Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

bmj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 702 posts

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#101

Post by chillingeffect »

AlexTWithBeard wrote: post #65

One 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?

the abundance of real names, the relative absence of juvenile spazzes. my gen X buddies and I and our families can share family-friendly/public-safe info with a great signal-to-noise ratio. Also the Groups are emerging as the most useful part of it.

It's not good for edgy discussion, but consider this: social media platforms are more like: "which platform is good for what type of interaction" vs. "is this a good social media platform or not?" When I want spazzy bullshit I go straight to /b. I avoid twitter, tumbler, and tiktok like that plague because I don't want to be a human garbage filter looking for diamonds in the rough. I go on Instagram sometimes for pretty stuff from people I kind of know.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#102

Post by hairofadog »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #59
ninkendo wrote: post #32

It 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.

Is that not the situation we're in now? Facebook does act as if it's giving people a variety of news information, they do censor the things my relatives see, and my relatives do think I'm talking nonsense if I bring up one of the topics the algorithm doesn't allow them to see. We are there already.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#104

Post by GSimon »

chrisseaton wrote: post #69
nradov wrote: post #33

In 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

Well... that seems to be working? The story isn't a fact. Got marked as not a fact. What's the problem?

"Repeat offenders will see their distribution reduced and their ability to monetize and advertised removed." Is the problem, a satire post by a satirical publication has been notified their distribution and monetization could be penalized as a result of their satire, because a 'fact checker' decided to identify the content and treat it like a news piece.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#105

Post by dshpala »

chrisseaton wrote: post #69
nradov wrote: post #33

In 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

Well... that seems to be working? The story isn't a fact. Got marked as not a fact. What's the problem?

Have you seen the tweet? Facebook threatens consequences for "repeated offenders". So the point of fact-checking them is to accumulate enough checks to be able to kick in these consequences.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#106

Post by chillingeffect »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #100
AlexTWithBeard wrote: post #65

One 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?

In my experience, Facebook is the platform which is most tied to people you actually have interacted with in real life, and that's by a large margin. I know the reddit account of like 1 person I know IRL (I don't even know my wife's account). ...but my facebook friends consist of basically everyone I know that still has a facebook. A lot of that is just the network effect and momentum, but still.

even my best friends wont tell me their reddit IDs and I don't tell them my alts.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#107

Post by Mezzie »

endisneigh wrote: post #74
Mezzie wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Everything, including your example. The entire point is to discourage people from making claims.

Then you wouldn't have discussion, at least not of this type. It would resemble more a slightly faster version of academic papers as everybody has to read everything and becomes more invested in preventing themselves from being blasted for making an unsupported claim on accident than in contributing.

> 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).

Right, but when you say 'we should do thing X' and when somebody says 'we can't do thing X without solving Y' you can't just reply with 'also solve thing Y'. For example, we should go to Alpha Centauri, but I think figuring out FTL travel is sort of necessary first.

> 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.

Yeah, it might work in that particular usecase. Perhaps as an adjunct to academic listservs.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#108

Post by ineptech »

OldManAndTheCpp wrote: post #12

"Fact checking" serves only to ossify the current view on any emerging discussion. Vatican "fact checkers" kept Galileo under house arrest for spreading "fake news", in a sense. This is an unwinnable fight, the only reasonable response is to abandon the pretense that opinions are facts, and that most people can't distinguish truth from falsehood.

I don't think it's unwinnable; we don't want FB to arbitrate between competing scientific opinions, we just want them to blackhole Magic Healing Water and Covid Vaccine 5G Drone Tracker type bullshit.

It may be true that it's hard to draw a clear line between bullshit and almost-bullshit, but it's hard to draw a clear line between porn and almost-porn and they somehow manage to do that okay.

edit because apparently this wasn't clear enough: the way you distinguish science from bullshit is not by evaluating the claims (that's what I am arguing we should not trust Facebook to do). One is a money-making endeavour and the other isn't, and that's the basis on which they are distinguished. Even the worst science is not festooned with ads.

I'll say it again: "Facebook doesn't do a good enough job of evaluating accuracy" is a trap, and it's a trap they desperately want you to fall in to. If we get to the point where we put any value in FB's evaluation of any scientific claim, we're already into dystopian sci-fi territory, no matter how good a job they do.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#109

Post by chrisseaton »

GSimon wrote: post #104
chrisseaton wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well... that seems to be working? The story isn't a fact. Got marked as not a fact. What's the problem?

"Repeat offenders will see their distribution reduced and their ability to monetize and advertised removed." Is the problem, a satire post by a satirical publication has been notified their distribution and monetization could be penalized as a result of their satire, because a 'fact checker' decided to identify the content and treat it like a news piece.

Maybe they should mark the content more clearly as satire to avoid causing confusion?

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#110

Post by sharklazer »

clarge1120 wrote: post #21
OldManAndTheCpp wrote: post #12

"Fact checking" serves only to ossify the current view on any emerging discussion. Vatican "fact checkers" kept Galileo under house arrest for spreading "fake news", in a sense. This is an unwinnable fight, the only reasonable response is to abandon the pretense that opinions are facts, and that most people can't distinguish truth from falsehood.

"Fact checking" as guard rails for protecting a narrative is (hopefully) a fad that will pass us by like bad fashion choices in the 1980's.

Fact checking has only become a PR management tactic that arrived in the 2000's, only as the cost of sharing your mind rapidly became zero. Before the widespread adoption of the internet, you were limited to broadcast and print. You could pay for a license from the FCC, or license a station with cable or go and print and distribute your text. Very little incentive for non-commercial work and certainly no avenue for simply anybody to say anything in a way that can spread easily.
Post reply on HN