidden mind viruses infecting armies of people, propaganda and legions of victims.
This isn’t an idle question - the problems here are about the nature of how humans structure Their networks, verify information and build trust.
Facebook or any social network will always fail at this, unless they see this as what it really is - time to make editorial decisions on content on the network at scale.
The Silicon Valley hey day ideal of free speech is dead. We’re now in a rear guard action to ring fence people from infectious and malicious ideas.
If you think this is a step too far, please remember that America has people actively fighting wearing face masks during the greatest modern Pandemic.
This is no different from removing an article which says you shouldn't use vaccines because they are ineffective and cause Autism.
When the facts which are used to back the opinion are false, then the factual portions of that opinion piece are subject to fact checking. Otherwise, there is zero point to having Fact checkers or any sort of moderation.
And as in any forum, private or public, there are restrictions in place. The question is only, which. If it no restrictions where in place, then it wouldn't be longer a discussion platform either.
"The researchers found that the post by the CO2 Coalition was based on cherry-picked information to mislead readers into thinking climate science models are wrong about global warming."
This is not a logical argument. Facts are correct or incorrect, whether they're cherrypicked or not.
Has this company ever been honest about anything in its entire history? Do any of the execs have mirrors in their houses so they have to look at who they are every now and then?
> Facebook does not employ fact-checkers directly but rather works with a range of third-party organizations to rate how true or false content shared in categories is.
The checker in the particular incident in question was Climate Feedback. The article doesn't have a link to the original Daily Wire article.
Things are made much murkier when you then find out that, yes, indeed, he was actually doxxed before once. And people did actually show up to his house to protest. And even more amazingly, the first person account of this "witness" actually makes you believe if Tucker has a point. Why did they go to his house at night? And how can anyone, from the inside of a house, distinguish "firm knocking" vs trying to break down the door. Will you be calm enough and just say "Oh.. I thought he was going to break it. But it was just a firm knock, now that I think about it. Phew.. "? And why in fuck's name would you actually spray paint anything on Tucker's property? He is going to refer to it as vandalism, because if someone came to your house and peed on the front door, that's exactly how you would refer to it too. Or are you instead going to say "Well, it's just some organic material, it can always be wiped off"?
https://archive.thinkprogress.org/i-was-at-the-protest-outsi...
At this point, there isn't actually any reason to believe one side over the other anymore. It is just complete hysterics on both sides.
Is it really outrageous when NYT has previously threatened to dox people? Most recently the owner of Slate Star Codex, which recieved a lot of attention on HN.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/22/nyt-is-threatening-my-...
To claim knowingly claim something impossible by definition is outragous.
Willfully conflating the White House and Tucker's house is disingenuous.
These are business entities that can quickly create short segments (based on the current events) designed to stir up emotion and interest among their targeted market segments to keep their eyeballs coming back and engaged while the TV ad is play.
FOX has their segment, MSNBC learn from them and has theirs, CNN a bit less defined and as a result they are suffering compared to FOX and MSNBC.
These entities are run by a group of executives that are focused on generating revenue. I don't believe MSNBC's executives are any more or less different ideologically than the FOX's executives.
Welcome to the skeptical moderates' table. We actively seek falsification of political assertions, particularly if it fits neatly in an overall narrative, particularly if we would like to be true. We are a small and beleaguered group.