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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

#141

Post by asveikau »

hevi_jos wrote: post #92
igravious wrote: post #83

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…

Agreed. The US is supposedly a democracy, in which people will respect the election made by others. They were proud of its System. Now it looks they have forgotten the principles of democracy as they take it for granted. The US has become bipolar, the Media has become hysterical, using war propaganda to infer the worst intentions and personal qualities to the adversaries, instead of using Truth using prejudices, cond…

Sorry to play exactly the role you are criticizing but my sense of irony implores me to point out that Trump was literally elected by a minority of people who voted, taking second place in the popular vote, so "supposedly a democracy" is a more apt phrase than I think you might have intended.

I don't have a problem with a phone call though. Although I would not have done it personally.

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

#142

Post by prolikewh0a »

creaghpatr wrote: post #87
Someguywhatever wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you could, then I suspect that you could do things like makes posts and GPDR the result, if you rinse and repeat you could probably reverse engineer what the algorithm is.

Share Washington Post articles and rat out your neighbors who post Infowars and you'll be set.

>Share Washington Post articles

Careful, you could get taken down for fake news doing this.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2003/02/06/i...

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

#143

Post by antidesitter »

panarky wrote: post #91
ChuckMcM wrote: post #59

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…

> every process must require more people to execute than can conspire without being detected Step 1 - let users report posts that are false Step 2 - human fact checkers investigate user reports Step 3 - rely more on users who report posts as false that really are false, and less on users who report posts as false that really are true Step 4 - repeat step 3 but for the fact checkers themselves Step 5 - train an ML mod…

This reminds me of a generative adversarial network.

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

#144

Post by prolikewh0a »

InfiniteBeing wrote: post #69

I'm going to guess that a lot of truly trustworthy right leaning people are going to get worse scores than they should because they don't believe in the left wing dominate media's narratives.

>left wing dominate media's narratives

Like what?

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

#145

Post by igravious »

austincheney wrote: post #103
igravious wrote: post #83

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…

Agreed. The worst of US politics is due to its two party system that invites a two team mentality. Any thinking in terms of us vs them or we vs they invites all kinds of conformance stupidity. I am fully capable of forming my opinions. I don't need a political label or their respective team to help me along with what my personal opinions need to be.

And from an outsider's perspective it's madness.

Case in point: https://www.google.com/search?q=majority+of+Americans+single...

The majority of Americans support single payer healthcare! Coincidentally (except it's not a coincidence at all) out of OECD countries the U.S. has the most amount of completely uninsured citizens (about 1 in 10!): https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=HEALTH_PROT but also pays on average more than anywhere else: http://www.oecd.org/els/health-systems/graph-of-the-month.ht... including this nugget: “Of all the OECD member states, only in the United States does voluntary health insurance and private funding such as households’ out-of-pocket payments account for more than 50% of the total”

When you realize that what the average person desires in the U.S. makes statistically zero difference on what laws get passed† it's little wonder that many have stopped voting.

And yet, what do the rest of us have to listen to on HN? Partisan bickering and identity politics. Spare us please.

† https://www.businessinsider.com/major-study-finds-that-the-u...

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

#146

Post by danielblazevski »

igravious wrote: post #133
lordCarbonFiber wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> "What this has got to do with Facebook's trustworthiness score machinery I do not know."

This article posted is immensely relevant for the intersection of tech and political discourse, and in such cases, I would personally prefer to see more discussion on HN.

If the article is about new advances in Golang, sure, I'd hate to see talk of politics in threads.

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

#147

Post by chongli »

eivarv wrote: post #29

I don't understand why the big players such as Facebook and Google keeps insisting on using (appeals to) authority as a proxy to truth, when we have rules and systems for critical thinking. It seems to me that if the claims and stories in question could be re-posed (e.g. as falsifiable, logically coherent statements or arguments) the worst of "fake news" could be weeded out. The rest (and biases, etc.) would likely h…

Google and Facebook want to have their cake and eat it too: billions of users without having millions of customer service workers.

What they're trying to accomplish, to my mind at least, would require the invention of general AI. Automatic content moderation sounds very close to a Turing test to me.

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

#148

Post by aglavine »

safgasCVS wrote: post #118

There have numerous times in history where free speech has been stifled and it turned out to be a bad idea. But I'm sure this time is going to be different

Free speech is not being stifled. They want to regulate content in their site. You can publish your content in other places.

I appreciate fake news being cleaned in my timeline, if the cost is no more than some occasional legit news being pruned once in awhile.

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

#149

Post by web007 »

cabalamat wrote: post #101
mipmap04 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be a viable alternative? I don't think they can just ignore the issue and, as you mention, can't review every single story. They'll have to rely on some form of sampling for the reviewers. Would it be better to just take a truly random sample of all reports? I don't think that would be very effective given the number of publications they have to review. Do you let users review the content for veracity? See…

> What would be a viable alternative? Not attempting to the arbiter of truth and falsehood would be one. Or reporting on what users think of a story's truthfulness: "49% rate this story as true, 21% rate it as untrue". Or, if they want to be honest, acknowledging that it is about policing taboo thoughts. "Smith, 4980203 Winston. This article is crimethink! Warning: If you read too many articles like it your Citizen C…

There are a lot of cases where truth and falsehood are absolute. Those cases where something is provably false should be called out as such.

Think of something like Pizzagate - the fact that the restaurant in question didn't have a basement belied the assertions that bad things were happening in said basement. Any article or comment that passed on that provable lie should be flagged as a lie.

Sure, there are grey areas beyond that. Those are opinions, and should be separable from facts.

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

#150

Post by mic47 »

rmrfrmrf wrote: post #132
WiseWeasel wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Really it's more "how likely is this person to accurately flag an article that matches Facebook's internal definition of fake news."

Couldn't say it better.

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