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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”

#351

Post by exporectomy »

cmurf wrote: post #259
bitL wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is an increasing infantilization world-wide where some group thinks it needs to "protect the others", assuming they are the single source of truth and that it's obvious they are. It's a well known bias which for some reason aligns with the current zeitgeist. As everything before, it shall too pass at some point.

It's not a new problem. 20 years ago at a national park with signs "don't feed the wildlife" with a parent teaching her 3 year old to feed the wild life within 3 feet of such a sign. I said "do you see the sign? why are you doing this?" She scoffed, pouted, and ran with her child to her car and drove away. We treat her like a child because so many adults act like children. They seek what their parents never gave them…

Are you sure those people are stupid (ie. they care about the environment and want to do the right thing but mistakenly do the wrong thing instead) or simply putting their personal convenience above the convenience of others? To be stupid, I think it would have to be an action that goes against their own interests.

Tragedy of the commons isn't caused by stupidity but by selfishness. It's different.

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

#352

Post by traek »

Dove wrote: post #322
snowwrestler wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is removing content because that is ground they want to stand on. Removing content feels like censorship, so it lends itself to political grandstanding in their favor. Millions of people get upset and demand that Facebook handle all content neutrally, which is exactly what Facebook wanted everyone to think in the first place. The real issue with Facebook is the editorial decisions they make about promoting s…

Facebook is removing content because they wanted to make money with a website, and the job of statecraft fell in their laps in the process. They didn't volunteer, they aren't qualified, nobody told them they were signing up to run a kingdom, let alone the world. So they don't produce lofty, philosophical, well-thought-out positions on free speech and human rights. They don't carefully manage the public square with th…

All of this is also true for our actual government[0]. I have zero confidence that if our government were in charge of running Facebook/Twitter/any other social media app the results would be better.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/16/white-house-says-facebook-ne...

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

#353

Post by [deleted] »

robbrown451 wrote: post #325
codeecan wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you believe "the vaccine turned people into the Hulk", thats a mental health problem. But when inconvenient claims, like "vaccines can cause blood clots in rare cases", often flagged as misinformation, you don't instil much confidence with the public. And so they go out and get information from other sources.

There are crazy things that people believe (not necessarily vaccines turning people into the Hulk, but still) that, in the past, I would have assumed were mental health issues. But when massive numbers of people believe these things, blaming it on individual problems is not so productive. About 300 people a day are dying because intense political polarization has caused people to believe whatever best feeds their tri…

[deleted]

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

#354

Post by richk449 »

Dove wrote: post #322
snowwrestler wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is removing content because that is ground they want to stand on. Removing content feels like censorship, so it lends itself to political grandstanding in their favor. Millions of people get upset and demand that Facebook handle all content neutrally, which is exactly what Facebook wanted everyone to think in the first place. The real issue with Facebook is the editorial decisions they make about promoting s…

Facebook is removing content because they wanted to make money with a website, and the job of statecraft fell in their laps in the process. They didn't volunteer, they aren't qualified, nobody told them they were signing up to run a kingdom, let alone the world. So they don't produce lofty, philosophical, well-thought-out positions on free speech and human rights. They don't carefully manage the public square with th…

Nice comment. I’m not sure that having a Thomas Jefferson on staff would be enough to make a difference though. The real Jefferson had one goal: build a sustainable democratic country that respects the civil rights of its citizens. Your Facebook Jefferson would still have to build an online system that prioritizes facebook’s financial health. Respecting the rights of users would be secondary.

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

#355

Post by exporectomy »

codeecan wrote: post #243
afavour wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If you believe "the vaccine turned people into the Hulk", thats a mental health problem. But when inconvenient claims, like "vaccines can cause blood clots in rare cases", often flagged as misinformation, you don't instil much confidence with the public. And so they go out and get information from other sources.

> If you believe "the vaccine turned people into the Hulk", thats a mental health problem.

Can you identify anyone who actually believes that? Keep in mind that people don't always have logically consistent beliefs, and they sometimes exaggerate their beliefs so they're not even true at all. If I really believed that claim, I would be making a bet with somebody who doesn't believe it and prove myself right by finding this hulk and asking them to punch a hole in a brick wall of flip a car over or something like that. Are there people who have put their own skin in the game like that to support that belief? If not, you're probably strawmanning.

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

#356

Post by bmcahren »

MeinBlutIstBlau wrote: post #330
hintymad wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: who's fact checking the fact checkers in FB? No offense, but those fact checkers are not necessarily smart or knowledgeable in every subject. They don't necessarily know the difference between DNA and RNA, allele or gene, second international vs third international, and the list goes on. The fact checkers may be ideologues themselves. They fact checkers may not even make it through college courses. S…

My personal guess is they are people in a middle management position designated full autonomy on their decision. It just so happens that the cultural beliefs there skew left since it is in California and in tech. Why factual information gets censored though is a genuine question. It is a legitimate "who watches the watchmen" issue seeing as they literally get to enforce whatever ideology tickles their fancy that mome…

This is incredibly off-base.

The truth is they have outsourced fact checking to the "International Fact-Checking Network at Poynter" who has to uphold standards not just freely enforce whatever ideology tickles their fancy.

Knowing one low-level employee of one of the subcontractors involved; it works something like this:

1. An article is posted to Facebook/Twitter/etc and is automatically flagged based on keywords or manually flagged based on user reports of misinformation.

2. Fact checking organizations take up fact-checking of the article for a small fee.

3. In this case for the organization I am personally aware of, the fact checking company has a large number of independent contractors who can research a "batch" of claims/articles.

4. Usually the jobs are broken up into simple questions.

5. You along with many others provide answers and must provide pertinent factual sources supporting the veracity of your assessment that this is either true, partly false, or false along with other categories such as if it is clearly and obviously satire.

6. Your answers are judged vs the final determination. Those who consistently skew in any direction are dismissed from eligibility to participate in the future.

7. The fact checking organization once it has enough answers for confidence has higher-level employees double-check the answer and source information.

8. The fact checking organization submits it's formal assessment on the article/opinion to the IFCN.

9. Companies like Facebook use multiple IFCN assessments and perhaps other fact check assessments to provide pertinent information that corrects misinformation that has spread rampantly over the last year like "Joe Biden wants to defund police departments across the US" with corrections like "After being asked if "We can reduce the responsibilities assigned to the police and redirect some of the funding for police into social services, mental health counselling, and affordable housing." Mr Biden has answered "Yes" to a question about whether he agrees with this redirecting of funding.

I may be slightly off in how this works but the overall program is the same for most social networks that care about misinformation. There is more information in the sources below: Sources:

https://www.facebook.com/business/help/2593586717571940?id=6...

https://ifcncodeofprinciples.poynter.org/

https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-53997196

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

#357

Post by ineedasername »

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #321
bitL wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is an increasing infantilization world-wide where some group thinks it needs to "protect the others", assuming they are the single source of truth and that it's obvious they are. It's a well known bias which for some reason aligns with the current zeitgeist. As everything before, it shall too pass at some point.

Institutions of ordered information (papers, publishers, tv) have been disrupted by a New tech - the internet What we see now is a knee-jerk reaction to reestablish order by the establishment. This happened too with the creation of the gutenberg printing press. New tech disrupted established information sources. Approx 60 years after the printing press creation, a relatively minor religious squabble ended up in a hug…

While I don't disagree about the knee-jerk reaction, the Guttenber comparison isn't quite apples-to-apples:

When Guttenberg made the press, access to it's output had a strong filter: most people couldn't read, and anyone who could read was highly educated for the times. Social media doesn't have a filter like that, and higher levels of education generally correlate to lower levels of belief in things like conspiracy theories.

Also keep in mind that the T+60 years conflict you're referencing, while greatly assisted by the printing press, was also greatly pushed along by the masses being told what to think by their preachers or by powerful elite looking to destabilize the status quo to their own benefit. The peasants of the peasant revolution weren't reading criticisms of the Catholic Church and coming to their own country conclusions, they were given emotional polemics by people like Storch sparking extreme levels of fanaticism.

So, yes, there is a lot in both situations about power struggles with the established order, but most people are being influenced more by emotionally charged arguments and tribal loyalties than they are by increased access to level-headed rational presentations of an issue.

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

#358

Post by okareaman »

It's getting kind of embarrassing to be a computer programmer when supposedly the best programmers in the world at Google, Facebook and Amazon can't fix simple problems and perpetrate junk on the world. A simple thing like if url == CDC then don't show the warning. Oh, and we don't know how to fix the mermaid problem in Norway. Sorry. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27991322

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

#359

Post by decremental »

p1necone wrote: post #309
tasogare wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> my profession is vaccine hesitancy and persuasion researcher Can't get if this is sarcasm or not. If true, it's scary how fast micro-fields are created and funded once there is a political purpose behind it, so that policies can be rubber-stamped as science. If false, nice troll.

There's a global pandemic killing thousands of people and there's a sizeable portion of the American population spreading misinformation that's causing a significant number of people to not get the vaccine, in turn endangering both themselves and others. It seems obvious to me that there would be people researching how to either stop this misinformation being spread, or educate people enough to stop believing it. Thi…

316 people have died of Covid in the last 7 days in the US, according to the CDC.

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

#360

Post by ineedasername »

Overton-Window wrote: post #343
IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Institutions of ordered information (papers, publishers, tv) have been disrupted by a New tech - the internet What we see now is a knee-jerk reaction to reestablish order by the establishment. This happened too with the creation of the gutenberg printing press. New tech disrupted established information sources. Approx 60 years after the printing press creation, a relatively minor religious squabble ended up in a hug…

The internet will kill most every institution that predated it. Citizen journalism killed media. Netflix/YouTube killed Hollywood. Blockchains will replace 51% democracy with 100% democracy. Dying inherited institutions are grasping to stay relevant with appeals to authoritarianism. Free speech is now a hinderance and a liability to their existence. As their relevance dwindles, tyranny becomes their only tool.

Can you expand on that 100% democracy part? It doesn't seem like any system would allow 100% of the people to all be governed by their preferred set of rules when at least some of those rules would always conflict with ones that others want to live with.
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