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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

#571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It resembles Objectivism. "The facts are the facts and you should see them the same way I do or else!!"

More like “the facts are the facts and reality does not care if you don’t believe in it”. It’s a special kind of nihilism to want to stick it to the universe and insist on one’s own alternative reality like an overgrown angry teenager edgelord.

Ayn Rand was pretty insistent that we should be able to objectively ascertain the facts. Objectivism failed precisely because we're not really all that rational, and because apart from the irrational part of us there's also the fact that we can manipulate perception and gaslight others. If you're a newcomer to a pair of groups that vehemently disagree as to the facts you might soon find that you have to make a choice yourself as to which group to join, and suddenly you have to deal with social pressures not just facts. Do you want to be in the in-group or in the out-group? Can you deal with the shaming that goes with being in the out-group? Etc.

It's all so tedious, but this is what we humans are like.

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

#572
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…

Blue Sky is what mastodon was when musk bought Twitter now X.

Also currently in the App Store (iPhone) bluesky sits at 167 .. Musk's X at 46 and Facebook at 19.

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

#573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Certainly poor molly russell does not appear to have seen this cintent occasionally, which is just my point. There is no mention of how she accessed this content either: was it a message board, or was it served algorithmically, which is important to the contention here.

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

#574

It's funny how facebook got so political all the normies left, then they downranked political content so much that the political people left too. Facebook is a ghost town now.

Surprisingly, Facebook has 2.1 billion daily active users. I primarily use the app for its Marketplace feature as an alternative to Craigslist.

Facebook has a net profit of $62 billion/year.

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

#575
post #410
post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

??? 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".

The earth has been warming. It's not a verifiable fact that it's still doing that today (you used present tense) or will continue into the future until the future comes and we've measured it. By the way, warming over what time period? It's colder now that it was at some times in its past so you could say we're in the middle of a longer term global cooling.

And of course you have to incorporate of the Earth's interior which is cooling. Are you sure that "fact" doesn't silently ignore almost all of the Earth?

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

#576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think it would have been product development malpractice the thing is both community notes and top down moderation, if they have any purpose at all, are product malpractice. If they work, they are always going to be intrusive because that's what they're supposed to do, correct factually wrong information. Community notes is the neighborhood police, top down moderation is the feds but if they do their job either on…

It seems pretty clear to me that one of these features generally makes users happy and, at the same time, does correct some misinformation, and the other catches about 0.0001% of the bad stuff and turns it into advertisements for how bad the site is.

How can you possibly call community notes on Twitter a "success" when they demonstrably have not reduced the amount of actively made up shit on the site, and the same people who complain about a fact checker saying "no, vaccines do not change your DNA" are just as upset when that info comes from the community notes box, and the only reason there hasn't been widescale anger about them is because Elon wants to pretend it was his idea.

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

#577
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…

You are repeating the talking point without including the number:

The number of those kinds of surgeries people claim to be "oh so concerned" about is in the low double digits--generally low single digits--normally zero in a year.

When you get to some medical procedure that incredibly rare, the medical indications are generally really, really unique and should be left to doctors. (breast implants in girls are simply not done until 18+ unless cancer is involved, for example).

Despite what people seem to think, doctors don't just do this stuff randomly (at least in the US). They can and will lose their license for doing this kind of thing unless they follow established guidelines. And all those guidelines dictate that this kind of stuff is simply not done until after 18 unless there are incredibly extenuating medical circumstances.

> 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.

I have yet to meet a girl or woman who had breast reduction and regretted it. See: Soleil Moon Frye, for example. She had genuine health issues. And, even still, she had to fight with her doctors to get it done at 16 rather than wait until 18.

> Children who have been sterilized for life and have permanent scars.

Cite examples. I suspect vastly more children have been sterilized for life from circumcision complications than from any other gender surgery.

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

#578

The discussion here is painful to read. The 'neutral' discussion of product features and how Austin, TX is more liberal than the rest of Texas are grotesque. Zuckerberg says Facebook is going to be more "like X" and "work with Trump". It has changed its content policy to allow discussions that should horrify anyone. "In a notable shift, the company now says it allows “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when…

I feel the same way and I think the writing is on the wall for the near future of the world. It is disheartening to see people on a forum like HN who I assumed have values similar to mine fall right in line with conservative propaganda and try to act like this isn't an overtly political action. This decision is political, and it goes a lot deeper than left vs right - its about attacking support for a baseline scientific 'truth' and fully accepting a post-truth world where reality is what the powerful deem it to be. This has always been the case to some extent but it has gotten so lopsided in the last decade that its hard to see how we come back from this.

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

#579
So lets take one of the most expensive, labor intensive parts of our business and replace it with crowdsourced notes.

As of 2022, Meta employed 15000 content moderators. Expected salary of 70K to 150K per person (salary + benefits, plus consulting premiums) so lets assume 110K.

This implies $1.65B in workforce costs for content moderation.

Meta is more likely to make their earnings....

Though I wonder if they will redeploy these people to be labelers for LLMs?

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

#580
The litmus test of this is whether they roll it out globally. If they do, Meta truly has seen the light; if they don't, this is just a cynical attempt to butter up Trump in case he regulates them into oblivion (as one could argue they deserve).

Zuck is making the right noises. Time will tell.

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