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Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News

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Re: Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News

#211

Post by paulsutter »

wu-ikkyu wrote: post #159
paulsutter wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A $100,000 ad campaign overpowered the dems $1.4B budget? The DNC should hire those guys! They're political geniuses!

Re: Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News

#212

Post by hackinthebochs »

mike_hearn wrote: post #195
hackinthebochs wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the new spin doesn't even make logical sense. Sure it does. The appearance of a wide division in our political landscape leads to a wide division in our political landscape. People tend to "pick sides" in political fights and when something gives the appearance of a serious political dispute, people are motivated to pick sides and entrench their opinions. This is in keeping with getting Trump elected, as a large par…

The logic makes no sense because it specifically fingers Russia, yet any adversary of the United States could conceivably benefit from "sowing division". Once you've left behind the specific support for Trump the underlying logic linking it to Russia collapses but the conclusion has been kept, which indicates motivated reasoning. There's a deeper issue here too. It paints the posting of political talking points from…

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/charlottesville-and-the...

This link goes into detail about the perspectives of some whites on the BLM movement and how Trump played on those fears and represented a solution to growing minority influence (presumably at the expense of whites) in the wider culture. This also needs to be understood in the context of disruptive BLM protests as well as the white nationalist protests in Charolettesville.

>yet any adversary of the United States could conceivably benefit from "sowing division"

This is just so obtuse on so many levels.

Re: Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News

#213

Post by xster »

belorn wrote: post #88
yAnonymous wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The experience from a few months ago during a conference showed me that education won't fix echo chambers. It was a conference that was organized by a organization that holds one of the major initiative against false news, and where one of the main tracks was about addressing the issue of false news. Last year they had a massive booth at the middle of the conference hall about false news. This year they brought in a…

I think there's also a risk of conflating 'education' with our 'education system' that teaches citizens to be good productive workers but doesn't teach citizens how to analyze and debate about the nature of our society.

I believe the parent might be referring to 'education' as in logic, political history, philosophy so that the student can retrace the historical steps and recreate a societal scaffold that may or may not look like society today in the same way civil engineers are taught trig, calculus, static mechanics etc so the engineer can retrace historical steps and engineer the structures that may or may not reinforce or criticize our engineering approaches today.

Re: Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News

#214

Post by xster »

hrktb wrote: post #99
yAnonymous wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

I think history would be a good source. We think we're facing unique challenges but the debates we're having today are already eerily discussed ad nauseam by Greek thinkers. And first sources are already so accessible that it's difficult to land on untrustworthy extractions unless you read contemporary commentaries.

Re: Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News

#215

Post by emodendroket »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #212
mike_hearn wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The logic makes no sense because it specifically fingers Russia, yet any adversary of the United States could conceivably benefit from "sowing division". Once you've left behind the specific support for Trump the underlying logic linking it to Russia collapses but the conclusion has been kept, which indicates motivated reasoning. There's a deeper issue here too. It paints the posting of political talking points from…

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/charlottesville-and-the... This link goes into detail about the perspectives of some whites on the BLM movement and how Trump played on those fears and represented a solution to growing minority influence (presumably at the expense of whites) in the wider culture. This also needs to be understood in the context of disruptive BLM protests as well as the white nationalist protests i…

I'm not sure what's obtuse about the second bit. If the goal is just weakening the US Russia is not the only actor with the motive.

Re: Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News

#216

Post by zeveb »

deadfish wrote: post #182
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…

Surely the problem is the lack of a dislike button? I wonder if Reddit has as much fake news as Facebook?

> I wonder if Reddit has as much fake news as Facebook?

I think that /r/politics, /r/shitredditsays & /r/The_Donald might count.

Re: Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News

#217

Post by davesque »

So they're now going to rank news stories based on the reported (i.e. subjective, not objective as they claim) familiarity and credibility of the source. It's hard to know how this would help without more details. Does anyone have any more information on precisely how this heuristic is defined? I have my doubts that this could even work at all. It seems the whole lesson of recent events is that the average person is not qualified to judge the credibility of hardly anything.

Re: Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News

#218

Post by hackinthebochs »

emodendroket wrote: post #215
hackinthebochs wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/charlottesville-and-the... This link goes into detail about the perspectives of some whites on the BLM movement and how Trump played on those fears and represented a solution to growing minority influence (presumably at the expense of whites) in the wider culture. This also needs to be understood in the context of disruptive BLM protests as well as the white nationalist protests i…

I'm not sure what's obtuse about the second bit. If the goal is just weakening the US Russia is not the only actor with the motive.

The point is only reasonable when divorced from all context of Trump's Russian contacts, Russia's interest in getting sanctions overturned, Russia's known past disinformation campaigns, DNC hacking, wikileaks, etc. Within the proper context it is entirely unreasonable to even posit some other actor working to influence the election.

Re: Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News

#219

Post by dmode »

InternetUser wrote: post #164
belorn wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The experience from a few months ago during a conference showed me that education won't fix echo chambers. It was a conference that was organized by a organization that holds one of the major initiative against false news, and where one of the main tracks was about addressing the issue of false news. Last year they had a massive booth at the middle of the conference hall about false news. This year they brought in a…

> education won't fix echo chambers. No fewer than 6 of the coveted "swing states" switched from blue to red[0], and many counties across the country flipped as well. What persuaded hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of 2012 Obama voters to be 2016 Trump voters? Trump himself educated them, in his speeches. I'm one such person, spent the entire election season commenting and chatting with others on Reddit and Yo…

I have been in this country all of 10 years and I knew about lobbyists, donors, special interests even before coming over. US and lobbying system is famous across the world, even my 75 year old parents know about it and they live in some far flung developing country. I am surprised that Trump had to educate people about this basic stuff.

Re: Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News

#220

Post by sjg007 »

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…

It won't work. I know a lot of educated folks who believe the fake news. Politics has for a long time lied by omission in the national press. Now they just blatantly lie. The stuff we see today is propaganda dressed up in identity politics. In addition, there are plenty of fake Facebook accounts and other avatars on comments sites that may also be Russian trolls pushing disinformation.
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