111–120 of 151 posts
This is such a slippery slope. Even now snopes hasn’t debunked the “Trump tower server communicating to Russia”[1] story even though it was simply spam and is soundly debunked. And when we learned that or national intelligence agencies wire tapped a duly elected president? CNN called it fake news (“we’re dumber for having heard that”). If we let these “fact checkers” control the narrative we’re sacrificing our own ab…
Give me a break. We sacrificed our ability to critically judge things for ourselves the second we decided we're ok with algorithmic feeds and timelines. Adding fact checkers only changes some input variables - the net result is still that each social media user lives in a thought prison of their own design.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Rather than picking a set of biases and viewpoints and presenting that, news orgs and silicon valley have decided that $thing_i_agree_with and $the_opposite_view deserve equal reach/airtime No, we do that because a marketplace of subjective ideas is a good thing.
Except a lot of the "ideas" aren't subjective. The most obvious case would be climate change. Regularly, climate skeptics are given the same amount of airtime as climate scientists, despite the fact that the evidence and opinion is overwhelmingly in support of climate change being a real problem. A realistic panel would be 98 climate scientists on one side, and two climate skeptics on the other. By giving someone wit…
I still can’t convince many of my left leaning friends we should be using nuclear power despite the clear risks we face from climate change.
"On the issue of fake news, Facebook has held off on a total ban, instead limiting the spread of articles marked as false by vetted fact-checkers. However, that approach can leave fact-checkers overwhelmed and able to tackle only the most viral hoaxes." Does anyone else find this concerning? Even the smallest bias held by fact-checkers can dramatically skew things towards one side e.g. only "fact-check" articles that…
You find it concerning because it's easy to abuse. The fact-checkers get to decide what is "true", and other Facebook users are unlikely to listen to you if you try and convince them that the fact-checkers are wrong.
Positioning anyone to be an information filter is wrong.
Full stop.
This is totalitarianism 101. It doesn't matter if they're right or wrong. Freedom isn't predicated on moral superiority - it is the polar opposite. Freedom is exactly for those who are "wrong".
I cannot imagine a more dangerous position for Facebook to take.
> Months ago, senior Facebook executives briefly debated banning all political ads, which produce less than 5 percent of the company’s revenue, sources said. The company rejected that because product managers were loath to leave advertising dollars on the table... Gotta remember what's most important. /s
Do you have a problem with political ads on tv? From my perspective we should have campaign finance laws that regulate political ad spending, but there's nothing inherently wrong with showing political ads on tv, facebook, or elsewhere.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, Facebook is different than television because ads can be targeted extremely narrowly. This makes them hard to audit and possible to use ads for things like voter suppression of populations that are likely to vote a certain way.
Advocating for/against a specific policy or politician is one things. Attempting to disenfranchise a group of people through misinformation is another.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You find it concerning because it's easy to abuse. The fact-checkers get to decide what is "true", and other Facebook users are unlikely to listen to you if you try and convince them that the fact-checkers are wrong.
Honestly, the much harder problem is convincing people that fact checkers are right , if they already disagree with the fact checker. And they are much more numerous than those who already happened to agree with the fact checker.
Somebody says "the speed of light is 300,000 km/s" and you go to a fact checker and you get:
> "TRUE: The speed of light is approximately 300,000 km/s."
Then you go to another one and you get:
> "FALSE: the speed of light is actually 299,792,458 m/s in a vacuum and has a medium-dependent value through air, water or another medium ... "
Then you get into an argument with someone where the distinction matters and they cite the first one, or get into one where it doesn't and they cite the second one.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Rather than picking a set of biases and viewpoints and presenting that, news orgs and silicon valley have decided that $thing_i_agree_with and $the_opposite_view deserve equal reach/airtime No, we do that because a marketplace of subjective ideas is a good thing.
Except a lot of the "ideas" aren't subjective. The most obvious case would be climate change. Regularly, climate skeptics are given the same amount of airtime as climate scientists, despite the fact that the evidence and opinion is overwhelmingly in support of climate change being a real problem. A realistic panel would be 98 climate scientists on one side, and two climate skeptics on the other. By giving someone wit…
Is this actually a thing? As far as I can tell what actually happens is that outlets like Fox News just pretend climate change doesn't exist. They don't host a panel on it with climate skeptics, they just avoid discussing it at all, or center discussions around ad hominem attacks on the character or financial/political incentives of anyone who proposes doing anything about it.
Granted it's hard for them to discuss anything at all now that cable news airtime is 89% commercials.
They'll most likely filter out anything conservative.
That's what the article is about filtering, so if conservatives aren't doing that more than liberals, their posts won't be hit more.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Instead of mass voter manipulation of voters through the establishment media? Nobody would be in a panic at all if Hillary had won.
America had to pick between an idiot, a criminal, and a socialist. They literally had no one to vote for. The country would be upset regardless of who won.