Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

about.fb.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 1001 posts

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

#451

Post by ttoinou »

chrisco255 wrote: post #404
linuxhansl wrote: post #338

Regardless of what you think about this step I find it disconcerting that we can now disagree on facts. For example: - whether crime is up or down - whether the earth is warming or not - how many people live in poverty - what the rate of inflation is - how much social security or healthcare costs - etc These are all verifiable, measurable facts, and yet, we somehow manage to disagree. We always used to disagree and t…

What you're talking about is statistics. Statistics are not irrefutable facts. They're data points from a report, and they are often incredibly easy to manipulate depending on how the macro is assessed. Usually it's impossible to gather stats over large, complex, chaotic populations. Instead samples are taken and applied to the whole and interpolated in-between. And in that interpolation an incredible amount of manip…

Fully agree. Statistics are not global irrefutable facts about society, it's literally just one or a group of person computing something random and claiming it is representing society as a whole, or a journalist saying he/she read that figure in a reputable source. Even from a mathematical point of view statistics are incredibly hard to manipulate, but even before that, reality cannot be really measured and put into numbers.

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

#452

Post by ianferrel »

kiney wrote: post #397
linuxhansl wrote: post #338

Regardless of what you think about this step I find it disconcerting that we can now disagree on facts. For example: - whether crime is up or down - whether the earth is warming or not - how many people live in poverty - what the rate of inflation is - how much social security or healthcare costs - etc These are all verifiable, measurable facts, and yet, we somehow manage to disagree. We always used to disagree and t…

most of those things are actually not verifiable measurable facts within any useful definition

Exactly. Supplying some context to support this:

The level of crime is pretty hard to measure. You can measure reported crime, but crimes are reported at different rates in response to complicated incentives.

How much the earth is warming depends on what you measure. Do you measure atmospheric temperature? Ocean temperature? And of course how much the world will warm is dependent on complicated models with tons of inputs.

How many people live in poverty depends on what your threshold for poverty is. There's a "Federal Poverty Level", but cost of living varies by significant amounts across the country.

The rate of inflation is highly dependent on the basket of goods measured and how improvements in goods are measured and so on. There are easily a dozen different measures of "inflation" and they're all reasonable and carefully considered, but none of them is the ground truth.

It is of course relatively easy to measure Social Security inflows and outflows, but usually when we talk about the "cost" of programs like this, we mean something like the net cost, which incorporates lots of societal effects. Also the interpretation of the accounting concept of the Social Security Trust Fund, despite being a fairly simple concept, has significant camps with diametrically opposed views.

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

#453

Post by mbivert »

throw83838445 wrote: post #403
chrisco255 wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"fact-checkers were authoritative source of the truth" There is no such thing. If your understanding of truth is so flat, you're incredibly ignorant and dangerously foolish. Biases, perception, and propaganda influence the "truth" you see in the world. And no one is immune to it. Even large groups of very smart people are not immune to it. In fact they're even more often prone to groupthink.

[flagged]

Stumbled upon this yesterday or so:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZlbQqXBsn0

« I think one of the troubles of the world has been the habit of dogmatically believing something or other and I think all these matters are full of doubt and the rational man will not be too sure that he's right; I think we ought always to entertain our opinions to some measure of doubt » (Russel)

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

#454

Post by jjulius »

sneak wrote: post #443
jjulius wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because social media has virtually eliminated peoples general ability to have constructive, level-headed conversations that take nuance into account.

I think the idea that a) people lack nuance now or b) that it’s simply social media’s fault is the exact same kind of lack of nuance that you seem to be objecting to. Nothing I’ve seen suggests that mass media or mass propaganda contains less nuance now versus any other time. Propaganda of all forms (regardless of whether delivered by newspaper, radio, tv, or facebook) has always been a blunt instrument.

I'm talking less about propaganda and more about the average person's ability to discuss the merits of climate change with one another online.

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

#455

Post by jay-barronville »

throw83838445 wrote: post #356
tptacek wrote: post #192

I'd like to hear an informed take from anybody who thinks that Facebook's fact-checkers were a better product feature than Community Notes. All of the articles I'm seeing about this online are ideological, but this feels like the kind of decision that should have been in the works for multiple quarters now, given how effective Notes have been, and how comically ineffective and off-putting fact-checkers have been. The…

[flagged]

[flagged]

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

#456

Post by chrisjj »

throw83838445 wrote: post #356
tptacek wrote: post #192

I'd like to hear an informed take from anybody who thinks that Facebook's fact-checkers were a better product feature than Community Notes. All of the articles I'm seeing about this online are ideological, but this feels like the kind of decision that should have been in the works for multiple quarters now, given how effective Notes have been, and how comically ineffective and off-putting fact-checkers have been. The…

[flagged]

Joke ;)

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

#457

Post by [deleted] »

linuxhansl wrote: post #338

Regardless of what you think about this step I find it disconcerting that we can now disagree on facts. For example: - whether crime is up or down - whether the earth is warming or not - how many people live in poverty - what the rate of inflation is - how much social security or healthcare costs - etc These are all verifiable, measurable facts, and yet, we somehow manage to disagree. We always used to disagree and t…

[deleted]

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

#458

Post by fzeroracer »

tptacek wrote: post #381
davidw wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about actual employees, it's about signalling "Texas - yay!" and "California - booooo!" in order to make good with the incoming administration.

Well, that and moderators being able to afford 1-bedroom apartments.

Have you ever been to or lived in Austin? Are you aware of how high the cost of rent is there now?

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

#460

Post by Karrot_Kream »

yieldcrv wrote: post #376
tptacek wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is what it is. It's a hotspot for local politics, so quitting it isn't really an option for me.

All the burning man camps I get invited to are a bunch of Gen X-ers conferring on Facebook groups so I wind up making a new Facebook account once a year for a few months although could see this moving to Discord across those same age ranges, I’m in some local groups there which overlap with festivals/events/things like the burn.

Yeah younger millenials and GenZ tend to do this sort of conversation on Discord.
Post reply on HN