[deleted]
Facebook Has Repeatedly Trended Fake News Since Firing Its Human Editors
11–20 of 335 posts
Re: Facebook Has Repeatedly Trended Fake News Since Firing Its Human Editors
#12You're going to have to break the Turing Test before you get good automated content curation. There will always be error. People are worried about bias. I'm skeptical that humans have the ability to be politically unbiased on an individual level. Many modern political issues do not have a middle ground - take abortion, you are either for choice, or you believe it is infanticide. So let's stop pretending to be unbiase…
How do you prove that you believe something?
I think it's extremely hard to reverse engineer passionate defense of an issue by a true believer. For example, if you were body-swapped with the late justice Antonin Scalia, I find it highly unlikely that you would be able to argue as vigorously for the conservative cause if you had lived your life as a liberal Silicon Valley tech geek (they'd also see right through you because you'd be a zombie and clearly not the true Scalia). So that's one thing.
Perhaps in some extreme pathological case you could have a person live their entire lives faking the opposite political ideology. But that just seems like a waste of energy... And if you can fake being for an issue convincingly enough, doesn't that have the same effect as being for the issue anyways? Like, people would catch on if you wrote about being a Bernie Sanders supporter in your bio, but wrote/submitted all articles about how he doesn't have enough foreign policy experience. The only way to fake being a supporter of something is to.. consistently make solid arguments in support of it.
Re: Facebook Has Repeatedly Trended Fake News Since Firing Its Human Editors
#13Yeah, all because people wanted to scream "bias." Sadly the community here seemed apt to agree with it, but I definitely have my opinions on that. Quoted from a previous thread: >Did the standard for their sources remain relatively constant regardless of the material being discussed? There isn't a clear answer here, but that doesn't make it defacto censorship of one set of particular political opinions. The sources t…
There are plenty of low-quality left-wing news sources too, but the high-quality sources definitely trend to the left for some reason. Breitbart and Huffington Post are both tabloid garbage, but at least there are highbrow counterparts to Huffington Post.
Re: Facebook Has Repeatedly Trended Fake News Since Firing Its Human Editors
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
You shouldn't downvote based on disagreement, on top of the fact that that seems like an incredibly disingenuous sentiment, what is your point?
Not fully sure what you mean here. I did not downvote your comment. I also have no idea what "seems like an incredibly disingenuous statement". I posted how your comment comes off to me, in case you were not aware it was coming off that way, or in case I was misinterpreting then perhaps you would clarify.
I'm not sure what you want me to clarify? At no point did I indicate that it's okay to downvote people you disagree with. They should constructively contribute to the conversation, and in cases where they are not, the downvote button should be used.
Re: Facebook Has Repeatedly Trended Fake News Since Firing Its Human Editors
#15You're going to have to break the Turing Test before you get good automated content curation. There will always be error. People are worried about bias. I'm skeptical that humans have the ability to be politically unbiased on an individual level. Many modern political issues do not have a middle ground - take abortion, you are either for choice, or you believe it is infanticide. So let's stop pretending to be unbiase…
Because optimizing for engagement is the modern equivalent of pandering?
It'd be interesting to optimize for other factors. I'd like to see a news source that tries to optimize its presentation to incite the least possible controversy/argument while keeping engagement high.
I'd guess this would be done by thoroughly explaining "both sides" of an issue (not in "equal times" terms, but in "all that can be said, has been said" terms)—but who knows, maybe there's a clever trick to doing something like this that such an algorithm would force into existence, much like PageRank forced the SEO industry into existence.
Re: Facebook Has Repeatedly Trended Fake News Since Firing Its Human Editors
#16You're going to have to break the Turing Test before you get good automated content curation. There will always be error. People are worried about bias. I'm skeptical that humans have the ability to be politically unbiased on an individual level. Many modern political issues do not have a middle ground - take abortion, you are either for choice, or you believe it is infanticide. So let's stop pretending to be unbiase…
How do you prove that you believe something?
By not having anything to sell.
Re: Facebook Has Repeatedly Trended Fake News Since Firing Its Human Editors
#17You're going to have to break the Turing Test before you get good automated content curation. There will always be error. People are worried about bias. I'm skeptical that humans have the ability to be politically unbiased on an individual level. Many modern political issues do not have a middle ground - take abortion, you are either for choice, or you believe it is infanticide. So let's stop pretending to be unbiase…
I have a hypothesis that a lot of articles "bury the lede" of their political affiliation (both from ML algorithms and from people) because journalists believe that they can "save the world" by tricking people on one side of an issue into reading arguments on the other side of that issue. Whereas—they believe—if such articles are clearly marked, people on the "other side" will just avoid them and stay happily in their filter-bubbles.
Re: Facebook Has Repeatedly Trended Fake News Since Firing Its Human Editors
#18You're going to have to break the Turing Test before you get good automated content curation. There will always be error. People are worried about bias. I'm skeptical that humans have the ability to be politically unbiased on an individual level. Many modern political issues do not have a middle ground - take abortion, you are either for choice, or you believe it is infanticide. So let's stop pretending to be unbiase…
Because optimizing for engagement is the modern equivalent of pandering?
My comment assumed we were optimizing to minimize bias - which people do care about - and gave an approach to solve that. Optimizing for engagement is fine, and profitable. You just can't claim to be unbiased.
Re: Facebook Has Repeatedly Trended Fake News Since Firing Its Human Editors
#19You're going to have to break the Turing Test before you get good automated content curation. There will always be error. People are worried about bias. I'm skeptical that humans have the ability to be politically unbiased on an individual level. Many modern political issues do not have a middle ground - take abortion, you are either for choice, or you believe it is infanticide. So let's stop pretending to be unbiase…
> take abortion, you are either for choice, or you believe it is infanticide
Well, no, even on abortion there is usually a position somewhere in the middle is where a lot of people end up (and you left out part of the spectrum, where even contraceptives are believed to be morally wrong), and usually the law has ended up somewhere in the middle, too.
We confuse "loudest" views with "most common" a lot these days, so I do agree that promoting the most extreme views possible to drive "engagement" (a tactic figured out by people looking for votes long before the internet was even around to introduce engagement->clicks->dollars) is a bad behavior for aggregators, but that's a hard argument to make for a business as long as we hold the current view of short-term "fiduciary duty" ruling all.
Re: Facebook Has Repeatedly Trended Fake News Since Firing Its Human Editors
#20You're going to have to break the Turing Test before you get good automated content curation. There will always be error. People are worried about bias. I'm skeptical that humans have the ability to be politically unbiased on an individual level. Many modern political issues do not have a middle ground - take abortion, you are either for choice, or you believe it is infanticide. So let's stop pretending to be unbiase…
take abortion, you are either for choice, or you believe it is infanticide