Facebook removes misinformation related to Oregon wildfires | Hacker News Reader

Facebook removes misinformation related to Oregon wildfires

mashable.com

27 pointsturtlegrids35 comments

Asymmetrical warfare. Truth can never win. Fact checking is akin to boiling the ocean.

Just require attribution and real names.

Then ban algorithmic newsfeeds, targeted advertising, and bots.

Sure, let the Freedom Speeches™ trolls keep their conspiracy theories and hoaxes. Anything approaching omission will trigger the cancel culture keyboard commandos. And who needs that heart ache?

But ffs stop promoting it. And if it's not signed with a real name, don't pass it off as any thing more than it is.

PS- I'm open towards banning likes and retweets. I haven't dug into the data, but I'm reasonably sure they're part of the dopamine addiction too. And if these obvious, common sense, proven remedies are not enough, start adding other frictions to the feedback loops.

I think another underrated solution may be geographically restricted posting. Someone else was talking about massive amounts of trolls flooding local groups that try to inform people about the fire, so why not have a feature where communities are effectively GPS locked down to some radius.

Otherwise agreed with all the points.

It's worth noting that the "misinformation" cited by Facebook regards the attribution of the fires to particular groups, and that they are not disputing that some of the fires may have been intentional. They are not claiming that all of the fires are natural, or that people have not been arrested for arson, just that those arrested are not shown to be associated with the particular groups that are being accused. This page has details on six individuals who have in fact been arrested for setting recent West Coast fires: https://thatoregonlife.com/2020/09/signs-in-oregon-fire-zone....

We are about 10 miles from the fire and about 5 miles from people who have been evacuated.

Frustratingly, one of the best sources of information about the fires has been community meetings and content posted on Facebook by the agencies involved. Often those same community meetings and PSAs about the fire have been bracketed by non-stop streams of people reposting this same bullshit about the fires.

In general, I think posting siloed content is really bad policy by government agencies, but in this case it's particularly bad. I don't see this as a failure of the fire agencies—it's not their job to be a platform for delivering content. The problem is our government lacks effective channels for delivering this content outside of these silos.

Why is Facebook's policy communications manager tweeting?

>We are removing false claims that the wildfires in Oregon were started by certain groups.

I don't get how Facebook can say with certainty this is misinformation? It's information that hasn't been verified. There is an important difference.

This trouble for Facebook and well anyone attempting to combat misinformation is that the falsehood can be created in seconds. The clever ones are designed to be hard to fully disprove, or at least seem that way.

Everyone else has to then scramble and spend hours, days or more gathering evidence to prove lies are incorrect. It's a denial of truth attack that is impossible to police fairly on a time scale that matters.

Facebook removes lots of truthful stuff, so that says nothing about the validity of it. It does tell us that Facebook employees dislike the information.

> Facebook removes lots of truthful stuff

Such as? Examples would be appreciated.

Anything pointing out that Kyle Rittenhouse acted in self-defense seems to get banned.

All https://JoeBiden.info/ links are banned. It's 100% truthful, with citations, and unmodified video that you can watch with your own eyes.

How do you go across state lines with a gun in the middle of protest and then claim “Self defense”?

According to Kyle's lawyer, that never happened. The gun never crossed a state line, not that it matters. The lawyer is a reputable source. See what happens when information is suppressed? You didn't know that fact.

> The lawyer is a reputable source.

Johnnie Cochran also said OJ wasn’t guilty.....

Don't remove posts.

Mark them as lies and don't let the writer modify or delete them.

Once people see they have been upvoting lies, some might reconsider next time.

More likely that they'll just become cynical and stop believing everything altogether. Marking a post as a lie doesn't educate the user how, or give them the tools they need to independently confirm the truth of a post.

If anybody really wanted to know "who started the fires," that's easy: It was you, driving that car of yours, running that air conditioner, heater, stove, fridge, washer/dryer, buying those products, living your life. Not a mystery. But nobody wants to know that. Consider each downvote a confirmation of that last sentence.

But the oil companies that lobbied to prevent any action on climate change, to make sure oil subsidies remain and renewable subsidies don't come to pass, that funded FUD research on climate change when their own confidential, internal research said it was a problem, they are completely blameless.

It is individual consumers, whose every attempt at organized action has been sabotaged, that are to blame.

Some sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/may/20/oil-company...

https://graphics.latimes.com/oil-operations/

I don't see it as an either/or situation. Also it's really not worth all the histrionics. It's a fact, it's happening, I'm contributing to it right now by continuing to not kill myself.

If carbon dioxide brought the bark beetle to our shores, then forced the federal and state agencies to not treat the resulting megatons of dried out trees as the emergency they were, then ok.

But you're going to have to explain how that works, because I'm not seeing it.

Sure, climate change is a real and increasingly urgent problem. And you can make a case that it made the situation worse; fine.

But the bark beetle was both necessary, and sufficient, to cause the crisis we're seeing. I've seen estimates of 30% kill rates in Western forests over the past five years.

Here is how it works: "Many species, such as the mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae) attack and kill live trees. Most, however, live in dead, weakened, or dying hosts."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bark_beetle#Ecology

You do realize the Native Americans used controlled burns for many centuries, as a way to prevent mass fires? The government hasn't been doing that, and the amount of combustible material on the ground has accumulated to dangerous levels as a result. Just some food for thought.

Yes, I've heard about that. Definitely important, though for the record I was talking more about things like the hundred-degree temperatures, bone-dry humidity and the unusual wind event last week (kind of like Santa Ana winds except in Oregon/Washington). But strictly in terms of wildfire suppression, there are people "voting" to keep doing it, whether it's the people who have claimed property and built structures in the forested areas; or ones who, voting with their wallets via the corporations they buy from, want those trees for building houses elsewhere or making paper products; or (ironically) the people who pushed for strict environmental laws, some of which now effectively prevent that kind of controlled burning. Sprinkle the usual "uninformed dust" on top for both voters and their reps, and there you have it! Maybe this kind of event will shove things in a better direction.

Political extremists did not start the fires. But decades of the political status quo in both dominant parties led to mismanagement that led to the current situation. Are any of the "corrections" correcting that omission?

It sounds like Facebook fell for misinformation, or they are willingly involved in a political coverup.

Here we have a distraught witness: https://www.bitchute.com/video/tNgWGZBxPtGx/

She didn’t witness anything, if that makes a difference. She is claiming her husband witnessed something.

Also, even if her claim is true, there is no evidence that the people involved had any affiliation with antifa or proud boys.

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