Facebook overrides fact-checks when climate science is “opinion”

In this case, the low-level moderators were apparently overruled by a self-describe “conservative” higher-up.

I’m not really sure what people expected from Facebook here.

The oldest of newspapers struggle with these kinds of judgements (until they just decide to stop caring and cater to a certain political side).

It is not reasonable to expect Facebook to get it right with any consistency, if there even is a definitive correct answer to begin with.

How many dead profiles are on there? I've just deleted mine, and in my circle of "friends" there were about 20 out of 350 that had updated their profile within the last year. Is there some kind of pareto distribution where Facebook has found its 'whales' that it can attract, and silently dropped all the other users, but kept their dead profiles?

I'm curious about the confederate general thing, do you have a link? It's true there is gray area everywhere, I guess I have a hard time believing that Facebook would bother stepping into a genuine aspect of history, in an area that isn't really much disputed.

Facebook is arbitraging manpower here.

Firstly, this article is about American issues, so it’s only the America issue “lens” that is being used to focus on issues. These same and similar issues must exist for every other country, many of whom have 0 ability to fund and afford individuals who can dedicate their time and lives to fact checking their Local power structures or narratives.

Secondly, even the constrained solution/issue space is too deep for Facebook to effectively police - leaving aside the philosophical arguments.

Removing statements which say “all minority people need to die” is easy,

Removing opinion pieces ? Suppose Kanye says he doesn’t believe in vaccines and that is his opinion. Remove ? Keep?

Is it noteworthy because a huge personality said it ? What about people who are B list celebrities. Or C list ?

What about an article which says “we find that the science on climate change makes claims that are not supported entirely by the data, here is why and here is research.” -

Now you need specialistS or have access to a network of diagnosticians who can tell you whether complex pieces of content are Trojans or not.

Facebook and social media enterprises are paying the price of the hollowing out of editorial boards. All those local newspapers and newsrooms where stuff gets filtered - that is the likely amount of (Skilled) manpower Facebook needs to employ to handle this.

This is where the social media model totally collapses - you can have issues with climate denial, fake medicine, voter suppression etc. - and sub divisions of these problem.

There’s never a shortage of problems and a fractal level of complexity.

How do you ever satisfy the verification needs at this point?

Therefore social networks will always have massive numbers of bad actors, subterranean cults, hidden mind viruses infecting armies of people, propaganda and legions of victims.

This isn’t an idle question - the problems here are about the nature of how humans structure Their networks, verify information and build trust.

Facebook or any social network will always fail at this, unless they see this as what it really is - time to make editorial decisions on content on the network at scale.

The Silicon Valley hey day ideal of free speech is dead. We’re now in a rear guard action to ring fence people from infectious and malicious ideas.

If you think this is a step too far, please remember that America has people actively fighting wearing face masks during the greatest modern Pandemic.