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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

#301

Post by killwhitey »

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 used to be a feature on Twitter for viewing other people's feeds[1], but was removed[2].

I made something to replicate that via Twitter Lists[3][4], but it seems like making one for Facebook is much more important.

[1] https://twitter.com/twitter/status/73833309163110400

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12117218

[3] https://otherside.site/

[4] https://gist.github.com/0x263b/7b391a1617fcbbabc57fb1e705884...

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

#302

Post by overcast »

pnathan wrote: post #287
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 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...

So because Trump was elected, it was shaped by marketing. If Hillary was elected, it was their will alone. Even though the Clinton campaign spent twice the amount of money.

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

#303

Post by weberc2 »

yolesaber wrote: post #269
weberc2 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I blame it on the left's constant, ruthless beratement and demonization of Christian|white|rural|blue-collar|conservative people. I'm not surprised they pushed back after a decade of bullying in the name of tolerance.

Oh yeah I forgot it was the evil left that was demonizing people during the past ten years. Certainly no Christians during that time berated and demonized someone just on the basis of say, their sexual orientation or religious beliefs. Give me a break. The right lost the culture wars (for good reason as their regressive social policies trampled all over civic rights) and this is them sending our country into a suicid…

I rest my case.

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

#304

Post by gdulli »

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…

When I knew people who supported Romney, I felt no need based on that to exclude them from my life or my social media circles.

One's ability to support Trump tells me much more about a person. There are too many things that are good and should be fundamental about a functional, enlightened society that one must reject in order to support Trump. Prejudice, fraud, bullying, and sexual harassment must all be accepted.

People who would accept these things are not welcome in my life. It's not because they're on the other side. It wasn't like this in 2008 or 2012. This time it goes deeper than that.

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

#305

Post by tdb7893 »

return0 wrote: post #268
tdb7893 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I presume that pollsters did their job well. There is a pattern here, they got it wrong both with Brexit and with Trump. I think bad polling was not the reason. The media, the government and academia have created an atmosphere of militant orhodox liberalism, where dissenting voices are not only silenced, but often ridiculed, doxxed, forced to resign etc. These people will choose to disappear from the polls. They will…

He is in charge of the EPA now but he tweeted that global warming is a conspiracy created by the Chinese. He is in charge of the State Department but he thinks that Mexico will pay for a border wall. He is charge of the FDA and he thinks that vaccines cause autism. Some of his views are deeply disturbing on a level much deeper than just "orhodox liberalism"

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

#306

Post by jasonm23 »

ethbro wrote: post #252
dasil003 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No because popularity does not equal truth.

It doesn't? Because in the sense that popularity is "agreement with consensus scientific opinion" then it absolutely does.

When was this ever the definition of popularity.

I'd like it if it was, but I've never witnessed popularity that embodies that statement.

Popular opinion is usually informed by the most often repeated narrative.

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

#307

Post by hx87 »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #273
hx87 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Separate ideology (or whatever happens to be the object of bias) from identity, and you're halfway there. People are much more amenable to changing their minds if their identities aren't at stake. For example, most people can discuss the pros and cons of F-150s and Silverados fairly rationally; those with the Calvin pissing logos, not so much.

Again agreed. But how would you accomplish that? For large majorities of voters, dropping that ballot in the box is over 90% an identity game.

On a societal level, your guess is good as mine. Perhaps increased infrastructure spending so that high-skill, high-pay jobs are more evenly spread out and ideological segregation is reduced?

On an individual level, being active in (non-political) hobbies and volunteer groups can help, especially ones that attract both people from the cities and the countryside.

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

#308

Post by DefaultUserHN »

ethbro wrote: post #39
jerf wrote: 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…

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).

They can just form a group of truth checker, a ministry of sort, who's job is to inform people of the truth. They can call it the Ministry of Truth, where busy citizens who have no time to research can get their truths from.

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

#309

Post by piotrjurkiewicz »

So what do they propose? To hire more human editors/moderators to evaluate/censor links and stories?

FB already has too much power and its moderators affects 'politically undesirable' content too much.

One week ago, FB blocked an event page of Independence March, which traditionally takes place on November 11th (Polish Independence Day) in Warsaw. This is the biggest mass event of Independence Day, having more than 100k participants each year.

FB also blocked or removed pages of NGOs and political parties, which are organizing or support the march (some of them had 80k or 170k followers) and personal accounts of people involved in these organizations.

Then FB went full rage and started to block personal accounts of everyone who invited or even positively mentioned the Independence March, including for example the personal account of editor-in-chief of the second largest daily newspaper in Poland (https://twitter.com/sjastrzebowski/status/793001362070052864).

The most extreme case was the personal account of a MP, who wrote on his timeline: "I will be [on the Independence March] along with my family, whether FB likes that or not." (https://twitter.com/jakubiak_marek/status/793497135954202625...) His profile was blocked for 24 hours after that.

Another case was a personal profile of a retired Intelligence Agency officer, who revealed in a FB post, that a local coordinator of an anti-government liberal-left protest movement during the communist period was a colonel of Soviet-dependent military intelligence agency.

All of this happened just within the last month. FB actions generated a huge pushback and hit the headlines. Deputy Minister of Justice qualified FB actions as "censorship". Minister of Digitization tweeted that she "asked FB management for a talk". Many people started deleting their FB accounts in protest.

FB got frightened and reactivated the event page of Independence March, but many nationalist/conservative organizations profiles still remain blocked.

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