"Fact Checking" is effective clickbait. Just claiming something is a hoax generates more engagement than claiming something is factual. Humans have a bias towards believing claims that wrongdoing has occurred (self-preservation / avoidance of harm). It is in Meta's commercial interest to hire people to flag stories as a hoax in an entertaining way that gets eyeballs (like a giant red stamp that says "Flaws Reviewed").
Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg
371–380 of 702 posts
Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
Facebook is also not preventing anyone from speaking to me; they are refraining from giving some sources a megaphone. If I want to know what the BMJ is writing, https://bmj.com is right there. Facebook is under no obligation to center it on my wall.
"A government that censors the press is also not preventing anyone from speaking to me; they are refraining from giving some sources a megaphone." "refraining from giving some sources a megaphone" is exactly equivalent to "censorship". There's no difference. Your argument confuses the prescriptive and the descriptive. Descriptively, yes, Facebook is under no legal obligation to treat speech on its platform equally. P…
A government which bans someone from speaking is preventing someone from talking to you. The government need not even consider the mode by which information is transmitted, or who is paying for these transmissions. If I am banned from sharing information such as classified intel, there is no means by which I am permitted to communicate this to you. A government which bans things also carries the force of government, which means laws, courts, police, and prison, which is typically the sole prerogative of government.
A public square is one which is funded and governed by public means, and the source of funding is one of the core mechanisms for ensuring that the public institution answers to public money.
Facebook is a private property, much like HN and the BMJ. That means people like dang, who also engage in banning, are not paid for by the government. Surely one's concept of public square does not entail private parties footing the bill for fancy engineers and metaphorical dang.
As a matter of prescription, why would we ever want Facebook to be the financially responsible party for public town squares? Why do we not have the government fund an actually public town square? Or ought we be using tax money to fund Facebook itself?
Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg
#373Let's please not throw out the baby with the bathwater and dismiss all fact checking as political, biases, or agenda-driven. Not agreeing on basic facts in the prime problem in our current political discourse. Disagreement is usually a good problem to have and leads to testing the complete problem space. What we are seeing now, though, is the absence of the problem space exploration. Instead any discussion is just di…
Without getting into the specifics of any individual instance of fact checking, it is not at all clear that the presence of third party “fact checks” advances towards a shared understanding of “the facts”. It may be better for the state of the online discourse to have no “fact checkers” than for them to make perform in this way. And if such mistakes are inevitable given sufficient scale, that means it would better not to have such entities.
Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg
#374I'm happy that Nikola Tesla didn't lived in such world.
Fact-checkers are dangerous option, especially when backed-up by capital and/or politics.
Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The questions are all whether this one company had poor practices. If the FDA did not follow up on the whistleblower report it raises far broader questions about oversight of the trials as a whole.
There are so many foaming at the mouth morons desperate to “prove” that the whole thing was a sham that it will take extraordinary evidence to convince me anything improper was done.
The solution is not to discredit BMJ but to explain how BMJ article doesn't mean what antivax is insinuating.
I totally understand that when BMJ writes that this clinical research organization did a mess is this trial, someone misreads it as all Pfizer vaccine results are false. But if you say that BMJ is hoax, then we have much stronger reason to distrust healthcare professionals. Do you see the paradox here?
BMJ is expressing concern about Pfizer and regulator's failures with the ultimate aim to fix them and increase the trust by showing that every fault is taken seriously. We cannot sweep unwanted things under the carpet and hope that nothing will happen. Bad actors should be appropriately punished.
Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg
#376There should be a discussion page, like on Wikipedia, for "fact checkers" to publicly interact with those who post "misleading information." It's highly upsetting that there was no process for this entity to challenge the ruling of the "fact checkers." Especially since it is an established medical journal. Why can't we have open discussions about "the facts?" Are we living in a democratic country or an authoritarian…
> "Facebook is a private company, it can do whatever it wants on its platform," I think it's important to distinguish between the legal right for a company I'll go a step farther. For those who say "facebook is a private company, it can do whatever it wants"... does that include taking a completely hands-off moderation policy? I'm pretty sure that the answer is no - because the U.S. government will step in if they tr…
Great point. Ultimately there are always coercive forces that put pressure on companies and individuals to comply, even if the legal system isn't directly invoked to force compliance. The case you're making is important because implies that Facebook is being puppeted by the will of the government. If this is true, then Facebook IS the government. If one entity is controlled by another, then the separation between them, i.e., private corporation vs. government, is illusory.
Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg
#377> As current and incoming editors in chief, we are responsible for everything The BMJ contains. And here lies the crux of the issue : Facebook (and other Meta services) currently don't. While since they decided that they wanted to moderate themselves what people were posting on their websites, and they are neither a small service, or a nonprofit (or potentially other attenuating circumstances), they should be respons…
> As current and incoming editors in chief, we are responsible for everything The BMJ contains That's also not a very honest claim in such broad sense of term "responsible" that we usually use when we talk about what Facebook does. Was Lancet responsible for publishing Andrew Wakefield paper? Yes. Does it try to pay for damages suffered by every person who had infectious disease with severe outcome that was a result…
To be more clear, I do not want Facebook to be responsible for societal impact, but rather to not even be able to exist because any for profit company that tried to pull this kind of widespread power over communications would have its growth ground to a halt by having to constantly defend itself against legal charges.
Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
Facebook and Twitter have very specific policies against hate speech and inciting violence. This caused a lot of extremists on the American political right to be banned. That isn't elitism or censorship. It's enforcing their ToS, which as a private business, they have every right to do. I also think you're confused about what an 'elite' actually is. Spoonfed, entitled, whining, bitching opportunists like Trump fit th…
The private business argument is weak as you're really pointing to the freedom that businesses employ. Quite obviously censorship runs contrary to the idea of freedom and the spirit of the law. Private industry does not have an inherent right to censorship, it is only legal currently because social media is a relatively new form of communication. This censorship has clearly been disruptive and since social media is e…
>Private industry does not have an inherent right to censorship
Facebook and Twitter both enjoy the rights bestowed upon them by the First Amendment to remove content as they see fit. Requiring Facebook and Twitter to host content that they don't want would violate their First Amendment rights.
Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg
#379We don't need "fact checkers", we need educated people who can think on their own.
This is anarchy, and it's good.
Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg
#380Turns out fact checking is hard and costs money. What's surprising is that Meta, which has capable staff and lots of money, can't seem to be bothered to do it properly.
" Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html p.s. I'm not defending what you're criticizing—I'm saying that on HN, criticism needs to be more substantive than this.
Thanks, got the message.
I think what I wanted to say is that it seems to me that a) the resources Meta throws at this are not sufficient to check facts properly, and b) that proper fact checking is a really difficult business.
a) because if they had used staff with minimal domain knowledge they would probably have been aware what BMJ is, that it is a trusted scientific journal that has peer-review in place. I don't know whether the article in question was peer reviewed, but I assume so. Either way, this didn't seem to play a role. Whoever fact-checked the article labeled BMJ a newsblog, so they have near-zero domain knowledge.
b) BMJ and all scientific journals which are worth their money employ experts to do the fact checking in peer review. Funny enough, these experts mainly do that work for free. Turns out that the experts place high value in fact-checked and verified information. Clearly, peer review takes a long time and wouldn't be suitable for facebook's quick turnaround. Or perhaps it would... if Meta designed a peer review process that takes Facebook's specific requirements into account. But that's a whole new approach to things, perhaps better developed in a startup and then bought out by Meta ;)
Not that peer-review is perfect, or that all experts are always right. But Meta needs to acknowledge that fact checkers are sometimes wrong, too. When that happens, there must be a way to correct the error. The BMJ having to write an open letter to Zuckerberg clearly indicates that this error correction doesn't work.