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Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

Full tweet:

> While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook's third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.

Hard to fit in the HN title length limits but my read is it's "guilty till proven innocent" for anything negative against Joe Biden.

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Given the intense disinformation efforts coming from both the Trump campaign as well as third-party state actors is it any surprise that FB would aim to try to take itself out of the equation as much as possible? What is the upside for them here?

> ... is it any surprise that FB would aim to try to take itself out of the equation as much as possible? What is the upside for them here?

How is arbitrarily deciding what gets promoted or demoted "taking itself out of the equation"? It's literally the opposite. They're deliberately downplaying a story to prevent its spread. What's nuts is the Facebook communications director says so explicitly too!

They are constantly deciding what gets promoted and demoted. By taking themselves out of the equation I mean they are trying to not become the vector for additional disinformation campaigns when they have the opportunity to do so. Delaying the distribution of propaganda pending fact checking is not deliberately downplaying the story.

It’s not really possible for Facebook to take itself out of the equation—Facebook sets up its algorithms to encourage the spread of engaging content. So if a story spreads on Facebook, it’s because they designed their algorithms to make engaging content spread. But if Facebook goes and adds a special-case on top, “don’t spread this particular story,” then they’re obviously interfering at that point. So they sort of inherently have to take a position one way or the other. The only other option is to do something like always make the algorithms focus on engagement without any special-casing, possibly with a general rule to limit how fast any new story spreads, but presumably they have reasons for not wanting to do that.

There is a reason they engaged fact checking companies to do what they do when it comes to some stories on the site. If you are surprised that they are actually using them I have no idea what to say.

But this is not a decision they made based on anything their fact-checkers told them. This is a decision they’re making before they get the results of the fact check. Andy Stone did eventually follow up with a clarification:

> This is part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation. We temporarily reduce distribution pending fact-checker review.

So apparently this is a standard process, but the process is kind of ironic in that it claims to farm out this decision to a neutral-as-possible third-party, when really they first have to make a preliminary decision internally.

Delaying the story in today's fast moving news environment is effectively censoring it. Who is fact checking this? Who fact checks the fact checkers? This is classic Orwellian bullshit and its getting worse by the day.

Stop calling them Fact Checkers and call them by what they are: The Ministers of Truth.

Have you even read the story? Really? It is so laughably false that the fact that Facebook does not instantly nuke references to the story as an obvious falsehood are themselves a thumb on the scale in favour of the current criminal administration and their enablers. The only bullshit here is what people like you are spreading.

The Republican House Judiciary Committee posted information on their website and their Twitter. Twitter is now listing it as an unsafe link:

https://twitter.com/SteveScalise/status/1316752470484410370

https://twitter.com/johncardillo/status/1316724949428600833

Rudy Giuliani has also come out and made the following statement about his involvement in the chain of evidence:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZasrHQeKiY

I did read the article. This isn't trivial. This is big, really big.

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