Why should Facebook be the platform where people post facts? Facebook has no responsibility of implementing any constitutional rights if they don’t want to. If people don’t agree with Facebook’s terms of service then they should use a different platform. This is what ultimately create better platforms for other types of discussions
Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg
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Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg
#72Quoted post unavailable.
These fact checkers are typically folks from the world of journalism. Those are not the people I consider to be experts on all subjects, certainly not deeply technical subjects like medicine.
I'm also not particularly confident that these social media companies have safeguards in place to ensure that their 3rd-party fact checkers are operating in good faith.
I don't think you need to jump to the conclusion that they're always operating in bad faith though - I think much of this is explained by a lack of competence in a field, overworked employees, low standards, and groupthink.
Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg
#73Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg
#74Is fact checking that difficult? Imagine a forum that works in the following way: 1. You post similar to here. 2. Any post that has a claim is flagged. The poster, or another commenter has 24 hours (or some time period) to link to both a page and specific text (similar to how Google highlights search text when visiting a link) that supports the claim. 3. Once a claim is attached, posters can vote and downvote how wel…
This wouldn't work, at least not outside of places like HN with a strong technical bent and a strong assumed knowledge base of the people. I've done fact-checking work professionally; it's not that fact-checking itself is difficult, it's that fact-checking can only work as intended in certain information environments, and mass media is NOT one. I've also studied filter bubbles, algorithmic influences on political POV…
> 2.) What counts as a claim? Is 'the sky is blue' a claim, or is that common knowledge? We clearly wouldn't flag common knowledge because using the flag when it's not necessary deprecates the usefulness of the flag, but then who decides what counts as common knowledge, particularly across different cultures and countries?
Everything, including your example. The entire point is to discourage people from making claims.
> 3.) A common metadata way of judging someone online is through their sources. Think of many subreddits which don't allow certain 'left-wing' or 'right-wing' sources. The supporting text will be upvoted and downvoted based on the readers' idea of the source: In the politics subreddit, a NYT 'claim support' would be upvoted while a WSJ one would be downvoted. Instead of using headlines as proxys, the URL would be: "Oh, it's X. They just always lie. Don't even need to check; downvote, nobody listening to THEM could be correct."
This is a good critique, but if one were actually implementing this, you'd also need to implement some way to verify that people are actually reading the sources (which in itself is already a big annoying problem).
Your other points are also good, but ultimately this thing I'm claiming would be niche due to the friction involved. If it were to not be niche you'd want to put in effort to "validate", or in other words have "trusted" (another problem) members randomly select controversial claims and verify them manually.
I don't believe a fully algorithmic approach, even with "the crowd" can work.
Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg
#75Is fact checking that difficult? Imagine a forum that works in the following way: 1. You post similar to here. 2. Any post that has a claim is flagged. The poster, or another commenter has 24 hours (or some time period) to link to both a page and specific text (similar to how Google highlights search text when visiting a link) that supports the claim. 3. Once a claim is attached, posters can vote and downvote how wel…
This wouldn't work, at least not outside of places like HN with a strong technical bent and a strong assumed knowledge base of the people. I've done fact-checking work professionally; it's not that fact-checking itself is difficult, it's that fact-checking can only work as intended in certain information environments, and mass media is NOT one. I've also studied filter bubbles, algorithmic influences on political POV…
> 2.) What counts as a claim? Is 'the sky is blue' a claim, or is that common knowledge? We clearly wouldn't flag common knowledge because using the flag when it's not necessary deprecates the usefulness of the flag, but then who decides what counts as common knowledge, particularly across different cultures and countries?
As a further point, what if a blog says "not a single cloud was in the sky" and subsequent facts show there was in fact one cloud in the sky - does that count as fake news?
Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg
#76In 2018 Facebook "fact checked" a Babylon Bee article with this headline: “CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine to Spin News Before Publication”. (Babylon Bee is a humor site and clearly labeled as such.) https://twitter.com/Adam4d/status/969405110324523008
That made me laugh. I don’t know anyone who would think that is a serious article.
Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg
#77One thing that puzzles me: why people (still?) use Facebook? What's so good about it? There are dozens of platforms where people can post their thoughts, like and be liked. I feel like something's evading me. Is it because I'm an old fart?
Their friends/communities are on it. At least, that's why I haven't uninstalled, I just aggressively unfollow/block things I don't want to see.
Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg
#78One thing that puzzles me: why people (still?) use Facebook? What's so good about it? There are dozens of platforms where people can post their thoughts, like and be liked. I feel like something's evading me. Is it because I'm an old fart?
People believe they get value from the groups
This has largely replaced forums
Facebook tried to make a separate groups product for people that just want groups and not the rest of Facebook
Just like Messenger can be used without a full Facebook account
It is higher value for users than the newsfeed other social network experience, but it mostly sucks too
Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg
#79It seems to me that if you have a whistleblower account of some poor research practices for a vaccine trial, spreading it around Facebook to be commented on by random people who have no idea how to interpret it, probably isn't the best place for it. I know that means publications like these which may have something important to add to the vaccine conversation, won't be able to have millions of "likes and shares"... b…
My concern is that I don't think that is the endgame. I think the endgame is a world where Facebook still seems to have a variety of news information, but it's heavily censored under the hood, and your parents/grandparents think you're talking nonsense if you bring up one of the topics Facebook fact checks don't allow.
Maybe my preferred endgame is just a world without global social media, then.
Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg
#80> We are aware that The BMJ is not the only high quality information provider to have been affected by the incompetence of Meta’s fact checking regime. It is not an acceptable tradeoff that some high quality information is censored in order that bad information is policed.
I'd normally agree with you. But in the case of Covid, some political actors are launching coordinated efforts to deliberately misinform millions of Americans in regards to a virus that has, so far, killed over 800,000 people here. How do we deal with this challenge without censoring some information that ought not be censored?
Seeing as the #1 political bad actor is Dr. Anthony Fauchi. So we could start by removing him.