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Facebook Has Repeatedly Trended Fake News Since Firing Its Human Editors

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Facebook Has Repeatedly Trended Fake News Since Firing Its Human Editors

#91

Post by internaut »

narrator wrote: post #37
vinhboy wrote: post #34

Thank god someone is writing about this. Recently I've been on the Yahoo's homepage a lot, because of Fantasy Football, and I noticed that a lot of the content is exactly like the article says, fake news from right-wing propaganda sites. And no, this is not me expressing my liberal bias. It's one thing to have opinionated headlines like the Huffington Post, it's another thing to have a completely fictional headline c…

They really should filter the news to each person's individual bias. It'd just be easier that way. Cognitive dissonance is real and it can cause serious emotional distress. That's not a good way to drive engagement.

This is an interesting statement.

I suspect this is an excellent heuristic for a media organization to become popular.

However I also don't like it because it would limit the range of thought. Most things that I find interesting are at the peripheral or in the cracks, intersections, oddities, peculiar facts.

Without countervailing narratives you don't have a benchmark for topic variance, and like the OP, become incapable of believing there even exists alternative models of reality.

In a relatively non-partisan example, I find that people who believe in God don't really understand atheists. Surely deep down these people believe in The Creator. I also find that secular oriented types do not really believe that religious people believe. They think they are faking it on some level.

These are serious, even dangerous errors.

So I submit that we need, require, something I'll label The Truman Clause or Exit from the Matrix. I do not know what that looks like in an ethical information aggregation system. I suspect it exists as part of meta-cognition in either our culture or in the human brain, since one of the most important functions of higher learning is to teach you to question your premises.

More so than any elite university I've seen, the kind of culture developed at LessWrong is perfectly suited to tackling these kinds of meta-cognition issues.

Re: Facebook Has Repeatedly Trended Fake News Since Firing Its Human Editors

#92

Post by jeremyjh »

unityByFreedom wrote: post #76
paulddraper wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Personally I think the risks posed by Trump with his thumb on the nuclear button are greater than the lives saved by repealing abortion rights. 10 to 1 you're wrong. https://xkcd.com/1132/

> 10 to 1 one you're wrong. https://xkcd.com/1132/ What are the two scenarios you're referring to? That Trump does or does not contribute to a nuclear war? Trump trashes everyone who disagrees with him. He will likely increase tensions on the world stage.

Yes but if you are right and the world ends and he doesn't have to pay up. That's the joke.

Re: Facebook Has Repeatedly Trended Fake News Since Firing Its Human Editors

#93

Post by babesh »

vinhboy wrote: post #55
wyager wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NPR, NYTimes, WaPO Not directed at you specifically, but if you think those sources are unbiased, it just means that you're bad at detecting bias. Edit: Haha, this one struck a chord.

I am completely ok with you directing that comment at me, because I fundamentally disagree with your assessment. I have a pretty complete understanding of current events from reading those sources. For your statement to be valid, you'd have to prove that there is a considerable amount of information missing and is only available via conservative media.

What one considers news is inherently biased and since you cannot report on everything, you will have bias. For instance, a person can value bird lives really highly and find that not reporting on bird deaths caused by cats biased. Then there is the interpretation of events: terrorism vs triumphant fight for freedom, win or lost, etc... Conservative vs liberal is a very, very narrow way to view the world.

Re: Facebook Has Repeatedly Trended Fake News Since Firing Its Human Editors

#94

Post by mtgx »

So this is a lot like what Google experienced for a long time. Its algorithms would get manipulated.

However, would you prefer Google to handpick (let's forget about the volume of manual labor for now) which sites get to be at the top? Or would you rather just keep improving those algorithms?

I think Facebook is in the same situation. Facebook, Google, and to a lesser extent, Twitter, have a lot of power to influence elections.

Re: Facebook Has Repeatedly Trended Fake News Since Firing Its Human Editors

#95

Post by internaut »

vinhboy wrote: post #55
wyager wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NPR, NYTimes, WaPO Not directed at you specifically, but if you think those sources are unbiased, it just means that you're bad at detecting bias. Edit: Haha, this one struck a chord.

I am completely ok with you directing that comment at me, because I fundamentally disagree with your assessment. I have a pretty complete understanding of current events from reading those sources. For your statement to be valid, you'd have to prove that there is a considerable amount of information missing and is only available via conservative media.

> I have a pretty complete understanding of current events from reading those sources.

Are you aware of the cathedral? What about the stagnation?

Re: Facebook Has Repeatedly Trended Fake News Since Firing Its Human Editors

#96

Post by outlace »

vinhboy wrote: post #34

Thank god someone is writing about this. Recently I've been on the Yahoo's homepage a lot, because of Fantasy Football, and I noticed that a lot of the content is exactly like the article says, fake news from right-wing propaganda sites. And no, this is not me expressing my liberal bias. It's one thing to have opinionated headlines like the Huffington Post, it's another thing to have a completely fictional headline c…

Some people say it's impossible to have unbiased news. Of course this is true in a trivial sense, in that anything written by a human with intent to be interesting to read is likely to have some bias. And of course one can bias the news simply by choosing what to report and not report (eg if all you report are all the things fmr Pres. Bush did wrong, then the audience will get a bad impression).

However, there is absolutely a difference between journalists attempting to report news in a neutral way and journalists intent on spinning news to forward some agenda, even to the point of using strategic omissions and what not to completely mislead the reader about a conclusion.

Moreover, a reasonably intelligent human can (and should) read a variety of new sources (that at least attempt to be unbiased) and generally can get an idea of what actually is going on. When you read 3 different versions of the same news story by BBC, NPR, and NYT (for example), then hopefully the biases sort of cancel out and you get something closer to the truth.

Re: Facebook Has Repeatedly Trended Fake News Since Firing Its Human Editors

#97

Post by emjenny »

There's a peculiar detail in this story.

It refers to "the 'Association of American Physicians and Surgeons' — a discredited libertarian medical organization."

1. First, why the quotes around the name of the organization? Is this not its actual name? 2. Discredited? By whom? Isn't "discredited" an objective judgement -- and thus, one the author should support with a rationale? 3. Further, it's odd that of all the examples mentioned, the AAPS is the only one not linked to. Why? The release must be online, if Facebook linked to it.

Curious.

Re: Facebook Has Repeatedly Trended Fake News Since Firing Its Human Editors

#98

Post by internaut »

dredmorbius wrote: post #80
leepowers wrote: post #31

What is the error rate of fake news over verified (real) news? A 5% margin of error could be acceptable. A 50% error rate would indicate a serious problem. > As part of a larger audit of Facebook’s Trending topics, the Intersect logged every news story that trended across four accounts during the workdays from Aug. 31 to Sept. 22. During that time, we uncovered five trending stories that were indisputably fake and th…

This raises the really interesting point that news doesn't have a post mortem process. It would be a very interesting experiment to, say, revisit a sampling of top stories at some interval (say 3-6 months) and compare the reported facts ( and omissions ) with the actual reality. From such elements as "did names and places get accurately reported?" to "was the underlying narrative correct?". Quotes and attributions mi…

That would be wonderful!

I hope you're fireproof though, because that would make a lot of people very angry.

Not to disabuse you, because I do think it is a good idea, but many people are simply not interested in asking the right questions. I used to belong to a millennial cult which had formerly been proven wrong about 'The End of the World' half a dozen times in the 20th century, and each time they decide the past prophesies were metaphorical while next time it is literally the 'Big One'.

Each time they do this they do lose a lot of support, so disseminating information about what happened in the past is not completely meaningless. I wouldn't have left the Truman Show without the Net I think, that and books.

> was the underlying narrative correct?

This is the one I want to have done most of all. The others you mentioned are easier to do but this is the crux of it. The cult believers treat every news articles as further evidence of their faith, and every discrepancy as a test from the Devil/oppositional lies.

There is some deep stuff here. I remember reading something from a person who lived under Communism, and like some kind of conspiracy theorist they had every detail about their 'Matrix' wrong but they did know instinctively that something was very wrong because of the mismatch between reports and anecdotal observations.

Re: Facebook Has Repeatedly Trended Fake News Since Firing Its Human Editors

#100

Post by gadders »

vinhboy wrote: post #34

Thank god someone is writing about this. Recently I've been on the Yahoo's homepage a lot, because of Fantasy Football, and I noticed that a lot of the content is exactly like the article says, fake news from right-wing propaganda sites. And no, this is not me expressing my liberal bias. It's one thing to have opinionated headlines like the Huffington Post, it's another thing to have a completely fictional headline c…

You can't put Breitbart in the same category as the NYT, true, but you could put it in the same category as the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, Mother Jones etc.
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