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

arstechnica.com

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

#121

Post by Supermancho »

vorpalhex wrote: post #7

I remember being very concerned that the fact checkers wouldn't be operating in a vacuum and we'd have a bunch of facebook execs being arbiters of truth. And that appears to be exactly what has happened. This is terrifying. A handful of mainstream publications and a bunch of basically unknown facebook folks are now the censors. We've already seen well known EFF activists rated untrue for their arguments against warra…

> This is terrifying.

Ironically, this news is terrifying if you have a very inaccurate view of human behavior. The following posts about "mindless masses" is so dismissive that I have to question the voracity of the analysis. People who use facebook are constantly faced with the dissonance of things found on facebook that do not correlate with reality. Even if FB was your one source of truth (there are no people who "only use facebook" or FB+Google, etc) they cannot inherently trust everything they read from day to day contradiction with their own community realities.

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

#122

Post by Nasrudith »

anonbcpolitics wrote: post #77
tzs wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of section 230 of the CDA was to say that they can. Before 230, there had been court rulings that said if a platform moderated user supplied content they were liable for that content. Section 230 was written to reverse those rulings. I'm not sure why, but a myth has taken hold that under 230 you have to be neutral to get the liability shield.

It's not a new myth but a new suggestion. 230 was written for a bulletin board site in '96. Twitter and other social media behemoths still enjoy this protection. There's been proposals to hold these behemoths accountable by taking away their liability IF they do not act neutral and meet a certain criteria (X users, X income, etc.).

"Accountable", there is that weasel word again for "do what we want or else" without even defining it.

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

#123

Post by s1artibartfast »

vkou wrote: post #103
s1artibartfast wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The grey area and room for debate is much greater for truth than nudity and sexuality. zuckerbergs policy preference was no censorship of fake news, not no censorship whatsoever.

> The grey area and room for debate is much greater for truth than nudity and sexuality. That's your subjective opinion. Different cultures will significantly disagree with you (and with the Zuck) on what the gray area for nudity and sexuality is.

Different cultures may disagree on what the policy should be, but Zuckerberg has the ability to create nudity rules that are objective, whether you agree with them or not.

For example, FB can make a policy that says no exposed nipples for females. There may be different opinions on the value of such a policy, but not the execution/implementation.

This is much more difficult for a policy stating that content must not be "misleading". Fact checking is much more problematic, because there can be support for either interpretation, nuance, as well as scientific uncertainty.

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

#124

Post by xaedes »

vorpalhex wrote: post #7

I remember being very concerned that the fact checkers wouldn't be operating in a vacuum and we'd have a bunch of facebook execs being arbiters of truth. And that appears to be exactly what has happened. This is terrifying. A handful of mainstream publications and a bunch of basically unknown facebook folks are now the censors. We've already seen well known EFF activists rated untrue for their arguments against warra…

That is why I recently said: Fact checking == Truth Factory.

Lets open a ministry for that, guess the name.

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

#125

Post by raxxorrax »

HumblyTossed wrote: post #91
raxxorrax wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let us be honest here. The people that have the job to sort out this stuff might also not be the brightest stars in the night sky. If I had vested interests where manipulation of social media nets me advantages, I would be very content with the situation.

> The people that have the job to sort out this stuff might also not be the brightest stars in the night sky. Why not?

Maybe they are... I just thought they might want to do a different job.

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

#126

Post by Karunamon »

hengheng wrote: post #35
Karunamon wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is the 6th most popular website on the planet (behind Google, Youtube, and 3 Chinese sites). That puts them in a position of control over a great deal of the world's information diet. If they say something is false or true, many people will believe it. If they censor something, many people will never see it.

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?

Those are Alexa rankings, which count actual page views and time spent, not mere accounts.

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

#127

Post by Nasrudith »

chrisco255 wrote: post #67
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... And before that, there was local news and newspapers. Some time before that it might be your boss, your parents, or the local clergy. This is no change, but business as normal. What has changed is that we actually have easy access to information outside of the keyholders. So when the government and some in society dismiss complaints about police brutality, we can have the retribution of actual video (an example w…

There's quite a difference between social media interjecting its opinion into your private, personal conversations and whatever the clergy at your local church back in the 90s would have said. They would not have even had visibility into say, what you might be talking about at the local pub or hanging out with your neighbors. A local newspaper might pitch a story, but editorials were clearly labeled and there were of…

The assertion that too little policing being a problem at large can be used to dismiss police brutality is disgustingly stupid and wrong. Police brutality isn't "too much" policing poured upon a location like floodwater but inherent crime and abuse of power and always a source of problems. Throwing police brutality into Jurarez is how you make the situation even worse and is part of how it got so bad in the first place!

No institutional trust in policing caused organized crime to form long before prohibition was an issue. Police brutality is a seed of crime. It isn't like trolling where attention creates the problem but a tumor where ignoring it makes it grow from manageable to insurmountable.

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

#128

Post by thelightthat »

vorpalhex wrote: post #7

I remember being very concerned that the fact checkers wouldn't be operating in a vacuum and we'd have a bunch of facebook execs being arbiters of truth. And that appears to be exactly what has happened. This is terrifying. A handful of mainstream publications and a bunch of basically unknown facebook folks are now the censors. We've already seen well known EFF activists rated untrue for their arguments against warra…

Could you elaborate on your point about the Confederate generals?

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

#129

Post by duskwuff »

refurb wrote: post #71
vorpalhex wrote: post #7

I remember being very concerned that the fact checkers wouldn't be operating in a vacuum and we'd have a bunch of facebook execs being arbiters of truth. And that appears to be exactly what has happened. This is terrifying. A handful of mainstream publications and a bunch of basically unknown facebook folks are now the censors. We've already seen well known EFF activists rated untrue for their arguments against warra…

Yup. This is why I actually agree with Zuckerberg on his “no censorship” approach. He’s smart enough to recognize that taking on the burden of what should be censored and what shouldn’t is a quagmire he’d prefer to avoid. No matter how “good” your filters are, you’re going to piss off a massive group of customers, despite all the effort. It’s just a massive time sink with little to no benefit. “The only way to win is…

> Yup. This is why I actually agree with Zuckerberg on his “no censorship” approach.

The Rohingya massacre in Myanmar begs to differ.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

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

#130

Post by newacct583 »

pjc50 wrote: post #96
newacct583 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Confederacy is hugely disputed. Certainly in relation to its intent, purpose, heroes, and legacy.

Not in a fact-checker-visible sense it isn't, though. We know who the actors were and what they did and how they wrote about it. The US civil war is one of, if not the, best-attested conflicts of its century. What is there to fact check? Like I said, I'm curious and suspect the real issue is a little deeper.
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