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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

#491
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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. P…

But Hillary supports Bill ? Why don't you support Bill but support Hillary ?

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

#492

Throwaway for obvious reasons. It's dangerous to support reform against the reactionary left. I'm a Trump voter. I consider myself pretty well educated (M.Sc. CS/EE, honors), and I work in a research lab. I'm not your typical Trump voter. Full disclosure: I'm also an immigrant (legal one, nearly 20 years), naturalized US citizen, I make several hundred thousand dollars a year, and pay a ton in taxes. I'm liberal on s…

I would like to hear you elaborate on your reasons for voting Trump, particularly what kinds of changes you are expecting/looking forward to.

Happy to oblige. Let's get the big one out of the way: I disagree with Trump on climate change. That said, the current president did jack sh#t about it, and so would Clinton (who is owned by her wealthy donors). Combined with the fact that the President can't enact policy unilaterally, and there's broad consensus around climate change in the legislative branch, I don't think too much damage will be done if any at all.

I voted for Trump for several primary reasons:

1. I'm very much against war, and Clinton has shown herself as a war hawk again, and again, and again, and basically wrecked much of the Middle East as a secretary of state. Enough is enough. This alone would have been a sufficient reason for me to vote for Trump. 2. I do not believe in government handouts. I believe that for prosperity, and especially to improve the lives of the working poor, it is necessary to create jobs. To do this, you need to reduce supply of unskilled, below-minimum-wage labor flowing across the border, and make keeping jobs in the country the low energy state into which corporations will naturally arrive, if they want to have US markets at their disposal. Trump promised both of those things. 3. I do not believe that free flow of military age males from the countries with which we're de-facto at war is a wise thing to have. Refugee needs would be much better served by their neighbors, not by people whose military blew up their relatives. 4. It is becoming blindingly obvious that Obamacare is a trillion-dollar handout to the Big Pharma and medical insurance companies. The healthcare is SIGNIFICANTLY more expensive now than it was before, and coverage is worse as well. And the cost is growing double digit percentages every year. Donald Trump promised to improve competition by allowing import of drugs and letting people shop for medical insurance across state lines. Not sufficient, IMO, but we just can't afford to pay 10x for the same drugs anymore. 5. The vast majority of Donald Trump's contributions comes from his small scale supporters, not from Wall St and megacorps. As such, he's not beholden to their interests, unlike certain other candidate. Thiel being the only notable exception I can name off the top of my head. 6. I've found what the press did in this cycle completely disgusting.

So TL;DR: anti-war, pro-jobs, anti-sjw/pc, pro-LGBT, not owned by Wall St or the establishment. That sounds pretty good to me, loose tongue and personal antics notwithstanding. I don't agree with him on some things, but by and large there's more overlap than with Clinton.

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

#493

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…

> face the reality

Talk about reality checks.

You guys wanted to have it too fast and too easy. You though you can change things by passing laws and silencing criticism with media hysteria. You celebrated your superficial legal victories while completely ignoring the fact that sentiments against "affirmative actions", "LGBT rights", feminists, Muslims, Blacks and whatnot had been steadily growing for ten years all over the West.

You gave voice to the most bitter representatives of minorities to sell them as victims to the general population and didn't mind that the venom they spill enrages everybody else. As if you completely didn't expect that one day somebody may give voice to the most bitter of your opponents.

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

#494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. And facebook does not pretend it 's not pro-Hillary (its CEO endorsed her). That doesn't mean the discussion is not warranted. In fact it's long overdue. Facebook is now a medium like the rest, it needs to be regulated like the press imho.

"Regulated like the press?" What the hell does that mean?

Freedom from censorship, enforcement of defamation laws.

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

#495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to hear you elaborate on your reasons for voting Trump, particularly what kinds of changes you are expecting/looking forward to.

Happy to oblige. Let's get the big one out of the way: I disagree with Trump on climate change. That said, the current president did jack sh#t about it, and so would Clinton (who is owned by her wealthy donors). Combined with the fact that the President can't enact policy unilaterally, and there's broad consensus around climate change in the legislative branch, I don't think too much damage will be done if any at all…

Thank you for responding, this gave me food for thought. (Also, you can add extra line breaks in your comment to get breaks between your numbered points.)

Also wondering how much you were convinced about Trump's sincerity. Whether he truly cares about the promises he made or the people he made them to.

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

#496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

>... and now Wikileaks has invited the whole internet to come play Richelieu with them

But why do you think that the whole internet wants to play the part of Richelieu, everyone is allowed to choose the role they want and wikileaks does not hide the context of the emails, everyone is perfectly able to check the whole correspondence. If anything the mass media is hiding the context because of their format and time limits.

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

#497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh... unless you have numbers, I'm going to disagree. I don't visit FB much, but I've seen enough other social media to know that both sides play the same game. They both leave out data, mis-use existing data, and outright lie. I'd love statistics to prove me wrong.

Isn't that what the person you are replying to is essentially saying? That it's both sides, not just the right?

Is it? I took it to mean that it's coming from one side. Maybe I'm mis-understanding?

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

#498

Here's a tool someone could write. Write a browser add-on which modifies Facebook pages so that the news links are changed to Google, Bing, and Wikipedia searches for the news headline. Connect to Google/Bing in a mode with no signin or cookie info, so you don't get "search personalization". This will get you out of Facebook's filter bubble quickly. Google and Bing have problems, too, but they are somewhat better at…

Better and easier to do a Google News search for the link itself. If the link doesn't show up in news search, it can be considered a less credible source. If the link shows up, it'll be accompanied by follow up sources

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

#499
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

As someone who vehemently opposes Trump, I feel that allegations of anti-Trump bias in the mainstream media were entirely correct and somewhat to be expected. Although Trump is certainly a name that sells papers, Trump's repeated threats to open up news media to broader libel laws were not well received. The news organizations' endorsements were pretty one-sided[0]. I don't want to take you too literally, but it seem…

You must have missed the leaked emails in which Clinton exerts massive influence on the media, planning every last details in exchange for all kinds of rewards [0]

[0] http://observer.com/2016/08/wikileaks-reveals-mainstream-med...

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

#500
post #375

"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…

Hmm, I mostly agree, but it's important to remember that a bad mechanism can encourage bad behavior as well. Facebook must make choices about design of the feed algorithm that have important effects on incentives and behavior. So even if they take a minimal censorship role, we cannot ignore the effect of the feed algorithm - in fact, we should focus on how to design it!

For example, the extent to which one "bubbles" users into their own echo chamber is largely up to the algorithm designer. If you look at "content aggregator" sites like HN, reddit, Facebook, they all have pros and cons. HN and reddit give incentives in the form of karma. They all have different levels of "bubbling" and opting into or out of bubbles.

Good design of such sites is an open problem -- even formalizing good goals for such sites is an open problem -- but it is a design problem we should be thinking about and addressing.

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