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Nancy Pelosi and Fakebook Dirty Tricks

nytimes.com

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Re: Nancy Pelosi and Fakebook Dirty Tricks

#61

Post by ianai »

manfredo wrote: post #59
ianai wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it’s entirely possible to have different legislation for different sized organizations. The tax bracket for individuals is an example. I’m more of the opinion that Facebook should be punished as an example. Don’t grow so big that your unilateral action could have devastating effects on society. Don’t do things with peoples data that remotely rises to the 1984 totalitarian level. See how fast we have publicl…

> Actually, it’s entirely possible to have different legislation for different sized organizations. The tax bracket for individuals is an example. Still illegal as per the First Amendment. The government cannot compel speech, regardless of company size. > I’m more of the opinion that Facebook should be punished as an example. Don’t grow so big that your unilateral action could have devastating effects on society. Don…

Facebook has a huge audience. They make it easy to for one entity to target a huge number of people with customized content per person. And yet people have some weird affinity to believe anything they see on it. If you instead had to work with several hundred facebooks across the world to target everybody it becomes more federated. The local facebooks would have more knowledge and incentive and resources to police their content for abuse.

Re: Nancy Pelosi and Fakebook Dirty Tricks

#62

Post by chias »

Barrin92 wrote: post #21
gfodor wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm assuming people railing on Zuck here don't like Zuck, so it's odd to me they would prefer he become the world's arbiter of permitted speech.

I don't prefer he become the arbiter of speech. I'd prefer the government would regulate his business and hold him accountable for the damage that lies and misinformation cause on his platform. Given that he recently called for more regulation, surely he'll agree.

> I don't prefer he become the arbiter of speech. I'd prefer the government would [...] hold him accountable for the damage that lies and misinformation cause on his platform

I'm understanding you correctly, you believe that Zuckerberg should be held liable for untruthful content hosted on its platform, but you also believe that Zuckerberg should not be allowed to choose what content is hosted on its platform.

How do you harmonize those two fundamentally contradictory viewpoints? Or do you feel that the only "correct" way forward is to excise Facebook in its entirety?

Re: Nancy Pelosi and Fakebook Dirty Tricks

#63

Post by drilldrive »

lazugod wrote: post #60
drilldrive wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump didn't spread the video, his lawyer Giuliani did. Trump pinned a video of spliced moments of Pelosi stumbling on her words: each segment was raw footage.

How is pinning the video not spreading it?

You are misreading my comment: there were two major videos of Pelosi that came to the fore recently. The one that Giuliani posted on his twitter was the one mentioned in the article, and the footage and audio was distorted and slowed down. Trump did not post this video. Trump posted the second video comprising of spliced segments of Pelosi speaking, each segment was raw footage of the House Speaker.

Re: Nancy Pelosi and Fakebook Dirty Tricks

#64

Post by gopher2 »

So, what's the normative suggestion here? All content on user-generated websites should be moderated for truth and anything edited, editorialized, fictional, or not strictly representing reality should be removed?

Or is the idea that only when there is enough public pressure to take down a particularly popular and deceptive video ... then it should be removed?

It seems sort of ridiculous that we should engage in across-the-board censorship of anything mis-representing reality in any way. OTOH removing things only as they become popular enough to go viral and meet some agreed upon definition of "fake" enough seems like it would establish a permanent, weird shouting match with no clear rules.

Or is the idea that we should ban and penalize Facebook specifically? Because they're Facebook. I don't really get that, but okay. We could do that. I don't think it would solve the user-generated content problem or the fake news problem.

We could not allow any website with posts, images and comments that isn't filtered through a some sort of sacred guardian of truth/editorial board. That sounds like a pretty locked-down version internet.

As some other commenters mentioned, the fact that the President/right-wing seem into this sort of approach and that this video became popular in the first place is a separate, sad issue.

I'd love for the NYTimes to spell out what they're advocating FOR as the solution. If it's just "delete facebook" and read our comments section instead, well-played I guess.

Re: Nancy Pelosi and Fakebook Dirty Tricks

#65

Post by manfredo »

jnbiche wrote: post #35
davidw wrote: post #27

I think several things can be true at the same time: * It's pretty worrying that our fascist-adjacent president is spreading doctored videos with essentially no repercussions. * Asking FB/Twitter/etc to police videos could be quite a mess in its own right. * This is a pressing problem for democracies around the world. (Note: I don't use the 'f word' lightly. Too many on the left use it freely with "people on the righ…

> Note: I don't use the 'f word' lightly. Too many on the left use it very freely with "people on the right they don't like". I think a person who loathes the free press, loves dictators, chafes at the idea of the rule of law, and threatens violence against political opponents fits the bill, though) You forgot "hates an independent judiciary" and "uses office for personal enrichment". Some may quibble with the use of…

> Some may quibble with the use of fascist to describe him, but he's very clearly authoritarian and anti-democratic.

That's pretty strange, seeing as he ran under the party that generally strives for lower government control in our lives - the direct opposite of fascism. And he has lessened government control in a variety of ways. One example (albeit one that is probably unpopular on HN) is deregulating telecoms.

The claim that Trump is even fascist-aligned is really only defensible if one uses the modern definition of fascist: a person that holds political views one deems offensive or bad.

Re: Nancy Pelosi and Fakebook Dirty Tricks

#66

Post by Macross8299 »

khuey wrote: post #43
Nition wrote: post #29

I don't fully understand why people think Facebook should be policing content, yet no-one thinks the phone company should delete SMS messages that are spreading misinformation, or the postal service should destroy false mail etc. It it because Facebook makes it much easier to share something with a wide audience? Is it because "the algorithm" means Facebook has more responsibility than if it were a simple chronologic…

tl;dr: yes, it's "the algorithm" Facebook (and Youtube et al) have chosen not to be content-agnostic distribution platforms (unlike the postal service and SMS). They perform a variety of editorial functions to curate content and provide recommendations with the objective of maximizing engagement and hence advertising impressions that they can sell. This is popularly known as "the algorithm". Given that these platform…

Facebook isn't an editor, though, it's a curator. You use them interchangably but I think there's a crucial difference. An editor modifies to inject their own standards into the work. A curator just includes or disincludes as-is.

Re: Nancy Pelosi and Fakebook Dirty Tricks

#68

Post by ianai »

ianai wrote: post #61
manfredo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Actually, it’s entirely possible to have different legislation for different sized organizations. The tax bracket for individuals is an example. Still illegal as per the First Amendment. The government cannot compel speech, regardless of company size. > I’m more of the opinion that Facebook should be punished as an example. Don’t grow so big that your unilateral action could have devastating effects on society. Don…

Facebook has a huge audience. They make it easy to for one entity to target a huge number of people with customized content per person. And yet people have some weird affinity to believe anything they see on it. If you instead had to work with several hundred facebooks across the world to target everybody it becomes more federated. The local facebooks would have more knowledge and incentive and resources to police th…

I can imagine a few ways this may be legally executed. One is to use the 1800s anti-trust laws to forcibly break up Facebook. Create the smaller entities I described in the process and say “this is the standard for a social media company.” Another would be to endow or reinforce citizens private data as some form of personal property. Give them the legal means to sue and demand payment for any storage of their PI. Make the costs of offenses steep. I am definitely not a lawyer though and not as up to date as I should be for this sort of spit balling.

Edit-I think they could also tie a temporal component and per instance cost of storing someone’s “PI”. That value could then be a basis to tax the corporation- create an incentive to “forget”.

Edit2-make a persons likeness and social media posts part of this “PI.” This would give Pelosi the legal right to the doctored content.

Re: Nancy Pelosi and Fakebook Dirty Tricks

#69

Post by vneumanarc »

Nition wrote: post #29

I don't fully understand why people think Facebook should be policing content, yet no-one thinks the phone company should delete SMS messages that are spreading misinformation, or the postal service should destroy false mail etc. It it because Facebook makes it much easier to share something with a wide audience? Is it because "the algorithm" means Facebook has more responsibility than if it were a simple chronologic…

"People" don't. I don't think social media companies should be policing anything. They should be agnostic platforms.

It's the establishment and the media/news companies that are demanding facebook censor according to their liking.

And what of "dirty tricks". There are "dirty tricks" in political ads/content all over TV, newspapers, radio, etc. Hell, CNN/NYTimes and much of the media outright colluded with Hillary and the Democratic party. Foxnews backed Trump.

If "dirty tricks" is this upsetting, then we might as well shut down all media.

Re: Nancy Pelosi and Fakebook Dirty Tricks

#70

Post by Simulacra »

rlt wrote: post #26

A bit ironic coming from Kara, who jumped on social media to condemn the Covington Catholic students before the whole story was out, but at least she admitted her mistake https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1087443815269584897

The tech media is just as much about gotcha stories as the rest of the media. Worse so, because the tech media is absolutely dependent upon its access to the tech industry, which it must always be careful to curb their reporting so as to not lose access.
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