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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

#131
Hot take:

This is to please the incoming president.

Both the far-right and far-left live off misinformation, but right now the far-right is experiencing a renaissance, and tech moguls are bending the knee to be on good terms with the leaders.

MAGA and European far-right politicians have been moaning for ages that fact checking is "politically biased". The Biden laptop controversy was the catalyst for this.

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

#132
post #4

What I think I just read is that content moderation is complicated, error-prone, and expensive. So Meta is going to do a lot less of it. They'll let you self-moderate via a new community notes system, similar to what X does. I think this is a big win for Meta, because it means people who care about the content being right will have to engage more with the Meta products to ensure their worldview is correctly represent…

> They aren't explicit about it, but it's clear that pressure does not exist anymore

It's clear that the pressure comes now from the other side of the spectrum. Zuck already put Trumpists at various key positions.

> I think this is a big win for Meta, because it means people who care about the content being right will have to engage more with the Meta products to ensure their worldview is correctly represented.

It's a good point. They're also going to push more political contents, which should increase engagement (eventually frustrating users and advertisers?)

Either way, it's pretty clear that the company works with the power in place, which is extremely concerning (whether you're left or right leaning, and even more if you're not American).

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

#133

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…

I've already seen disturbing stuff on X since Elon took over that I never would have seen when it was twitter. They don't even show the warning "this might be harmful content" on images and videos anymore. The X algo seems to go haywire every couple of days and dumps a bunch of this crap in my feed until I block 20+ bluecheck accounts showing this crap.

I believe it's only going to get worse going forward as they all adopt these policies.

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

#134
Perhaps, given the situation with Twitter, now "X", more web and mobile app users will come to understand that despite its size, Facebook is someone's personal website. Like "X", one person has control. Zuckerberg controls over 51% of the company's voting shares. Meta is not a news organization. It has no responsibility to uphold journalistic standards. It does not produce news; in fact, it produces no content at all. It is a leech, a parasite, an unnecessary intermediary that is wholly reliant on news content produced by someone else being requested through its servers.

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

#135
post #127
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this should be a boon both for far-right and left discussion. If by left discussion you mean discussion of the genocide in Gaza, don't count on it, because this censorship is bipartisan in the United States. Zuck cares about currying favor with the powerful. He doesn't give a crap about the powerless. Also, he's pretending that Texas, the proposed site for content moderation, is not politically biased, which is lau…

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Conspiracy theory?

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

#136
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that we are awake. As a dev for a long time, I realized only 6 months ago, that all the tools I use daily are directly from US. My job and my life would be very very different without this technology. We are loosing ground, or more, we are falling down more and more quickly.

What tools? The ones I use are done from people all over the world, certainly not predominantly in USA. https://map.debian.net/

Yes I somewhat agree on FOSS and I agree for the people. But I think that for the capital, it is massively US controlled (though is international too). Think of the seven first companies of the S&P500. (GAFAM, Nvidia, ...) If you look at the cac40 (france) or EUROSTOXX50 : I dont use directly any products of the tech company. But I'm sure that these companies use at least one the seven. Tech company in Europe are not ridiculous, but they are not leading the change. They optimize, they improve, but the lead is us centric. We have ASML, but for how long. ?

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

#137

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!)

Arguably they don't go both ways. The distinction is action vs inaction. If someone wants action from someone else, they need to argue the case for that action. Arguing for not doing something on the other hand is never necessary. To see why, consider that the space of possible actions someone could not take is infinite. If there's an expectation that someone do a ton of research and work to argue for why they are no…

Choosing not to act is an action. The choice not to moderate certain content is a choice to permit certain content.

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

#138
post #122
post #17

Mark has looked at what has happened to Twitter since Musk took over, a notable decline in activity and value… and decided he wants a piece of that? Musk is begging people on Twitter to post more positive content, as it devolves into 4chan-lite. If Musk’s ideological experiment with Twitter had proven the idea that you can have a pleasant to use website without any moderation then Mark’s philosophical 180 would at le…

I’m not sure where you’re getting data from but Twitter seems fine: https://www.demandsage.com/twitter-statistics/ Additionally, if you haven’t read the article you’re commenting on, community notes is an excellent replacement so-called fact checking services which are notoriously biased.

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

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I challenge you to find another economic system that has worked in history, because it sure isn’t communism if that’s what you’re referencing. This is also aside from the fact that Europe is also a subscriber to capitalism. America is the most successful country on this earth and we bankroll most of the rest of the world but somehow we’re always the bad guys. As an American I’d be very happy if my tax dollars stopped…

> America is the most successful country on this earth

According to what metrics? life expectancy? crime rate? wealth per inhabitant? education? work life balance? health care? happiness? incarceration rate? human rights? corruption? freedom of press?

American tax dollars aren't spent in Europe or elsewhere in the world for some altruistic reason. The US want to maintain their hegemony and prevent other powers from emerging. They certainly don't care about Europeans or Taiwanese or whoever.

> I challenge you to find another economic system that has worked in history, because it sure isn’t communism if that’s what you’re referencing.

Not that I'm a big fan of communism or China, but communist China has been doing pretty well, and is getting more innovative than the US

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

#140
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…

> Seems to me in my experience after decades of watching and participating in online discussion extremism really only became more problematic when fact checking and active efforts to suppress took hold. Whatever the good intentions may have been, the results were worse.

Seems like the opposite. Traditionally we only had siloed forums which were often heavily moderated by volunteers who considered the forums their personal fiefdom, read every single thread and deleted stuff for being "off topic" never mind objectionable, plus the odd place like /b/ which revelled in being unmoderated. Then you ended up with more people on big platforms that were comparatively-speaking, pretty lightly and reactively moderated. Then you ended up with politicians weighing in against moderation with the suggestion even annotating content published on their platform was a free speech violation, let alone refraining from continuing to publish it.

The difference between antivax sentiment now and circa 2005 isn't that nobody ever determined that they weren't having that nonsense on their forums or closed threads with links to Snopes back then or that it's become difficult to find any references to it outside antivaxxer communities since then. Quite the opposite, the difference is that it's now coming from the mouth of a presumptive Health Secretary, amplified on allied news networks and now we have corporations running scared that labelling it a hoax might run the risk of offending the people in charge. Turns out sunlight is a catalyst for growth

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