Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation • Hacker News Board

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

#441

Post by xs » Fri, Nov 11, 2016, 5:18 AM UTC

sandworm101 wrote: post #248

xs wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was trying to paint the picture that Facebook is the one passing along messages from one person to another. So yes, people could turn their computer off and go directly to someone elses house and tell them the message, but I think we've grown accustom to sending messages to each other over social media.

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

#442

Post by the8472 » Fri, Nov 11, 2016, 5:20 AM UTC

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…

> Now they are in a situation where they are damned if they do, damned if they don't. And people immersed in echo chambers will accuse them of bias no matter what.

What if they simply change the algorithm to perform some graph clustering/principal component analysis on the stories that are shared organically among groups and then inject let's say 10% stories that are disproportionally shared by other clusters, but not this one?

The granularity could be tweaked to chunk everything into let's say ~5 clusters per nationality and language.

The machines do not have to assess facts, they just have to allow people to see beyond their friend-horizon. So call it the bubble-burster.

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

#443

Post by nl » Fri, Nov 11, 2016, 5:20 AM UTC

ethbro wrote: post #383

nl wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how do you think that they would do that? Choosing a random story from politifact: http://www.politifact.com/missouri/statements/2016/nov/06/ro... Like most false stories, there is a hint of truth to this but that doesn't make it true. Politfact spends 3 pages discussing it, and concludes: Courts did object in three cases to decisions Kander made as secretary of state. But the specifics of those cases are much mo…

I'm not surprised parsing something nuanced is beyond state of the art. But what about "illegal immigrants are committing an epidemic of rape against our children" or "we have a flood of illegal immigrants"? A lot of claims that were made this cycle are rooted in measured quantities where the measurements we have disagree with the claims.

Define "epidemic of rape" or "flood of illegal immigrants".

If there is at least one rape or at least one illegal immigrant then it becomes subjective or contextual.

Is 3 rapes a flood? What if it is in a week in one town? What if one was by a former illegal immigrant? What if it is over the course of a year, but all 3 occurred in one day?

Is 20 illegal immigrants a flood? What if they all arrive in a town with a population of 100?

Who is "we"? Is a story about millions of illegal immigrants in Greece relevant? What if it about thousands of illegal immigrants working in Athens? What if Athens is in Georgia?

A real example:

"Broken Families: Raids Hit Athens' Immigrant Community Hard" vs "Athens crackdown shows no hospitality for illegal migrants"

One is a real headline from Georgia, the other from Greece. Can you tell which is which?

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

#444

Post by tdaltonc » Fri, Nov 11, 2016, 5:24 AM UTC

B-Con wrote: post #375

colllectorof wrote: post #363

"OMG, Trump has won through lies and deception! We failed to stop him. How on Earth did that happen? We must out-manipulate our opponents next time." If you read between the lines, this is what the article condenses to. The discussion here is mostly creepy groupthink shit. Social networks fact-checking their content? What's next? Should AT&T stop the spread of misinformation over its phone lines? Should USPS fact-che…

Agreed. The problem is the users, not the platform. If users propagate misinformation, the users propagate misinformation. The easy solution people often jump to is fighting negatives with negatives, assuming it yields a positive. But often a positive approach is more effective. Offering incentives for good acts, not just disincentives for bad acts, is a fairly popular recent trend backed by research. In this case I…

If the news feed were just a reveres chronological list of everything your friends posted, then I'd agree with you -- facebook would be just a medium. But they filter and sort it.

I would actually like to have a knob or a switch I could use to add or remove certain elements from the news feed filter algo. I think it would be great if one of those parameters was a (open source) "factuality score."

they're already doing this with click-bate, why not brain-rot? Especially if it's an optional feature.

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

#445

Post by thecrazyone » Fri, Nov 11, 2016, 5:33 AM UTC

jerf wrote: post #27

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…

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…

Why not do what Twitter does and let the floodgates open I.e. Do no filtering?

I'm however doubtful that a "successful" social network would learn from struggling one. Well C'est la vie.

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

#446

Post by shinamee » Fri, Nov 11, 2016, 5:34 AM UTC

the8472 wrote: post #442

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…

> Now they are in a situation where they are damned if they do, damned if they don't. And people immersed in echo chambers will accuse them of bias no matter what. What if they simply change the algorithm to perform some graph clustering/principal component analysis on the stories that are shared organically among groups and then inject let's say 10% stories that are disproportionally shared by other clusters, but no…

Quite sensible. The more options the better

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

#447

Post by gozur88 » Fri, Nov 11, 2016, 5:36 AM UTC

lingben wrote: post #435

emodendroket wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you could avail yourself of some of your erudition and explain what relationship these three links have to your objection.

https://www.fastcoexist.com/3061574/the-new-nationalism-of-b...

It has less to do with "the digital age" and more to do with governments ignoring large numbers of voters. This is what's supposed to happen when the ruling class gets out of touch.

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

#448

Post by _audakel » Fri, Nov 11, 2016, 5:42 AM UTC

why not just add a "spam flag" on all posts and let the users clean it up? Or something like a downvote.

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

#449

Post by dmode » Fri, Nov 11, 2016, 5:49 AM UTC

DrScump wrote: post #355

dmode wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please point to the Obama quote on government appointed gatekeepers.

Here's one relevant monologue: "We are going to have to rebuild within this wild-wild-west-of-information flow some sort of curating function that people agree to," Obama said at an innovation conference in Pittsburgh. "There has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those that we have to discard, because they just don't have any basis in…

I don't see anywhere he says that there will be government appointed gate keepers

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

#450

Post by MaxfordAndSons » Fri, Nov 11, 2016, 5:53 AM UTC

jerf wrote: post #159

Bud wrote: 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…

The case of news sources failing to predict events seems like a red herring in the larger debate here - news media is generally about reporting events that have actually happened. Predicting presidential elections or other uncertain events is a side hustle they've been dragged into because it sells. And if you throw out their predictive failures, I think it's pretty easy to compose a trustworthiness function based on overall factual accuracy. And sure, there may be lingering biases that need to be corrected for, but even so, the MSM biases generally don't extend into the realm of pure fabrication, whereas clickbait outrage farms absolutely do - and they are a large chunk of the problem.