If the goal is not to bias, total transparency is the answer.
Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation
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Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, trying to solve this problem by creating a definition of "misinformation" sufficiently precise to act on it for all possible articles, then trying to remove it somehow is probably an AI-complete problem. If it's not AI-complete it's probably just plain an ill-formed question. That's before we ask questions about the biases that get embedded into the misinformation detector. This can't be fixed at Facebook scales…
Facebook completely controls the presentation priority, no? Bolt a Watson-like truth scoring system on to evaluate content and use the resulting confidence to boost or bury content in other's feeds. It would absolutely have to be automatically generated, but it doesn't seem impossible (just much harder NLP that Watson playing Jeopardy).
It seems to me the hardest part would be separating truthiness from virality. How do they seed legit sources in the current media climate of racing to the bottom for eyeballs.
Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation
#63[deleted]
Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation
#64This article criticizes Facebook for firing the human editors that had been keeping things sane. However they were pushed to that by accusations of bias in the right-wing media. Accusations that looked likely to lead to a Congressional investigation. See, for example, http://thehill.com/policy/technology/279361-top-republican-d... . Now they are in a situation where they are damned if they do, damned if they don't. A…
"they were pushed to that by accusations of bias in the right-wing media."
Accusations of bias? I think you mean to say that actual Facebook employees stated this as a fact. And the story was covered by ALL news outlets, starting with Gizmodo.
Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation
#65this is what I would propose. Attach a very visible rating on each story shared from all news sources, the rating says how much the news source holds to it's journalistic integrity. There should be a very clear criteria that facebook holds it's news content providers to. If you click on the rating of a low rated news source, you should be shown exactly what extremely misleading articles they have published in the past, these reviews should also be tagged so you can view it directly if someone is spreading misinformation on the news feed.
Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, trying to solve this problem by creating a definition of "misinformation" sufficiently precise to act on it for all possible articles, then trying to remove it somehow is probably an AI-complete problem. If it's not AI-complete it's probably just plain an ill-formed question. That's before we ask questions about the biases that get embedded into the misinformation detector. This can't be fixed at Facebook scales…
Facebook completely controls the presentation priority, no? Bolt a Watson-like truth scoring system on to evaluate content and use the resulting confidence to boost or bury content in other's feeds. It would absolutely have to be automatically generated, but it doesn't seem impossible (just much harder NLP that Watson playing Jeopardy).
If the scoring system does anything other than maximize engagement with Facebook, Facebook ends up making less money and performing worse on KPIs than they otherwise would. It'd be very difficult for any decision maker at Facebook to build, deploy, and maintain that feature. It'd be the sort of thing that'd only be there if otherwise the company would be under existential threat.
Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation
#67This article criticizes Facebook for firing the human editors that had been keeping things sane. However they were pushed to that by accusations of bias in the right-wing media. Accusations that looked likely to lead to a Congressional investigation. See, for example, http://thehill.com/policy/technology/279361-top-republican-d... . Now they are in a situation where they are damned if they do, damned if they don't. A…
There's a proper response to "accusations of bias" from alt-right white-nationalist thug media. Never mind whether the accusations "looked likely to lead to a Congressional investigation". The response is to tell them to fuck off, and that the professional editors in your private company will continue to do their job however they see fit. Period, paragraph.
Correct. I don't know why editorial bias was a problem in the first place.
Right now they have false-equivalency bias that drives fake stories.
Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation
#68This article criticizes Facebook for firing the human editors that had been keeping things sane. However they were pushed to that by accusations of bias in the right-wing media. Accusations that looked likely to lead to a Congressional investigation. See, for example, http://thehill.com/policy/technology/279361-top-republican-d... . Now they are in a situation where they are damned if they do, damned if they don't. A…
There's a proper response to "accusations of bias" from alt-right white-nationalist thug media. Never mind whether the accusations "looked likely to lead to a Congressional investigation". The response is to tell them to fuck off, and that the professional editors in your private company will continue to do their job however they see fit. Period, paragraph.
Telling people who aren't aligned to with the liberal intelligentsia to fuck off is exactly what got us in the current mess. Most people are reasonable, but when the reasonable and rational media ignores their issues, we leave the door open to demagogues and dictators. How else could a silver spoon like Donald Trump ever claim to represent the everyman?
Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation
#69Let's be frank here: Free speech and facebook never go together. They want to present as a respectable forum where prominent people like politicians can have their platform (same with Twitter). That needs some kind of filtering. And, as we saw with pretty much the entire American press, as soon as you start filtering and selecting, you start to induce gross biases and distortions of the truth. The truth only comes ou…
> The truth only comes out in a clutter of contradicting opinions, engaging discussions, pieces of evidence and leaked materials It feels like we're way beyond that. It's degenerated to the point of two tribes who no longer have any "shared truth" from which to argue. If I see a post of Facebook saying that Obama has instituted martial law in New York, how can I convince the 4364 people liking it that it's a lie? If…
I think it may be worse than two tribes. Its a million tribes with limited overlap in what they consider the truth, but all having a large megaphone that cuts across tribal lines while still building bubbles.
My analogy is breaking down. I don't think we understand how the complete removal of barriers to publishing are changing society. Nor do we understand how to cope with it. A bunch of folks just elected an authoritarian to "guide" the way.
Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation
#70I read somewhere that Facebook isn't liable for information posted there, that the user's posting the information is the liable party. Here in Sweden, that's not how news organizations work. Here, whatever they publish they are liable for, regardless of who originally wrote it.
I know Facebook isn't a news organization, but it's treading a fine line isn't it? At some point one might argue that by being an aggregator and driving a large portion of its engagement in the sharing of stories is akin to being a publisher, and thus should be held liable for the things it publishes – regardless of who pulled the trigger. Of course, this would be a huge liability for Facebook, and a growth inhibitor because all of a sudden, a story going viral isn't exactly a good thing if it means they can easily be sued for libel.
I'm not a lawyer (probably obvious given the above) but I think it's a bit strange that given Facebook's position they can so easily get away with a "wasn't me!" kind of attitude to misinformation and straight up lies being spread around presented as though the stories were in fact news.