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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

#611

Post by toss1 »

tptacek wrote: post #217
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…

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…

If it was in the works for a long time, then Zuckerberg has been planning to bend the knee to Trump for a long time.

Today, Trump in press conference (video at [0]:

Q: "Do you think Zuckerberg is responding to the threats you've made to him in the past?"

TRUMP: "Probably. Yeah. Probably."

This tells us all we need to know. It has nothing to do with facts and everything to do with yielding to political pressure to bend the media to his whims.

This is just the most standard and basic elements of autocracy, the autocrat must make all the institutions serve him, not the people. This includes not only the branches of government, but also of society, starting with the press, but also the corporate world, the academy, social groups, and everything else.

This is bog-standard autocracy, not democracy.

[0] https://x.com/atrupar/status/1876683641113248036

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

#612

Post by coffeemug »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #564
coffeemug wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Like alcohol and drugs, I think there's a certain kind of person that's susceptible to social media addiction. I don't think it's a large segment of the population but I also have no idea how big it is either. Plenty of people can drink or consume weed in moderation. Likewise I know a lot of people who mostly use socials in the bathroom or before bed but rarely elsewhere.

Smoking is a better analogy IMO.

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

#613

Post by hug »

tshaddox wrote: post #468
stronglikedan wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also not offensive in English, even though some virtue signalers insist on taking offense to it.

Have you ever seen someone use the slur without intending the same mean-spiritedness that the "virtue signalers" are taking offense to?

As someone who works adjacent to rail operations, it's somewhat common to see used in a completely straight-faced and serious way.

Plant failing to be properly retarded is a somewhat regular cause of near-miss safety incidents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retarder_(railroad)

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

#614

Post by zahlman »

jimbokun wrote: post #550
throw83838445 wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You can’t possibly seriously believe this? The whole point of science is to eliminate human authority as a source of truth. Every claim must be peer reviewed, should be replicated by independent parties, and open to falsification by new evidence. “Appeal to authority” is always the wrong approach if you are seeking truth.

I think it was very clearly sarcasm.

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

#615

Post by bsder »

ChocolateGod wrote: post #569
bsder wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> basically making it harder for teenage boys to be manlier Making it harder for teenage boys having surgery to fit a stereotype sounds like a win? I don't think you thought that point through.

My point was that the breathless hyperbole about "gender affirming" surgery is actually in direct opposition to "traditional male stereotype" of the same group--thus invalidating that the concern is a genuine issue rather than political rhetoric.

As to whether teenage boys should be getting that surgery? That's .. more complicated. Should one that lost 100+ pounds to be healthier be able to get that surgery? Probably. How big should the growth be before it becomes "medical"? Don't know.

This is why stuff like this should be left to doctors who actually understand the circumstances of the patient.

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

#616

Post by pesus »

Eextra953 wrote: post #578
tqwhite wrote: post #339

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 scienti…

I similarly share your pessimism. Ironically, I think a lot of the propaganda that is effective on HN's demographic works because it frames itself in a way that makes it appear logical and intellectually robust. Us devs love thinking we're the smartest person in the room and strong, logical thinkers who can't be fooled, but that's exactly why those kinds of propaganda and talking points can work so well. (I'm certainly guilty of it myself at times, fwiw.)

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

#617

Post by nomel »

tootie wrote: post #520
comex wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t use either Facebook or X so I have no personal experience. But the New York Times cited this meta-analysis for the proposition that they’re not ineffective: Fact-checker warning labels are effective even for those who distrust fact-checkers https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01973-x They also cited this paper for the proposition that Community Notes doesn’t work well because it takes too long for the…

Notably Zuckerberg did not cite any data for his assertions that community notes are effective.

A way to quantify this doesn't immediately come to my mind. Maybe reasonable metrics would be:

1. What % misleading/false posts are flagged

2. What % of those flagged are given meaningful context/corrections that are accurate.

It seems there's circular logic of first determining truth with 1, and then maybe something to do with a "trust"/quality poll with 2. I suspect a good measurement would be very similar to the actual community notes implementation, since both of those are the goal of the system [1].

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.15723

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

#618

Post by jay-barronville »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #609
jay-barronville wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Community notes are just opinions of random people on internet. No. Community Notes is an open-source peer review-like system but designed in a way to limit bias: When sets of note contributors (the peers in this case) who normally strongly oppose each other’s views on Topic A strongly agree on a point made re Topic A, we’re likely getting closer to the truth.

When you use the term "open-source" in this context, what do you mean?

> When you use the term "open-source" in this context, what do you mean?

The code for its implementation is literally available on GitHub [0] under the Apache License 2.0.

[0]: https://github.com/twitter/communitynotes

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

#619

Post by insane_dreamer »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #606
insane_dreamer wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, journalism always has some inherent bias. But to say that the X community is going to be less biased than a fact-checking organization staffed by journalists whose job is to be neutral (within what's humanly possible), is frankly absurd.

Why is it absurd? Journalists don’t think their job is to be neutral. They are among the most biased. They abuse the trust given to them, which is why they don't deserve it. Community notes allows a diversity of opinions to compete, which is a better way to seek truth.

you're confusing fact checking with forum discussions and social media posts
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