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Comment by Dansvidania | Hacker News Reader

People spread misinformation on Facebook. Arguably, it's not Facebook's responsibility to fact-check anything.

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

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Facebook selects and controls what users see.

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.

I also do not like the fact that Facebook "optimizes" the content shown to users, and would rather just have no Algorithm at all, but that seems to me like a different (although possibly related) problem.

It would force users to curate and would reduce time spent on FB - both positive outcomes in my book.

The way most people use Facebook is “friend everyone and let god^H^H^H zuck sort it out”.

(Not a Facebook user myself)

> Facebook is not a publishing house

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.

What concrete problem did Facebook cause on that matter?

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?

Thank you for this insight.

In the "old" days, people had to actively look for or click through to get misinformation on platforms. Facebook's algorithm now shoves posts into user's feed, which is optimized for engagement. We're all seeing now where that has led, and it's not going to get any better if nothing changes.

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.

People spread viruses at bars. The bars themselves don't spread viruses. Yet they're shut in quite a lot of countries, to their severe financial detriment, because that's where the spread happens.

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...

> People spread misinformation on Facebook.

That is misinformation. Most of it is pushed by Facebook's paying customers, not the users.

> 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.

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.

Ads are different to the things people post on social media. Facebook can’t moderate and fact check ads? Why not? Because it would cost them too much of their 17billion dollar revenue? Boohoo

Because that allows the people in charge to censorship ads with the excuse of fact checking, for one.

But haven’t publishers always done that? Why is that now a bad idea?

again, I do not think Facebook is a publisher, but rather a platform, so I do not see how the parallel applies.

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.

Particularly given that most of the exemples cited by the article are approximations, the sort that mainstream newspapers do routinely to push a narrative.

Facebook is strictly a tool for social control, run for profit.

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