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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

#131
post #39
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A. A dictatorial, totalitarian government rating all its citizens based on opaque criteria and using that to restrict access to essential services, financial support, and general life and liberty. B. A private company scoring its users to combat spam, as all social networks do.

It's a short hop to banks (also private companies!) asking Facebook for those numbers, and it's not a stretch for the government to do the same.

I wonder if they will let you advertise to people based on trustworthiness, seems like a metric that would be rather useful for a lot of different scenarios.

Also fantastic as a hiring screen.

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

#132
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for FB anti-spam team, and believe me, nobody trusted user feedback absolutely (i.e. it's good to send to review, but not automatically take down). I guess that with fake news the signal to noise ratio is even worse. The whole article sounds more like focusing on one implementation details of review queue prioritization (i.e. what is the difference of definition of "fake news" for this user vs Facebook's def…

To me, fake news also includes slanted coverage of true events (i.e. covering events in such a way as to convey a sponsored message, biased polling methodology, etc.). That encompasses statistically approaching 100% of trashy sources you’re likely to encounter as 'sponsored content', as well as a healthy portion of more established sources' content. I'd be likely to report a majority as fake news in perfectly good fa…

I think the use of "trustworthiness" is misleading. Really it's more "how likely is this person to accurately flag an article that matches Facebook's internal definition of fake news."

That would mean that your number would be on the lower end, but that's not a reflection of your character. More likely it just means that whatever queue is set up for review will wait until more and higher-scoring individuals also flag the article before bumping it up the queue.

Funny how this article is something I would flag if I used your definition of fake news. To me this article is trying to allude to some nefarious Black Mirror nonsense.

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

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reas…

You haven't a clue what my politics are so stop trying to throw mud hoping some will stick.

My initial comment called for less of this kind of thing on HN but it seems that some of use here will always be at pains to show the rest of the world how on the correct side of history we are. How tedious. What this has got to do with Facebook's trustworthiness score machinery I do not know.

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

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certain content might be more or less blatant about it, and as seymour1 suggests, gathering that additional data and cleaning up the currently actionable data really only has upsides. One avenue would be to put those who report the same things as biased in cohorts, to be shown or not shown similar content.

> One avenue would be to put those who report the same things as biased in cohorts, to be shown or not shown similar content. That just reinforces the current self-silo effect we see, with people only seeing the point of view with which they agree.

It's not like being exposed to content biased contrary to our view changes our view; it's just more readily detected as biased, and in certain ways may reinforce our view as we defend it.

In any case, the ratio of bias reports/views for content is likely to be inversely related to its value and general appeal.

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

#135
post #13

"Lyons said she soon realized that many people were reporting posts as false simply because they did not agree with the content." Well, yes. Have they not learned from any of the preceding work on moderating?

People also use all of the available actions completely different

Some people view a like as a personal read receipt

Some people view a like as a broadcasting to their friends/network that they saw it

Some people view a like as consent to the message

Some people view a like as liking the message

The most extreme of those benign actions are the ones making its way into public policy.

So it isn't surprising to me that a moderator also had no clue what people do.

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

#137

Is it anything like the Chinese credit system? Seems the two could share the notes.

Sounds just like it to me, except we are being categorized by corporations instead of the state. How long until potential employers make a good social score a pre-requisite to hiring?

> except we are being categorized by corporations instead of the state

Considering that the state very likely has wholesale access to all the data, I'm not sure that's making actually much of a difference.

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

#138

Is it anything like the Chinese credit system? Seems the two could share the notes.

Sounds just like it to me, except we are being categorized by corporations instead of the state. How long until potential employers make a good social score a pre-requisite to hiring?

Will I be denied employment if I don't have social media?

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

#139

Is it anything like the Chinese credit system? Seems the two could share the notes.

Sounds just like it to me, except we are being categorized by corporations instead of the state. How long until potential employers make a good social score a pre-requisite to hiring?

> except we are being categorized by corporations instead of the state.

The difference vanishes when your state is run by corporations.

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