>Rather than picking a set of biases and viewpoints and presenting that, news orgs and silicon valley have decided that $thing_i_agree_with and $the_opposite_view deserve equal reach/airtime No, we do that because a marketplace of subjective ideas is a good thing.
An accurate presentation of the facts very rarely looks like presenting precisely two opposing sides as having equally valid ideas, and then refusing to contextualise the debate that you've artifically created in doing so.
A presentation is subjective. Unless you are literally showing people recorded values and scientific study methodology verbatim, it is subjective and open to interpretation to some degree.
I really don't think you should remove information (or even be able to sue someone, except for defamation) for it being false, because it gives people the false impression that if information is printed or allowed on Facebook that it's probably accurate. We need to give everyone the impression that whatever they read might be false, because it actually might be false. Maybe that will make people think critically abou…
This logic would also have us stop prosecuting pickpockets on subways, for fear that people might stop being careful with their belongings. Private social media platforms should both take steps to remove obviously false material and educate users as to how to recognize misinformation.
I don't know what sort of people you talk to, but I don't treat legal behavior in anywhere near a similar way to the way I treat illegal or directly harmful behavior. The idea of even making such an analogy feels wrong to me.
Pickpocketing physically damages you and your property. To draw a parallel with speech stretches my imagination too thin.
The upcoming US elections may prove to be a watershed moment for modern democracies in general. There is a widely held belief in academic cycles that mass voter manipulation through social media has managed to trump all other kinds of propaganda, causing people to become electoral zombies. This belief is based on flimsy evidence and on a mountain of bias. I hope facebook and the other media do everything by the book…
Instead of mass voter manipulation of voters through the establishment media? Nobody would be in a panic at all if Hillary had won.
Just like nobody was in a panic when Obama won?
Have we forgotten what 2008-2017 was like, or do we just pretend that the republican fringe collectively losing its mind over a black man in the white house didn't happen?
Except a lot of the "ideas" aren't subjective. The most obvious case would be climate change. Regularly, climate skeptics are given the same amount of airtime as climate scientists, despite the fact that the evidence and opinion is overwhelmingly in support of climate change being a real problem. A realistic panel would be 98 climate scientists on one side, and two climate skeptics on the other. By giving someone wit…
I had a wonderful chemistry teacher once. Someone asked him what he thought about climate change, and he gave a fantastic response. "The atmosphere is a lot like a fish tank full of water. If you put food coloring in that fish tank, it turns slightly red. The more food coloring you put in that tank, the more red it gets. If you take a flashlight and try and shine light through one side of the fishtank and out the oth…
I wish it was a matter of outreach, but I I fear people won’t remember your wonderful analogy unless they identify as a member of your tribe. Instead, putting skeptics on TV who are a member of their tribe, and who assured them it is nothing to worry about, allows them to carry on mining coal and driving their SUVs where they need to go and not updating any of their beliefs. All those things are expensive and painful for adults, but weren’t problems for you as a child.
> Months ago, senior Facebook executives briefly debated banning all political ads, which produce less than 5 percent of the company’s revenue, sources said. The company rejected that because product managers were loath to leave advertising dollars on the table... Gotta remember what's most important. /s
Do you have a problem with political ads on tv? From my perspective we should have campaign finance laws that regulate political ad spending, but there's nothing inherently wrong with showing political ads on tv, facebook, or elsewhere.
I had a wonderful chemistry teacher once. Someone asked him what he thought about climate change, and he gave a fantastic response. "The atmosphere is a lot like a fish tank full of water. If you put food coloring in that fish tank, it turns slightly red. The more food coloring you put in that tank, the more red it gets. If you take a flashlight and try and shine light through one side of the fishtank and out the oth…
I wish it was a matter of outreach, but I I fear people won’t remember your wonderful analogy unless they identify as a member of your tribe. Instead, putting skeptics on TV who are a member of their tribe, and who assured them it is nothing to worry about, allows them to carry on mining coal and driving their SUVs where they need to go and not updating any of their beliefs. All those things are expensive and painful…
I heard that story in college. It stuck out because it was pithy and convincing.
If you think people don't listen to new ideas or change their minds, do you think people should only be allowed to hear what you think is true, so that they don't hear wrong ideas to begin with?
I really don't think you should remove information (or even be able to sue someone, except for defamation) for it being false, because it gives people the false impression that if information is printed or allowed on Facebook that it's probably accurate. We need to give everyone the impression that whatever they read might be false, because it actually might be false. Maybe that will make people think critically abou…
Or you could use your critical thinking skills and keep in mind that they're not going to catch everything. This falls in line with the mentality of "don't let perfectionism get in the way of progress". We need to focus more on teaching critical thinking in schools, it will lead to people who can call out bullshit way more reliably.
How do you think people practically learn critical thinking skills? Occasionally people need to be fooled, and shown that they were fooled.
Fraud requires financial gain. This is just lying. People are allowed to lie in this way, and you should not believe everything you read, particularly if it sounds very appealing, gets your emotions fired up, or seems to offer benefit without requiring any payment or responsibility.
A lot of these fake news sites don’t care about the truth. They’re all about generating clicks to their sites which produce revenue.
I really don't think you should remove information (or even be able to sue someone, except for defamation) for it being false, because it gives people the false impression that if information is printed or allowed on Facebook that it's probably accurate. We need to give everyone the impression that whatever they read might be false, because it actually might be false. Maybe that will make people think critically abou…
An ability to trace the sources of the posts might be interesting. And connecting that to discourse about the typical accuracy of those sources. "This content paid for by... here's the other content they paid for/posted, the trend of topics they discuss, and a weighted bullshit meter" But Facebook plainly wants to moderate the narratives for themselves; until recently their entire news feed was human curated. Now the…
Journalism requires citations. Otherwise it's just gossip.
Instead of mass voter manipulation of voters through the establishment media? Nobody would be in a panic at all if Hillary had won.
Just like nobody was in a panic when Obama won? Have we forgotten what 2008-2017 was like, or do we just pretend that the republican fringe collectively losing its mind over a black man in the white house didn't happen?
Looking from the other side of the Atlantic, the difference is stark. Obama's were the first campaigns widely lauded for their aggressive use of social media. Nobody made a fuss about it, facebook didn't change a single rule because of somebody complaining or anything. The lunatics waving birth certificates were seen by us as some typical American oddity. This time it is different. Our facebook accounts have to be verified, our pages and apps vetted, comments are blocked or filtered, the words "fake news", "russian trolls", russian propaganda etc have become national issues even in countries which never face such a thing. There have been countless elections and referenda throughout the world during the social media age, but the "election phobia" and the idea that all elections are inherently tainted because people can't keep themselves from voting the wrong person/thing was born after the US election.