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

Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong

bmj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 307 posts

Re: Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong

#91

Post by GameOfFrowns »

MrsPeaches wrote: post #73
GameOfFrowns wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the same vein: "If you mix art and politics, you get propaganda"

May I ask where this quote came from? It seems utterly nonsensical to me. Edit: maybe it’s Politics with an uppercase P rather than politics with a lowercase p? That would make more sense.

Sorry, I have no source and also I think the actual quote goes something like this (I just tried to follow the template from the parent comment):

"If art gets involved with politics, it stops being art and becomes propaganda."

I think it was some kind of retort to the Frankfurt school[0],[1] philosophical movement.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...

Re: Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong

#92

Post by ceejayoz »

emmelaich wrote: post #85
bobcostas55 wrote: post #22

The entire idea of "fact checking" on social media is premised on the notion that fact checkers have some kind of superior epistemic merit compared to the checkees. When you're fact checking random people or journalists that may or may not be true, but why does Zucc think facebook's checkers are superior to the BMJ? What are the fact checker's credentials, and most importantly what is their track record? The extreme…

This what gets me. Zuck is a well educated fella. He must know this is wrong. Why is this happening? Has he lost control of Facebook? Is he not interested?

> He must know this is wrong.

It's entirely possible to be well educated and amoral, either via genuine inability to comprehend or simply not caring.

Re: Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong

#93

Post by apatters »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #80
jakobnissen wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did Facebook really censor the lab leak idea? Last I checked, Facebook only censored the idea that the virus was manufactured, not that it merely leaked - and that theory is still fringe.

https://gizmodo.com/facebook-will-stop-labeling-posts-questi... Arguable whether adding a ‘fake news’ label is censorship.

This is an important distinction. Claiming someone else's statements are false in fact is not censorship. What it is though is confirmation that Facebook is a publisher which publishes editorial opinions about things. (It's incidental that they claim their opinions are facts, publishers have been doing that since the beginning of time.)

The only real question is why the government exempts this particular corporation from following the usual rules that publishers have to follow.

Re: Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong

#94

Post by mandmandam »

jakobnissen wrote: post #75
wolframhempel wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true, there are fundamental problems with the concept of "fact-checking". Often the "fact" is just the majority consent, as e.g., demonstrated by the banning of the Wuhan lab leak theory prior to it becoming mainstream. But more broadly, there is a stark imbalance between the resources of the fact-checker (a few minutes or hours to decide) and the author who (e.g. in this case) conducted a month-long, in-depth i…

Did Facebook really censor the lab leak idea? Last I checked, Facebook only censored the idea that the virus was manufactured, not that it merely leaked - and that theory is still fringe.

First of all, those warning significantly reduced user interaction. The chilling effect is nothing to write off, when we're talking about hundreds of millions of posts.

Second, Facebook has removed, completely memory-holed, twenty million posts relating to Covid "misinformation" without any accountability.

I can't find how many of those related to the lab leak theory (a significant fact itself), but I think it's pretty safe to say that many of those 20 million removed posts related to the novel coronavirus lab situated a few miles from the novel coronavirus outbreak.

To this day the lab leak theory is seen by many as unscientific or a conspiracy theory, and that's in no small part entirely due to FB and Twitter deciding that they had the right to tag and remove information on a question that was very, very clearly not actually settled by science.

[0] https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/facebook-remo...

Re: Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong

#95

Post by SilasX »

wolframhempel wrote: post #67
bobcostas55 wrote: post #22

The entire idea of "fact checking" on social media is premised on the notion that fact checkers have some kind of superior epistemic merit compared to the checkees. When you're fact checking random people or journalists that may or may not be true, but why does Zucc think facebook's checkers are superior to the BMJ? What are the fact checker's credentials, and most importantly what is their track record? The extreme…

It's true, there are fundamental problems with the concept of "fact-checking". Often the "fact" is just the majority consent, as e.g., demonstrated by the banning of the Wuhan lab leak theory prior to it becoming mainstream. But more broadly, there is a stark imbalance between the resources of the fact-checker (a few minutes or hours to decide) and the author who (e.g. in this case) conducted a month-long, in-depth i…

Be careful not to jump the gun here. The vast majority of fact checking exists to call out stuff that's demonstrably false, and it's to their credit that social media platforms link a refutation.

But when you have a huge number of stories, there are going to be edge cases, and BMJ got snared by one here. As I understand it:

BMJ found legit problems with one vaccine's clinical trial. But this kind of thing gets seized on to promote a broad anti-vax narrative. Facebook's approach is to label it with the least-significant category, "needs context", i.e. please don't go overboard with drawing conclusions from this. But then they apply that label to all postings of the story, even ones who were sharing it with the subtext of "Pfizer is corrupt" rather than "don't get vaxxed".

Facebook claims that this category doesn't result in the story or poster being penalized, but I'm not inclined to believe that since the users were reporting that they got nasty messages saying their posting in general would get de-prioritized and show up less if they kept reposting such stories.

Re: Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong

#96

Post by mandmandam »

ceejayoz wrote: post #92
emmelaich wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This what gets me. Zuck is a well educated fella. He must know this is wrong. Why is this happening? Has he lost control of Facebook? Is he not interested?

> He must know this is wrong. It's entirely possible to be well educated and amoral, either via genuine inability to comprehend or simply not caring.

We know for a fact that FB leadership regularly discussed ripping off smaller companies business ideas (ie, Snapchat [0]. Not a sign of moral people.

https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2017/08/17/theftovation-facebook-...

Re: Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong

#97

Post by ceejayoz »

throwaway2474 wrote: post #83
locuscoeruleus wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - It’s failed to stop the pandemic in any meaningful way One of the nordic countries has 10x more infections than the first wave and 0.5x people in intensive care. While the vaccines have failed to stop the pandemic, I disagree that the contribution is not meaningful.

I think that’s largely because omicron is less serious. I think the vaccine helped against past strains, and maybe a bit against omicron, but it was vastly oversold.

> I think that’s largely because omicron is less serious.

You can think that as much as you like, but we have actual numbers on hospitalization/death in the two populations, and there's a clear, large difference even in the Omicron surge.

Re: Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong

#98

Post by mandmandam »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #49

Did the people who pushed the “Fact Checking” system ever consider what the people reading the misinformation the fact check would appear under would think when they saw the fact check? Because I really doubt the thing going through their head is “wow this might be wrong”. Trust in any government, media or institution has already been completely burned for those people and things like “Fact Checks” to them only makes…

That's a nice idea, but not actually true.

> “When people saw those warning labels, 95% of the time they did not go on to view the original content,” the company says. Moreover, if an article is rated “false” by their “fact checkers”, the network will “reduce its distribution”. This means that, while an author or poster is not aware that censorship is taking place, the network could be hiding their content so it is not widely disseminated.

The piece above was censored by FB as misinformation, before they apologised for the error. - https://unherd.com/2021/05/how-facebook-censored-the-lab-lea...

Re: Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong

#99

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

nickelpro wrote: post #37
jjgreen wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then there will be response articles which expose those errors as such, a consensus will be reached and we will move on to other issues. That is the nature of scientific discourse. Expecting everyone to shut up just because you shout "ANTIVAX" is not.

I posted exactly such a response. I don't expect everyone to shut up. The response addresses both the inaccuracies of the BMJ opinion piece and, more interestingly, explores how such a piece came to be put out by the BMJ in the first place.

That piece you linked is equally (if not more) biased as the original Thracker piece. Honestly, I've lost a lot of respect for SBM based on that post, as it's a political argument.

In general, it's incredibly sad that Covid has lead to such politicisation around vaccines and trials. It seems (to me, at least) that most of what people (SBM, the FB fact-checkers) are concerned about is other people using the information "incorrectly".

Like, fundamentally, this is an impossible problem to solve (none of us can control others interpretations of things) and the attempts to solve this "problem" are likely to result in much worse outcomes.

Re: Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong

#100

Post by pdpi »

kryogen1c wrote: post #76

the idea of "fact checking" has a false premise - its begging the question[0]. we need to disabuse ourselves of this notion that we can know the Truth or the "facts" if we just checked enough. there is no such thing as contextless infromation. is the sky blue? depends. maybe it emits a certain spectrum based on gas content on our planet, but color is a perceptual experience. did trump\biden say X? maybe; is that the…

You don’t need to have a nuanced perspective on the truth to be able to spot outright lies and nonsense. E.g. Bill Gates is most certainly not using the vaccines to inject tracking chips on the whole of the world population.

I’m perfectly OK with fact checkers getting rid of that level of nonsense while letting most of everything else true.

Post reply on HN