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Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to one

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Re: Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to one

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I’m overly pessimistic about how people collectively behave. But seriously, imagine an article posted on Facebook stating that Planned Parenthood sells body parts of aborted fetuses (or something similarly likely to elicit reactions). Obviously, that's either factual or it’s not. Yet I'm certain that if Facebook users had the ability to vote on whether the story is true of false, they would vote based on person…

> Obviously, that's either factual or it’s not. Sure, but unless people actually work at PP or carry out their own individual on-site investigation, their knowledge of the fact is going to be based on what third-party sources they trust (including those acting as fact checkers), which is tightly correlated with viewpoint. > Facebook users had the ability to vote on whether the story is true of false, they would vote…

> their knowledge of the fact is going to be based on what third-party sources they trust (including those acting as fact checkers), which is tightly correlated with viewpoint.

But that's true of nearly everything.

On anything controversial, users will generally vote based on what they like to believe, and such a system of ranking news stories or posters of news stories would never be reliable.

Re: Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to one

#122

I am tempted to paraphrase the Elephant man, "I am not a sigmoid function, I am a human being!" in response to that headline :-) That said, I think it is great that they are trying to characterize this sort of thing. The second law of institutions is that every process must require more people to execute than can conspire without being detected[1]. But relying so much on humans in one way or another is going to gum i…

the second law of institutions you say? can we get a source

Re: Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to one

#123
Facebook is finally learning from the playbook of insurance companies, using your hangouts, friends, job, acquaintances, activities and behavior to assign you a risk score.

It's designed to reduce THEIR risk, which means by default that it will be stacked against YOU, and they won't care about those getting ground up in the wheels of the machine.

Re: Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to one

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a European I want to make it vocally known that in my opinion US politics has in recent times almost irrevocably poisoned HackerNews; and that is coming from someone who has been on this site eight years. One _cannot_ in _any way_ infer a lack of good intentions from a single alleged phone call. Besides, if I were a titan of industry I would do my best to call whoever the hell got elected president the night of th…

>"As a European I want to make it vocally known that in my opinion US politics ..." "can we please please focus on tech and policy and put identity politics and tribal politics to one side on HN?" It's amusing that you start off by establishing your own identity(European) and then ask others to stop engaging in identity politics.

I'm merely pointing out that I'm not from the US so that people know that I don't have a dog in the race. Just so you know I would vote for neither of the two big teams in the US.

What I am trying to do is to say that from a neutral perspective the politicking here is reaching a toxic level. It distracts from the real issues of giant monopolistic tech companies and other such real social ills. You think it's amusing, I think it's downright depressing that I should have to wave a white flag.

Re: Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to one

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a European I want to make it vocally known that in my opinion US politics has in recent times almost irrevocably poisoned HackerNews; and that is coming from someone who has been on this site eight years. One _cannot_ in _any way_ infer a lack of good intentions from a single alleged phone call. Besides, if I were a titan of industry I would do my best to call whoever the hell got elected president the night of th…

I hate the "identity politics" meme. What is policy that effects humans but "identity politics". From privacy oriented individuals concerned with data collection to social minorities concerned about prosecution any administration is going effect you based on identity. For racial and sexual minorities, in the current US climate especially, it's hard to avoid "identity politics" when you have literal mobs with torches…

10/10 for putting a serious subject in bunny rabbit ears to trivialize it. There's no good pretending we're not in the middle of a cultural war.

Re: Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to one

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate the "identity politics" meme. What is policy that effects humans but "identity politics". From privacy oriented individuals concerned with data collection to social minorities concerned about prosecution any administration is going effect you based on identity. For racial and sexual minorities, in the current US climate especially, it's hard to avoid "identity politics" when you have literal mobs with torches…

10/10 for putting a serious subject in bunny rabbit ears to trivialize it. There's no good pretending we're not in the middle of a cultural war.

Given that the term "culture war" has no set definition and best I can tell is just a dog whistle for "rally the bigots against ", I'm really at a loss as to what your point is.

Are you concerned changing cultural tides will put you on the wrong side of history? Or is it more of an existential angst about privilege? I think we're in agreement that current trends are very serious, although it appears for opposite reasons.

Re: Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to one

#128
post #5

Can you GDPR request this?

You should be able to.

Why? If I store your height and weight for you as part of my app, but compute on the server-side the quotient of those for server-side features, why do I need to give you that intermediate value? Would you then be entitled to any intermediate variables used in any calculations that use your data?

Re: Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to one

#129
post #19

I wonder whether there's some PageRank-like principal eigenvalue problem under the hood (similar to EigenTrust). As my Linear Algebra prof used to say - deep down, everything is just linear algebra... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EigenTrust

I bet your graph theory professor thought otherwise!

I thought so too but then there’s the edge space and cycle space which are essentially linear algebra over F2.
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