Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation

Okay but to be fair, there are something like 6000 tweets every second. Are they not moderating because they believe in the principle of free speech, or because it would be impractical?

I do think that they manually curate their trending sidebar. After Comey announced that the emails on the Wiener laptop were cleared by the FBI, the sidebar looked like this: http://i.imgur.com/9LW0iaU.png

Now, since when do hashtags get an explanation underneath them? Who wrote that explanation and why? Why doesn't it show the amount of tweets below it like every other trend? I had never seen that before.

And in this particular case, if they did manually put that there, I think they're vindicated in the sense that they're actively trying to not spread misinformation. Because if I had gone on twitter and saw "Comey" trending, and I hadn't read about the announcement that she'd been cleared, I'd simply think that a lot of Americans were talking about it within the context of an ongoing investigation, and I'd get the sense that twitter users were collectively rallying against Clinton, rather than for her.

And that, in essence, is the real problem that I have with manual curation by FB/Google/Twitter/etc. People are underestimating how much trust the general population puts into algorithmically produced content, and how much of a betrayal of trust it is for them to inject something into that. They're underestimating just how quickly we've learned to interpret algorithmically produced content and infer certain things about it. And in spite of the fact that the sidebar could have mislead you to think something else was being expressed by those tweeting about Comey than was actually taking place, I also think the public is more aware of the shortcomings of algorithmically produced content than we give them credit for.

If I watch Fox/MSNBC/CNN/etc, I know that there's an implicit bias to the pundits and the guests and the networks themselves. I factor that into whatever content I receive from them.

But when you have Twitter trends that are organically produced 95% of the time, and you silently inject something into that, you've done something much more sinister than a news network leaning towards a particular angle. You've taken a metric that a lot of Americans trust entirely to be reflective of the whole country, and you've elevated a certain few or silenced a few others.

That's significantly more powerful. You can provide the illusion that millions of people do or don't feel a certain way. It's the most dangerous thing to happen this election cycle.

the elite mainstream media and the supposed-to-be-independent reporters are the biggest losers in this election, as they took sides so strongly that the other 50% will never bother to have anything to do with them. facebook needs improvement? sure, but more important, those biased media outlets will be irrelevant for most of the people due to not only technology advancement, but also what the news industry has been doing over the last few decades, i.e. they're all so biased, that you always know what they're going to say, why bother reading there.

anyone can tell me one true independent news source in US today? there is _none_.

Facebook isn't the problem. It's a function of its users. It is as much responsible for misinformation as a city park is responsible for the crazy guy shouting about the lizard people. The problem is all the users who actually believe anything they read via facebook.

I have personally asked an individual why they don't trust snopes.

Their claim is that it's a Democrat rag towel and shill.

I then ask, then what fact-checker would you trust?

Their response: None of them.

Congratulations. We've reached a point, for this individual, where "facts" as decided in the common forum are suspect and the only thing they trust is themselves (and whatever non-Mainstream Media they listen to). We have reached a point where the only truth is what they decide is the truth.

That is a non-trivial problem to resolve. If we can't even agree what basic facts are, there is no way to even have a discussion.

> I don't know why editorial bias was a problem in the first place.

Because, like it or not, Facebook has become a trusted news source. Because of that, they have a duty to accurately report the news.

Their human editors fell down by vanishing stories they found politically uncomfortable.

Their algorithmic editor fell down by promoting stories that were false.