Mark Zuckerberg: Fact-checking on Meta is too "politically biased"

Yes same I think they're generally quite good and add important missing context to posts.

The best thing about community notes IMHO is that you get notified if something you liked previously has been community noted. Gives you a chance to reassess.

> I'm curious, what are HN's opinions around community notes on X/Twitter?

I notice that there are influence groups who are trying to play them, but so far I haven't seen them be successful. I see tons of proposed notes from certain groups but rarely do I see them actually be shown on X, so I guess it is robust in a way.

The main place it doesn't work is on popular polarizing accounts. For example, generally the followers of Elon Musk like him so if you try to correct him there, a bunch of his followers will just say the note is wrong even if it isn't, they vote out of loyalty to Elon. So polarizing large popular accounts generally cannot be community noted. Same applies to most political leaders.

So community notes is for correcting plebeians, not for the patricians.

Ultimately: It can take some time for community notes to correct misinfo posts; by the time community notes gets to it, the firehose has ten more misinfo posts community notes needs to fix, the people who saw the original post rarely see the community notes correction, and given the algo has a massive temporal bias the original post was probably on the way out of new viewers feeds anyway.

Its a good system that should exist. It could probably be made better by finding any way to help it act faster (e.g. the moment a post is even in the process of community notes voting, attach a temporary banner like "The Community Notes people has suspicions about this post, it might be misinfo, we're doing our research").

If the goal is to prevent, or limit the spread of "misinformation" community notes is a failure. I see community notes merely as additional context on what is now a wide open machine for spreading any information, regardless of truth.

I think they're potentially good, but are used nowhere near enough. So many posts on X simply do not have community notes attached, even though they contain misinformation and lies.

Community notes is the main reason I have not migrated to bluesky.

Community notes don't work when there are small number of users for a particular topic.

For example, Indian Twitter/X user were posting with old/unrelated/fake photo/video saying Hindus are being killed in Bangladesh (after change of fascist government that was under controll of the indian government), hindus homes were burnt. None of them are true, but there are not enough Bangladeshi Twitter/X users to community note them.

this reads like a twitter post.

I'm not really a twitter user (I just get posts from friends occasionally), but I think community notes is actually an awesome feature for a social network.

Honestly, I think the real solution is far, far simpler: just have social media operate more 'privately'. My Bluesky feed shows me content from people I follow, that's it. I don't get extreme opinions forced upon me and, if I did, I would simply unfollow that person. It doesn't need any censorship in the same way email doesn't.

community notes often (at least on x) provide a link, some commentary and then it's up to you to make up your own mind.

Personally I find that 10x better than someone just deciding I shouldn't be seeing this.

Community notes do not claim to be the source of truthfulness at least by its name

Americans take it as an article of faith that everyone wants to live like they do.

It must be utterly demoralising for anyone working at the US State department right now.

>Maybe it's time said governments start just banning or outlawing these platforms

They should and it's long overdue.

America, China, Russia and to a far lesser extent Japan and South Korea all have outsized political interference power upon other countries through the various social networks that operate out of them.

Any country with a desire to safeguard domestic politics against foreign interference and influence should be banning them without question and it should not be controversial.

Fully agree. It's high time each own country had sovereign platforms.

"Conspiracist" is a political label today, too.

It’s at times like this we realise how much better our situation would be if the internet remained decentralised and not consolidated into a few “social networks”. We messed up.

Cater to the new guy in power. Zuckerberg has already been doing this for decades.

I think that question is going to be very easy to answer.

There's no neutrality against fascism.

There's nothing complex about Zuckerberg's statement.

He along with other US companies is "adapting" to the new reality that starts on 20th - so yeah, catering to the new guy. Hell, it's not just the corporate world - politicians in the western world also enabled "pampering" mode because they do remember with whom had to deal with last time.

I saw politicians in my country doing weird "acrobatics" which contradict what they were saying few weeks ago as well.

Everything is political.

Now what's factual about politics?

Have seen people who disagree over issues like climate change or the Israel/Palestine conflict? The disagreements are not just over policy, but over what is even real.

Or, if you have 15 minutes, this video clip examines how major media outlets cover (or do not cover) two different atrocities: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s8mP2jN6bJI

I’m wondering if it’s because so many people seem to be living more than 50% of their lives online. Facts seem less important in the virtual world.

Go play with some live electrical wiring and see how quickly facts about electricity become important.

> where there is no longer a broad, societally-wide accepted definition of facts.

I am not sure it is actually difference.

In the lead up to the Iraq War in 2003, there was so much discussion in the media about how Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and those saying it was made up were marginalized. In the end those doubters were right.

I think in Vietnam, there was similar misleading statements about cause belli e.g. Gulf of Tonkin Incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident I think that there is often disagreement on facts.

I think with Wikipedia existing, we are actually in the gold age of grounded truth.

There is always a sizable segment of the population who doesn't really care for truth though and they will just align with their side and be angry. This happens on all sides of the political spectrum. In the past this was pushed via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism and is still pushed via similar outlets today.

Hasn't that been the case much longer than that? The US for example has had a problem with creationists.

> we really have entered a world in the past 10-15 years where there is no longer a broad, societally-wide accepted definition of facts.

Never was :(

> This is a major change for humanity, one I'm not quite sure how we'll cope with.

I don't know, it seems vastly more likely to me that this is a regression to how things have been for thousands of years before the invention of mass media. Like, once mass media was invented, the "set of facts" could be distributed to everyone, and so it exploded, but now the various factions who want to control the narrative have figured out how to use that mass media to share their "set of facts" in the same way.

There has never been one.

Naomi Klein recently said "conspiracy theorists ‘get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right’" and this is how I think a lot of way too online people are. They've correctly judged that the mainstream news is biased or flat out manufacturing consent such as the lead up to the Iraq war. However instead of seeking out actual truth or just better sources of news in response to this, they seek out what makes them feel good and correct in their assumptions. Honestly its the same behavior you see in older people that are "set in their ways" - new evidence and objective truth be damned.

I would have to disagree a little. I think what were seeing is the true nature of some of these issues where you have a case where both sides are right and wrong at the same time and it really just depends on your perspective.

Take a conflict, any conflict. In most cases you can go to both sides and ask why they are fighting the other side and they will give you a coherent response. In some cases it's easy to judge right and wrong but in other cases it becomes murkier. This applies not just to war but to all social conflicts and issues like healthcare, abortion, immigration, so on and so forth.

Now what has happened previously is because media was essentially a monopoly of a few, outlets would take what happened and re-package that into something that typically stood in line with our western values, and that's how roughly everyone was on the same page, we were just being fed roughly the same story we all believed was happening and it was very hard to prove otherwise what happened.

Fast forward to now and that monopoly is long gone. Now we get the full unfiltered picture from independent media sources and increasingly just social media from ordinary people on the ground. The full idea doesn't have a concept of right and wrong, both sides of are right and both sides are wrong, just depends on your own personal worldview. This results in people drifting one way or the other depending on their personal beliefs and is a complete fragmentation compared to what we had before.

„We have always been at war with Oceania“.

Facts and their representation has been changed by governments since time immemorial. The internet probably made us much better in sporting it so we became a bit paranoid.

At risk of sounding argumentative, another way of looking at this I think is that the community of people in the US who have known only a facts-first approach to reality are now discovering the size of the community of people whose worldview is effectively tribal. I was raised in a very rural community and many of my most vivid memories are of members of my extended family recounting stories which I now know are urban legends, joking knowingly with one another about how so called experts in far-off cities were confused, and cautionary tales about the horrible things that members of other races would do to you. You can imagine how confusing it was then to go off to college and then to see the world and meet people and discover how much of the mythology I'd absorbed was no more than that.

The bulk of the people I've described had very little interaction with the world outside the area where they lived, and the only way they were likely to interact with someone from the facts-first community was via a letter to the editor of some magazine (which might not be published), or if an outsider came to visit, in which case politeness might avoid a confrontation.

Social media introduced these two groups to each other, each group thinks the other is comprised of fools and neither is shy about saying so, and here we are. In my own family, I have yet to see a case in which a member of the tribal knowledge community was moved by an argument from a member of the facts-first community; their belief structure seems to ossify at around pubescence and compromising on it in any way would risk a loss of status in that community.

I take some comfort in believing that we have not been plopped into a post-truth reality, but rather that providing the internet to rural tribal communities was rather like switching on a light and discovering what things had been hiding before our eyes in the dark. I think its also a generational issue because the difference between my old relatives and their offspring my childrens' age is nearly as stark as the difference between the facts-first and tribal-knowledge communities on the whole. While it sucks that this post-truth era will be with us for a while I'm hopeful that the same internet access that led to this schism will also allow at least some of the kids who grew up like I did to be skeptical about tribal knowledge from a younger age. However you might also argue that now the segment of the entire population who are susceptible to misinformation will be poisoned in the same way I was.

Anyhow thanks for your comment; reading it made me stop to think about something that had been bothering me a great deal lately and it was helpful writing this response.

People used to care if they way they talked about politics made them look intelligent, reasonable, and informed. Now many of them speak online where they get warped signals of approval, and these signals elicit behavior that they would never engage in if they still depended on the good opinion of their friends, neighbors, family, and coworkers.

This is liberating and positive in so many dimensions of personal expression, but in politics, the effects are turning out to be the opposite. Some become entirely dependent on these online signals of approval, and they let themselves be guided by a warped perception of political effectiveness, where effectiveness might mean using disinformation to motivate people on "their" side (which I guess actually is politically effective) or it might mean winning meaningless games of online dunking. People who invest time and energy in online political discourse see themselves as heroes, above the judgment of those who don't engage, and see their online activity as brave and dangerous, even though in reality, both sides always go home the winner in their own eyes, and there are no consequences except degraded mental habits all around.

It has long been dogma on the far left and far right that the concepts of civility, reasonable debate, and legitimate political process are only cloaks for the brutal exercise of power, and the sooner cast aside the better. If you pay any attention to the quality of how we do politics, you have allowed your liberal oppressors to trick and distract you. Thirty years ago, I heard it from left-wing professors at university and from far-right gun nuts promoting race war in chat rooms. Now it seems a lot closer to the mainstream, on one side in rhetoric and on both sides in practice.

It is a catchy phrase for saying that lies are spread by the goverment and the public is willing to pass them as facts.

Truth or fact is one and only, perspectives are many, opinions are personal. Lies are infinite.

In this case, they get the benefit of saving money AND increasing the rise of misinformation and fascism. It's a double bonus for Zuck and UFC president/Meta Board member/Trump booster. https://apnews.com/article/meta-facebook-zuckerberg-board-me...

Once comparatively nothing happened after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Zuck realized he has a better chance of continuing to reign if he sides with the right-wing.

A fact can be verified. Someone with the necessary knowledge to verify a fact is a fact checker in that particular domain of facts. They are not infallible though, let alone unbiased; even though the facts themselves are immutable and, well, factual.

That said I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment on critical thought. It should be everyone's duty to verify facts for themselves but... consider how many people are functionally illiterate in the world. They wouldn't be able to verify even simple facts, because they lack the mental framework to do so (i.e. reading comprehension). And also consider how much of a burden it is to individually verify every single claim that is made, and compare it to how easy it is to make wild claims. It would be impossible to navigate the modern world without a group of dedicated fact checkers that you trust. You can't be an expert on everything -- and if you think you are, that means precisely that you are NOT.

> Incidentally: A "fact" is an immutable facet of the world itself, whether we can even acknowledge it properly or not. Facts don't need checkers.

The term "fact checker" does not mean someone who checks that facts are true. It means someone who checks that what someone claims is a fact is in fact a fact.