111–120 of 239 posts
See more stories from preferred sources, and block news sources you don’t like.
- Under "Preferred," list publications you want to see more news from.
- Under "Blocked," list publications you don’t want to see any news from.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you really want to fight the root of the problem, it's not likes and comments, but education. Should we censor social media, because people are too stupid to deal with it? I don't think so and if you do, you're playing in the hands of corporations who want a cheap work force. Your "solution" isn't a solution, but a hot fix that will cause more damage in the future. It's exactly the shortsighted crap politics are t…
The experience from a few months ago during a conference showed me that education won't fix echo chambers. It was a conference that was organized by a organization that holds one of the major initiative against false news, and where one of the main tracks was about addressing the issue of false news. Last year they had a massive booth at the middle of the conference hall about false news. This year they brought in a…
BuzzFeed. The most trusted name in news.
Actually BuzzFeed has recently been doing some excellent investigative and long-form journalism. Surprising turnaround; kind of like Vice.
> For instance, Buzzfeed's initial beginnings as a viral site would have almost certainly hindered its growth into a serious news organisation had it been subject to the ideas about to be put in place by Mr Zuckerberg's team.
I'm not really sure what the answer to this is - but they are really good now and would definitely have been perma-black-holed before now by many measures I can think of.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you really want to fight the root of the problem, it's not likes and comments, but education. Should we censor social media, because people are too stupid to deal with it? I don't think so and if you do, you're playing in the hands of corporations who want a cheap work force. Your "solution" isn't a solution, but a hot fix that will cause more damage in the future. It's exactly the shortsighted crap politics are t…
> If you really want to fight the root of the problem, it's not likes and comments, but education. I agree, but it's impossible to educate everyone on any subject. I think in this case, people who are experts in the matter, should give a reputation rating on the article. That would be really great. For example, I am no expert in theoretical physics, but I may enjoy an article about it, but how do I know it's not a bu…
This seems very lazy on Facebook's part. Rather than employing people who will research and fact-check, they're punting the problem to the users. This whole situation arose because users are very bad at determining which sources are credible. People will believe anything that confirms their biases, and disbelieve anything that doesn't.
I'm sure Facebook wouldn't care about a few million spent on a panel of the world's greatest connoisseurs of real news. This feature is in fact guaranteed to cost far more than a few experts ever would. But Facebook knows that any expert panel will without a sliver of doubt quickly converge to a ranking that has the Economist and the New York Times in top positions, and Breitbart somewhere behind a random word genera…
I read articles in the New York Times, the Economist and also Breitbart (UK edition) fairly regularly. Whilst they cover very different stories as you'd expect given their political biases, I have not noticed any major difference in accuracy when dealing with objective facts. This is partly because "mainstream" media is quite unreliable, rather than any awesome quality of reliability inherent to Breitbart, but the idea that it's unreliable seems to be to be coming from people who simply dislike conservative worldviews ... and desperately want to stop people from reading them. Same reason they try and smear anyone who goes looking as nazis, bigots etc. They fear that if someone reads things from the "other side" they might find it's not so unreasonable after all ...
Why not remove anything except from social interaction from FB instead of this? IMHO anything on FB beyond connecting with people is worthless anyway and mostly driven by bots and not people these days.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's arrogance. Zuck wants to be in control of which sources are seen as trustworthy and which are not, but he doesn't want to actually be on the hook for making these decisions. So he implements a faux-democratic facade, and gets to make the actual calls behind the scenes by tweaking algorithms. He wants to have his cake and eat it too.
Let's be clear here. Facebook is a private website. They legally, morally and ethically have the right to determine what content their users see. Especially given that we have demonstrated evidence of fake news being disseminated. The idea that this was supposed to be a democratic process was never claimed nor should it have been expected.
Um, legally, sure. Morally and ethically is not up to them.
Bad or good, this is an admission of failure. Facebook just flat out said "screw it, you all decide what's real...because we sure as shit can't."
...because we sure as shit don't want to get into that mess.
They would be better off auto-blending articles at the other end of users' opinion spectrum into their news feeds (or comment threads) to try and burst the echo chambers. "Here are some articles at the polar opposite to your norms."
I don't think that would work well at all. "The polar opposite to my norms" is stuff like Alex Jones and Breitbart. I won't learn anything from exposing myself to such idiocy. Dishonest clickbait is worthless, even if it comes from a diversity of viewpoints. No algorithm is (yet) smart enough to judge the quality of journalism. Facebook shouldn't try.
Its a bit tone-deaf, Mark. Remember the "we had no effect on the election" line that everyone laughed at? This year its "user curation is the answer to fake news". Everyone is laughing at you again.
If you want to determine credibility, hire people to judge credibility. Hire a mix of viewpoints. Its not that hard, it just costs money, which you have more than enough of. Maybe give some of that money back to the users who turn over their online lives to you and actually improve their lives, instead of just monetizing them by feeding users garbage that gets them to click and consume while at the same time you go around complaining that users aren't discriminating enough with those clicks and consumption.