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Ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to Community Notes model

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Re: Ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to Community Notes model

#81

They've also said there will be more harmful (but legal) content on there as they'll no longer automatically look for it, but require it to be reported before taking action. As someone who worked on harmful content, specifically suicide and self injury, this is just nuts - they were raked over the coals in both the UK by an inquest into the suicide of a teenage user who rabbit holed on this harmful content, and also…

> There is research that shows exposure to suicide and self injury content increases suicidal ideation.

Yes. However, I find this obsession with harm-based value judgment to the exclusion of all other considerations ethically problematic, to put it mildly. Ethics does not reduce solely to considerations of harm.

Re: Ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to Community Notes model

#82

Zuck claims "Europe has an ever increasing number of laws,institutionalizing censorship and making difficult to build something innovative" Ouch. As a European, I feel very wary of such a sentence and the implications. Time for Europe to wake up ? (edit: fix typos)

The faster we decouple from societies like american, the better we europeans will be. We europeans defend our European way of life, against the degenerate capitalism of the US.

Re: Ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to Community Notes model

#83
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't seen a single discussion be worse off due to fact checking, but I've seen tons of discussions where having it would improve things. I have seen people get mad because they can't post BS without it being challenged. To claim internet discussion worked better without fact checking is something I haven't seen any actual evidence for, just opinions like yours. Community notes is just a watered down, more easily…

Exposure to many viewpoints, including wrong ones, provides a counterbalancing effect. When you actively try and suppress information you create a “forbidden knowledge” effect where people seek out silos where extreme and wrongheaded information gets passed without the “sunlight is the best disinfectant”—-it grows faster…becomes more wrong, more extreme, and more dangerous. Seems to me in my experience after decades…

There's some academic research to the contrary; banning /r/fatpeoplehate and /r/coontown on Reddit reduced incidents of hateful speech across the platform.

https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/6zg6w6/reddits_ban... / https://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf

"Sunlight is the best disinfectant" is a great pithy slogan, but modern society needs bleach and chlorhexidine sometimes.

Re: Ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to Community Notes model

#84
post #63

Zuck claims "Europe has an ever increasing number of laws,institutionalizing censorship and making difficult to build something innovative" Ouch. As a European, I feel very wary of such a sentence and the implications. Time for Europe to wake up ? (edit: fix typos)

Europe has anti-nazi laws for .. historical reasons.

What gets interpreted under anti-nazi law is the wrinkle though.

Re: Ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to Community Notes model

#85
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> And why aren't you considering the countervailing harm to society of centralized moderation? Are there reproducible studies showing that? What is the effect size? (These objections go both ways!)

There’s lots of mainstream media content I think is psychologically harmful and should be suppressed, such as content normalizing adultery. But I’m quite content to live in a society where the social norm favors people saying what they want and the burden is on the opponents of that to produce strong evidence of harm.

Re: Ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to Community Notes model

#87

Corporate censorship should have never happened. It is a huge corruption of public discourse and the political process. These platforms have hundreds of millions of users, or more, and are as influential as governments. They should be regulated like public utilities so they cannot ban users or censor content, especially political speech. Personally I don’t trust Zuck and his sudden shift on this and other topics. It…

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there's any reasonable political discourse that is ever* censored by social media companies. During COVID, there were people spreading lies about the vaccine, which many people believed, and many people died as a result of believing those lies. Even Louis Brandeis, one of the fiercest advocates of free speech, made an exception for emergency situations[0], which…

It's hard to talk about, because when a discussion is successfully censored you usually don't hear about it and presume any discourse on it would have been unreasonable.

I would point towards immigration as a topic where meaningful discourse is missing from social media. On most social media sites, the discussion will be dominated by people who think immigration should rarely if ever be restricted; Twitter has been colonized by some people who take the opposite extreme, often for overtly racist reasons, although this is tempered a bit by Elon Musk's personal support of high skill visas.

The "normie" immigration restrictionist position, that immigrants are great but only so long as they enter the country lawfully, is something I very often see expressed in news interviews or supported by older relatives and rarely if ever see expressed on a social media platform. I don't know how I'd go about proving this is downstream of fact checking, but there's a lot of orgs who argue that it's factually false to characterize, for example, someone who crosses the border without authorization and then applies for asylum as an illegal immigrant.

Re: Ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to Community Notes model

#88
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exposure to many viewpoints, including wrong ones, provides a counterbalancing effect. When you actively try and suppress information you create a “forbidden knowledge” effect where people seek out silos where extreme and wrongheaded information gets passed without the “sunlight is the best disinfectant”—-it grows faster…becomes more wrong, more extreme, and more dangerous. Seems to me in my experience after decades…

There's some academic research to the contrary; banning /r/fatpeoplehate and /r/coontown on Reddit reduced incidents of hateful speech across the platform. https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/6zg6w6/reddits_ban... / https://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf "Sunlight is the best disinfectant" is a great pithy slogan, but modern society needs bleach and chlorhexidine sometimes.

> There's some academic research to the contrary; banning /r/fatpeoplehate and /r/coontown on Reddit reduced incidents of hateful speech across the platform.

That does not imply it reduced hateful speech overall, maybe the censorship just increased antipathy and drove that speech underground or to other platforms where it couldn't be seen.

Re: Ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to Community Notes model

#90
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And why aren't you considering the countervailing harm to society of centralized moderation? Are there reproducible studies showing that? What is the effect size? (These objections go both ways!)

There’s lots of mainstream media content I think is psychologically harmful and should be suppressed, such as content normalizing adultery. But I’m quite content to live in a society where the social norm favors people saying what they want and the burden is on the opponents of that to produce strong evidence of harm.

Convenient that only your debate opponents need provide reproducible studies that meet your standards.
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