Facebook Has Repeatedly Trended Fake News Since Firing Its Human Editors

That is pretty clearly an endorsement for TPP (other leaks make this connection more obvious[0]). Hillary says she is not in favor of it, this seems to directly contradict that statement. Saying one thing behind closed doors and another in front of the voting public is a scandal to me.

[0]http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/oct/12/leaked-email...

The question of how to deal with missing narrative or omitted detail is also huge. There are efforts underway in that regard, usually in the legal field. The Innocence Project would be an example.

I can think of a great deal of follow-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion which have turned up since, and in particular numerous instances of people caught blatently lying.

The public though seems mostly to move on. I feel that's a mistake.

Yes, the activity would be quite incendiary, though that's somewhat the case for the news as it is. There is Project Censored, at Sonoma State University in California, which looks at under-reported stories.

Cults and their own belief systems is a whole 'nother fascinating area. Have you written on your own experiences on this?

On questions and answers I also agree -- I think we're pursuing a lot of the wrong questions, and the answers to the wrong questions are simply meaningless. I'm looking for a few good questions: https://redd.it/1v052g

Assessing narrative means some way of scoring a narrative. That's an interesting problem in itself.

On your "Matrix" example: I'm convinced that one of the key fundamentals of an accurate model of the universe (e.g., a true or useful narrative) is that your different perceptions all tend to correspond. It's when you're getting different messages in different places, or from different sources, that you've got a problem.

Mind, there are circumstances in which there is no one true narrative -- optical illusions such as the Necker cube, "dancing lady" illusion, or the rabbit-duck picture come to mind. But there's a huge realm in which a fairly accurate understanding is possible.

In the context of facebook "censoring" conservative media outlets, there's an observable trend that major conservative news sources are more apt to post false or misleading content that tickle's their audiences expectations, than it is for major liberal sources.

This is an observable trend. Take something as scientifically sound as global warming or evolution. Fox News or Breitbart will consistently misreport on these issues, just to be in harmony with the overall conservative narrative in the U.S. It is highly unlikely you will find equivalent liberal sources that do anything remotely like that. Liberal sources are not perfect nor are they immune from criticism. It's just _more_ likely that an editor will find reason to deny a story from a conservative source than a liberal one. Again, this doesn't seem like a problem for facebook to solve by removing editors, it seems like a problem conservatives should strive to fix.

No news source is going to be perfect. They're never going to report everything accurately, and sometimes they might jump the gun to just get a story out. But there is a line when you can consistently observe a set of news sources being dishonest, or even worse, malevolent.

With all this mind, keep in mind the stories that were falsely trending. It's coming from the same set of sources, with the same political idealogies that Facebook got lambasted for "censoring." You have to be blatantly ignoring what's going on at this point to admit that maybe, just maybe, the problem wasn't with the editors.

And as a side note, I really have never labeled myself one way or another, but I've found over the years I'm consistently labeled as a "liberal" so I've picked it up. The only thing I've ever done is looked at the evidence, been skeptical about claims, and tried my best to form opinions around an ever revolving set of information. If that means my opinions happen to be more consistently liberal than conservative then so be it, but screaming "bias" just because one side of the U.S. political spectrum consistently has absurdly low standards is the worst kind of false equivalency.