Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information” • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”

#411

Post by midev » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 3:04 AM UTC

Overton-Window wrote: post #382

ineedasername wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for a thoughtful response! I agree more referendums would get to a better level of participatory democracy. Though on any specific issue it could still be a 51% win with 49% going away angry. I'm not sure how blockchains makes more frequent referendums easier. Maybe harder to game the system? Apart from that it seems like a platform for regular referendums could be built without blockchains. It's still relativ…

Math is more trustworthy than the state. One of the few things both Democrats and Republicans can agree on is the state of the Bitcoin ledger. Political representation becomes obsolete with blockchains that can facilitate a referendum on every issue without the need for centralised trust.

Math is not magical and the blockchain doesn't solve any of these problems. Let's look at the risks and see how the blockchain does nothing:

1. Vote machines change votes - Great, the blockchain would allow people to verify their vote! Well, the software that sums up all blockchain votes could still miscount them, regardless of what the blockchain contains. Ok! So we can audit the results! Great, we can already do that with paper ballots.

2. Dead people voting - Again, same as the audit before. We see a John Smith voted on the blockchain. We can look up John Smith based on a paper ballot, just as we can with the blockchain.

3. Illegals voting - The same process used for identifying voters and giving out private keys can be used for verifying voters

But what about risks you have introduced?

1. By making everything electronic, you've shifted the risk from local elections, to state actors.

Signing keys are not magic. If a country found a solution to the factorization problem, or solving discrete logarithms, the scheme would collapse and they could forge massive amounts of votes.

2. Getting 300m people to manage cryptographic keys is impossible. Keys will be stolen, just as bitcoin wallets are. Now you need to deal with revocation of votes, and other controls that nobody has yet invented.

tldr: blockchains are dumb

Re: Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”

#412

Post by zdragnar » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 3:05 AM UTC

emodendroket wrote: post #394

snowwrestler wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is removing content because that is ground they want to stand on. Removing content feels like censorship, so it lends itself to political grandstanding in their favor. Millions of people get upset and demand that Facebook handle all content neutrally, which is exactly what Facebook wanted everyone to think in the first place. The real issue with Facebook is the editorial decisions they make about promoting s…

Nobody actually wants an "uncensored" Facebook. If you went there and your feed were full of spam, porn, and shock videos, you'd stop going.

There's a reasonable, substantial difference between not allowing material deemed indecent- porn and gore- and becoming an arbiter of "truth".

Re: Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”

#413

Post by phy6 » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 3:05 AM UTC

bmcahren wrote: post #356

MeinBlutIstBlau wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal guess is they are people in a middle management position designated full autonomy on their decision. It just so happens that the cultural beliefs there skew left since it is in California and in tech. Why factual information gets censored though is a genuine question. It is a legitimate "who watches the watchmen" issue seeing as they literally get to enforce whatever ideology tickles their fancy that mome…

This is incredibly off-base. The truth is they have outsourced fact checking to the "International Fact-Checking Network at Poynter" who has to uphold standards not just freely enforce whatever ideology tickles their fancy. Knowing one low-level employee of one of the subcontractors involved; it works something like this: 1. An article is posted to Facebook/Twitter/etc and is automatically flagged based on keywords o…

It's worth seeing who else besides Facebook funds the fact checkers. https://www.poynter.org/major-funders/

Re: Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”

#414

Post by takeda » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 3:05 AM UTC

Most misinformation is at least in part founded on truth, it is just that some of it is left out, some changed and a lot of BS is added.

The links to CDC forwarded on Facebook contain the misinformation in the description, very few actually click on the link and read it.

Facebook simply used their system to add clarification.

The misinformation that is spread says that CDC, banned RT-PCR, because it confused flu with covid. When in reality FDA approved new tests that test for both to save time and resources as the flu season is approaching.

Re: Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”

#415

Post by zdragnar » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 3:08 AM UTC

cat_plus_plus wrote: post #375

cududa wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry but my profession is vaccine hesitancy and persuasion researcher and OP is just wrong. I have n=20,000 polls showing people get disinformation from Facebook that informs their decision to not get vaccinated and hours of focus group recordings also showing this.

How do you distinguish correlation and causation? People who are concerned about something are naturally going to search online and engage with content that confirms their biases. Do you have a robust evidence that vaccine hesitant go on Facebook and change their minds based on pro-vaccine content that is heavily promoted these days?

You give people too much credit.

Tuskegee experiment cast a very long shadow and contributes a significant reason for the racial divide in vaccination rates for covid. No research needed, the bias is built into cultural memory.

Re: Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”

#416

Post by esrauch » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 3:11 AM UTC

wffurr wrote: post #222

gunapologist99 wrote: post #210

Facebook seems to be censoring so much because Facebook believes that most people will actually believe whatever bits of misinformation are floating around out there. But is everyone that easily manipulated? More importantly, does everyone actually believe that they can be easily manipulated, or do they just think that everyone else is so easily manipulated, but somehow they're above the fray? And at what point does…

The problem is FB "recommending" content and groups and prioritizing the feed. They could just not do that and the problem solves itself. Just show me a time descending list of posts filtered by whatever set of friends I am viewing. Don't recommend groups or friends or content from people or groups I haven't subscribed to. Let me search for groups or friends instead.

I don't think that problem solves itself if they get rid of algo ranking. Misinformation on WhatsApp chats have literally lead to multiple lynchings, and it can't possible be said to stem from any algorithm promoted the content out of order.

I'm clearly against the HN grain here but I actually think these companies do have a civic duty to actively dampen viral spread of information; there are plenty of clear cases where it is leading to Pizzarias being shot up, and almost no cases where I've seen viral information rapidly propagating on these networks is valuable.

Re: Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”

#417

Post by 13years » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 3:11 AM UTC

munk-a wrote: post #300

13years wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet you are witnessing exactly what I describe today in realtime. Censorship went from censoring crazy conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in 2017, to affecting everyone in the public as well as heads of state. I said this was going to happen the very day he was deplatformed. With great power comes great temptation and abuse nearly a certainty to follow.

Free speech issues are never simple - but their solutions is never found in the extremes. We've already, as a society, compromised free speech to make exceptions for discriminatory speech and violent destabilizing speech - we're already compromising how available all information is and it's necessary to have a functioning society. Right now the US, specifically you guys - most of the rest of the world is handling thi…

> we're already compromising how available all information is and it's necessary to have a functioning society

I would call that a functioning prison. Not a society.

Freedom is extremism in a world of tyranny

Re: Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”

#418

Post by emodendroket » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 3:13 AM UTC

b0tzzzzzzman wrote: post #408

emodendroket wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody actually wants an "uncensored" Facebook. If you went there and your feed were full of spam, porn, and shock videos, you'd stop going.

Alot of projection .. And not much 'me' only 'you'

Well, I could have written it as "one," but most people find that pretentious.

Re: Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”

#419

Post by IfOnlyYouKnew » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 3:16 AM UTC

coryrc wrote: post #270

cududa wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry but my profession is vaccine hesitancy and persuasion researcher and OP is just wrong. I have n=20,000 polls showing people get disinformation from Facebook that informs their decision to not get vaccinated and hours of focus group recordings also showing this.

Who is wrong?

The 99.5% of dead people that weren’t vaccinated. This isn’t difficult.

Re: Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”

#420

Post by emodendroket » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 3:16 AM UTC

zdragnar wrote: post #412

emodendroket wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody actually wants an "uncensored" Facebook. If you went there and your feed were full of spam, porn, and shock videos, you'd stop going.

There's a reasonable, substantial difference between not allowing material deemed indecent- porn and gore- and becoming an arbiter of "truth".

So you say, but is there really? What about hate speech? Should that go there? If not, now we need to decide what is and isn't hate speech, which is itself contentious. And material "deemed indecent" could also be newsworthy, so it's not really simple to apply even this standard. It's a pretty clear trend: every supposed "free speech platform" ends up having to have active content moderation to actually make it a site anybody would want to use, and many of them still languish in obscurity or eventually shut down because it turns out most people don't want to hang out with the people who were too unpleasant for the mainstream sites to want them.

Actually, once you start to probe, I think you'll find people disagree in degrees, even though most people consider their lines in the sand clear and commonsensical.