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Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation

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521–530 of 645 posts

Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation

#521

"OMG, Trump has won through lies and deception! We failed to stop him. How on Earth did that happen? We must out-manipulate our opponents next time." If you read between the lines, this is what the article condenses to. The discussion here is mostly creepy groupthink shit. Social networks fact-checking their content? What's next? Should AT&T stop the spread of misinformation over its phone lines? Should USPS fact-che…

They can fact check whatever they want, it's their site. It's stupid but people that should leave to greener pastures, it's not like in the beginning there was Facebook and we're bound to use that forever.

The problem is people want to 1) trust blindly and 2) not be taken advantage of that. You can only have one of those.

Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation

#522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mind linking to where Obama said that? The closest I can find is this: https://www.yahoo.com/news/obama-decries-wild-west-media-lan... >"We are going to have to rebuild within this wild-wild-west-of-information flow some sort of curating function that people agree to," Obama said at an innovation conference in Pittsburgh. Why do you think that the curation is going to be done by the government or by government…

It's implied by the use of the word "we" and the fact that he is a government employee.

> It's implied by the use of the word "we" and the fact that he is a government employee.

I think it's clear that's he's asking for a rebuilt mainstream media so that people can at agree on facts.

Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation

#523
post #332
post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the non-elite supposedly non-mainstream media ? Like Fox News ? Who perpetrated a false story days before the election and came back to apologize for it ? They are real winners right ?

for the record I don't read fox-news and don't know what you're talking about. I read Reuters but its US news is limited, I did some study and was educated it is probably the closest to be called as a neutral source.

oddly enough the two financial news wires, Reuters and Bloomberg were the least bias. Cause they give sterile news about markets, their customers want to know how markets will go, not hear what they want.

Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation

#524
post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see anywhere he says that there will be government appointed gate keepers

Obama saying "we" is not referring to his administration? What do you think "we" refers to?

The public

Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation

#525
post #83

the elite mainstream media and the supposed-to-be-independent reporters are the biggest losers in this election, as they took sides so strongly that the other 50% will never bother to have anything to do with them. facebook needs improvement? sure, but more important, those biased media outlets will be irrelevant for most of the people due to not only technology advancement, but also what the news industry has been d…

That's because there was only one valid candidate if anything they're to blame by treating him seriously.

Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation

#526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not do what Twitter does and let the floodgates open I.e. Do no filtering? I'm however doubtful that a "successful" social network would learn from struggling one. Well C'est la vie.

Is it established that that is in fact what Twitter does? I see something non-chronological on Twitter and it hasn't been clear for years what criteria are used.

They also banned the Hillary for prison hashtag I believe. The supporters had to spelling it wrong in order to get it to trend again.

Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation

#527
Can't proper moderation be crowdsourced somehow?

E.g.: a group of fact-checkers, with reputation based on previous performance and a page-rank like system, and perhaps a meta-level above that (people checking the fact-checkers), so that gaming the system becomes difficult.

Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation

#528

I have had a lot of similar thoughts recently. If you think of this historically -- soon after mass-communication technologies were first invented, they were eventually abused, the radio propaganda of WWII being one of the best examples. Laws were introduced, and corporations grew up around these technologies, the producers of the content became professionalized, and by doing it full time, some of them even developed…

Not just mass media.

Writing coincided, and probably facilitated, building of cities, and rule of law (which previously couldn't be written down).

Printing (1436) in Europe saw the split of the Catholic church into multiple denominations.

The continuing fall in printing and paper costs, and rising literacy, eventually lead to revolution and populist reform first in the American colonies, then Europe. Particularly the Chartist movement in England and the Revolutions of 1848 throughout the Continent.

Mass comms as you said, with Fascism in Italy and Germany.

https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/gqzszjwf4unuqfupzqff8g

Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation

#529
post #416

FB is supposed to promote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd

Mackay had some thoughts on that topic.

https://archive.org/details/memoirsextraord05mackgoog

https://archive.org/details/memoirsextraord01mackgoog

Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation

#530

How hard is it to write a bot that googles the facts and checks if they contradict the story?

See Google's Knowledge Engine.

The problem is challenging. Perfection is impossible (for deeply philosophical reasons), but a reasonably tractable system strikes me as possible.

https://www.google.com/intl/es419/insidesearch/features/sear...

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