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Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

politico.com

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Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#91

Post by [deleted] »

mike_hearn wrote: post #75
mrtksn wrote: post #31

In a few years they are going to be sorry for the other end of the spectrum because the issue stems from the fundamentals of their business: lack of mechanism to hold civil discussion, one person pretending to be multiple people, institutions pretending to be people. When a BS is viewed 10M times and its correction is viewed 10K times, what do you do? Demote the content you assume that it's BS but this time you have…

> Twitter's community notes are quite effective but they are simply very low bandwidth That's why they are effective. I review Community Notes sometimes and the right assessment is almost always "no note needed". A lot of attempted CNs are just arguing with the poster's opinion, which belongs in replies. CN is meant to be for correcting cases where something is objectively false or missing critical context, and it do…

[deleted]

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#92

Post by EasyMark »

consp wrote: post #2

He said it is not political and published it at the end of an election cycle ... Of course it is.

He said it because they got criticized for something that cost them a lot of money. It’s all about how much it costs and takes away from the pockets of the board of directors and owners. For profit companies are amoral for the most part and their only obligation is to make money.

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#93

Post by binary132 »

Infinity315 wrote: post #78
throw310822 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A quick reminder of how democracy works: people's choice -> government -> media -> narrative -> people's choice

I disagree with the assertion that the relation is cyclical. In reality, all of these systems are highly interdependent. I'd model it as a weighted complete digraph. And certain subsets of these various nodes have a greater outsized influence than their peers. For example, the intelligentsia within the people are usually far more impactful than say Joe Blow from Appalachia.

I’d say mass media, especially in entertainment and news (but I repeat myself), is far more influential than intellectuals, except inasmuch as they are influenced by them. But let’s be real, Noam Chomsky doesn’t have a ton of clout in Hollywood. If anything, it’s more about money than about the intelligentsia. And if you’re talking about social-media influencers, please revisit my first point.

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#94

Post by ErikBjare »

loa_in_ wrote: post #62
ErikBjare wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was timed to be relevant. Doubt this will influence the outcome of the election, esp given the WH statement which seems to be in agreement.

As far as I'm concerned he typed it out right after the events and scheduled it to be released later, that is now.

The letter was a response to the House Judiciary Committee, it didn't from nowhere.

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#95

Post by archagon »

mike_hearn wrote: post #75
mrtksn wrote: post #31

In a few years they are going to be sorry for the other end of the spectrum because the issue stems from the fundamentals of their business: lack of mechanism to hold civil discussion, one person pretending to be multiple people, institutions pretending to be people. When a BS is viewed 10M times and its correction is viewed 10K times, what do you do? Demote the content you assume that it's BS but this time you have…

> Twitter's community notes are quite effective but they are simply very low bandwidth That's why they are effective. I review Community Notes sometimes and the right assessment is almost always "no note needed". A lot of attempted CNs are just arguing with the poster's opinion, which belongs in replies. CN is meant to be for correcting cases where something is objectively false or missing critical context, and it do…

At least an NGO will likely have a consistent point of view. The CN algorithm, apparently, requires “agreement from contributors who have a history of disagreeing.” Let’s say we have an entirely hypothetical scenario where the two primary political groups arguing over notes are a milquetoast centrist party and a far-right party susceptible to conspiracy theories; accordingly, any notes that are agreed upon will either be extremely obvious (“the sky is blue” but not, perhaps, “the president’s wife is not a man”) or will tilt center-right. That seems far from objective to me. And that’s to say nothing of thumbs-on-the-scale tweaks to the algorithm by the platform owner, which will be undetectable, or changes to the political makeup of the editors.

I don’t think there’s any way to algorithm your way out of non-trivial fact-checking. Tech is not the solution to these kinds of fundamentally social problems.

(I should add that the best-case scenario here is an emergent and stable cabal of intellectually-rigorous editors, perhaps of varying political persuasions, similar to what happened to Wikipedia. But that’s barely different from fact-checking by some NGO.)

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#96

Post by greenthrow »

throw_m239339 wrote: post #90
greenthrow wrote: post #13

Facebook, Instagram, etc. moderating content isn't a free speech issue. They are just glorified bulletin boards. They try to raise everyone's sense of their importance by claiming it to be a free speech issue, but they are awful garbage and the sooner everyone realizes the better for society.

> Facebook, Instagram, etc. moderating content isn't a free speech issue. When it's at the demand from the white house, it becomes a free speech issue because it's the executive branch that essentially controls what these big bulletin boards are allowed to publish. Furthermore, nothing is for free, so what perks did these big bulletin boards got in return? maybe that administration decided not to proceed with an anti…

I know this narrative is appealing to people when someone they disagree with is in the white house but it isn't true. If you are a member of a country club and then Biden or Trump (whichever you dislike more) has you kicked out of the country club, it doesn't become a free speech issue due to their involvement. There may be other issues but it isn't a free speech issue. So it is with private platforms which already do all kinds of other moderation.

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#97

Post by EasyMark »

mike_hearn wrote: post #75
mrtksn wrote: post #31

In a few years they are going to be sorry for the other end of the spectrum because the issue stems from the fundamentals of their business: lack of mechanism to hold civil discussion, one person pretending to be multiple people, institutions pretending to be people. When a BS is viewed 10M times and its correction is viewed 10K times, what do you do? Demote the content you assume that it's BS but this time you have…

> Twitter's community notes are quite effective but they are simply very low bandwidth That's why they are effective. I review Community Notes sometimes and the right assessment is almost always "no note needed". A lot of attempted CNs are just arguing with the poster's opinion, which belongs in replies. CN is meant to be for correcting cases where something is objectively false or missing critical context, and it do…

If said activists are part of a company that approves of their activities why isn’t their censorship legitimate? Commenters/posters are free to take their comments and posts somewhere else. Why don’t the “censors” get a say on what goes up on their platform?

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#98

Post by PaulKeeble »

The same elements that make Reddit and Twitter unpleasant places to comment are also the elements that meant they sustained the discussion around the research (and conspiracies) of the ongoing Covid pandemic. There is no Covid aware community really anywhere else of remotely the same size as on Twitter and secondarily Reddit (which cracked down a bit). The weird part is 4.5 years into this pandemic there are still significant restrictions in most places that don't allow Covid medical papers to be posted and discussed. Its an ongoing problem.

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#99

Post by EasyMark »

influx wrote: post #77
minkles wrote: post #28

"Musk is getting away with it so why can't I?" ?

[flagged]

Musk is free to do what he wants with his platform, but let’s remember Facebook, x, TikTok, instagram, etc are all free to censor their content as they see fit. They are under no obligation to be a free for all. While they can do that like X, not all choose to. That’s also respecting their own Constitutional rights as an organization. Freedom of speech means controlling the narrative of your platform as much as you like, as you are not stopping those people you kick off from forming their own platform as happened with Gab, Truth, etc.

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#100

Post by ryandrake »

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #59
chasd00 wrote: post #46

When the platforms starting censoring during the pandemic and last election cycle I remember saying they better get it right 100% of the time because the moment they get it wrong their credibility is shot. Hear we are. Censorship, beyond what’s required by law, is doomed to fail.

They were already doing censorship, just for different things - there was never a free for all because that eventually ends up like 4chan which is not advertiser-friendly. So you can lose credibility two ways, one by not doing any censorship because people on the internet will be the worst if you let them. Doing too much censorship is also bad because people don't like that either. Of the big causes of censorship cur…

> They were already doing censorship, just for different things - there was never a free for all because that eventually ends up like 4chan which is not advertiser-friendly.

If you look at every attempt to create "The Uncensored Free Speech Version Of [ANY_SERVICE]," they all, inevitably turned into a 4chan-like trashfire. You've got to have some kind of moderation.

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