Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

about.fb.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

921–930 of 1001 posts

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

#921

Post by red-iron-pine »

gadders wrote: post #865
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.

There was always a political component to it. The Twitter files told us this. It's just the political component is going the other way.

what are the twitter files?

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

#922

Post by freejazz »

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…

Ah right, because calling it a product feature suddenly makes the assessment of it objective and non-political

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

#923

Post by JohnMakin »

timeon wrote: post #657
JohnMakin wrote: post #183

I'm certain it will make parts of the user experience worse, but at least for the Threads app, this seems at least a little necessary - if you're aiming to be the "new" twitter or whatever social need twitter was fulfilling, you need to break free of the shackles of IG/Meta moderation, which is very unforgiving and brutal in very subtle ways that aren't always easy to figure out. But basically, I find a platform like…

> but at least for the Threads app Sorry for OT but what is the point of Threads? Twitter/X is already thing if you do not care about corporate-owned social media.

> corporate-owned social media

In what sense do you think X is not a "corporate owned" company?

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

#924

Post by freejazz »

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 think the point of the fact-checkers is so that facebook users like them, and it seems odd to pretend that was ever the point.

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

#925

Post by lotsofpulp »

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.

People move to other states due to state laws. City laws can easily be avoided by living and/or working just outside the city limits. Or more likely, state laws will preempt city laws that go against state level politics.

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

#926

Post by theptip »

philjohn wrote: post #306
theptip wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, before making policy decisions, I would want the second order data: I think this the wrong lens. The correct lens is: if they don't voluntarily make this change, will they be forced to? The incoming administration seems committed to banning "censorship", so I believe making a cost/benefit analysis is something of a false choice. E.g. see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJfUXVOoFBo

That ignores the regulations in the EU, and the UK (coming into force this year), and also the huge volume of lawsuits they are facing in the US. Does everyone remember Zuck turning around to apologise to the parents in that senate hearing? Those parents must feel this is a slap in the face.

This is a decision for the US market first and foremost. The lawsuits you mention are sadly irrelevant to the decision-making; again, if you are about to be forced to make this change by Trump, the results of some cost/benefit study will not sway his reasoning. His decision is already made.

FWIW I would not be surprised if the bluster about championing free speech abroad gets quietly forgotten; we’ll see. They explicitly state they will comply with laws, which in EU likely means continuing to moderate (more not less over time, given the regulatory trends).

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

#927

Post by davidclark »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #546
hcurtiss wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we have any evidence that Musk has removed a CN on his own post? I've personally seen evidence to the contrary, and he makes a point of highlighting that even he gets a CN every now and then.

As the root comment noted, one of the great things about community notes on X are that the algorithm and the data it's operating on are public. If Musk were removing notes that would be trivial to prove. The fact that such claims of tampering are never accompanied by said proof should tell you all you need to know.

How would it be trivial? Can you describe in a more specific way?

The data I can find says it was last updated 9:02 PM Jan. 5, 2025 (presumably America/Chicago from my browser). That’s a >2 day window as of writing this comment.

Not throwing any accusation, just trying to understand the technicals.

If there was any manipulation of community notes in the last 2 days, how would we know?

If there’s manipulation of this data before it is published, such as ratings or notes never hitting these data files, how would we know?

Maybe, an individual could check to see their own contributions are included in updates to the published data. Is that sufficiently common such that it would get caught?

Community note data I can find (log in required): https://x.com/i/communitynotes/download-data

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

#928

Post by nunobrito »

verdverm wrote: post #878
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…

> 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.

No it isn't. The only implementation of ATProto so far has been heavily criticized for immediately blocking anyone with wrong opinions, while at the same permitting pedolovers post without much trouble (that butterfly logo is a well-known pedophile logo).

More reports about the awful actions of bluesky/ATProto: https://www.newsweek.com/conservatives-join-bluesky-face-abu...

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

#929

Post by panarky »

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…

Both professional fact-checkers and Community Notes have a pretty low false-positive rate.

It's the false negatives that are the differentiator, but false negatives are by definition invisible to the user.

When you evaluate moderation as a "product" you place more weight on factors that are mostly losers for third-party fact checkers and winners for Community Notes: speed and annoying tone.

But since false negatives are never seen, there's no visible "product" to be annoyed by. Sure, the platform fills up with even more disinfo, but users blame that on other user, not the moderation "product".

And this is where Community Notes fails. Because Notes require consensus from multiple groups with histories of diverse ideological perspectives, when one perspective has an interest in propagating disinfo, no Community Note appears.

Some studies show something like 75% of clear disinfo doesn't get a Community Note on X when it involves a hot partisan shibboleth.

False negatives are mostly invisible failures that make the entire platform worse, but the user can't blame it on a "product" because it's really the absence of a product that's the problem.

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

#930

Post by toss1 »

curtisblaine wrote: post #826
toss1 wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ben…

Autocracts doesn't get democratically elected, as far as I understand. Trump is a democratically elected leader who will end his term at most in 2028. Autocracts tend to not be democratically elected (or to change the rules once they're elected to never be deposed). Zuckerberg will bend his knee to the Democrats if they win next term. This is not autocracy, this is just knowing where the wind blows.

In current times, democratically elected autocrats include Putin of Russia, Orban of Hungary, Erdoğan of Turkey, Chavez/Maduro of Venezuela, Bukele of El Slavador, and more. Jumping back a most notorious autocrat, Hitler was democratically elected.

Autocracy is not typically imposed by conquest, it is mostly created by corruption of institutions. It is not binary, it is on a scale.

In full democracies, all the institutions of government, legislative, executive, and judicial, are independent and serve as checks & balances against each other. And the institutions of society, industry, trade, press, academic, sport, social, etc. are also fully independent.

Under autocracy, all of these governmental and societal institutions are corrupted to bend to the will of the autocrat, often by his using force of government to his corrupt ends.

This is exactly what Trump just admitted to and Zuckerberg just did — he threatened Zuckerberg with unfair government actions, and Zuckerberg is now converting Facebook to work to further Trump's goals instead of remaining an independent institution.

Here's just a few resources on elected autocrats [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/meet-the-new-auto...

[1] https://nps.edu/-/nps-professor-takes-a-deep-dive-into-elect...

[2] https://academy.wcfia.harvard.edu/publications/democrats-and...

[3] https://press.umich.edu/Blog/2022/07/Elections-in-Modern-Dic...

Post reply on HN