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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

#551
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ideological bits are: * Dana White added to the board. * "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 actual mechanisms of running a social media network at scale are tricky and I think most of us would…

I get how the partisan story is easy to tell here, but I'm saying something pretty specific: I think it would have been product development malpractice for this decision not to have been in the works for many, many months, long before the GOP takeover of the federal government was a safe bet. Community Notes has been that successful, and Facebook's fact-checkers have been that much of a product disaster. I've never s…

As a product decision, I agree.

But I think that can still be addressed separately from the fact that all the tech leaders in Silicon Valley are bending the knee to Trump (e.g. the Mar-a-Lago visits, the "donations" to his inauguration, etc.)

I'll give you an example I find analogous. When Bezos forbid the Washington Post from giving a presidential endorsement, he wrote an op-ed, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/28/jeff-bezo.... I pretty much agreed with the vast majority of what he wrote there. What I think is total BS, though, is his purported rationale and the timing of the decision. I think it's absolutely clear he did it because he didn't want to piss off Trump should he win (the "obeying in advance" part), which he did. The reason I believe this is because he made this decision so close to the election, and he apparently didn't feel the need to do this in previous years, or even the fact that WaPo made other political endorsements (e.g. Senate races in Maryland and VA) just before the presidential endorsement was banned. Bezos subsequent Mar-a-Lago visits and Amazon's inauguration "donation" pretty much confirm my view in my opinion.

In Zuckerberg's announcement, I thought the part he put in about fact checkers being "politically biased" was unnecessary (not to mention dubious IMO), and cleared seemed done to curry favor with the current powers that be.

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

#552

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…

Fact checkers are the technocratic solution, they're a panel of experts to Community Note's jury of our peers. Fact checkers are a much better product feature than community notes if we want a feature that best serves people who care about facts. That's not our world, though. People don't care about facts, we are humans, our lives are lived based on vibes. The average person would rather listen to their idiot friend'…

Do you have some kind of analysis demonstrating Facebook fact checkers are more accurate than X’s Community Notes?

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

#553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going back even further, one of the initial draws of Instagram pre-acquisition was that you could escape the toxicity of trolls and other socially unproductive behavior on Facebook. Meta has a big problem coming up. They'll get to the point where they won't be able to hide Facebook and Instagram's lackluster appeal. I suspect we'll start seeing advertisers peel away, followed by a few savvy investors first. Let's jus…

To me facebook seems a lot quieter but instagram is as busy with stuff as ever. We definitely have differences of opinion on that. Especially if TikTok is shut down (fingers crossed) most people will fall back on Instagram Reels.

Instagram needs a Bluesky. It's truly an awful experience, but the only semi-competitor is TikTok which... isn't great either.

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

#554
post #443

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.

The issue is that before social media nobody took the guy bullshitting at the end of the bar seriously.

But with social media, his bullshit post looks just as authoritative as an expert who’s been studying the topic for decades.

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

#555
post #549
post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Calling a legitimate argument a "dog whistle" is a classic tactic OP is talking about which is used to shut down discussion. Just debate the merit of what he's saying rather than try to label him as an enemy. Breast reduction for children IS in fact irreversible. It causes huge scars and trying to get breast augmentation later is not actually restoring their body to its natural state. It is definitely something that…

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

#556
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good. Private communication is private, even if it's a group. The nice thing about the crazy is that they're incapable of keeping quiet: they will inevitably out themselves. In the meantime, maybe now I can discuss private matters of my diagnosis without catching random warnings, bans, or worse.

What kind of diagnosis spawns so many fact checks that it's a problem? I'd think any discussion about medical issues would benefit greatly from the calling out of misinformation.

Amusingly enough, it's not misinformation being blocked or called out, it's just straight up censorship of any mention of the topic.

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

#557
post #212

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…

The ideological bits are: * Dana White added to the board. * "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 actual mechanisms of running a social media network at scale are tricky and I think most of us would…

The whole thing is ideological. Trump and Musk are undertaking their takeover on government, and so the trillion dollar companies which control the rules of the spaces in which the vast majority of our discourse today happens, do their thing and kiss the ring.

We can debate the merits of notes vs factcheck. But it's hard to see the bullshit about freedom of speech as anything other than that: you are now allowed to express opinions that the new regime shares. Long live the king.

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

#558
post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s self-censorship, some of which I find extremely weird and cringe. Go on Twitter and you will see people self-censor the normal swear words too. Shit becomes “sht”, fuck becomes “fck” Very dystopian.

It's been trivially demonstrable that the use of "forbidden" terms or swearing can affect your ranking on their algorithms, whether it be displaying your comment, or your post on someone's feed, etc., at least on Meta's platforms. So no matter how "cringe" you may find it, it's done out of some degree of necessity and precisely because of these dumb moderation mechanisms, not out of any misguided, altruistic self cen…

1) Do you honestly think they would add "fuck" to a blocklist but then turn a blind-eye to "fck"? Basic profanity filters on old forum software were more strict.

2) I find it completely inane that you are willing to self-censor yourself for an algorithm. I guess we no longer need a ministry of truth if the people just produced censored content to begin with, right?

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

#559
post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s self-censorship, some of which I find extremely weird and cringe. Go on Twitter and you will see people self-censor the normal swear words too. Shit becomes “sht”, fuck becomes “fck” Very dystopian.

It’s very human. This is no different from people using terms like gosh, shucks, and darn, instead of their stronger relatives. It’s just how profanity works, no need to worry about it.

Fck is just as strong as fuck, not sure how that could be confused at all.

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

#560
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously exposing the same content which was proven to cause harm to the content moderators to absolutely everybody on the platform will be worse.

It is not obvious that many people (when was the last time a single post was seen by the entirety of the platform?) seeing occasional soul-destroying stuff is worse than seeing soul-destroying stuff as full-time employment, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for the length of one's work life. Also: perhaps the occasional soul-destroying post would help people break their social media addictions.

Counterpoint: Molly Russell.

https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Molly-Ru...

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