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Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News

nytimes.com

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Re: Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News

#151

Post by bhandziuk »

yAnonymous wrote: post #123
hrktb wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you really want to fight the root of the problem, it's not likes and comments, but education. But how do educate yourself though ? The same argument was already made about books or newspapers: depending of the subject a lot of them are trash. Same for TV news. Wikipedia is also not a defacto trustable source. Except for first hand experience on a subject, you will never be able to find a source that is inherentl…

First of all, good education should come from schools. Being able to further educate yourself and judge the trustworthiness of sources are direct results of a good primary education. Many western states have criminally decreased education expanses for decades and the current state of the civilization is in big parts a result of that. This shit is infectious, too. Many stupid people think their kids don't need a good…

I think the type of education they're talking about is not formal education like in school but how to educate yourself about today's events. Not something you could or should go to school for.

Re: Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News

#152

Post by NoGravitas »

dvt wrote: post #24

Slightly off-topic: are there any social networks out there not polluted by news -- fake or otherwise? Is there room for a new social network that's for, you know, people? Snapchat's a tabloid, Facebook is basically a news RSS feed, and I'm even starting to get news "stories" when browsing hashtags on Instagram. I just want to discover people and talk to people . Apart from dating apps (Tinder/Bumble/etc.), it seems…

Mastodon has a norm that news/current events are hidden behind a content warning/subject line. So if you want a news-free timeline, you can have it. You're still responsible for who you follow, but the timeline is straight reverse-chronological with no algorithmic fiddling, and numbers aren't shown for favs and boosts unless you zoom in on a post's details. There's less incentive for clickbait and outrage.

It could get worse in the future, as it's relatively small (1 million known active users) and has a positive founder effect, but for now it's very good.

https://joinmastodon.org/

Re: Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News

#153

Post by FilterSweep »

1024core wrote: post #140

This is a genius move by FB. Now it becomes a battle of which side can marshall more FB users to flag stories of the other side as fake. Which, in turn, results in more views and clicks for FB.

This also precludes malicious actors are more incentivized to continue flagging posts while other users move on.

Re: Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News

#154

Post by Reedx »

imgabe wrote: post #95

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.

How would that work with people who think the New York Times is fake news to begin with? They're not going to suddenly change their mind because fb says they're real. It'll simply reinforce people's mind or they'll say fb is biased or paid off or whatever. Even if fb had a perfect system it wouldn't solve the problem. People didn't use logic when coming to the idea that NYT is fake and Breitbart is real, so you can't use logic to get them out of it.

It's a no win situation at this point. I'm not sure there's any solution short of removing news from the platform.

Re: Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News

#155

Post by tbirrell »

paulsutter wrote: post #144
themagician wrote: post #16

This is the opposite of what they should have done. Shows just how much of an echo-chamber Facebook has become. This is just adding another metric by which garbage can be made legitimate and vice versa. Facebook would be a much better platform if they removed the like and comment count from every post. It’s those numbers that lead people to believe that garbage is legitimate in the first place. By hiding these number…

Are you talking about yourself or other people? My Facebook feed is mostly personal updates about hundreds of people I have met, and it feels like the most democratic media I’ve ever seen. It improved a lot when I unfollowed the handful of people who post junk like sportsball. Are you assuming the faceless masses are exposed to some unimaginable horror that you aren’t seeing? Or tell us more about the horrors you do…

It's more like, letting users "legitimize" news is how you get bots screwing with everything. It may not be a problem for some, including myself since my feed is similar to how you describe yours, but network waide, it will pose an issue.

Re: Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News

#156

Post by ben_jones »

imgabe wrote: post #95

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.

It's also a huge amount of hubris. You either punt this problem to the users in which case you have massive, incurable, vote brigadding, or you pretend to be opening it up "democratically" but in reality you use heavy handed algorithms to curb all outliers in whatever bias the algorithm deems fit.

Re: Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News

#157

Post by frogpelt »

yAnonymous wrote: post #72
themagician wrote: post #16

This is the opposite of what they should have done. Shows just how much of an echo-chamber Facebook has become. This is just adding another metric by which garbage can be made legitimate and vice versa. Facebook would be a much better platform if they removed the like and comment count from every post. It’s those numbers that lead people to believe that garbage is legitimate in the first place. By hiding these number…

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…

Maybe the problem is education. Education is the solution for most problems. It's also the hardest, most expensive solution.

You will never educate the masses and even if you did, some of what you taught them would be wrong.

Re: Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News

#159

Post by wu-ikkyu »

paulsutter wrote: post #144
themagician wrote: post #16

This is the opposite of what they should have done. Shows just how much of an echo-chamber Facebook has become. This is just adding another metric by which garbage can be made legitimate and vice versa. Facebook would be a much better platform if they removed the like and comment count from every post. It’s those numbers that lead people to believe that garbage is legitimate in the first place. By hiding these number…

Are you talking about yourself or other people? My Facebook feed is mostly personal updates about hundreds of people I have met, and it feels like the most democratic media I’ve ever seen. It improved a lot when I unfollowed the handful of people who post junk like sportsball. Are you assuming the faceless masses are exposed to some unimaginable horror that you aren’t seeing? Or tell us more about the horrors you do…

>feels like the most democratic media I’ve ever seen.

The Democrats thought the same thing too, before Trump won the election. Perhaps you are falling victim to a filter bubble confirmation bias?

A democracy implies independent national sovereignty. When anyone (govt, corp, or rogue hackers) across the world can effectively manipulate your elections at scale, sovereign democracy is no longer a thing.

Re: Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News

#160

Post by mistermann »

bhandziuk wrote: post #151
yAnonymous wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, good education should come from schools. Being able to further educate yourself and judge the trustworthiness of sources are direct results of a good primary education. Many western states have criminally decreased education expanses for decades and the current state of the civilization is in big parts a result of that. This shit is infectious, too. Many stupid people think their kids don't need a good…

I think the type of education they're talking about is not formal education like in school but how to educate yourself about today's events. Not something you could or should go to school for.

I'm not so sure, critical reading/thinking skills could be taught in school, just take newspaper articles and pick out the parts that are fake/misleading. Finding teachers able to do this may be easier said than done though, as would doing it in a non-partisan way.
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