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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

#241

Post by kgwgk »

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.

> He got about 25% of the total voting population overall.

Clinton got about 24% of the total voting population in 1992 and 1996. What is your point?

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

#242

Post by makomk »

quirkafleeg wrote: post #127
tnones wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only reason it looks alt-right white-nationalist to you is because anyone on the left who disagrees with prevailing left wing dogma is branded a heretic and a bigot, and shut down quickly. Take The Guardian. They employ people like Jessica Valenti and Laurie Penny who publish feminist clickbait. Then they aggressively moderate comments which explain why those two are ill-informed at best and dishonest manipulator…

I may be missing something here, but what do your two paragraphs of axe-grinding about women have to do with his remark about American "alt-right white-nationalist thug media"?

What does two paragraphs of axe-grinding about woman like Jessica Valenti and Laurie Penny have to do with American "alt-right white-nationalist thug media"? Take a look at the narratives they've been pushing about Truump and the evils of the alt-right lately.

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

#243

Post by nkassis »

RankingMember wrote: post #101
AlexC04 wrote: 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…

This is a brilliant idea. My hope is for a similar thing to exist in real-time in future political debates, where live fact-checking spits back at anyone who speaks a mis-truth, nipping B.S. in the bud.

could we shock the candidates when 3/4 fact checkers disagree? Joking (mostly) aside. I like this idea as well. I think it could replace the useless and toxic chat/twitter feed that is put on websites hosting debate streams.

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

#244

Post by rayvd »

StanislavPetrov wrote: post #75

In corporate speak "misinformation" is defined as "any information that doesn't support our narrative". Certainly it is the goal of Facebook, the government, and every other large media corporation to control the flow of information. You need look no farther then Obama's recent statement that news needs to be "curated" by government appointed gatekeepers, to filter out all that pesky information that doesn't jive wit…

Yes. Tread lightly here. If you designate some power to determine what's good information and what's bad, you're headed down a pretty slippery slope.

Note: I really don't have an issue with Facebook doing this if they want. They're a company after all, not the government. I can just choose to get the information they deem 'bad' elsewhere.

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

#245

Post by withdavidli »

japhyr wrote: post #210

It's also on us to resist the temptation to build social media bubbles around ourselves, and to poke into each other's bubbles. Every time I've wanted to block a friend or relative on facebook, I've put my phone down and come back to it later. Looking away from people we disagree with isn't working. My cousin shared a post this morning asking why people on the left aren't celebrating the fact that a female campaign m…

There was a comment that just got deleted wondering about if people are just roaming around for liberals to hate on. The answer to that is yes. This just posted on my feed [1]. Driving around Wellesley (also where Clinton graduated from) taunting people.

[1] https://m.facebook.com/?_rdr#!/story.php?story_fbid=10210780...

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

#246

Post by nix0n »

squozzer wrote: post #165

A humble question -- Had Hillary won, would this post even be on HN?

Yes, because it's an interesting technical and social problem. I do admit the discussion here would have a different tone if the result had gone the other way, but not necessarily a better tone as there's plenty of vitriol on both sides.

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

#247

Post by tdb7893 »

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…

The polls weren't that off actually. They missed the mark overall by about 2%, which is actually pretty similar to the error in past elections. That's not very surprising because without being able to sample the actual distribution you need to make some assumptions for the statistics to work.

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

#248

Post by sandworm101 »

xs wrote: post #231
sandworm101 wrote: post #85

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.

Suppose you were the person to relay the message though. Imagine one friend tells you "Can you please tell Adam X", but you know X is a flat out lie and is actually horrible and offensive. So do you agree to spread the lie? Oh and you're doing this free, and it's not your friend it's 2 strangers.

"Can you please tell Adam X" is a hair away from spreading rumor, hearsay. I would ask, at least in the context of facebook, why the speaker cannot talk to Adam himself. If he cannot, if he doesn't have the connections required to speak to Adam, then his message probably isn't worth forwarding.

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

#250

Post by ethbro »

nl wrote: post #198
ethbro wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

This is basically impossible given the current and near future state of the art. The Allen AI group has been working on solving year 4 multiple choice science tests for about 3 years. They now score a bit over 60% correct, and that is a much easier task.

What I'm suggesting we start with is not exactly the same. The analogous question in that domain is "How accurate have they been in eliminating wrong answers?"

Everything has to be right for an answer option to be correct. Only one thing has to be wrong for it to be incorrect.

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