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Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”

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Re: Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”

#211

Post by colejohnson66 »

ALittleLight wrote: post #203
908B64B197 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get why they can't add a regex to ok *.gov$ websites. > Nevertheless, the level of carelessness upon which this mechanism seems to have been built upon is an embarrassment. Same mechanism would flag and ban folks who argued that the lab leak hypothesis was a possibility and was worth investigating... Interesting how the media changed their narrative on this one.

MySpamSite.com?queryParm=.gov

I'm sure the check (if implemented) wouldn't be a naive regex that would fail that easily

Re: Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”

#213

Post by beezischillin »

svaha1728 wrote: post #114

Text classification with Transformers is hard. Humans are expensive. My guess is also that the link got flagged because of who shared it, but that's just a guess.

I might be wrong on this but I think their fact checking partners just go all around on Facebook and fact check specific links and claims, I don’t think it’s flagged automatically and paired with a fact check, or at least the few I looked at were directly referencing the source for the content that was shared.

Re: Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”

#214

Post by tuankiet65 »

specialist wrote: post #174
tuankiet65 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook going down means losing contact with my friends overseas. I myself am studying as an international student, and many of my former classmates are studying in another countries as well. Messenger (and consequently Facebook) is pretty much the place that people in my home country hang out at.

Is Messenger a vector for misinformation? (I've never seen or used it.)

Maybe? Messenger is just an instant messaging platform like iMessage or Whatsapp. Technically speaking you can stumble upon group chats that disseminate misinformation, but Messenger doesn't show you group chat recommendations like Facebook.

Re: Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”

#215

Post by 13years »

munk-a wrote: post #160
13years wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You only have two choices, let all information be available regardless of whatever downside there may be, given that at least you still have some control over how to deal with that, or live in a truly Orwellian society in which you have no control over what you know.

The world isn't a black and white place and there are a variety of more nuanced stances between those two extremes. Any amount of censorship doesn't necessarily and immediately devolve into 1984.

And yet you are witnessing exactly what I describe today in realtime.

Censorship went from censoring crazy conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in 2017, to affecting everyone in the public as well as heads of state.

I said this was going to happen the very day he was deplatformed. With great power comes great temptation and abuse nearly a certainty to follow.

Re: Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”

#216

Post by dumbmachine »

jensensbutton wrote: post #119
dumbmachine wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By adding content to user's newsfeed , they ( facebook's algorithm ) have made a explicit decision to share the piece of content and implicit decision that they deem the post safe for sharing. In that case shouldn't a speaker operator be responsible for the voices they amplify?

You only see things in your newsfeed from people you've explicitly added to your network (i.e. explicitly opted in to receiving content from). Is facebook wrong for showing you the things you said you want it to show you?

I don't follow enough users to have a flourishing newsfeed, so facebook gives me suggestions to follow pages and shows posts from those pages. These suggestions are purely based on what facebook thinks I may like.

With people having enough sources to feed their newsfeed, facebook decides the order and cherry picks what posts are shown.

> Is facebook wrong for showing you the things you said you want it to show you?

I do agree with this. Coming to a solution to this would be hard problem. Users will have to give finer information about types of posts people like from a creator. I doubt there are any real work incentives for a big company to build a system like this.

Re: Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”

#217

Post by afavour »

gunapologist99 wrote: post #210

Facebook seems to be censoring so much because Facebook believes that most people will actually believe whatever bits of misinformation are floating around out there. But is everyone that easily manipulated? More importantly, does everyone actually believe that they can be easily manipulated, or do they just think that everyone else is so easily manipulated, but somehow they're above the fray? And at what point does…

> do they just think that everyone else is so easily manipulated, but somehow they're above the fray?

Based on my own anecdotal evidence, it’s exactly this. The people that went down the rabbit hole of QAnon on YouTube are, in their mind, the informed ones. They’re the ones that went out of their way to do the research and the rest of us are just lemmings. Thus, spending hours staring at an algorithmically generated video feed is actually a positive attribute rather than the obviously negative one the rest of us see.

Re: Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”

#218

Post by jdavis703 »

908B64B197 wrote: post #193
ravenstine wrote: post #117

I actually verified this yesterday on my own FB acount. https://imgur.com/a/5tgkbFL Not sure if it's still happening, but you can test it if you make the post visible to only you and you wait ~5 minutes for that misinformation message to show up. Even if the fact checker had some kind of point, I don't know how labeling an authoritative source as "false information" helps anyone understand anything just because part…

I don't get why they can't add a regex to ok *.gov$ websites. > Nevertheless, the level of carelessness upon which this mechanism seems to have been built upon is an embarrassment. Same mechanism would flag and ban folks who argued that the lab leak hypothesis was a possibility and was worth investigating... Interesting how the media changed their narrative on this one.

Are we sure government websites won’t contain misinformation? For example, senior government leadership was advising the consumption of bleach as a COVID-19 cure.

Re: Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”

#219

Post by davidw »

adolph wrote: post #202
davidw wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not think FB is a "government agent" from everything I've read. They operate within government rules and regulations, and they're certainly going to listen to the government, but listening is normal for any company. They can still do what they want.

> They can still do what they want. Sure FB, you can do what you want. It'd just be a shame if it were determined you were a monopoly, sure would be a shame. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2020/12/ftc-s...

You know they lost, don't you?

Re: Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”

#220

Post by afavour »

ALittleLight wrote: post #203
908B64B197 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get why they can't add a regex to ok *.gov$ websites. > Nevertheless, the level of carelessness upon which this mechanism seems to have been built upon is an embarrassment. Same mechanism would flag and ban folks who argued that the lab leak hypothesis was a possibility and was worth investigating... Interesting how the media changed their narrative on this one.

MySpamSite.com?queryParm=.gov

If you were going to check for this and didn’t immediately reach for location.host rather than location.href then it might be time to read some API docs.
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