Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook Is a 'Super Spreader' of Election Misinformation

newsweek.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 150 posts

Re: Facebook Is a 'Super Spreader' of Election Misinformation

#41

Post by rendall »

unmdplyr wrote: post #15
im3w1l wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on, you know it's not true that it's designed to propagate misinformation. The algorithm can't even tell whether it's misinformation or not.

I think it's possible. I know for certain there are techniques to identify "click-baity" text snippets. My partner is currently working on a data model now and she has already had some reasonable success. Imagine what a company that hires several 10s or even 100s of data scientists can achieve? From there on, it's just a matter of highlighting these successful matches constantly in your feeds. I wouldn't put it past…

Interesting idea.

I see 2 potential problems.

If the approach would be content-neutral - i.e. simply relying on the form of the information (eg misspellings in the title, many exclamation points, and such) to distinguish that which is more likely to be fake - then there could be a race condition where the misinformation purveyors learn and subvert the algorithm followed by the misinformation identifier incorporating the new forms of misinformation, and so on. In the meantime, true information purveyors would also need to be aware of this algorithm so as not to be falsely labeled. Think of the race in SEO for an example

If the misinformation identifier uses the content of the information to label misinformation, then the identifier itself is as open to bias and opinion as anyone else

Re: Facebook Is a 'Super Spreader' of Election Misinformation

#42

Post by cm2187 »

Dansvidania wrote: post #13

People spread misinformation on Facebook. Arguably, it's not Facebook's responsibility to fact-check anything. Facebook is not a publishing house (at least not the Facebook social media platform as such) and mandating that they fact check and curate their ads and content is tricky business. It requires a legal definition of truth, which is a matter complex enough to justify the existence of the whole judiciary system…

Particularly given that most of the exemples cited by the article are approximations, the sort that mainstream newspapers do routinely to push a narrative.

Re: Facebook Is a 'Super Spreader' of Election Misinformation

#44

Post by beagle3 »

Dansvidania wrote: post #13

People spread misinformation on Facebook. Arguably, it's not Facebook's responsibility to fact-check anything. Facebook is not a publishing house (at least not the Facebook social media platform as such) and mandating that they fact check and curate their ads and content is tricky business. It requires a legal definition of truth, which is a matter complex enough to justify the existence of the whole judiciary system…

Facebook selects and controls what users see.

Facebook chooses to promote disinformation over your friend’s cat pictures because it drives more engagements and thus more money.

They are totally responsible for that content, even if this is an emergent property of optimizing for money algorithmically aNd no explicit editorializing takes place.

Their users may be dumb f&cks[0] but Facebook is not a dumb pipe.

[0] Zuckerberg’s words, not mine.

Re: Facebook Is a 'Super Spreader' of Election Misinformation

#45

Post by sveme »

harwoodleon wrote: post #9

It’s baked into the business model. Attention is the main material of the business, however it is gotten. It can’t change. Facebook couldn’t afford for it to change.

That's actually always a good guidance: What's the business model/the aim of a company? Does it align with my own aims and wishes?

It's the basic difference between Google/Facebook and Apple. Google/Facebook sells ads, Apple sells hardware. Google/Facebook need to know as much as possible about you to sell more ads. Apple does not.

Obviously, these things can change.

Re: Facebook Is a 'Super Spreader' of Election Misinformation

#46

Post by truculent »

sgdesign wrote: post #7

One thing I still don’t quite understand is how a system like this one can develop when the people developing it almost certainly are completely opposed to these ideas on a personal political level. I almost feel like it was an excess of idealism and belief in “the free market of ideas” -as well as the idea that Facebook should remain a neutral party at all cost- that led to overcompensating in the wrong direction, a…

The people at the top believe in these ideas and our ability to organise and exercise our collective power is so withered and atrophied that people feel incapable of doing anything except going along with it

Re: Facebook Is a 'Super Spreader' of Election Misinformation

#48

Post by kapuasuite »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #36
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... I shouldn't talk to family overseas during this time or find another way to do it? Or everyone not living in the US should not have facebook before an American election? It would seem to be more prudent to disallow political ads the week before. Or make it a crime to, say, spread wrong information about voting. And so on.

> I shouldn't talk to family overseas during this time or find another way to do it? A speed bump on posts (not messages or comments) isn’t a bad idea. One month before an election, there is a fifteen-minute cooldown on posts. One week before, a one-hour cooldown. One day before, three. This lets people keep talking. But it slows the reproduction rate and gives people a shot, even if a long shot, at fact checking.

This sounds like a lot of ridiculous limits for very little, if any, positive impact.

Re: Facebook Is a 'Super Spreader' of Election Misinformation

#50

Post by cryptica »

pjc50 wrote: post #40
cryptica wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Railways and telecoms worked out just fine. Sure, in many countries, train tickets have been getting overly expensive under government control but high costs are not such a huge concern in the grand scheme of things. On the other hand, the break up of AT&T in the US had huge benefits for consumers in terms of lowering costs. If Facebook is nationalized, at least they will not manipulate people to serve corporate inte…

> Sure, in the worst case, under government ownership, social media might be used to manipulate elections to give preference to the incumbent party over the other, but that is infinitely better than manipulating elections based on the financial interests of a tiny minority These are the same thing.

I totally disagree. They look like the same thing today, but this is merely a consequence of the fact that everyone is under Facebook's thumb and Facebook works in the interest of corporations/big money who pay for their ads.

If you shift the control to government, the dynamics change fundamentally. The power will once again start at the government (like it should) and not at the corporations. Money will still influence things, but not nearly as much as it does today.

We need to take steps to decouple money from political power, decouple state from economics.

Like guns, Facebook is not inherently evil. It mostly depends on who is holding it.

Post reply on HN