Facebook Is a 'Super Spreader' of Election Misinformation
newsweek.com
newsweek.com
It can’t change. Facebook couldn’t afford for it to change.
It's the basic difference between Google/Facebook and Apple. Google/Facebook sells ads, Apple sells hardware. Google/Facebook need to know as much as possible about you to sell more ads. Apple does not.
Obviously, these things can change.
Not to mention their actions like political censorship (just from today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24939717 )
Your narrative fits Apple marketing, but not their actions anymore.
Just because Apple does things besides sell hardware, doesn't mean those other things are their primary focus. "Services" make up 'only' 22% of their revenue:
* https://sixcolors.com/post/2020/10/apple-q4-2020-results-rec...
I'd hazard to guess that App stores, Music, Pay, and TV make up the majority of revenues—and not ads.
That's a very limited view of Apple.
It's only fairly recently that this threat vector was exploited. Facebook grew for years without being a disinformation channel.
But my point was that Facebook could survive and thrive in a hypothetical situation wherein engagement over political content/disinformation was removed.
"Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."
So I'd say HN explicitly allows some political content as long as it is "interesting".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404
It ended early:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13133823
Numerous references:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
This is the driving force behind symbiosis, family rearing, community building, business, justice systems (and the necessity of blind spots with regards to Law Enforcement to universally apply) and the "taming" of the criminal element as a much needed escape valve for development away from dysfunctional political dead ends. Quite to the contrary, all life tends toward the political, and politik as it happens makes all other value measures besides existence possible.
So quite to the contrary, from the system-centric point of view, in which a eukaryotic organism can be considered a policy of living tissues, extant fauna, and set of evolvedmechanisms for keeping everyone alive and in check, the stable political equilibrium from which all other activity inherent to prolonged existence can take place, the political is life.
I am continuously surprised at how things I thought were ‘above the fray’, can become a political issue.
The point of “everything is political” is to snap people out of the mistaken idea that politics is just abortion, voting, gun rights, and tax loopholes.
> The point of “everything is political” is to snap people out [...]
Oh, wow. That can make sense, but I had a complete different interpretation. I understood it as prompt to reflect on everything you do with an examination if it furthers partisan goals.
I agree that it is a common mistake. It is difficult to draw direct lines to individual ups and downs to policies and that trying to do that is usually a tool used to swing voters more than what is actually happening. But I think it can’t be overstated the effect political decisions have, in the aggregate, of shaping the economic situation. Internally, look at the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, and the resulting construction of 50,000ish miles of highway over the next 2 decades. While it is a bit harder to draw a direct line from all that to the rapid growth of Walmart and their newfound ability to transport large amounts of goods faster and to more places than rail, it is easy to say that that political decision had a profound effect on how the country operated over the last 60 years. The country would look very different in almost every facet had that not happened.
Externally, look at the trade agreements and foreign policy decision in the post WWII cold war era. If the US had not decided to embrace Japan as a trading partner and had not imposed strict controls on their post WWII government on military spending, the money from the Marshal Plan, the Japanese government’s decision to rebuild the economy through the central planning of the MITI, would they have exploded into the technological powerhouse they became? Maybe, but I can’t imagine it would have looked anything like what they did end up with.
> I had a complete different interpretation. I understood it as prompt to reflect on everything you do with an examination if it furthers partisan goals.
I think it is both. To snap you out of the idea that politics is just those big talking point issues that politicians and voters focus on (or that politicians convince voters to focus on). That it is a lot of everyday things that you may rarely think about being connected to “politics” and partisan actions.
This isn't a Facebook problem as such. It's just sensationalistic journalism. Just that Facebook as a platform helps amplfiy it. Just my 2 cents.
From there on, it's just a matter of highlighting these successful matches constantly in your feeds.
I wouldn't put it past that.
I see 2 potential problems.
If the approach would be content-neutral - i.e. simply relying on the form of the information (eg misspellings in the title, many exclamation points, and such) to distinguish that which is more likely to be fake - then there could be a race condition where the misinformation purveyors learn and subvert the algorithm followed by the misinformation identifier incorporating the new forms of misinformation, and so on. In the meantime, true information purveyors would also need to be aware of this algorithm so as not to be falsely labeled. Think of the race in SEO for an example
If the misinformation identifier uses the content of the information to label misinformation, then the identifier itself is as open to bias and opinion as anyone else
Some of the best spammers have better practices than the legitimate companies sending email.
That was hyperbole on OP’s part.
The algorithm is designed to incentivise the creation and dissemination of attention-grabbing content without considering truthfulness. That simply and directly incentivises misinformation propagation. The fact that politically-disinterested troll groups routinely get incentivised to produce misinformation for clicks is Exhibit A to how deeply Facebook promotes these mechanisms.
Facebook and its employees turn a blind eye to these second-order effects because they are massively profitable. That’s as close to “designed to” as one can get without literally coding for it.
> The algorithm is designed to propagate misinformation like crazy because that's what drives engagement and improves Facebook's metrics.
I would put it like this:
The algorithm design causes the propagation of misinformation like crazy because it optimizes for engagement (which is Facebook's core metric).
The fact the platform(s) generates revenue from this situation doesn't sit well with me.
I'd agree it's not a problem exclusive to Facebook, but a handful of platforms.
Depending on what's being dumped in the river the polluter can be thrown in jail, the govt can be sued, the river can be closed off etc etc
But what helps in determining damage is the curve. On all kinds of chemicals.
Right now when Facebook allows ppl to swim in info sewage no one knows what the dose - response is.
There is no EPA.
And in the big scheme of things, algorithms aren’t even all that good yet. They are only going to get better at manipulating us and making us want and need it. Like the study with the mice that would compulsively push a lever to deliver drugs until they starved to death. Using digital stimulus to illicit the addictive biochemical reaction in our brain instead of a drug’s more direct chemical delivery method. Or maybe I’m just paranoid.
I'm borderline anal about managing which notifications I allow if a particular service lets you adjust them at all, but I feel like I'm constantly turning off some new one that they must have added and opted me into by default. I know I can turn them off for an app entirely, but sometimes I legitimately want a "ding" if a friend sends me a message. Yet I still feel like I'm in a constant haze of pointless "notifications" that are not about some event I need or even want to know about it. It's just attention theft, where a hostile computer program acts of it's own accord to cause my brain to have thoughts I didn't intend to have and waste my precious attention. I didn't ask for it to remind me of something, or let me know when a specific thing happens. This isn't even a "notification." It's just spam funneled into a channel that spammers know we haven't completely tuned out yet. They'll strip mine it until nobody bothers to pay attention to notifications anymore, and then they'll move to the next channel that still has any attention left in it.
If I could request any feature from Apple right now, it would be to treat "attention grabbing" as strictly as it has access to the device's camera or photos. Instead of a blanket "allow notifications," make developers register exactly which notifications they want to send with a predefined message template. Let me easily switch each of those templates on or off in the general settings app instead of having to hunt through the settings pages of the app itself (if it offers the option to tweak notifications at all).
That's exactly what algorithmically curated content feeds like Facebook and YouTube recommendations do. They amplify messages to certain people who are susceptible, and there's little awareness until somebody shoots up a mosque and then suddenly we realize there's a whole subculture of people that have semi-willingly brainwashed themselves with conspiracies floating around about white people being "replaced" and think Shariah law is being implemented in Western countries.
I don't think censorship of the content is the right answer. Short of calling for violence, people should obviously be free to propagate conspiracies, alternative history, whatever. The component that I am wary of is the algorithmic curation. It seems to tend towards "you like that? How about this slightly more extreme piece of related content?"
I almost feel like it was an excess of idealism and belief in “the free market of ideas” -as well as the idea that Facebook should remain a neutral party at all cost- that led to overcompensating in the wrong direction, and the current situation.
Facebook pays well.
The result is actually an emergent property of "increase attention/engagement to the max".
This is actually an algorithmic result that was just one of many possibilities.
So, I don't blame the developers 100%. Forest/trees problem.
What I do blame is Zuckerberg & the Board's decision to not 180' on the algorithm and lower engagement now that we know this is the result - money & power.
They know they can't lower engagement, these are positive feedback loops, and attention is a zero-sum economy. If they give up even a tiny bit, they 'll lose out to competitors.
Subjects must remain fixated until the end.
edit: Also, the demographic might be relevant.
$$$
Does it have to be more complicated than that?
were abandoned by facebook the moment non-customizable feed algorithms replaced chronology, not after the resulting system lost whatever 'objectivity' remained.
this, and not the resultant 'gaming' of the implicitly-clickbait-biased platform, are the root cause 'that led to overcompensating in the wrong direction, and the current situation.'
It is, as they say, giving people what they want. People get genuine pleasure from the feeling of outrage and, better still, righteous anger. And creators of content get paid by the ad industry more from outraging people than drily informing them of the fact of the matter.
I agree that truth is a pretty firm line, but discerning that truth and agreeing on it is a very, very squishy line. Discerning what's true is arguably the most difficult task we can face, philosophically speaking
No matter how many well-meaning people agree that some assertion A is false, if they are wrong and have the authority to suppress it, then they have committed the injustice of censorship.
Even with the scientific method, which I believe is the best method ever invented for discerning truth, there have been many, many times that the scientific consensus has been, not only wrong, but egregiously, arrogantly wrong. Any time throughout history that authorities have been allowed to suppress what they believed to be false - and they often had excellent reasons for believing so - they invariably and inevitably suppress ideas that turn out to be true.
Throwing AI at the problem is just adding another layer of misdirection. It's not going to be better this time in spite of all of the other times just because an AI decides it
No, personally speaking, I think we will have a much, much healthier society if we can just learn to live with the fact that people believe stupid things and they will always believe stupid things even when you try to hide the stupid things from them. I know that I believe things that are both wrong and stupid, I just don't know which things. If everyone could acknowledge that they probably hold at least some wrong and stupid ideas, we would all be a little bit more humble about banishing other peoples' wrong and stupid ideas.
Policy proposal:
Maximize the amount of people that can see a given post / news article. People would have to resubmit in substantially their own words any information they glean that should be passed on beyond that limit. E.g. someone posts a news article that reaches 10,000 people. The 10,001st gets an error saying it has already reached maximum views.
One of the initial 10,000 couldn’t just copy paste what they saw, but would have to generate unique content to reinitiate an information node that would also have a 10,000 view maximum.
This would not be great for national news sites, but it would reinvigorate local news, because that would be the only way for the information to spread.
Decentralization is key.
My issue is that I read about this often (and care about these issues), but I have not used facebook since 2010 and so I have no experience with what everyone's talking about. I feel like in order to understand I need some data to work with that is more specific than 'flagged false', because facebook is just not part of my experience right now and I don't know what people are actually saying on the platform
Facebook is not a publishing house (at least not the Facebook social media platform as such) and mandating that they fact check and curate their ads and content is tricky business. It requires a legal definition of truth, which is a matter complex enough to justify the existence of the whole judiciary system.
Expecting that a condensation of such a system be applied to the publishing of information on any platform is wishful thinking at best.
Edit: Corrected typos
That is misinformation. Most of it is pushed by Facebook's paying customers, not the users.
Social media is a sufficiently different form of media that it will require its own form of regulation. Pointing to the publisher-editor delineation is anachronistic. Publishers never had the reach, insidiousness and information velocity that Facebook does.
I don't use facebook, just passively through contacts, but that is very limited. There are opinions that are wrong. But where did it lead to a real problem?
At any rate, if you are asking why censorship, I guess there are angles and perspectives from which it is not, but that risks becoming a path to various dystopian scenarios (freedom of expression/speech negatively correlates with authoritarianism of governments, for example)
If you want to publish something and some publisher does not want to publish it for you, chances are you can find a different publisher that is willing to, without necessarily negatively impacting the spread of your content and ideas.
For platforms such as Facebook that is fundamentally different: A- they gain their power by offering a service, not spreading ideology... users come to them to access content produced by others, so their influence to the content that they are, or are not, able to access is "unfair" and should be in my opinion unlawful; B- exclusion from them pretty much disconnects you from a large amount of fellows humans in a significant way.
Yes, it's asymptotically hard to assign truth values to every single thing that crosses our feeds, but there are degrees to this stuff, and at least two conservative "news" organizations have made court depositions to the effect that nobody should mistake their entertainment for facts.
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-yor...
Facebook chooses to promote disinformation over your friend’s cat pictures because it drives more engagements and thus more money.
They are totally responsible for that content, even if this is an emergent property of optimizing for money algorithmically aNd no explicit editorializing takes place.
Their users may be dumb f&cks[0] but Facebook is not a dumb pipe.
[0] Zuckerberg’s words, not mine.
The way most people use Facebook is “friend everyone and let god^H^H^H zuck sort it out”.
(Not a Facebook user myself)
This is not by force of nature; this is the result of laws and policies that people created and that can be changed. The safe harbor provisions that exempts internet service providers from liability for user generated content created the circumstances that led to the creation and growth of huge companies like Facebook. But it doesn't have to be that way: in another world where all publishers (internet or other) would be liable for all content on their platform, companies like Facebook would never have existed, we'd probably have many smaller and more local publishers, economically less efficient but having much less of the current disinformation problems.
Facebook keeps hiding behind the claim that they are a neutral platform when their own man made algorithm optimizes user feeds for ad/content delivery to maximize profit. Whether the developers meant to or not, that algorithm has actively spread and amplified misinformation, even polarizing entire nations.
If facebook cannot tame (identifying "truth") what they have made (their algorithmic feed), they should kill it. It does not matter if this taming is possible or not, because they do have the ability to terminate the algorithm.
Or everyone not living in the US should not have facebook before an American election?
It would seem to be more prudent to disallow political ads the week before. Or make it a crime to, say, spread wrong information about voting. And so on.
A speed bump on posts (not messages or comments) isn’t a bad idea.
One month before an election, there is a fifteen-minute cooldown on posts. One week before, a one-hour cooldown. One day before, three. This lets people keep talking. But it slows the reproduction rate and gives people a shot, even if a long shot, at fact checking.
Ask for your money back if you are inconvenienced.
It is possible, but email doesn't offer real time communication, phone calls can be expensive, and not everyone knows how or wants to use zoom. Getting the family, including both grandma and kids to switch is hard "why isn't it working like it did before?".
And BTW, to Facebook, Google and everyone else. Stop messing with the fucking UI. For most of us, keeping up with redesigns is often just a minor annoyance. But to older non-technical people, it is awful.
I remember when Trump won in 2016, CNN immediately turned it's theme black and ran gloomy headlines that continue until this very day.
Likewise, other news sources went into spin mode, seemingly faster than they did pre-Trump. Actors and athletes became media stars not for their area of expertise but for their political opinions (which should be worth exactly the same as the bartender's but the bartender doesn't make the news for some reason.)
I agree that Facebook is a huge platform for politics. The difference is that you can post your own views and you can indicate if you like or dislike someone else's opinions.
I think it's actually progress.
https://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/11375/Misinfo...
Obama was probably the first candidate to win thanks to social media and facebook groups. Partisan Facebook groups post a lot and it's 50% your party's interpretation of reality, 45% outrageous claims, 5% pure fake news. I don't even think the fake news spreading is done maliciously, the groups are probably maintained by radicalised individuals who believe whatever news fit their narrative.
Trump (who often retweets fake news and even retweeted a website similar to the onion, once) equally calls fake news on opposing publications.
Still, I think fake news is a vastly overblown problem. Fake news is merely the scapegoat left wing media use to explain why Trump/Brexit won, even if it's represented so poorly in media. You can call it populism or far right extremism or Nazi, but outside of the rich tech community bubble, outside of universities, poor people want less government not more. The socialist message is lost on them, that's why Trump and Brexit won, despite the media coverage.
If we look at similar cases, like Berlusconi in Italy 30 years ago, it's just a matter of time before Trump understands fixing the government is hard, if not impossible and get caught in some corruption case himself.
The parasitical nature of the state just allow for the state to grow larger until it destroys its host. Spending in the USA is still at record highs.
The fact is, they will all lose money if Trump isn't reelected. Every single FB employee knows this, and does their part to keep the rage machine working. No conspiracy theory needed here, it's all part of the job.
If this wasn't the case, we would have a simple setting on the home feed to exclude shared links and news. One click and no more Fox News hatred from your crazy uncle. But we don't have that option. Why? All I want from Facebook is to see updates of distant relatives on vacation, or graduation photos, etc. But they don't make money if there's no anger, so oh well.
I don’t understand what you mean here. Why does Trump need to be reelected? There is always outrage to be generated for clicks. There was no shortage of outrage during Obama’s term. Even things that were objective non issues, like the tan suit, was whipped into a viral attention storm. “Obama's tan suit shocks social media”. It seems like social media is just designed to promote outrage, since outrage produces virality, but not that it needs Trump specifically. Is there something I’m not getting relating specifically to Trump and Facebook?
The same reason Howard Stern was allegedly so popular. People who hate him listened even longer than people who liked him.
This is like blaming parks because people deal drugs in parks sometimes.
And the fruits of their labor?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24932881
It's amazing how links I post to other HN subs always wind up with -1 karma; never positive, never zero, never -2. Always -1. I'm sure that's totally and completely organic.
At this stage, all remaining Facebook investors are deeply immoral individuals. All the reasonable moral individuals have already cashed out. The government should just screw over the remaining shareholders. They deserve it.
It is outrageous that the history and effects of arbitrary nationalisation is so uncommonly understood.
If Facebook is nationalized, at least they will not manipulate people to serve corporate interests (that is the main threat).
Sure, in the worst case, under government ownership, social media might be used to manipulate elections to give preference to the incumbent party over the other, but that is infinitely better than manipulating elections based on the financial interests of a tiny minority and allow it to drive an increase in surveillance and restrictions of public freedoms. Eventually, even the tiny minority of shareholders (the smaller ones) will end up being harmed at the expense of the bigger shareholders. It's not going to stop at non-shareholders.
These are the same thing.
If you shift the control to government, the dynamics change fundamentally. The power will once again start at the government (like it should) and not at the corporations. Money will still influence things, but not nearly as much as it does today.
We need to take steps to decouple money from political power, decouple state from economics.
Like guns, Facebook is not inherently evil. It mostly depends on who is holding it.
Nationalizing businesses is the literal opposite of decoupling the state from economics isn't it?
We can go to an extreme and point out that to properly decouple state from economics, we'd have to abolish corporate personhood first. We would need to abolish 'limited liability' legal entities; the real purpose of these entities is to allow individuals to repudiate responsibility for their actions by deflecting blame towards these abstract legal entities. This doesn't make any sense aside from facilitating criminal activity. Whenever a corporation commits a crime and isn't shut down (which is 100% of the time), that is government interference of the worst kind.
You should read up on:
1. The history of railroads and regulation in the United States, including their collapse and resurgence in the 20th Century.
2. The history of Bell as a government-sanctioned monopoly, their breakup and subsequent industry consolidation.
3. The disastrous environmental damage caused by state-owned energy companies.
They were explicitly anti-Brexit, and arguably anti-Corbyn. They're fairly anti-Boris. The common factor is bias against threats to the bureaucracy. It always puzzled me that they could get away with criticizing the people who held power over them, but I think it's just that MPs don't hold much power over them. They're more worried about the branches of government that don't change between elections.
Very few media organizations have the kind of international reach as the BBC has. Frankly, that says something about its quality and wholesomeness. I'm not a US citizen but the only reason I ever watch Fox news and CNN is to get a sense of how bad things are going in the US. They're more like reality shows than news.
I agree with you. I don't really like media organizations but as media goes the BBC is great.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC#Governance_and_corporate_s...
That is the wrong solution. The threat to _democracy_ because of _advertising_ is a US phenomenon.
It says something about social values if journalism and public education/discourse, which are essential to democracy, depend for their survival on _advertising_.