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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

#331

Post by EvilTerran »

nkassis wrote: post #236
gregpardo wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem these 'fact' checkers have become leftist doctrines... You just point to snopes or politifact and that is end of discussion? That's not how the world works. Wikileaks is a far more credible source than either of these. People need to do their own research if they want to form conclusions not just little to prepackaged conclusions.

I would argue that wikileaks on it's own can also be very misleading. Reading emails out of context and without knowing if they've been altered is probably not the best way to get a full picture. The value add of media looking at them is they can also go and get other sources to add context or to corroborate what they are reading in the wikileaks releases. Sources which aren't available to everyone. It's also easy to…

Give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, and I would find something in them to have him hanged.

... and now Wikileaks has invited the whole internet to come play Richelieu with them, only with ten thousand times the ammunition the Cardinal (apocryphally) asked for. The online mob has been accusing (eg) Podesta and his correspondents of all kinds of insane things - from corruption & arms dealing to satanism & child abduction - based on the flimsiest of cherry-picked quotes, even when the context (beyond the leaks, within them, even in the very same email sometimes) showed without doubt that their claims were obvious bunk.

And Assange merrily fed into that: drawing spurious connections on his twitter feed; linking/retweeting the fever dreams of naked partisans; and dragging out a single dump into an episodic drip-fed spectacle, all the better to whip his fans into an inquisitorial vigilante frenzy.

"wikileaks on it's own can also be very misleading"? I can't argue with that - except perhaps to say it's far too charitable.

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

#332

Post by ausjke »

dmode wrote: post #292
ausjke wrote: post #83

the elite mainstream media and the supposed-to-be-independent reporters are the biggest losers in this election, as they took sides so strongly that the other 50% will never bother to have anything to do with them. facebook needs improvement? sure, but more important, those biased media outlets will be irrelevant for most of the people due to not only technology advancement, but also what the news industry has been d…

What about the non-elite supposedly non-mainstream media ? Like Fox News ? Who perpetrated a false story days before the election and came back to apologize for it ? They are real winners right ?

for the record I don't read fox-news and don't know what you're talking about. I read Reuters but its US news is limited, I did some study and was educated it is probably the closest to be called as a neutral source.

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

#333

Post by yarou »

tdb7893 wrote: post #305
return0 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Regardless of how you feel about him, you can't deny that he knows his audience. He's a salesman par excellence.

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

#334

Post by bduerst »

remarkEon wrote: post #49
agildehaus wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the solution to "damned if you do, damned if you don't" here is to just remove the stupid news sidebar.

I imagine the news sidebar drives a lot of traffic. (I agree, though.)

Facebook fixes misinformation with this one weird trick! Publishers hate it.

(I couldn't resist)

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

#335

Post by gohrt »

z_mollusk wrote: post #64
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…

"they were pushed to that by accusations of bias in the right-wing media." Accusations of bias? I think you mean to say that actual Facebook employees stated this as a fact. And the story was covered by ALL news outlets, starting with Gizmodo.

> ALL news outlets, starting with Gizmodo.

That's like saying "the truth of this information is at least 0"

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

#336

Post by jondubois »

miles7 wrote: post #275
jondubois wrote: post #264

I don't think this is only Facebook's fault. I watched several extremely biased Youtube videos on both sides. I guess it's just how decentralized media works; it only tells people what they want to hear. Not so long ago, the media used to be relatively trustworthy, now everything has become propaganda. It started online mostly but now even major TV channels and newspapers which used to pride themselves on journalisti…

This assumes Fox is as biased in one direction as, say, NPR is in the other. But you can tell the quality of reporting from the content itself and the way it is presented. For example, while cable news channels will go to the same non-expert pundits for every story, NPR will actually call a different specific expert who is knowledgable to comment on each story.

Sure, that's something you have to account for as well (they're not equally biased).

That said, you'd be surprised how well media organizations can bend hard facts (and so-called 'experts') to match their opinions. People who've worked in quantitative market research will tell you that you can find pretty much any pattern you want in any data if you present it (and label it) carefully.

Just because they've put in extra work to get an 'expert' and did some research doesn't mean that they're unbiased; it just gives you extra confidence - But you still have to fact-check yourself.

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

#337

Post by gohrt »

brightball wrote: post #232
caseysoftware wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really want Facebook in this role? I guess it works as long as you agree with their choices, prioritization, and opinions but as we saw this cycle, there was a collusion between "journalists" and the Clinton campaign. Even if you see no problem with that, would you see a problem if the Trump campaign had done it?

Not particularly. Personally, I've always advocated for some type of "internet journalistic credentials" that could be embedded in meta tags to identify content producers, editors, originators and retractions according to a process of journalistic ethics that actually valued real journalism over content spam. Content originators over scraper and ad-farms. I'd honestly envision something closer to the BBB to manage th…

The BBB is just a way for angry consumer to snipe at vendors. It doesn't to any sort of investigation of issues, nothing close to Politifact or Snopes.

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

#338

Post by bduerst »

makomk wrote: post #57
duaneb wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Twitter moderation is slow and ineffective, but still partisan - they're jut not very good at it.

If it's ineffective then what is the evidence is it that it's partisan?

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

#339

Post by bmj »

kbenson wrote: post #271
cpr wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry. Most of the official sources in this recent campaign were dead wrong on a lot of issues, mostly because of their own massive biases.

Are you referring to wrong when they described what they thought was going on, which contains a large amount of opinion, or wrong on the facts as they exist? Facts can be presented in a biases way (generally through omission of other contextual facts), but if what is said is factual, at least that bit of information is still correct. If combining multiple sources to generate a grouping of facts, that presentation bia…

Or opinions can be presented as facts, or at least presented in a way that makes it hard to tell if it is reporting or analysis.

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

#340

Post by quirkafleeg »

unethical_ban wrote: post #281
quirkafleeg wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where does he use the words "SOME women" then, if you want to be this anal?
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