Facebook relatively recently reaction buttons. Would a "This is untrue" reaction button help?
Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation
341–350 of 645 posts
Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation
#342The biggest source of bias in the media is not related to feeding people false information, it's about misdirection.
If you have two articles A and B, where A is more important than B, sometimes the media outlet will deliberately choose to publish B instead of A if it matches their philosophy better (even though it's less important). If the news outlet shows each reader 5 articles of type B for every 1 article of type A - Then they are manipulating the reader's opinion to become biased towards type B thinking (by focusing their attention on less important stuff). It doesn't matter if all articles are 100% accurate, your perception is being affected through the exposure imbalance; through priming.
I think that's what happened with the Clinton/Trump fiasco; "Hillary media" was publishing more articles about Trump's "sexual deviance and unstable character" while "Trump media" was publishing more articles about Hillary's "deception and murky financial schemes".
Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the scoring system does anything other than maximize engagement with Facebook, Facebook ends up making less money and performing worse on KPIs than they otherwise would. It'd be very difficult for any decision maker at Facebook to build, deploy, and maintain that feature. It'd be the sort of thing that'd only be there if otherwise the company would be under existential threat.
> under existential threat You mean government regulation a la China because some memes really are dangerous? If you increase the velocity of transmission, then even in a free system there are some dangerously infectious falsehoods that it might be in the public good to slow. Think War of the World on Facebook.
Ah, but herein lies the difference. Memes seem to universally promote freedom of communication, communication about freedom, and a way to react to the oppression of the status quo. In China, this is counter to the powers that be, but in America, this is fully aligned with the anti-regulation party that is sweeping through all branches of government. Memes play into their hands, and so Facebook would never be under existential threat.
Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation
#344I 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 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).…
Well, is there a fact-checker that doesn't claim Trump's very unenthusiastic acceptance of war with Iraq when asked by surprise on the Howard Stern show means that Trump is somehow lying when he says he didn't support the war?
It's stuff like this, turning a single reluctant "I guess so" or "probably" or "it seems we should" into support, that make supposed fact-checkers suspect. Who will fact-check the fact checkers? The supposed fact-checkers were just another political weapon, tainted as could be.
Fact checkers are like certificate authorities. Once you lose credibility, you might as well close shop. You're done.
Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation
#345"Rhetorical Fever" is entirely too contagious. Recovery from it can provide immunity, but is fairly rare. (See Shikasta by Nobel-Prize winner Doris Lessing for more).
Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
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"
The response to people who are wrong should be to engage and argue with them. By tossing them as deplorables they will keep to themselves until they can get back at you.
The use of "deplorables" is presumably a reference to Clinton's remarks and it's really interesting you reference that here because her point of that comment is similar to yours in that you can't just lump all Trump supporters into the racist and xenophobic basket that many people did. I agree with you and I will gladly argue politely with people who are willing but I don't think it's unfair to criticize such damaging views in a presidential candidate.
Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 v…
A couple thoughts:
- How do we get broad, bi/cross/multi-partisan support?
- Is there any precedence for news articles having citations/eligible for peer-review (post-published, of course) similar to scientific papers?
Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation
#348I 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 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).…
>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). We have reached a point where the only truth is what they decide is the truth. //
This is similar to the UK going in to the Brexit vote. Politicians that were promoting the break away from Europe were pushing hard the idea that "we don't need experts" and that listening to expert opinions was wrong (listening to experts like pro-Brexit economists who stated, in common with the anti-s, that Britain would be financially worse off leaving Europe).
It's like the media managed to spin the idea that all people who have rigorously studied something are not to be trusted. The biggest wtf is that it worked, writing a big fat lie in big fat letters on a bus trumps (heh!) countless professors of economics telling the people it's a lie.
The trap is to conclude that people are idiots, postmodernism is not really the reason either I feel. The reason IMO is that the media have become very very good at manipulating people's thought processes and feeding them a position with out resorting to having the person think through that position. Yay, we've won, the media can now make us all believe whatever they want.
But don't panic all those rich politicians and business people are sure to use their powers for good ... /s
Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation
#349This 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…
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…
I think I would argue that this is beyond an AI-complete problem, it is an unanswerable problem. For instance, consider the following spectrum of ideas:
- The earth is flat
- 9/11 conspiracy theories
- Barack Obama was born in Kenya
- Anti-vax
- Climate change denial
- Anti-GMO
- Denial of underlying quantum randomness in the universe
- The Clinton Foundation has been or is involved in some shady dealings
- Muslims want to implement Sharia law in Europe
- The minimum wage decreases employment
- Donald Trump has sexually assaulted a number of women
- Monetary policy impacts the real economy
- The sun will, on balance, probably rise tomorrow
I've sorted this in a (rough, personal) order of increasing plausibility / conformance with facts. Where is the line between misinformation and alternative information? As a human, it's pretty unclear to me.
Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation
#350Earlier 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 think The Guardian is a bad example of this. Their articles follow a particularly narrow group of viewpoints. They will never have the mainstream (liberal) appeal as the New York Times or the Washington Post.
Don't you mean a good example of this?