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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

#211
post #125
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right. Telling bullies "no" does risk that other bullies will leave your site. But that risk is already there. And Facebook is already seen as political; that ship has sailed.

>And Facebook is already seen as political; that ship has sailed. I don't think that's true. Certainly the extremes on each side will say that. But I think everyone in the middle doesn't. I don't. Certainly not in the same way as I see Fox News/CNN/MSNBC as political.

We're only talking about the extremes. We're talking about spurious pressure from alt-right media.

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

#212
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now they are in a situation where they are damned if they do, damned if they don't. And people immersed in echo chambers will accuse them of bias no matter what. You are making an assumption that algorithms can not be biased. Earlier, humans were biased. Now, algorithms are biased.

Provided the data isn't wrong, we can typically put tight statistical error bounds on the output of various ML algorithms. Most people's understanding of how algorithms can be "biased" is completely wrong. There was a whole furor a while back about algorithms discriminating due to language differerences in the data for people of different races. Guess what; if you give race as a parameter to any half-decent algorithm…

> Guess what; if you give race as a parameter to any half-decent algorithms trained on that data, the algorithm will learn that the written data contains those biases.

You know what? Even if you do not give race as a parameter; an algorithm could be biased. It can easily learn race from secondary or tertiary parameters.

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

#213
post #139

I'm still waiting for the day that there's a responsible entity that only ever publishes things when they're 100% certain and is willing to bet their freedom (going to prison) on it. But given how information and influencing of opinions is a market and means control of the population, I'm afraid this won't happen with official support, and only be seen as the crazy lunatics news agency that publishes stuff a week or…

That's scary. 100% certain? Nothing is 100% certain. So they can't even say "it's likely to rain tomorrow"? This doesn't seem thought through.

Not all topics warrant certainty, but given the power of news outlets forming opinion and thereby influencing the population's behavior, I do think certain topics demand responsible reporting which doesn't report anything at all if uncertain. It's the same as a good police detective not disclosing speculations to the media because they pursue many leads but only conclude one, and you don't want a mob go lynch people. The same logic applies to news outlets forming people's opinions. That's why I think there's a need for, admittedly few, certain-report-only news agencies. That way, if you read posts on TheSun or E!Online, you get accustomed to not taking it seriously, forming doubt that this is most likely speculation. Once something gets confirmed unquestionably, it can migrate to one of the few vetted-only news outlets, if that's something they cover.

That said, our weather models are pretty good but not good enough to make certain predictions that far away into the future, but they can for the next few hours.

It's like a software company's model of code branches. The Apple/Google/whatever filesystem team works on something, it gets pushed into their level of production branch, then it percolates up to the shared production kernel branch, and after a couple more layers it hits the common branch, which is what public production binaries are made from and consists of kernel, userland, foobar modules all merged together. Not all software shops operate this way, but it's what size of a project can demand after it hits certain amount. The linux kernel works this way too, to name a successful non-commercial project. You can argue this doesn't prevent regressions, and that's true, but it's hard to deny there would be more regressions (aka false reporting) with unfiltered (aka unvetted) reporting.

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

#215
post #76

I think it would be relatively easy to have an "auto-snopes" feature which detects a URL being shared and immediately attaches a post that says "this has been debunked by X" For example - I've seen dozens of links to Michael Moore's trumpland speech which strategically ends with the phrase "America will elect Trump and it will feel great" Sample: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-25/michael-moore-trump... He conc…

I like this. But it needs to be open and multiple sources.

so you might get a panel with

SNOPES : FALSE NYT: FALSE HUFF: MIXED DAVID AVOCADO WOLFE: QUANTUM CRYSTAL HARMONIZED

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

#216

> 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?

Buzzfeed lately has been trying to 'outgrow' their reputation as clickbait, and actually do traditional investigative reporting. With moderate success.

I agree with you though, it's hard to take them seriously.

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

#217

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…

Fact check: Copernicus was not killed. He died of natural causes at 70. According to viral stories at the time, moments after having seen the first print of his book.

Maybe people confuse Copernicus with the advocate of related theories Giordano Bruno, who was killed in 1600 for his beliefs and advocacy (though not only for his beliefs about astronomy).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

People may also confuse Bruno with Galileo Galilei, who was punished by the Inquisition for his defense of Copernican theory, but not executed.

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

#218
post #180
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Correct. The singular value decomposition it was based on was first described 100 years before.

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

#219
post #45
post #6

The moderation of Facebook is outsourced to a select group of organizations, not unlike Twitter with their Trust and Safety Council. https://about.twitter.com/safety/council https://blog.twitter.com/2016/announcing-the-twitter-trust-s... Unsurprisingly, Twitter's Safety Council members are predominantly left-leaning with ties to the (now defunct) Clinton campaign. I would presume there are plenty of seats to be fille…

Isn't twitter moderation openly mocked for being, well, hardly functional at all? It's been a bastion of bigotry for the past year. It's Trump's main platform. If they're trying to suppress the right, they're doing a TERRIBLE job.

Oh they are doing a terrible job. And one of the reasons I don't use a platform that thinks its ok to name groups things straight out of "Fahrenheit 451".

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

#220
An interesting contextual point is that Amazon (or perhaps more precisely Jeff Bezos) has an outstanding and tremendously well respected journalism feature whereby the publish original, factual, well-researched articles every day at the Washington Post.
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