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Facebook’s Walled Wonderland Is Inherently Incompatible with News

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Re: Facebook’s Walled Wonderland Is Inherently Incompatible with News

#221

Post by yummyfajitas »

EdHominem wrote: post #208
yummyfajitas wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote a reply to this asking about the alternate category of material which is both true/accurate and also intended to incite negative feelings. That comment was flagged to death. I guess that's the answer - it's not just "fake" news we want suppressed.

Well, there's "true" and there's "an accurate summary of events". I could sift through arrest records in my city and publish a list of Group X (let's pick an established group, like Italians) and make them look like monsters. But that's just a framing exercise. For instance, the immigrant rape issue. Yes, of course many immigrants have committed sexual assaults. But are they more numerous per-capita, or more vicious?…

I could sift through arrest records in my city and publish a list of Group X (let's pick an established group, like Italians) and make them look like monsters. But that's just a framing exercise.

This is exactly what the mainstream media does in the US. The relatively small number of police shootings of black men get lots of coverage. The much larger category of black criminals harming white people get very little coverage, as does the biggest category of crime (white on white violence).

Stats quoted here: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/420565/shameful-libera...

What makes it a less "accurate summary of events" when a non-mainstream source chooses a different small subset of crime to focus on?

As for the "rapefugee crisis" in Europe it's hard to know. Crime statistics tracking these things are usually suppressed and the authorities seem to cover up major incidents. (Even in the US, the Bureau of Justice Statistics stopped publishing it's table of interracial crime stats when Obama took office.) So all we really have are anecdotes and incident reports. Given this level of suppressed information, how can you claim that the white supremacists are less "accurate" than anyone else?

Sometimes unpleasant people are correct about facts. Sometimes their views are just as accurate as anyone else's.

Re: Facebook’s Walled Wonderland Is Inherently Incompatible with News

#222

Post by jwtadvice »

ianstallings wrote: post #182
gdulli wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well here's why someone should care about fake news: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2016/12/04/d-c-... I won't answer whether that entity should be Facebook. But when people start getting shot at and transparently disreputable demagogues start getting elected I would say the conversation at least has to begin.

Maybe if the public trusted the mainstream journalists this wouldn't be such an issue. They've eroded that trust themselves. It's their job to clean up the mess by gaining that trust back through integrity. Everything else sounds dangerously like thought censorship.

This.

Mainstream journalism has to regain credibility.

The first step down that road is producing credible journalism, a difficult but necessary cost the industry is going to need to swallow if it expects to survive.

The alternatives are an expansion of thought censorship from the mainstream networks to its bubbling alternative competitors.

I understand the urge to misrepresent the world to garner public support. I really do. But nature abhors a vacuum. When the information available to the public is obviously compromised it will be filled by something or someone else.

The response to that isn't to censor alternatives and continue the misreporting. The solution is to recede from propagandistic instincts, and provide the kind of analysis you want to be recorded in history books for providing to democratic deliberation. If people really understand what's at stake in issues, and what powers, people and industries has what stake where, and when they understand issues to the point where they can make discernible political decisions - be they about representation or directly on issues - rather than being emotionally coerced at scale by every media platform above water; then, and only then, will the "information war" the State Department has been waging will really be won. It won't be won by the State Department, but by the people. And it will be for the people and by the people.

Truly: the alternative to this is to continue down this folly road of doctrinal misrepresentation of the world to the American people, and to play whack-a-mole with every narrative that challenges the useless and ill-predictive emotional appeal whose vacuum is being challenged.

(I speak as an American about my country).

Re: Facebook’s Walled Wonderland Is Inherently Incompatible with News

#223

Post by nickik »

sergiosgc wrote: post #41
aikah wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Facebook simply kills democracy for their own benefit. Give me a break. It's not Facebook's job to tell the truth from the lies. They provide a social network, for profit. They are not a charity or a non profit. They sell ads. If "news filtering" aligns with their bottom-line they'll do it, if it doesn't, they won't, that's business. Now to anybody who thinks he can control the internet and what people read/think/d…

> Give me a break. It's not Facebook's job to tell the truth from the lies. They provide a social network, for profit. They are not a charity or a non profit. They sell ads. If "news filtering" aligns with their bottom-line they'll do it, if it doesn't, they won't, that's business. This is a technology forum, so I'll warn beforehand that my opinion, although it has political conclusions, is from a systems perspective…

> Each agent should act on its best interest, and disregard all else. Distilled like that, it's the purest form of capitalism.

No. Each agent should act according to his own will and believes, that often is in his own best interest, but that not always true.

Its a hard case to actually prove this assertion of facebook. I have not spent any time an it or read much research on it.

Is it really that different from all Americans reading the same newspapers that thought the Spanish American War was a great idea?

Re: Facebook’s Walled Wonderland Is Inherently Incompatible with News

#224

Post by jwtadvice »

exwebtina wrote: post #197

"Trump campaign made use of fake news" NPR tracked down one of them - Democrat. http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/503...

The sickening thing this election, and elections prior, was the use of fake news by the Democrats and by the Republicans, in a media industry that gets paid by political campaigns to mass-influence audiences with pre-strategized series of stories.

The entire information industry is sick. It's extremely efficient at serving it's customers. It's customers are a maelstrom/cacaphony of interests trying to make broad base emotional and misrepresentative appeals to purposefully uninformed audiences.

The information industry does NOT provide a paid service to customers seeking to understand the world. The information industry provides a paid service to industries and parties seeking to influence the world.

Trying to run a partisan political line, blaming one political party (who spend incredibly SMALL amounts compared to the other strategically politicizing news) is looking perpendicular to the problem, and falling prey to its continuance.

Fake news? The Iraq War justifications. The Jessica Lynch stories. The fake army letters sent by Bush Administration PR firms. The echo chamber from the Obama Administration on the Iran Deal that they've BRAGGED about. The horribly inaccurate coverage of the Syria proxy war. The whitewashing of politically sensitive topics, like the genocide by our allies in Bahrain. Conspiracy theories about Putin and hogwash misinformation like "Putin and Trump are best friends." US coverage of the Chinese economy ("Will China fall?!") while they were slated, instead, to be welcomed into the Special Economic Basket at the IMF. The fake news coverage about the Snowden Documents.

It's just... so frustrating to see people promulgate on HN one-sided, politicized and irresponsible finger-pointing, as though propaganda and mass-media disinformation were a partisan issue.

Re: Facebook’s Walled Wonderland Is Inherently Incompatible with News

#225

Post by bdrool »

welanes wrote: post #50
andrewvijay wrote: post #6

> We are not in the business of picking which issues the world should read about. We are in the business of connecting people and ideas — and matching people with the stories they find most meaningful. Our integrity depends on being inclusive of all perspectives and view points, and using ranking to connect people with the stories and sources they find the most meaningful and engaging. Simply incredible. They are ass…

> They are asserting themselves only as a business and not emotional influencers...The emotional influences that facebook brings in people is very powerful. The same could be said of TV networks, Spotify, Twitter, Google photos. We are the catalyst that turn stories, music, photos into emotional reactions. We control the dials. Facebook makes it incredibly easy to step outside our bubbles. Click the Like button on a…

> Click the Like button on a Page that challenges your beliefs, interact with that information and you'll see more of it.

Yeah ... not gonna happen. I already use private browsing windows to read anything even remotely controversial. Not going to start building a publicly visible history of 'liking' things that could be seen negatively. Call me paranoid, but I can see that happening some day in a job interview or something similar. I love my freedom, and that includes being able to read whatever I want without being accused of wrongthink at some point in the future. Facebook isn't getting any data from me on that front.

Re: Facebook’s Walled Wonderland Is Inherently Incompatible with News

#226

Post by nitrogen »

lovich wrote: post #218
yummyfajitas wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get a little bit of exposure to white nationalist blogs since they are occasionally quoted by neoreactionary blogs. I don't agree with their normative conclusions at all, but their factual claims seem reasonably accurate. There was a great article on this recently: http://hurryupharry.org/2016/11/27/who-gave-us-post-truth-co... Some years ago, a friend sent me a shocking article. It said hundreds of British girls w…

I agree with your point that theres not really a solution anyones putting forth that prevents false positives, but I wouldn't agree that its entirely necessary. You are never going to get a system that is 100% accurate so I feel it would be better to focus on being as accurate as possible. This would involve false positives and negatives to some degree. What degree that should be isn't apparent yet, but I don't think…

The solution to imperfect binary true/false decisions is to stop making binary decisions, and instead provide a probability and confidence interval (dressed in non-mathematician-friendly UI), with several references to verifications or refutations.

Re: Facebook’s Walled Wonderland Is Inherently Incompatible with News

#227

Post by EdHominem »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #221
EdHominem wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there's "true" and there's "an accurate summary of events". I could sift through arrest records in my city and publish a list of Group X (let's pick an established group, like Italians) and make them look like monsters. But that's just a framing exercise. For instance, the immigrant rape issue. Yes, of course many immigrants have committed sexual assaults. But are they more numerous per-capita, or more vicious?…

I could sift through arrest records in my city and publish a list of Group X (let's pick an established group, like Italians) and make them look like monsters. But that's just a framing exercise. This is exactly what the mainstream media does in the US. The relatively small number of police shootings of black men get lots of coverage. The much larger category of black criminals harming white people get very little co…

> black criminals harming white people get very little coverage

That makes sense though. It's not a competition between the two groups so the amount of black-on-anything violence is irrelevant to the issue of police shooting people when it can be shown that the people being shot weren't acting violently.

Talking about the black community when discussing police shooting is like blaming the prostitutes dressing badly down the block for your sister getting raped. Not only is it victim blaming, but it misses the point that these aren't meaningful groupings. (All black people, your sister and the prostitutes, etc...)

> how can you claim that the white supremacists are less "accurate" than anyone else?

Well, I don't claim that but I think I could, because I see them grasping at straws and forwarding the same tired stories around as if they prove anything. With no effort to dig into the facts behind the case and its selection as news.

Exactly the same as the anti-racist knee-jerk I see which posts the same set of "Immigrants don't rape" refutation articles with the same lack of critical inspection.

> Given this level of suppressed information,

That is a problem. When our government lies to us it throws all semblance of civilian oversight right out the window and instantly becomes a dictatorship.

Re: Facebook’s Walled Wonderland Is Inherently Incompatible with News

#228

Post by nitrogen »

0xfeba wrote: post #164
yummyfajitas wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote a reply to this asking about the alternate category of material which is both true/accurate and also intended to incite negative feelings. That comment was flagged to death. I guess that's the answer - it's not just "fake" news we want suppressed.

I read the post before it was removed. I don't agree with a lot of it (like declaring lists of things true and then qualifying individual items with "probably because"), but I get your point. You have to tread very carefully. A better example would be a statement made by Trump's recent pick for National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn, in his book "The Field of Fight": "I don't believe all cultures are morally equiva…

> I read the post before it was removed.

You should be able to see the flagged comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13105342) if you turn on showdead in your HN settings.

It is disappointing that HN isn't able to discuss openly the ways in which true facts are (ab)used to create false beliefs.

Re: Facebook’s Walled Wonderland Is Inherently Incompatible with News

#229

Post by yummyfajitas »

lovich wrote: post #218
yummyfajitas wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get a little bit of exposure to white nationalist blogs since they are occasionally quoted by neoreactionary blogs. I don't agree with their normative conclusions at all, but their factual claims seem reasonably accurate. There was a great article on this recently: http://hurryupharry.org/2016/11/27/who-gave-us-post-truth-co... Some years ago, a friend sent me a shocking article. It said hundreds of British girls w…

I agree with your point that theres not really a solution anyones putting forth that prevents false positives, but I wouldn't agree that its entirely necessary. You are never going to get a system that is 100% accurate so I feel it would be better to focus on being as accurate as possible. This would involve false positives and negatives to some degree. What degree that should be isn't apparent yet, but I don't think…

I think that the costs of giving back control to the mainstream media drastically exceed the benefits of stopping some misinformation. I'd prefer the whole truth mixed with lies to a partial truth that is also mixed with lies (what we had before when the mainstream media controlled everything).

Re: Facebook’s Walled Wonderland Is Inherently Incompatible with News

#230

Post by yummyfajitas »

EdHominem wrote: post #227
yummyfajitas wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could sift through arrest records in my city and publish a list of Group X (let's pick an established group, like Italians) and make them look like monsters. But that's just a framing exercise. This is exactly what the mainstream media does in the US. The relatively small number of police shootings of black men get lots of coverage. The much larger category of black criminals harming white people get very little co…

> black criminals harming white people get very little coverage That makes sense though. It's not a competition between the two groups so the amount of black-on-anything violence is irrelevant to the issue of police shooting people when it can be shown that the people being shot weren't acting violently. Talking about the black community when discussing police shooting is like blaming the prostitutes dressing badly d…

Talking about the black community when discussing police shooting is like blaming the prostitutes dressing badly down the block for your sister getting raped. Not only is it victim blaming, but it misses the point that these aren't meaningful groupings.

I'm making a different point. Why discuss a few hundred innocent (and quite a few not so innocent) black people shot by cops when we can instead discuss the tens of thousands of innocent white people harmed by blacks?

I.e., why is police shootings of black men the topic at all?

The answer is the exact same framing exercise you (correctly) accuse white nationalist groups of engaging in. And it's also a framing exercise I find more palatable; I'm just pointing out that you can't distinguish between these based on truth.

Also, the levels of black crime are directly relevant to the topic of police shootings of black people. Assume some fraction of crime prevention results in people getting shot, regardless of race. Assume further that blacks disproportionately commit crimes. Given these two assumptions, you will get disproportionate levels of blacks being shot by cops, even though no one is being racist. That directly contradicts the narrative the media is framing.

Scott Alexander has a great blog post where he dives into the empirical literature on this: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-m...

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