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

481–490 of 1001 posts

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

#481

Post by chambers »

> When we launched our independent fact checking program in 2016, we were very clear that we didn’t want to be the arbiters of truth. We made what we thought was the best and most reasonable choice at the time, which was to hand that responsibility over to independent fact checking organizations... That’s not the way things played out, especially in the United States. Experts, like everyone else, have their own biases and perspectives. This showed up in the choices some made about what to fact check and how.

This frustration with fact-checkers seems genuine. Mark alluded to it in https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-says-hes-d... which squares with how the Government used fact-checkers to coerce Facebook into censoring non-egregious speech (switchboarding) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41370516

Alex Stamos pushed this initiative pretty hard outside of Facebook in 2019+, seemingly because he wasn't able to do inside of Facebook back in 2016/2018. But I haven't dug into his motivations.

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

#482

Post by ball_of_lint »

flavius29663 wrote: post #444
gruez wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

??? Aside from maybe "whether crime is up or down" (because of under-reporting), everything else can be objectively measured. The measurements might not fit with everyone's specific circumstance (eg. earth is warming as a whole but it's unseasonably cold where you live), but that's not a reason to throw up our hands and say "those things are actually not verifiable measurable facts within any useful definition".

> - whether the earth is warming or not The Earth is warming, but how much of it is caused by humans is under debate. The Earth is still coming out of an ice age, so it would be warming even without humans. Also, the more important question is: how much will it accelerate based on our emissions? If there are no positive feedback loops, it would only warm up 1C maximum, no matter how much more CO2 we will emit. But be…

https://xkcd.com/1732/

We've had in the last 100 years a temperature swing that usually takes a thousand years or more. We've already seen greater than +1C of temperature increase compared to before widespread use of fossil fuels.

Is that caused by humans? Sure that's up for debate, in the same way whether tobacco causes cancer is. People are willing to be wrong when being wrong gives them money/status/utility.

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

#483

Post by aimanbenbaha »

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…

Also didn't know Meta was outsourcing fact-checkers which is a very terrible idea that sponsored a shady economy of ghost workers that were paid pennies for reviewing gore content.

It'll really take a special mind to think Community Notes wasn't a positive feature added to the social network sphere. Musk despite his schtick did very bold things that other platforms wouldn't think of doing, such as open-sourcing the recommendation system or recently suggesting the idea of optimising content with unregretted time spent that will reward healthy content and punish toxic content even if the two had the same number of impressions.

The overtone window is shifting towards a more open speech and less of self-gratifying echo chambers that promoted the toxic cancel culture.

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

#484

Post by viraptor »

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…

Nuance is dead with the short posts. "whether crime is up or down" may not be possible to post about realistically. On what timescale, which crime, has the reporting about this crime changed, has the classification changed, is it about confirmed crime or reports, etc. etc.

Specific crime is such a complex system now that we can (both accidentally and maliciously) post factual information that presents a small fragment of the issue, sometimes helpful, sometimes misinforming for the context we're talking about.

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

#485

Post by _DeadFred_ »

jay-barronville wrote: post #455
throw83838445 wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Well the most mainstream "news" source Fox news had to pay out almost a billion dollars for dis-information, so the biggest mainstream 'news' (though they did claim in court no one could possibly think they are news so it's ok for them to lie) institution kind of had to apologize.

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

#486

Post by encoderer »

davidw wrote: post #321
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content." - like people being in Texas makes them more objective?! The FB office in Austin, Texas is a moderately left-leaning area. Their office in Silicon Valley is about the most extreme left-wing place in the country. At the v…

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

Grew up in Ohio. Always wanted to live in Silicon Valley. Been here 14 years now. Not leaving. But this is happening because of how terrible the California brand has become. Pretending our prestige and brand is the same as it was 20 (or even 10) years ago is not the answer.

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

#487

Post by aimanbenbaha »

circlingthesun wrote: post #210
JohnMakin wrote: post #183

I'm certain it will make parts of the user experience worse, but at least for the Threads app, this seems at least a little necessary - if you're aiming to be the "new" twitter or whatever social need twitter was fulfilling, you need to break free of the shackles of IG/Meta moderation, which is very unforgiving and brutal in very subtle ways that aren't always easy to figure out. But basically, I find a platform like…

I once posted a picture of an email stating my train was delayed in French. So the word 'retard' appeared in it. Instagram banned me from monetization or partnerships or something on my account, because the word for delay in French is offensive in English.

As someone who speaks French this made me chuckle

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

#488

Post by _DeadFred_ »

aredox wrote: post #475
mhh__ wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"People don't care about facts" is such an asinine reactionary way of thinking about macro dynamics in the world. It has no predictive power at all.

Americans don't care about facts. There's a reason why you have Creationists at the highest levels of government.

Unnecessary attacks like this don't help your cause and part of what has driven the other side to the point they are at.

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

#489

Post by sanderjd »

tptacek wrote: post #234
davidw wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a product decision taken independently, maybe. Running one of those things at scale with all kinds of people trying to subvert it for various reasons, including some downright evil ones, is not an easy task. Announced together with everything else and given the timing, I just can't help but think there's a political component to all of it.

I don't at all doubt that they're going to do whatever they can to cast this presumably longstanding product plan in the light most favorable to the governing majority! I just want to get the causality right.

I don't understand though: What makes you think that you are getting the causality right? It seems to me like you're asserting the causality goes one direction, when there doesn't seem to be any evidence (at least in public) for that assertion at the moment. Have I just missed some other information on this that you're basing this on?

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

#490

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN