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Facebook, Twitter dismantle global array of disinformation networks

reuters.com

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Re: Facebook, Twitter dismantle global array of disinformation networks

#161

Post by hnracer »

root_axis wrote: post #157
hnracer wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can see the effects in China where state control of the narrative, achieved in large part by oversight of companies, has made their population completely unaware of the Uighur situation. Granted, FB is a private company so the extent to which it's a concern is not as big, but given the control that FB has over information flow and the network effects of FB, similar risks are present. Think: swaying elections by p…

I think the general concern with respect to foreign ownership of U.S. firms is reasonable to discuss, but I don't see a problem with Facebook removing content from the website regardless of the owner. Regardless of who owns Facebook there is going to be some content that will be removed, same of every platform out there, I just don't see what the harm is that something is taken down from Facebook.

I think my main concern is the potential for politically biased vetting, which could lead to an election being swayed. It's a large amount of power over a democratic outcome by a small group of individuals who are not accountable to the public and are not guaranteed to be acting in good faith.

It's possible that the fact-checking orgs that have been chosen really are neutral but given the political power they hold in their hands, and given my experience with human beings, I still do harbor some residual concern about this. They seem like a remarkably high leverage attack vector for cynical political operatives. I probably have to do some more digging about who these fact checking orgs are before I come to a concrete opinion, however.

I will however admit that the alternative is also fraught with the exact same risk. Allowing various actors to actively spread misinformation can itself sway an election. Perhaps the best solution is to have vetting that only targets the most egregious, obviously false information, where the information that was censored (unless it is violent/pornographic/criminal), especially that which is relevant to upcoming elections, is catalogued and available for viewing by the public, simultaneously for accountability, public trust and to assuage conspiracy theorists that the vetting is political.

Re: Facebook, Twitter dismantle global array of disinformation networks

#162

Post by rndgermandude »

tyre wrote: post #20
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can’t and they shouldn’t. The potential good that could come from this does not outweigh the catastrophic failure modes of this approach. Some enlightened people understood this, hundreds of years ago. Its time for another amendment. EDIT since this is related, another horrendous idea that recently disgraced my timeline https://twitter.com/yelp/status/1314197509623947265?s=21

What do you propose to combat disinformation campaigns? Look at what’s happening. The end results of allowing anything to happen on social media are not good. We’re not in a good place. So we can ignore that for rigid principles, or admit that those principles don’t stand up to the real world. No, no one hundreds of years ago had any idea about the scale or effect of social networks. Yes there was propaganda and brai…

We're far from being in a perfect place, but we're in a relatively good place compared to the rest of history.

Reinstituting modernized versions of monarchs and clerics who tell us what we're allowed to know and to think.

I neither want Facebook and a few corporations to declare themselves the gatekeeper of morality and acceptable thought nor do I want the oppressive regimes and dictators use freedom of expression against us by flooding us with misinformation and lies. But forking over control to a group of tech figures like Zuckerberg, Dorsey, Bezos, or Pichai cannot be the answer to the threat of Putin and Xi Jinping.

Re: Facebook, Twitter dismantle global array of disinformation networks

#164

Post by JakeTheAndroid »

influx wrote: post #147
bjelkeman-again wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would find it hard to argue that any of the current POTUS work has been competent.

We just had a thread on hacker news where most folks agreed the administrations changes to the H1B program were welcome.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Competence is demonstrated over time, not in a vacuum of individual decisions. Someone that is competent at Chess proves it over an entire game. A novice can still make a few good moves over the course of that same match.

Pretty much any competency can be demonstrated that way.

Re: Facebook, Twitter dismantle global array of disinformation networks

#165

Post by intrasight »

drawkbox wrote: post #33

Repeat after me, social media is not reality. Social media is the new tabloid salacious media. Yes it can be fun, entertaining, informative and educational, it can also be propaganda, misinformation, astroturfing, and a big high school like popularity contest where people are fake and narcissistic but probably insecure. The truth is the internet is teaching the biggest lesson ever in critical thinking and getting you…

I have hundreds of Facebook friends. I read their posts or add my own posts perhaps twice a day. 90% are status updates and/or photos of what they are up to. I find it extremely useful. It's a micro-blogging service. When did this moniker "social media" come into being? What does that even mean? I should say that I have everything except direct posts disabled - including all "shares" and all ads - and that's why to me it's just a micro-blogging site.

Re: Facebook, Twitter dismantle global array of disinformation networks

#166

Post by jfengel »

soindepend wrote: post #140
meekmind wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. This. Thinking is hard and it requires training and conditioning to do. I'm not talking about what to think, but rather how to think. It's an incredible convenience to delegate thinking, like the difference between spending 3 hours debugging some code versus having the answer readily available on StackOverflow. Conversely, that convenience comes with a cost of a stunted intellect, where an individual can become…

This is a tangent but is the meme about programmers being dependent on Stack Overflow really all that true? It's something I've heard about a lot -- I've been coding for fifteen years, professionally for seven, and certainly I have used Stack Overflow occasionally, but I go to the language documentation a lot more often, and honestly write a lot of code without looking at more than the source of the libraries I'm int…

The meme isn't that we're asking questions ourselves on SO, but that SO contains answers to questions that are difficult to ferret out of the documentation. If you don't know what to call something, or need to know common practice rather than every possibility, or comprehend an error message, it's a lot easier to get it from somebody else who has already solved that problem.

Of course somebody has to ask the question first, but with StackOverflow, one person can ask it, and then everybody else can find it via the magic of Google. (And I do mean "magic": beyond matching keywords, a search engine can, on a good day, point you pages popular with people having similar problems.)

I'm on StackOverflow any time I need to learn a new piece of software, which is pretty common. When I'm "just programming", I can get my work done without it due to decades of experience. But keeping current with new technologies often means getting lost in the implementation weeds, and it's great when others have already been there and can give me a shortcut out.

Re: Facebook, Twitter dismantle global array of disinformation networks

#168

Post by Groxx »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #109
unethical_ban wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're substituting reality for your ideal. Sure, I believe we should have public schooling teach more raw critical thinking, rhetoric and civics. But you're not going to get the existing billion people in the online world, many of whom are some combination of hotheaded or ignorant of the wicked ways of misinformation, to suddenly "improve their informational diet". The people who are most likely to take that advice…

> you're not going to get the existing billion people in the online world Your original point, and my response, were both on how an individual can escape the misinformation cesspools of Facebook and Twitter. Of course I agree it's much harder to solve the problem at the societal scale.

As a passer-by: no, I think their original point was that it's ridiculous to depend entirely on individual actions to address misinformation. On that point they've been consistent across all comments.

Re: Facebook, Twitter dismantle global array of disinformation networks

#169

Post by carry_bit »

vinhboy wrote: post #74
unethical_ban wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the alternative? Think you're the smartest person on the planet, unaffected by misinformation? "Feed me the libraries worth of bullshit from the Internet, and I will sort through this free market firehose to come to a logical, evidence based conclusion", hm? Have you ever read spam ads on Craigslist, fake comments on news sites, bots on Tinder, etc? There are patterns, there are foul motives, and with their i…

> Think you're the smartest person on the planet, unaffected by misinformation? Thank goodness someone is calling this out other than me. Sites like these are filled with people who think they are smart don't need any help, and worse, expect everyone else in the world to be at their level. I too am glad social media companies are finally waking up and taking action against this stuff. Can you imagine a world where Go…

> Can you imagine a world where Google decided they wouldn't filter spam because it was too controversial?

It would be like email: you can run an email client with a spam filter. If you don't like how it's filtering, you can configure it or even download a different client without abandoning your email address.

Re: Facebook, Twitter dismantle global array of disinformation networks

#170

Post by root_axis »

hnracer wrote: post #161
root_axis wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the general concern with respect to foreign ownership of U.S. firms is reasonable to discuss, but I don't see a problem with Facebook removing content from the website regardless of the owner. Regardless of who owns Facebook there is going to be some content that will be removed, same of every platform out there, I just don't see what the harm is that something is taken down from Facebook.

I think my main concern is the potential for politically biased vetting, which could lead to an election being swayed. It's a large amount of power over a democratic outcome by a small group of individuals who are not accountable to the public and are not guaranteed to be acting in good faith. It's possible that the fact-checking orgs that have been chosen really are neutral but given the political power they hold in…

> I think my main concern is the potential for politically biased vetting, which could lead to an election being swayed.

That ship has already sailed. The problem of politically biased vetting is a universal fact of life on literally every media platform in existence; people just need to be judicial in their consumption of media.

> It's possible that the fact-checking orgs that have been chosen really are neutral but given the political power they hold in their hands, and given my experience with human beings, I still do harbor some residual concern about this.

I am sure they will be quite flawed, but I don't see the problem with that, of course they will be flawed, why is that such a problem?

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