‘Orwellian’: Facebook faces backlash for ‘harmful extremist content’ alerts
washingtontimes.com
washingtontimes.com
Makes sense, no? "White begins and wins in 3 turns" - surely this is a KKK recruitment video?!
The last time I checked, the Washington Times was slightly to the right of Fox News. It was more of an opinion paper than a journalistic endeavor. It may have changed since then, but that was my assessment about ten years ago.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2021-07-01/new-facebook-warni...
Note: Their comment section is probably not safe for work
I also don't know if it's the right feedback loop. Wouldn't it promote extreme ideas? Since if you agree with the general consensus, you wouldn't click the button. If we pretend it works as advertised, it would promote very persuasive changes in the status quo.
1) I already agreed with this post's ideas to detect echo Chambers, and maybe trigger more content with opposing viewpoints.
2) I disagree with this post to have a strong active signal if that besides just passively not hitting the "like" button.
Or maybe these are awful ideas. But as much as intrusive data collection is part of the problem, as long as people are being fed content based on simplistic algorithms that optimize for anger and fear, we won't get anywhere.
In systems will many millions of pieces of content, random selection won't work. Showing similar content to that already viewed has been less than productive. There has to be some way to have social media and content outlets optimize for something other than $minutes_of_attention.
An example of that would be somebody coming up with a energy out of thin air idea (extremely unlikely, hard to check in-house), and pointing out that same person made such claims for 10+ years, perhaps with different apparatus and it never worked when reviewed, etc allows quick dismissal for many people until more trusted source checks and speaks on the matter.
"Extremist" material plaque on Facebook however is factual information, there's nothing to quickly dismiss based on credentials of the author here. Therefore bringing up their identity only introduces previously missing bias in otherwise unbiased conversation, thus damaging clear thought process.
This is obviously not what people do. It's not what experts in media criticism recommend. And it's also not even vaguely practical.
The number of claims made is effectively infinite. The time needed to validate a given claim varies, but is often quite large, and can be effectively infinite. No single person can fully validate even a tiny fraction of all the claims made. Ergo, a person must choose between almost never deciding anything or collaborating with other people to do the work of validation. This introduces the vital concept of trust.
The whole existence of journalism is part of that. If the world worked the way you suggest, we would just need something like 4chan: a bunch of anons posting messages. Then individuals could validate each one themselves.
Instead what we have is established, branded newspapers, networks, magazines, and the like. What most have in common is a reputation for accuracy, something they invest quite a bit in maintaining and defending through the use of standard journalistic practices, professional editors, and fact-checking departments.
The Washington Times purports to be a respectable journalistic outfit, inviting its readers to trust it. Its history demonstrates that is has a strong agenda and is willing to ride roughshod over traditional standards of validity in pursuit of partisan gains.
There's nothing wrong with noting that so that people don't mistake it for some sort of journalistic effort.
I looked for other sources besides Washington Times and found them. Could the submitter have chosen a more centrist source? Sure.
Does it change the fact that Facebook is posting these alerts and there is controversy over them? It does not.
I'm confident it the voting was political because I didn't just fall off the turnip truck. It's my long experience here that unless criticism of the US right is phrased in very particular ways it will get a lot of reflex downvoting.