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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

#581

Post by insane_dreamer »

coolhand2120 wrote: post #350
insane_dreamer wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Strong disagree. This is a very naive understanding of the situation. "Fact-checking" by users is just more of the kind of shouting back and forth that these social networks are already full of. That's why a third-party…

But "fact-checking" by people in authority is OK? Isn't that like, authoritarian? "Fact-checking" completely removed the ability for debate and is therefore antithetical to a functional democracy. Pushing back against authority, because they are often dead wrong, is foundational to a free society. It's hard to imagine anything more authoritarian than "No I don't have to debate because I'm a fact-checker and by that m…

> But "fact-checking" by people in authority is OK?

it's by third-party journalism organizations, not Meta employees, so not "people in authority"

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

#582

Post by toofy »

jfengel wrote: post #198
phatfish wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Or maybe such people have far better things to do than fact check concern trolls and paid propagandists.

There do seem to be a lot of people who enjoy fact checking concern trolls and paid propagandists. I'm not sure if they do more good than harm. Often the entire point seems to be to get those specific people spun up, realizing that the troll is not constrained to admit error no matter how airtight the refutation. It just makes them look as frothing as trolls claim they are. And yet, it's also unclear if any other cou…

> Often the entire point seems to be to get those specific people spun up, realizing that the troll is not constrained to admit error no matter how airtight the refutation.

Your point is exactly why I can’t take anyone serious who claims that randoms “debating” will cause the best ideas to rise to the top.

I cant count how many times i’ve seen influencer propagandists engage in an online “debate”, be handheld walked through how their entire point is wrong, only for them to spew the exact same thing hours later at the top of every feed. and remember these are often the people with some of the largest platforms claiming they’re being censored … to millions of people lol.

it’s too easy to manipulate what rises to the top. for debate to be anything close to effective all parties involved have to actually be interested in coming closer to a truth. and the algorithms have no interest in deranking sophists and propagandists.

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

#583

Post by compiler-guy »

pesus wrote: post #345
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…

Thinking Menlo Park (or any of Silicon Valley, really) is in any way "extreme left-wing" is a sure indication you haven't spent any time there and are basing your viewpoints off of what others have said on social media. Billion dollar corporations by definition do not support anything remotely "extreme left-wing".

Very few, if any, billion-dollar corporations are in any way “extreme left wing”.

But that is not “by definition”. The definition of a “billion-dollar company” is that it is valued by investors at a billion dollars. That definition has absolutely nothing to do with its political leanings.

“Vanishingly unlikely” sure. But not by definition.

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

#584

Post by insane_dreamer »

chillacy wrote: post #526
insane_dreamer wrote: post #163

NYTimes with more on this: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01/07/business/meta-fact-c...

Ironic that the NYT's article here focuses on the political angle instead of just the "facts" so to speak... > It is likely to please President-elect Trump and his allies.

because part of reporting events is reporting the context and repercussions of those events

that's what journalism is about; otherwise we don't need newspapers, all we need are company PR releases

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

#585

Post by insane_dreamer »

coffeemug wrote: post #240
insane_dreamer wrote: post #166

I'm sure it's a win for Meta (less responsibility, less expense, potentially less criticism, potentially more ad dollars), but certainly a loss for users. More glad than ever that I deleted my FB account 10 years ago, and Twitter once it went X.

My twitter account wasn't big, but it was non-trivial (~30K followers). A post could usually get me to experts on most topics, find people to hang out with in most countries, etc. There were many benefits, so deleting was very hard. But it was eating my brain. I found myself mostly having tweet-shaped thoughts, there was an irresistible compulsion to check mentions 100 times a day, I somehow felt excluded from all th…

If I'm honest with myself, I too had become addicted to Twitter. Elon's oligarchic takeover gave me the push to not only stop going but eventually delete my account altogether (so I wouldn't be tempted to go back into the bar so to speak). So for that I suppose I should be grateful to our new Generalissimo.

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

#586

Post by _DeadFred_ »

jay-barronville wrote: post #500
_DeadFred_ wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Well the most mainstream "news" source Fox news had to pay out almost a billion dollars for dis-information […] The case in question did NOT go to trial, so your claim isn’t entirely correct, but yes, all mainstream “news” outlets (including Fox) abuse our trust by constantly lying to us—I don’t watch or trust any of them. I remember when Rachel Maddow told us, “Now we know that the vaccines work well enough that t…

The court made findings though, didn't they? Check page 44 under 'Fair Report'.

https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Civil-Opinio...

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

#587

Post by insane_dreamer »

pessimizer wrote: post #254
insane_dreamer wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fact-checking and censorship are two very different things.

Deleting isn't fact-checking. Whereas "community noting" actually can make a case for being fact-checking.

Fact checkers weren't deleting posts and didn't even have the right to do so. They are separate journalistic orgs tagging posts. Deleting is done by Meta moderators, which is something else entirely.

I think you also just proved my point that if HN users can't even get basic facts about an event right, how do you expect the average FB user to do so? Goes to show that even on HN "community noting" would be a disaster.

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

#588

Post by andr »

I know some of those fact checkers. They are career journalists and the bar to tag a post as disinformation is extremely high.

To tag a post, they need to produce several pages of evidence, taking several days of work to research and document. The burden of proof is in every way on the fact checkers, not the random Facebook poster.

Generalizing this work as politically biased is a purposeful lie.

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

#589

Post by astolarz »

Seattle3503 wrote: post #491

> As a result, we’re going to start treating civic content from people and Pages you follow on Facebook more like any other content in your feed, and we will start ranking and showing you that content based on explicit signals (for example, liking a piece of content) and implicit signals (like viewing posts) that help us predict what’s meaningful to people. We are also going to recommend more political content based…

>Social media sites should give users an explicit lever to see political content or not

Facebook does sorta have this, under Settings & Privacy > Content Preferences > Manage defaults. Note that the only options for "Political content" are "Show more" and "Default". The other categories listed also include "Show less". There is no "off" option for any of the categories.

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

#590

Post by matwood »

lr1970 wrote: post #534
davidw wrote: 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…

> The ideological bits are: ... Should we expect Meta doing 180 degrees u-turns every 4 years when another party wins US Presidential elections?

Only when the incoming party has threatened going after anyone who was against them with criminal charges.
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