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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

#281
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"?

SOME women. You're already altering his words.

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

#282
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).…

This is something that concerns me a lot as well. How do we rebuild this?

Well, for a start we'd need some form of fact checking that was actually about just the facts rather than political spin, and that's really hard to do once politics becomes involved. Even purely factual questions like whether someone said something or not become blurry.

For example, take the child rape trial Hillary Clinton was a defence attorney for, in which she claimed that an unspecified person had told her the victim "is emotionally unstable with a tendency to seek out older men and to engage in fantasizing" and "has in the past made false accusations" to justify putting her through a nasty court-ordered psychiatric exam. Is this the same as Hillary herself making the claims? The original viral version and the victim saw it this way. Snopes argued that this was a lie because the document showed that other people had made the claims, neglecting to mention that the interpretation and wording was Hillary's and the existence and honesty of these other people rested entirely on her word. Neither of these is inherently more truthful than the other, it's a question of which spin is politically convenient.

This is probably the most clear-cut example imaginable too, since it's about the contents of a court filing. Most of the world is a lot more factually unclear, visible only through a lens of conflicting evidence and multiple sources of information.

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

#283
post #159
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 can't, however, pack up into a recipe how to do this yourself.

Sum (from: 0, to: PosInf, Enumerable: Source - Bias)

converges asymptotically to Truth

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

#284
I think it would be better to provide something like the opposite of "friends you'd get along with"

If we could switch the facebook algorithm to different modes - "people you agree with" "people who'd challenge you"

That would be better than straight up blocking false things. Let the conversations happen.

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

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on. You've highlighted one staff member as having once mentioned having a personal political leaning (like most people do) and that she once worked at a blog with a tarnished reputation and spun that into implying Snopes is untrustworthy. I'm sure you could meet this extremely low bar of "proof" for practically any news organization. If you really want to present a case of bias, find some real evidence. Specific…

This post wasn't meant to be a thorough debunking of Kim and snopes. I actually think snopes does a mostly good job of producing accurate information. However, it does show in some cases, such as the Hillary Libya "We didn't lose one person" question from the debate. http://www.snopes.com/hillary-clinton-benghazi-msnbc/ Snopes and Kim claim "Hillary Clinton overlooked Benghazi victims when she said that "we didn't lo…

> Neutral bias: Clinton made a decision to support the invasion of Libya. As a result of the invasion, Americans died in Benghazi.

Even that statement could be twisted if you draw the conclusion that Clinton supported the invasion, people died, therefore she is partly responsible. And it's missing information about the "600 requests for additional security".

I do understand and agree with your point.

Perhaps the more important issue is that some voters have an overly simplistic world view. "Casualties from an attack on a diplomatic enclave in a volatile country" should be separate from "US Foreign policy had implications for the conflict in Libya".

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

#286
post #27

Earlier 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…

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.

Exactly right. This should be strongly emphasized in our educational curriculum.

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

#287

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 people have spoken

many marketing and propaganda people would smile knowingly seeing this, knowing that the will of the people is very shapeable. It's been known for 90 years now...

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

#288

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…

This article would not have been written had the election outcome been different.

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

#289

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…

Please point to the Obama quote on government appointed gatekeepers.

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

#290
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Because, like it or not, Facebook has become a trusted news source. Because of that, they have a duty to accurately report the news. What other trusted news source has this "duty?" What other trusted news source does not have biased editors?

> What other trusted news source has this "duty?"

All of them.

> What other trusted news source does not have biased editors?

None of them, of course. Man is a fallible creature.

But other news sources try, most of the time, to be objective and accurate.

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