Ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to Community Notes model • Hacker News Board

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

#711

Post by bag_boy » Wed, Jan 08, 2025, 2:11 AM UTC

lossolo wrote: post #529

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…

It doesn’t matter if they were better or worse, it’s all relative. It depends on who you ask, everyone will give a different answer. You are looking at this from a technological and problem solving perspective, while the people who made the decision prioritized these much lower on their list. You need to think like a politician and consider the PR side of things. This is not about solving the problem, it’s about perc…

It also gives Facebook a new product feature that encourages user activity.

It was the correct chess move given the current board.

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

#712

Post by harimau777 » Wed, Jan 08, 2025, 2:11 AM UTC

j45 wrote: post #621

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…

Perhaps part of it is the optics that California is interpreting it for other places?

How is it any better for Texas to interpret it for other places?

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

#713

Post by bag_boy » Wed, Jan 08, 2025, 2:12 AM UTC

viraptor wrote: post #476

tptacek wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is what it is. It's a hotspot for local politics, so quitting it isn't really an option for me.

It's also the marketplace in some countries. Wanna sell some furniture locally? It may be close to the only option.

Just wait until they release a job board. They’ll figure this out soon.

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

#714

Post by irisgrunn » Wed, Jan 08, 2025, 2:14 AM UTC

jimbokun wrote: post #566

eynsham wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it not possible that ‘attacking trans people’ is both (sometimes) a euphemism for criticism of maximalist positions and (at other times) a perfectly normal term that designates approximately what ‘attacking x’ generally means? There is such a thing as an unsubstantive and utterly unpleasant insult explicitly motivated by the fact that its target is trans. Many trans people say that there are many such, and one doe…

It’s possible theoretically. In practice people complaining about attacks on trans people almost always want to shut down discussion about related topics all together.

Yes because it has no real life consequences like https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01979-5.epdf or https://goodlawproject.org/rise-of-deaths-young-trans-people...

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

#715

Post by zahlman » Wed, Jan 08, 2025, 2:16 AM UTC

n4r9 wrote: post #102

ceejayoz wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And why aren't you considering the countervailing harm to society of centralized moderation? Are there reproducible studies showing that? What is the effect size? (These objections go both ways!)

Right. The challenge for free speech absolutists is to demonstrate that free speech takes priority over moderating hate speech, adult content, highly addictive media etc... . That demonstration needs to evidence-based and framed in terms of short and long term social harms/impact. Simply saying "censorship hasn't gone well for some countries" or "having a free speech zone is extremely important to the future of civil…

>The challenge for free speech absolutists is to demonstrate that free speech takes priority over

Why? And how, in principle? Why is the burden of evidence not on others - and equally, how, in principle, could they furnish evidence?

The entire point is that freedom of speech is a core moral value; they have weighed the potential harms and come out against censorship, because they consider censorship to be inherently harmful. There is no objective way to compare different kinds of harm to each other; each individual's moral values are what they are.

When a free speech absolutist argues that freedom of speech is more important than whatever goal the censor has in mind, that argument is of fundamentally the same kind as the censor's argument, just with opposite polarity. When the censor says that "hate speech" needs to be prohibited, that, too, is based on a relative weighing of values and purported rights (i.e. freedom from hearing it).

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

#716

Post by zahlman » Wed, Jan 08, 2025, 2:21 AM UTC

philjohn wrote: post #66

rayiner wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Are we arguing that graphic images of suicide and self injury are required for open discourse?

Freedom of speech is not about what's "required". That's why pornography is allowed to exist.

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

#717

Post by ramblenode » Wed, Jan 08, 2025, 2:23 AM UTC

mrguyorama wrote: post #641

miramba wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 subj…

Most experts will not give simple answers to simple questions because they see the question itself as ill-posed. Theses could be written about "Is crime up or down?" GP's claim is that this has a simple answer that can be checked. The bigger issue isn't whether a dataset is statistically valid but which data would even be relevant to a particular underspecified and vague question.

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

#718

Post by zahlman » Wed, Jan 08, 2025, 2:25 AM UTC

isx726552 wrote: post #540

This is happening because Trump threatened to put Zuckerberg in prison for life (not an exaggeration): https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-warns-mark-zuckerberg-c... Trump himself confirmed this today: https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lf66oltlvs2l I cannot believe anyone would actually be okay with this situation.

>This is happening because

Correlation is not causation, and coincidence definitely isn't.

Trump is politically incentivized to take credit for this. But he cannot in principle "confirm" anything about Zuckerberg's mental state.

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

#719

Post by zahlman » Wed, Jan 08, 2025, 2:28 AM UTC

pbasista wrote: post #160

aurareturn wrote: post #104

I speculated what Zuckerberg wanted and what he'd do when he visited Mar-a-lago[0]: * Push to ban Tiktok * Drop antitrust lawsuits against Meta * Meta will relax "conservative" posts on its platforms * Zuckerberg will donate to Trump's cause So far, Zuckerberg has already donated to Trump's cause. Now he has relaxed "conservative" posts on its platforms directly or indirectly. When Trump comes into power, he'll likel…

> ban Tiktok I would be really interested in how someone could spin advocating for less moderation and at the same time asking to ban the competitors' social media platforms.

It's not about the users of that competing platform, but about the country where the parent company is registered (https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/24/tech/tiktok-douyin-bytedance-...).

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

#720

Post by kcplate » Wed, Jan 08, 2025, 2:29 AM UTC

fzeroracer wrote: post #177

kcplate wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exposure to many viewpoints, including wrong ones, provides a counterbalancing effect. When you actively try and suppress information you create a “forbidden knowledge” effect where people seek out silos where extreme and wrongheaded information gets passed without the “sunlight is the best disinfectant”—-it grows faster…becomes more wrong, more extreme, and more dangerous. Seems to me in my experience after decades…

> Seems to me in my experience after decades of watching and participating in online discussion extremism really only became more problematic when fact checking and active efforts to suppress took hold. Whatever the good intentions may have been, the results were worse. This is just overtly and flatly wrong. I reject your experience fully because over the past few decades the internet has become more open, not less.…

You can reject my experience all you want but the reality is that between 2020 and 2023ish the world’s top social media platforms became less open about specific kinds of information and actively tried to censor and suppress any contrary information to a government opinion/narrative about certain subjects. During this time certain forms of extremism exploded in popularity as people were driven to information silos to find and learn about the information that the social media platforms were trying to suppress. Those silos generally didn’t have censorship but they also didn’t have contrarian voices either. So when folks landed in those silos all they heard was the assholes at the loud volumes and without the contrarians, followed those assholes.

Specifically to vaccines, the antivax crowd was pretty minimal to a some nutjob soccer moms, holistic medicine fanatics, and RFKjr until you stopped having conversations with them, because you folks who want or believe that censorship is good silenced the debate and did not follow them to the forums where they went to spread their ideas to continue the debate.

I am absolutely convinced that the growth in the antivax movement is directly tied to the censorship effort (and the desire of the government to not be completely honest about the vaccines at the time).