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

#941

Post by nailer » Wed, Jan 08, 2025, 5:38 PM UTC

llamaimperative wrote: post #683

nailer wrote: post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

People who are floating using the military to steal territory from a NATO ally, as just one totally random example. Yeah, I know what the press release said lol. Do you typically take press releases as fact? Journalist: "Can you assure the world that as you try to get control of [Greenland and Panama], you are not going to use military or economic coercion?" Extremist: "No. You're talking about Panama and Greenland:…

No, I don’t take press releases as fact - do you not see that mainstream opinion on gender and immigration is clearly not in line with what Facebook were moderating for?

Compared to compelling people to believe in gender ideology, industrial scale suppression of dissent on private platforms, and teaching race based original sin in schools, being the third president to want to get control of Greenland doesn’t seem particularly extreme.

Also, as was pointed out but you omitted from the question you’re quoting, asking a military commander their strategy is a very poor question.

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

#942

Post by lotsofpulp » Wed, Jan 08, 2025, 5:39 PM UTC

justin66 wrote: post #937

lotsofpulp wrote: post #918

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s resounding because the expectations were that the nation’s voters were trending away from Republican politicians (or at least the popular vote), and the country was just waiting for old voters to die. But that was shown to be completely wrong, even after women lost rights in quite a few states. The message was clear that Republicans are here to stay, and businesses better learn how to do business with them, or e…

They barely scraped out a popular vote win. It's not a "resounding" victory, regardless of what you subjectively experience when you talk about it.

Popular vote doesn't win President, electoral college does, and that was 312 to 226, not barely, and Dems didn't win a single one of the 7 states that were supposedly in play (GA/NC/PA/MI/WI/NV/AZ).

In the legislature, it is almost impossible for Dems to regain control before 2028, as the majority of states electing senators in 2026 are very unlikely to elect a Dem. And I am not optimistic on Dems' chances in the 2026 House:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_divisions_of_United_Stat...

As far as I can tell, Repubs have the executive for at least 4 years, the judiciary for who knows how long, the Senate for at least 4 years, and the House for at least 2, if not 4 years.

Knowing this, it makes sense why businesses would want to cozy up to Republicans.

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

#943

Post by Digit-Al » Wed, Jan 08, 2025, 5:44 PM UTC

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #246

kelseydh wrote: post #190

It's funny how facebook got so political all the normies left, then they downranked political content so much that the political people left too. Facebook is a ghost town now.

Do they still mandate using your legal name? That's the biggest no-go for me. It's just awful opsec.

Don't know if they mandate it, but I know a few people who use either names that are a slight modification of their real name, or completely made up names.

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

#944

Post by lupire » Wed, Jan 08, 2025, 5:46 PM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #871

curtisblaine wrote: post #828

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 capacit…

There is ambiguity, insofar as the whole document is a word salad of sentence fragments and rambling sentences that branch off in different directions without logical coherence.

It takes quite some effort to discern the intended meaning, which I agree matches your interpretation.

Even the tier system is declare but it's meaning never explained.

Calling out "weird" and no other word is hilarious, suggesting that Team MAGA is still sore over how much people enjoyed using that term to describe the bizarre behavior of of Trump and company.

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

#945

Post by lupire » Wed, Jan 08, 2025, 5:49 PM UTC

freejazz wrote: post #936

raxxor wrote: post #897

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know Dana White and I don't know any predecessor. It isn't really relevant though apart from which actions they indeed did take in their approach. Your second point about why people in Texas might be less biased is the distance to primary locations of tech companies perhaps? I don't think that it is convincing, but a lack of trust is the most severe problem of fact checkers. I believe the concept cannot work…

> I don't know Dana White Oh, he runs the UFC and also the new slap fighting league. What that has to do with Facebook? I have no idea.

Facebook is a rhetorical slap fighting league.

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

#946

Post by BurningFrog » Wed, Jan 08, 2025, 5:49 PM UTC

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…

Moving the moderation teams to Texas may be a way to induce a lot of the people working there to quit.

Texas is of course also an easier place to run a business.

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

#947

Post by jacksnipe » Wed, Jan 08, 2025, 5:55 PM UTC

xvector wrote: post #783

jacksnipe wrote: post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about better, but I'm concerned about a second Rohingya genocide. There was a lot wrong with Facebook's moderation system. Spend any time in any politically active groups -- or groups that like to discuss politics -- and you'll quickly find people complaining about deranking. Based on both the extreme frequency with which it's reported and my own experiences with Meta, I believe that they're not making i…

I tend to blame the people actually doing the genocide for genocide, rather than a social media network. Ultimately I think one can clearly draw the line for personal responsibility well before literal murder. Tens of thousands of have been raped, entire towns have been destroyed, around 50k killed and 700k forced to flee. If Western countries actually cared about the human cost of this genocide, it would be almost a…

Eh, I don't think that lens is useful. It appears to me that the genocide very likely may not have occurred -- and certainly would have harmed fewer people -- if Facebook didn't exist.

It is not simply a matter of it happening elsewhere on the internet -- Myanmar is one of the countries that Facebook provided its Free Basics package to.

Of course, I think the bulk of the blame lays on those actively perpetrating the genocide. But I'm concerned mostly with outcomes, and it seems that with different behavior from Facebook, there would have been a different outcome in Myanmar.

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

#948

Post by redserk » Wed, Jan 08, 2025, 6:16 PM UTC

DrScientist wrote: post #892

DecoySalamander wrote: post #890

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing that removing anonymity would do is make it easier to harass people with dissenting opinions. Professional bad actors can switch to posting under "real people" names, just as spammers now post from home IP proxies.

I share your concern - however harassing people is illegal and if you can't be anonymous to do it then that's also much less likely. I don't buy favourite argument of the US gun lobby - that only criminals ( yes by definition ) would have guns/anonymous accounts if you banned it therefore we shouldn't do anything. You could apply that to anything that's illegal - by definition only criminals are outside the law - so…

I suggest you consider looking how much it costs to go through the legal system, as it seems your assertion is based in a theoretical understanding of our system.

Filing a civil suit can be pretty expensive if you want a lawyer -- which, yes, you do effectively need one.

This is effectively a tax on the victims of harassment.

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

#949

Post by raxxor » Wed, Jan 08, 2025, 6:20 PM UTC

hmmm-i-wonder wrote: post #142

raxxor wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claims are challenged all the time by other users and there are enough cases where fact checkers were wrong or heavily biased. EU legislation tries to introduce "trusted flaggers". A ridiculous approach, an information authority by a state-like entity doesn't work, even if they paint these flaggers as independent. They simply are not, a trusted and verifiable fact. Community notes provide higher quality info, it is t…

>Claims are challenged all the time by other users and there are enough cases where fact checkers were wrong or heavily biased. I've only seen a handful of cases where they were wrong of heavily biased, but I've seen hundreds of cases where the poster refuses to accept they are wrong and the fact checkers are right. >Community notes provide higher quality info, it is the better approach. That is an opinion of course.…

I don't know. I believe the average internet user has less to gain to feed me wrong info. It happens of course, that is why you shouldn't believe everything you read on the internet.

A fact checker however has economic incentive towards their employers. You can paint them as independent, but the will always be in a precarious situation or are influenced by third party financiers. This does not at all evoke more trust than a random internet person. Trusted source is pretty subjective, but for me "official" fact checkers don't have too much of that.

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

#950

Post by cloverich » Wed, Jan 08, 2025, 6:22 PM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #742

tgma wrote: post #739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> like people being in Texas makes them more objective?! This is the least charitable interpretation. Obviously, it is not talking about a single person moving to Texas suddenly changing colors like a chameleon (although I suspect there is quite a bit of merit to that due to groupthink and community speech policing in BayArea/LA). And yes, I think it won't be a stretch to think Texas would be more objective represent…

Is the distribution of people in Austin so very different from the Bay Area? Both states are internally diverse. And it’s just silly to suggest that “groupthink and community speech policing” is something that exists in California but not Texas.

Its slightly but consistently different. I moved from Austin (after 30+ years in TX) to the west coast, and the group think / speech policing is extremely noticeable to me (spend most of my time in Portland and SF), even though its not extremely different.

That being said I think a more nuanced but still political take on the move is, having moderators is important, and its less likely those moderation will be pressured to shut down if the moderators are actual jobs in a red state. Further the jobs are low skill jobs so they can be moved back (or elsewhere) as needed. Easy move even if the political capital is minor.