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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

#171

Post by lightbyte »

overcast wrote: post #156

This is seriously hilarious. Now that's he's won, against seemingly all odds, we have to find some other reason for why EVERYONE ELSE, was completely WRONG. Every media outlet, everyone in politics, all the polls, completely shit on Trump. Now look who is the most powerful person in the entire world. The Democrats, and the rest, did it to themselves. Overconfidence, smear campaigns, and all of the morons doing the po…

>we have to find some other reason for why EVERYONE ELSE, was completely WRONG

>and the people have spoken

Trump lost the popular vote, so this isn't true. He got about 25% of the total voting population overall.

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

#172

Post by taurath »

__jal wrote: post #71
Bud wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're actually not; that's simply false. No, Facebook is not "at it's best" [sic] when it sticks to birthday wishes and cat pictures. It's actually at its best when it is truly social , in all senses of the word. When it facilitates real communication on real issues across a broad spectrum of people. When it spreads information, not misinformation.

Not trying to speak for the original poster, but what I took away from the argument is that when FB is "truly social", involving real issues, the potential rewards are sufficiently high that misinformation becomes valuable, thus dangerous. When it sticks to birthdays and cat pictures, there's no incentive to go hostile. Think of it as being somewhat similar to the arguments about the Flash Crash regarding HFT and liq…

This is the same as reddit. As social platforms get larger they starts diverging from their original userbase (programmers/geeks for reddit, college students for facebook) to apply to a wider and wider audience. Eventually the wider audience starts to look a whole lot like the demographics of a whole country (or maybe the world), and it becomes a platform with as many arguments as society in general.

The solution to not becoming a battleground which is inherantly destabilizing to the platform is to not grow, or only grow in a single direction. State up front what your targeted user base is and keep to them. NeoGAF as a "gamers only" forum will survive a very long time, for instance.

Facebook has sidestepped it by becoming a personal community for each user, but whenever they try to connect that personal community to the wider world through "shared" news, "shared" trends etc that are not personalized it causes a big ruckus.

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

#173

Post by popmystack »

btilly wrote: post #11

This 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…

>However they were pushed to that by accusations of bias in the right-wing media.

As per my previous comments on this subject. The sources that got "censored" _happened_ to be conservative. They were unreliable sources, and stories that turned out to be not true. But people still moaned about it.

The fact that more conservative sources report false information seems like a problem conservatives should want to fix, instead of crying censorship. We have too much false information flying around; it's yellow journalism.

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

#174

Post by bbctol »

ethbro wrote: post #136
bbctol wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watson scoring something for truth is only as good as the data drawn from. Who decides that data? Jeopardy questions center around long-established, non-controversial information; how does a Watson-like system evaluate unprecedented breaking news? It's not a question of the language used, it's a much, much higher-order issue that current Watson sidesteps.

Agreed, much more difficult, but ultimately the same way we do so? We believe certain ideas to be facts (hopefully based on scientific sources), then we parse incoming information in light of those. I can't imagine an unprecedented breaking news story that has no basis in any factual information. I'm not talking about an upvoter here, but primarily a downvoter (incongruence with accepted facts being easier to prove t…

Sure, and that's the higher-order problem. If we could make machines that solve any problem the way we do, we'd be a lot closer to AGI, but for now, it's still science fiction for a computer to have beliefs, and understand information in the context of those beliefs.

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

#175

Post by intellegacy »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #96
nostrademons wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a problem with human wetware - there are several cognitive biases [1][2][3][4] that make people engage more strongly with ideas that fit their preconceptions and discount ideas that don't. Add information-sharing to the mix and the aggregate effect you get is large information cascades that fracture the population into tribes that believe things not necessarily because they're true, but because they are state…

> The fix is for people to be aware of these cognitive biases in themselves, to actively seek out information that differs from their preconceptions, and to challenge inaccurate information (with evidence!) when presented with it. You are right, but I hope you are aware that this would require a giant leap to an essentially superhuman state of rationality and clear thinking for a vast majority of people. Just stop fo…

Is that how you function?

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

#176

Post by millermp12 »

stevendhansen wrote: post #23

Except it isn't just the spread of misinformation. Even more important (IMHO) is the insulating effect of showing people only like-minded opinions, effectively trapping everyone in a bubble. I can't think of any way Facebook can solve this problem without drastically decreasing their reliance on ad revenue. What are they going to do, force people to view opinions they disagree with?

Can't this charge be leveled at the NYTimes?

Misinformation is not a right-wing phenomenon, as much as it appears to be a comfort food for the Left these days.

It's very telling that the "obvious" solution for the defeated party is a more powerful stranglehold on the flow of information, to appoint the "right" people to curate reality for those who cannot be trusted with it.

In which case, it's going to be a long sojourn in the wilderness my friends...

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

#177

Post by masmullin »

> Last week Buzzfeed reported on an entire cottage industry of web users in Macedonia generating fake news stories related to Trump vs Clinton in order to inject them into Facebook’s Newsfeed as a way to drive viral views and generate ad revenue from lucrative US eyeballs.

Does anyone else find this incredibly ironic? Buzzfeed ratting out others doing clickbait?

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

#178

Post by overcast »

lightbyte wrote: post #171
overcast wrote: post #156

This is seriously hilarious. Now that's he's won, against seemingly all odds, we have to find some other reason for why EVERYONE ELSE, was completely WRONG. Every media outlet, everyone in politics, all the polls, completely shit on Trump. Now look who is the most powerful person in the entire world. The Democrats, and the rest, did it to themselves. Overconfidence, smear campaigns, and all of the morons doing the po…

>we have to find some other reason for why EVERYONE ELSE, was completely WRONG >and the people have spoken Trump lost the popular vote, so this isn't true. He got about 25% of the total voting population overall.

Irrelevant. This is a republic, not a democracy.

If you want to cherry pick small percentages by comparing to the voting age population.

Clinton got 25.5% and Trump got 25.4%

Voting population 235,248,000

99% reporting per Google Polls.

Trump 47% 59,821,874

Clinton 48% 60,122,876

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

#179

Post by [deleted] »

btilly wrote: post #11

This 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…

[deleted]

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

#180

Post by ethbro »

jerf wrote: post #159
Bud wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no need to create a Grand Unified Theory of misinformation, here. This problem isn't that hard. You filter this stuff and rank it by its SOURCE, not by the content of individual articles. It's not hard to figure out which online sources are pushing out most of the abjectly-bad propaganda, and de-rank them.

"This problem isn't that hard. You filter this stuff and rank it by its SOURCE, not by the content of individual articles." I don't think reifying ad hominem into code is the solution to the problem. Of course, if you don't mind a rare few false positives here and there on articles, I've got your filter right here: def source_is_trustworthy(source): return False Remember as you sit here thinking through your exceptio…

I don't think you're ever going to detect truth correctly, but you can absolutely detect falsehood.

Compare "{Candidate} up over 5000% in polls" vs "{Candidate} up over 15% in polls".

Baby steps. PageRank wasn't built in a day.

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