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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

#871

Post by pavlov »

curtisblaine wrote: post #828
pavlov wrote: post #738

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “maybe it's just a way of saying that certain kinds of 'content' like attacking trans people is going to be ok now” The new policy explicitly says that allegations of mental illness are not allowed except if the target is gay or trans, so, yeah… https://www.wired.com/story/meta-immigration-gender-policies...

> it allows “allegations of mental illness or abnormality, based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird.’” I think you misread that: it allows allegations of mental illness even on the basis of gender and religion, which before weren't allowed. It still allows allegations of mental illness based…

No, it’s explicitly so that allegations of mental illness are forbidden except if the target is gay or trans.

Here’s another source:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/meta-new-hate-spee...

And the original document:

https://transparency.meta.com/en-gb/policies/community-stand...

Tier 2 forbids insults based on:

Mental characteristics, including but not limited to allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity, and mental illness, and unsupported comparisons between PC groups on the basis of inherent intellectual capacity. We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like “weird.”

There’s no ambiguity. Allegations of mental illness or abnormality are explicitly allowed based on gender or sexual orientation, but no other reason.

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

#872

Post by gitaarik »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #863
gitaarik wrote: post #789

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they are more realistic, or less corrupt. Seems to me that if some authority is determining what are facts and what are not for me, that I am easily shapable and foolable. Community Notes at least don't claim they have the facts. So that leaves you more with a responsibility to make up your own mind. I know this isn't for everyone, there are still a lot of people that like to have leaders tell them how they should…

None of this is to do with anything about what people want. It's to do with the government. Meta has always, by necessity to some degree, gone with what the current US administration wants re: content moderation. This is the same thing. Do you really think the company which has openly admitted it wants to create AI profiles that post as if they're humans and not tell you they are AI care at all about facts or what yo…

Well yeah true, the decision is probably mostly made because of the change of government. The fact checking was pleasing the left, and now that the right has the power, this left-wing-propaganda thing has to go.

But then is community notes right-wing?

They could also have kept the fact checking system, but just alter the facts to please their agenda.

But they didn't do that, they are replacing it with Community Notes, which isn't some small group supposedly figuring out the facts for everyone, but a community build information system.

To me that seems a lot more fair and less prone to corruption. So regardless of the real motivation behind the move, I think it will have positive effects for society. At least a step in the right direction. Still a long way to go.

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

#873

Post by khafra »

jimbokun wrote: post #516
davidw wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a product decision taken independently, maybe. Running one of those things at scale with all kinds of people trying to subvert it for various reasons, including some downright evil ones, is not an easy task. Announced together with everything else and given the timing, I just can't help but think there's a political component to all of it.

Fact checking, Community Notes, whatever you want to call it, is inherently political.

What I've read of the Community Notes algorithm casts it as far more neutral than any hiring decisions about professional content moderators could possibly be. If it's "political," it's in a similar way to comparing the GDP of various countries is political--reality gives the verdict, the politics is in whether that verdict was the optimal one to ask reality for.

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

#874

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

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…

I don't understand your point at all. Community Notes on E(x) has been ineffective, because ultimately the point of moderation is to delete posts which aren't true so they receive no reach and spread no disinformation.

Not to turn them into a public debate which might as well continue in the posts themselves.

Meta's political history has consistently been shady. Meta patented behavioural targeting technology in 2012 and was fined $5bn for its "accidental" links to anti-democratic election-fixers Cambridge Analytica/SCL, who have ties to far-right oligarchs in the US and the UK.

If you're looking for an ideological position, look there. The historical record is absolutely clear.

And then there are comments from Meta insiders, who - perhaps - have a clearer picture of what's going on than outsiders do.

As for malpractice, consider the recent AI rollout and rollback. It was an absolute fiasco for all kinds of reasons, PR and technical, not least of which was the way the bots themselves turned on the company.

Threads has already had a mini-exodus because of slanted moderation.

Meta is simply not a trustworthy company. So "Oh, let's scrap our moderation and do community notes" is hardly an isolated slip-up on an otherwise unblemished record of noble public service.

https://fortune.com/2025/01/04/meta-ai-accounts-bots-false-r...

https://www.platformer.news/meta-fact-checking-free-speech-s...

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

#875

Post by Cthulhu_ »

torben-friis wrote: post #424
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…

I don't care about the fact checking part but I do care about the "removing the limits on political content on feeds". I think everyone can agree that polarizing content being pushed into people's feed for engagement is a very very bad mix with politics. There is no benefit for anyone in doing this, except for meta's metrics and propaganda outlets.

Didn't they get in trouble with lawmakers and / or advertisers for that in the first place?

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

#876

Post by llamaimperative »

xvector wrote: post #794
llamaimperative wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only they had lawyers to defend their free speech rights

Then the government sics the FCC or European Commission on you, who make trumped up charges that they push through a kangaroo court to fine you billions. There's no fighting a government, and all governments are corrupt if they see an opportunity to rent-seek from you.

Examples of the FCC doing this?

Europe has way weaker free speech protections so I have no interest in defending them.

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

#877

Post by magic_smoke_ee »

spacechild1 wrote: post #841
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…

> We are also going to recommend more political content based on these personalized signals and are expanding the options people have to control how much of this content they see. Great, so more filter bubbles? They don't learn, or more likely, don't care.

Doubling-down on idiocracy and civilizational decline because there's money in it.

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

#878

Post by verdverm »

davidw wrote: post #212
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…

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…

> most of us would be fine with some experimentation

This is why ATProto is a great foundation for to the next generation of social media applications. It makes experimentation easier and open for all. It removes the cost of switching to the better alternatives. ATProto enables real competition on a single, common social media fabric.

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

#880

Post by throwaway48476 »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #838
toasteros wrote: post #818

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just can't help but think there's a political component to all of it. "We're moving to Texas to eliminate perceptions of bias" is the biggest giveaway of this.

Austin is very left of center. If they end up there, they will have ideologically strayed in California while geographically moving to Texas.

Stayed not strayed.
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