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Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

bmj.com

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Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#411

Post by fallingknife »

dang wrote: post #291
endisneigh wrote: post #22

Is 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…

It's extremely difficult because the human psyche seems incapable of distinguishing "fact" from "that which supports my view", at least when the emotions are activated, and the only topics where people seek "fact checking" in the first place are the ones where emotions are activated. There may be exceptions—i.e. people whose minds don't work this way—but if they exist, they're so rare as to be no basis for social pol…

Very well said. And the only difference between community moderation and 3rd party "fact-checkers" is if the "fact-checkers" have a different average political profile than that of the users of the site.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#414

Post by umvi »

So basically everyone's worst fears back when "fact checking" was being introduced were realized - fact checkers becoming thinly veiled political censors that only allow certain narratives through regardless of the actual nuance/truth.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#416

Post by otterley »

specialist wrote: post #310
specialp wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not a fan of Facebook, but this is one reason they did not want to get into being the arbiter of what is true (Along with a lot of other less noble reasons). There are indeed things that are demonstrably not true, or presented in a very misleading manner, but there's a whole class of things that are in between. The scientific world in general is a community where research about things comes in, people digest it,…

If Facebook doesn't want to be arbiter, they should stop arbitrating. The moment Facebook chooses what to display, they own the content. And it just so happens that what Facebook chooses to display, chooses to recommend, are the lies, more often than not.

I don’t know exactly what you mean, but from a legal perspective, Facebook most certainly does not “own” anyone’s content by virtue merely of putting it in someone’s News Feed.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#417

Post by srcreigh »

NoPie wrote: post #398
invisible wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I completely understand the article but still think that it's editorializing facts. Why exactly would professionals feel differently? If they had done some investigations themselves and found a series of poor contractors that all reported similar issues, I think we could take this as much more concerning. This looks like a director from a single company and a few anonymous researchers at the same company came…

The issue is that proper investigation was not done. We need more transparency and this is not what is happening. What happened with the data from these researchers? There are no indications that they were removed from the study analysis. If the problems with this one researcher is swept under carpet, how do we know that there are not number of other researchers with different problems? Without this vigilance how do…

The BMJ article, near the end, reports that the FDA actually did investigate and did find issues with the trial.

> An FDA review memorandum released in August this year states that across the full trial swabs were not taken from 477 people with suspected cases of symptomatic covid-19.

Of course, this comes after insinuating earlier that there is a complete lack of oversight.

> “There’s just a complete lack of oversight of contract research organisations and independent clinical research facilities,” says Jill Fisher, professor of social medicine at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and author of Medical Research for Hire: The Political Economy of Pharmaceutical Clinical Trials.

I guess since you yourself were misled according to their own inconsistencies, maybe that is enough to convince you that the article is misleading.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#418

Post by superflit2 »

twic wrote: post #412
rabite wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cool it with the anti-semitic remarks

Rupert Murdoch is Jewish?

It took a lot of work finding one that was English/scott.

There is the famous Elon Musk tweet

https://i.4pcdn.org/pol/1637457156799.jpg

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#419

Post by verisimi »

Who has the truth?

"Fact checking" is just a narrative device, to present something as authoritative.

The reality is that even for obvious, physical phenomena, whenever there is any complexity, you cannot know the truth. There are all sorts of buried assumptions and theoretical knowledge.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#420

Post by threatofrain »

throw10920 wrote: post #395
threatofrain wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> A government which bans someone from speaking is preventing someone from talking to you. I didn't say "prevents someone from speaking" - I specifically said "censors the press" because those are two very different cases (and because that's the exact language that GP used). A government could censor the press but not prevent private individuals from speaking to each other, so it wouldn't technically be preventing pe…

You are free to define the "public" part of public town square as essentially popular, open and social, but that is not the flashpoint of disagreement. When people disagree on the boundaries between private and public institutions, they are not disagreeing over whether something is popular, open, and social. A public elementary school is not public because it is popular, open, and social, and neither is a mall.

And public funding is a critical component to public governance. Facebook is accountable to private money. There is a reason why people don't like the idea of politics being funded by private money.

To change that, we might talk about using taxpayer money to fund Facebook, and rather than mere rules for companies, we might talk about public ownership and governance of Facebook and not merely breaking businesses apart. Breaking Facebook apart is about dealing with free market concerns. Nationalizing Facebook is about recognizing that Facebook ought be a public institution.

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