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Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation

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Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation

#141

Post by vetinari »

doomlaser wrote: post #72
paublyrne wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that's patently not a true statement. The Guardian, the NY Times, and Der Spiegel are the first three publications that do important investigations that come to mind but they are not alone. There are a lot of PR plants even in the more reputable newspapers, which is unfortunate, but there are still regular thorough investigations, which I assume are getting harder to do as money and resources continue to shrink.

The blind NYTimes bias has been readily apparent in this election cycle. WaPo as well. The entire media system missed this election. A staffer in the Obama White House remarked on the quality of reporting now, as of a few months ago: "All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus. Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world event…

On this side of the pond, The Guardian is also so biased, that it is not worth reading anymore.

Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation

#142

Post by ethbro »

dasil003 wrote: post #62
ethbro wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook completely controls the presentation priority, no? Bolt a Watson-like truth scoring system on to evaluate content and use the resulting confidence to boost or bury content in other's feeds. It would absolutely have to be automatically generated, but it doesn't seem impossible (just much harder NLP that Watson playing Jeopardy).

It seems to me the hardest part would be separating truthiness from virality. How do they seed legit sources in the current media climate of racing to the bottom for eyeballs.

Isn't this essentially the problem Google's been solving with continued iteration on PageRank?

From an untrustworthy collection of input relationships, how do I produce the most reliably correct output?

Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation

#143

Post by LoSboccacc »

Bud wrote: post #104
jerf wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, trying to solve this problem by creating a definition of "misinformation" sufficiently precise to act on it for all possible articles, then trying to remove it somehow is probably an AI-complete problem. If it's not AI-complete it's probably just plain an ill-formed question. That's before we ask questions about the biases that get embedded into the misinformation detector. This can't be fixed at Facebook scales…

There is no need to create a Grand Unified Theory of misinformation, here. This problem isn't that hard. You filter this stuff and rank it by its SOURCE, not by the content of individual articles. It's not hard to figure out which online sources are pushing out most of the abjectly-bad propaganda, and de-rank them.

this assumes their interest is in being fair, but I suspect their goal will gravitate mostly toward 'not being sued/investigated' which may very well create a selection bias.

Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation

#144

Post by 234dd57d2c8db »

AlexC04 wrote: post #133
234dd57d2c8db wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you done any research at all on snopes? I just spent 5 minutes on google and found that one of snope's main "fact-checkers" is Kim Lacapria. She used to write for a blog called "The Inquisitor", a site known for posting bad news stories, similar to the right-wing Alex Jones programme. They have published fake quotes and stories without doing research: http://www.inquisitr.com/670091/retraction-and-apology-to-ro.…

In fairness, I should mention that by "auto snopes" I mean "implement an auto-debunker" or even just "auto fair balance" which automatically adds "the other side" to anything linked on facebook. I have no hat in the ring with respect to which side publishes the truth, I just think that if something is FALSE facebook could alter their UI to immediately debunk something. Like the other quote of Trump saying "I'd run as…

Thanks for clarifying that! I don't have any skin in this game either, and I agree it might be helpful to have an auto-bias feature, but it needs to be completely transparent and open so we can fact-check the fact-check checkers ourselves :) Someone must fact-check the fact checkers, and facebook should do their best to ensure this is possible with any system they decide to implement.

Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation

#145

Post by cpr »

Bud wrote: post #104
jerf wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, trying to solve this problem by creating a definition of "misinformation" sufficiently precise to act on it for all possible articles, then trying to remove it somehow is probably an AI-complete problem. If it's not AI-complete it's probably just plain an ill-formed question. That's before we ask questions about the biases that get embedded into the misinformation detector. This can't be fixed at Facebook scales…

There is no need to create a Grand Unified Theory of misinformation, here. This problem isn't that hard. You filter this stuff and rank it by its SOURCE, not by the content of individual articles. It's not hard to figure out which online sources are pushing out most of the abjectly-bad propaganda, and de-rank them.

Sorry. Most of the official sources in this recent campaign were dead wrong on a lot of issues, mostly because of their own massive biases.

Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation

#146

Post by linkregister »

doomlaser wrote: post #72
paublyrne wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that's patently not a true statement. The Guardian, the NY Times, and Der Spiegel are the first three publications that do important investigations that come to mind but they are not alone. There are a lot of PR plants even in the more reputable newspapers, which is unfortunate, but there are still regular thorough investigations, which I assume are getting harder to do as money and resources continue to shrink.

The blind NYTimes bias has been readily apparent in this election cycle. WaPo as well. The entire media system missed this election. A staffer in the Obama White House remarked on the quality of reporting now, as of a few months ago: "All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus. Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world event…

That said, NYT performed some significant investigative reporting. Though Gawker broke the Clinton private email server story, the New York Times vastly expanded the investigation and brought the story into the mainstream.

The statement that the entire media system missed the election is an exaggeration. One function of the NYT, the election prediction section, failed. It shouldn't reflect on the various investigative reporters doing actual digging.

Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation

#147

Post by ethbro »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #134
ethbro wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> under existential threat You mean government regulation a la China because some memes really are dangerous? If you increase the velocity of transmission, then even in a free system there are some dangerously infectious falsehoods that it might be in the public good to slow. Think War of the World on Facebook.

That, or a public reaction to their product (ie, clickbait fatigue - Facebook gets really good at local optimization for the most engaging news posts but creates a news feed that convinces people that Facebook as a whole isn't worthwhile). It basically needs to be serious enough to overwhelm the internal incentives of maximizing key performance indicators.

I think there's the global maximum vs local maxima argument in favor of doing something too. Why do people ultimately spend time on Facebook?

I would say they don't do so because of micro-optimized KPI targeting: they do so because they feel time on Facebook is valuable and makes them happy. If Facebook can't deliver increases in that, then optimizations only take them so far.

Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation

#148

Post by tn13 »

btilly wrote: post #11

This article criticizes Facebook for firing the human editors that had been keeping things sane. However they were pushed to that by accusations of bias in the right-wing media. Accusations that looked likely to lead to a Congressional investigation. See, for example, http://thehill.com/policy/technology/279361-top-republican-d... . Now they are in a situation where they are damned if they do, damned if they don't. A…

Human editors can separate sane from insane ? I dont think so.

The recent presidential poll fiasco is prime example. All the large media houses like CNN, ABC, WaPo, NYT complete failed to detect and acknowledge the silent righ-wing voters claiming Clinton would win hands down. This is not just about political bias of the media but more importantly their complete failure to judge the pulse of the nation. In my opinion the main stream media was just insane here.

On the contrary the media engaged in an active social bullying of conservative voters by calling them bigots,racists,misogynist and what not. Had this media been lot more sensitive and sane in understanding both liberal and conservative voters, had they focused on what issues really mattered to conservative voter-base instead of ridicule and bullying I am pretty sure it would have changed things.

I blame the social bullying by main stream media as the prime reason why country seems divided.

Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation

#149

Post by belorn »

How are we to ever prevent misinformation when news papers are happy to publish that "political candidate did crime X! anonymous john/jane doe said".

If news papers were held to ethical requirements that prevented mere accusations from being news, I could see how Facebook should also be held liable for not following the same rules. As it is now, someone could just append "john doe said" at the end of any conspiracy theory and by news standard, its fact checked and ethical.

Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation

#150

Post by cjjuice »

rwhitman wrote: post #140

If you do a root cause analysis of this election's result, much of it points back to Silicon Valley in one way or another. Workforce automation created millions of unemployed people in places far away from economic hubs, with no hope of employment in their hometowns or re-skilling for the new roles, leaving them desperate. Proliferation of mobile apps lead to an explosion in use of social media. The wild popularity o…

Yes, Federal jobs should have been moved from cities to fill those lost. Norway did something similar.
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