Facebook is pressuring its independent fact-checkers to change their rulings

> It's been entertaining to watch him gradually tightening the screws on speech over the years though

It's sad to read the Terms of Service and easily count Facebook PR scandals like rings in a tree-trunk. My "favorite" example is the years-long fights over breastfeeding photos on individual profiles and in parenting groups: https://bc.ctvnews.ca/facebook-policy-on-breastfeeding-photo...

When a policy gets so specific that it starts talking about times the "child is latched" my eyes just glaze over and I can only read it like "DEAR WOMAN, please remember your body is disgusting, you're disgusting for having it, and it must remain covered aside from these extremely-specific legally-mandated exceptions. With love, everyone at FB."

> and if you do, those elements will declare you biased, claim censorship, and seek political action. Of course, the other side will eventually seek political action in the first case as well, so there's no winning.

I mean, this may be close to the root problem. At this point, the political atmosphere in the US is charged enough that scientific facts have become a matter of political debate.

He has every resource imaginable to grow and keep a spine. This is just a direct result of him being a shitty person.

Can you name one specific example of a conservative media outlet spreading a demonstrably false story and not being penalised?

I tried facebook today. It's garbage.

I only found ads, prostitution services, pages of kids that seemed inappropriate, rumours, fake news, x minute craft videos with medical misinformation, make up videos with toxic products, etc on my 15 minutes of usage.

Live streams of people similar to this: https://ibb.co/0yBqf1n

Facebook groups are full of living ads. Most pages recommended didn't have any activity this year.

Everything is turned on by default on the privacy settings page. It includes facial recognition, content analysis, phone number, birthday information, and whatever you shared on sign up (everything). That data is available for everyone else too by default and there is no way to make a profile completely private or hidden.

> Facebook's power is it's ubiquity

Exactly. Facebook is much more than just messaging app and sharing photos. If you're running a restaurant and want to bring people via ads on Instagram and Facebook, you gotta have a Facebook account. There is tons of other things where you could survive without a Facebook account, but it makes business harder.

> no one wants social media companies to be the Internet police

I wish. Facebook wouldn’t do anything if there was no angry mob to demand such measures to be implemented.

Many politicians quoted in the article are quite explicitly calling on Facebook to be the Internet police. Senator Warren says that Facebook has a responsibility to ensure people have the right beliefs about climate change.

Not quite. It’s only in the 20th century with the rise of pass production that every paper had strong advertising income, and thus the need to expand circulation to a geographically defined group (with ad-reading partisans on both sides). This is what made them compete with quality differentiated investigative news content, and that is how you get the news culture in question.

If anything today’s decline has produced a regression to the earlier days of the 18th and 19th centuries, where you sold the content itself, reaching for sensationalism - often overtly political sensationalism, which sells great - and yellow journalism.

Ad based papers traditionally hated opinion pages because advertisers didn't really want to be next to controversy. But readers love them. Now that you once more need to sell to readers more than advertisers, now that you have a million choices of news instead of maybe two per city, the whole news medium turns partisan, whether it’s the NYT or Fox.

I'm glad this is being brought up, since it doesn't get addressed enough.

One major difference is that investigative journalism was already on the decline by the time the Net showed up.

Cable news, media consolidation was already underway. Fox news existed before the internet truly became a global fact of life.

If anything, it was craigslist that became the last nail in the coffin. It killed of the classifieds section, which was what gave news rooms their last trickle of cash.

The problem is the technology too. For the first time in history can two people see the same information source (in this case Facebook) but see two completely different worlds, as each one gets their own bubble, and that bubble is biased. I often see friends Netflix accounts and prefer what they are getting suggested than mine, as Netflix presents me the bubble it thinks i'll like, and I never see the other variation that I want (unless I look at others' accounts), so can't easily expand beyond my bubble. In Netflix's case they want me to see more content, but in Facebooks case they are perfectly happy with bubbles as it makes their targeted advertising easier. Sometimes I'd like to know that the version of a site I'm seeing is the same as others as I really don't want to be in my own information bubble.

Technology amplifies the effect though.

The presumption that there is a possible unbiased perspective is itself the most insidious form of bias.

I think the problem is ‘wrong bias’ which is directly related to overestimating self, which is basic human nature.

True. But not in this case.

FB and most sites which have a bias against, say conspiracy theories, regularly find themselves against conservative forces which for, whatever reason, have a willingness to expound and accept conspiracy theories.

> https://phys.org/news/2018-12-political-views-people-false-d...

Can't find the original articles which showed how conspiracies thrive in different political groups.

This then creates the new phenomenon that people here are trying to explain.

IF BOTH groups were equal, the bias in action would be then on FB's end.

Both groups are NOT equal, and frankly American conservatives (as a group) are far more often to be targetted and spreaders of conspiracy theories and misinformation.

This means they are also the subject of far more actions.

Since they are the subject of far more actions, this creates a political opportunity.

As you can see in this discussion, there is a difference between Perceived Skew of Moderation, and Actual Skew of Moderation.

Now people can say "See, we need to deal with FB in congress, because they do more against Conservatives! We suffer more action!".

Since FB is also in california, and accused of being "liberal" this accusation is even easier to sell, since it is already believed.

FB responds by giving them extra passes, so that they don't get called out or forced to handle new legislation which complicates an already complicated field.

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Its really interesting to see how the argument here hinges entire on people's perceptions of what the world is ("both sides are the same") and reality (one side is more affected than the other)

They want free speech for themselves, not for others. They want to shut up people they hate or disagree with.

A different perspective: If most of the speech is spam, hoaxes and lies, and if as a recipient, I have no meaninful way to detect those, then what value does the speech still have?

So if everyone can say whatever they want (which is a good thing), the recipients must have some tools at their disposal to verify whether someone should be listened to or not.

> If there are going to be limits to free speech, then who gets to set those limits and who enforces the limits?

Denying facts that are backed by the overwhelming majority of scientists would be a good candidate for a limit.

Cause they’re “independent” contractors

Or at least an option to turn their commentary off. It’s getting ridiculous on YouTube too.

Oh, if they want to editorialize on content the should loose their safe harbor protections too. Fair is fair.

How is Parler doing these days anyway?

Because FB is probably one of the few places actually trying to grapple with the scope of this problem in a manner that makes business/practical sense.

Not at FB.

Content moderation is developing so fast, and with problems so thorny, that the difference between intuitions of normal people and trust and safety teams is whiplash causing.

Current moderation practices are perhaps analogous to the ages of proto police forces. Since there is also no separation of powers, moderation is a cost center, and comprehension of moderation principles is nascent and disregarded outside of T&S teams, you have people from sales/strategy/Personal connections overturning rules/policy.

The speaker at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J19Xa3-SN1M, has a book on this topic which discusses some of the many problems this field throws up.

FB is trying to resolve this problem by offloading the problematic thought policing to the state, in some way or form - white paper sent in the UK is a case in point.

This is likely the way forward for major firms, it seems unfortunate, but unless someone reframes the incentives and problems, government sanctioned censorship is the likely future.

> So standard question when terrible stories like this are posted: there are many HN members who work at FB. How do you deal with stories like this and continuing to work there?

I’ve been interested in hearing a cogent response to this question as well. Obviously FB is held in regard as a tech company to work for and member of FAANG, but I believe their core platform facilitates more harm to society and democracy than good.

I’d love to hear from some HN members who work there and understand their reasoning better. I’m open to entertaining a different perspective.

There are reasonable arguments that Facebook is worse than other companies, but this isn't one of them. All big companies engage in and respond to political pressure; it's an occupational hazard.

I work there, not on anything remotely related to this.

For me the "justification" is mainly three things.

1. What Facebook is doing is not morally wrong.

2. This is not a moral issue, it's a political one with powers much larger than Facebook duking it out on the fact-check surfaces.

3. IMO the fact checkers use marginal cases to reinforce a political agenda. Often "fact checks" will call exaggerations made by conservatives "false" while calling similar exaggerations made by others "partly false" or "mixed". I am absolutely not a conservative and generally despise the conservative publishers subject to fact-check drama, but it's also very clear to me that these appeals make treatment more fair.

There is an argument like: the moral quality of institutions/companies is determined by the people inside it, so if all of the conscientious people vacate the institution/company then they are effectively ceding their places to the unconscientious people. If said institution/company is powerful, it's not clear that this is going to make things better.

A counter-argument for this is that working at such places makes one complicit, and most generic software engineers, regardless of their technical acumen, have close to 0 potential to affect the moral compass of the institution/company at all. Such people may be viewed as keeping an immoral institution/company afloat.

But if there is a charismatic, driven, conscientious person who does have the potential to accumulate enough power at Facebook to shift its moral compass . . . it might be nice if they actually worked there.

You can’t serve both God and Mammon.

— Matthew 6:24

It's uncommon throughout human history for private organizations to have such concentrations of wealth and power. Typical such concentrations have been reserved for the state.

It is the opposite really - opinions are some of the least controlled they have ever been as reach is far equalized and means of control at a low. It is one of the least conquered times.

Hell the idea that they can even 'control the attention' is a fallacy that assumes they have active knowledge of what their content will do like the New York Times has an editorial control. It is like the idiot congresspeople who spent their question time complaining about their negative search results for their name.

Even the heaviest handed management would fail to exercise the level of control as an editor of a scientific journal who knows absolutely nothing about the underlying field.