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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

#641

Post by mrguyorama »

miramba wrote: post #447
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…

Every single one of your points is not boolean and depends on the definition and the data you include and exclude. For each you could easily find studies and statistics in either direction. The fact that this is apparently not obvious to you proves the point that all fact-checking is inherently biased and depends on the subjective opinions of the checking person.

People who study statistics are pretty good at saying "look, that data set was probably gamed, I would have done it ", or "that conclusion does not follow from the data presented".

It's no different to someone claiming on twitter that they are a great programmer who can fix twitter's search in a weekend who then has to tweet for suggestions on how to write a search feature in javascript. People familiar with the subject matter can see right through your bravado.

I'm so tired of people with no expertise on anything insisting that people who have clear expertise "didn't think of trivial point A that just came to mind" as if some of these fields aren't centuries old and have been around the block a few times.

It's similar to the teenager insisting "you just don't get it mom", but like, mom totally gets it, she was a teenager once too. And while there are occasions when mom might not get it, like how she didn't grow up in a world with social media so she might not be able to help you through that, but she ABSOLUTELY gets that it feels like your world is ending when your first love leaves you, and in fact it is YOU who does not "get it" that you will move on eventually.

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

#642

Post by unethical_ban »

Off topic but related to holding communities to account: I wish there were a way to metamoderate subs on Reddit. The Texas subreddit has been co-opted by a moderator that bans anyone who criticizes their editorial decisions or notices antagonism trolls taking over the sub.

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

#643

Post by flawn »

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…

You are assuming the people in social media are a representative cut of people in the society but what you will notice quickly is that this is not the case, just look at echo chambers.

If I am trying to debate the same fact on a far-right or far-left post, undoubtedly both will come up with the same discussion and conclusion - let's not lie to ourselves.

So for your claim to have any validity the requirement of a fair, unbiased group of people on all posts would need to be given (in the first instance, there are a lot more issues with this, just look at the loud people versus the ones not bothering anymore to comment as discussing seems impossible) and that is just de facto not the case and the reason fact-checking is indeed helpful.

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

#644

Post by zahlman »

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.

By the same - entirely unevidenced - reasoning, your posts ITT are about signalling the reverse in order to make good with sympathetic readers on HN.

See how that works?

The specific places in California where Facebook had "trust and safety and content moderation teams" were places that very much don't reflect the average politics of the US. That is naturally going to reflect itself in the ideological composition of employees, and therefore in political bias in the fact-checking process.

We've already seen harm from this. For example, Facebook suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story (https://www.yahoo.com/news/zuckerberg-admits-facebook-suppre...), even though:

* there has never been any evidence provided to link the story to supposed Russian disinformation;

* The FBI (i.e., the agency supposedly telling Facebook and other social media companies to be on the lookout for such disinformation) acknowledged that they did in fact seize the laptop from the computer shop owner in 2019 (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/22/us/politics/hunter-biden-...) and verified that it was Hunter Biden's - which later came up in a criminal case against him in mid 2024 (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/live-blog/hun...

* there is no good reason a priori, outside of political bias, to suspect the New York Post (founded 1801 by Alexander Hamilton) of spreading such disinformation.

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

#645

Post by autarch »

Asterisk just published an interview with the folks behind Community Notes at X (Twitter) - https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/the-making-of-community-no...

I don't use Twitter so I hadn't seen it in action, but the interview convinced me that this is a good approach. I think this approach makes sense for Facebook as well.

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

#646

Post by DonHopkins »

throw83838445 wrote: post #356
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…

[flagged]

Thank God Congress finally passed a law that made it illegal to get brain cancer from cell phones.

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

#647

Post by blased »

riffic wrote: post #159
blased wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, just maybe, it's because most people in the media are Democrats, and therefore inherently self-biased in their concerns and worldviews, and they have a belief that prevents any critical self-examination easily summed up by the Stephen Colbert line that: "reality has a liberal bias." You can't argue with someone who thinks their beliefs are merely "reality." At least the other side recognizes it as religion, et…

More accurately, the quote is "Reality has a well known liberal bias," and was given in the persona of a character Colbert played on an Comedy Central show and can be seen with a certain irony. https://en.wikipedia.org/?redirect=no&title=Reality_has_a_we...

I think this reinforces my argument that liberals view it as indisputable that there is no bias in their favor in media and all their opinions are "merely reality."

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

#648

Post by clubsoda »

hahahacorn wrote: post #595

Unpopular opinion: I would rather just be on a global-entry-esque kyc'd social media platform at this point. Bots and gov-psyop trolls are certainly (hopefully) like 95% of the gross misinformation, right? I'd give some reasonably trustworthy platform my Passport and identity to speak to only other people who have done the same.

Not at all! It’s been talked about before.

The problem becomes, do you trust the company implementing it?

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

#649

Post by zahlman »

bsder wrote: post #532
jimbokun wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t help but roll my eyes at mindless euphemisms like “attacking trans people.” There are very serious issues involving trans people with no easy answers. Like allowing minors access to irreversible treatments. Like women’s sports. Like the safety of women only spaces. I bring this up because on so many questions like these, the progressive reaction is to shut down any discussion and isolate themselves from expos…

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This is a cheap political gotcha accompanied by a litany of unevidenced and vague allegations against a political out-group (which "particular group"? On what basis do you assert that "some AI somewhere" is involved, and why would that matter? Not to mention the tired "dog whistle" cliche) and a demand for self-censorship.

You've also made a bold claim about the relevant statistics without any kind of citation.

My understanding is that a higher standard of discourse is expected on HN.

But aside from that meta point: your argument seems to rest on the idea that your ideological opponents would prefer for cisgender teenage boys to be able to get mastectomies when they exhibit unwanted breast growth. But the source your interlocutor found suggests that the "breast reductions in teenage boys" you're talking about are in fact dominantly performed on transgender teenage boys (i.e., people your ideological opponents would consider "teenage girls"). So the intended gotcha doesn't even work; you haven't identified any kind of inconsistency in the position or potential for a "self-own".

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

#650

Post by lazyeye »

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

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Also I saw an interesting interview with Marc Andreessen recently where he mentioned about how the Dems would fund "Disinformation Research" units at universities. These research units would (shockingly!) be staffed by 100% Democrat supporters and (even more shockingly) would tend to view everything the Dems disagree with as "disinformation". These groups would then apply pressure to media/social media companies to suppress content. So they were able to breach the first amendment by using censorship by surrogacy. The Democrat censorship industrial complex was ugly and insidious and leading us to a very dark place indeed.
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