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Ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to Community Notes model

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Re: Ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to Community Notes model

#91

Post by naasking »

silverquiet wrote: post #18
blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fact checkers are often wrong, and often corrupted by the activists that end up working at them. For example I’ve repeatedly noticed articles from Politifact that are blatantly wrong or very misleading. When I look up those authors and their other work, their bias is clear. Community notes on X/Twitter is far more effective and accurate.

The older I get, the more I realize that people just live in different realities and so many contradictory facts can be true. Obviously this is a source of conflict.

I don't think facts ever contradict each other, it's the stories people create to explain the facts that are at odds. These stories lead people to extrapolate other beliefs which they present as "facts", and it's an organic process of discussion and exposure that changes peoples minds over time.

I personally think aggressive fact checking authorities impedes this process, because people don't change their minds when faced with authoritarian power against which they are powerless, and because they are powerless here, they get angry and they disengage. This ends up which reinforcing their beliefs and now you've lost all chance of change.

Re: Ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to Community Notes model

#92

Post by ceejayoz »

incomingpain wrote: post #73
macNchz wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> CNotes were extremely successful on X. > reddit died By all measures I can find, reddit continues to grow year over year, while X seems to have been flat or in decline, so I’m not sure this is a strong premise.

Facebook is #1, followed by youtube. Tiktok is 4th. Linkedin is 8th. X is 12th. Reddit is 16th. Reddit fell a great deal in rankings. They mostly use bots to make it appear like they are still relevant. Which ironically is creating a 'dead internet' conspiracy theory. In reality its just 'dead reddit'

Ranked by whom, on what metrics?

What were their relative rankings on the same metrics, say, five years ago?

Re: Ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to Community Notes model

#93

Post by rayiner »

> We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate. It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms.

My mom and my wife’s mom both have remarked in the last year that they’re upset with speech policing. My mom can’t say things about immigration that she thinks as an immigrant, and my mother in law is censored on gender issues despite having been married to a transgender person in the 1990s. They’re not ideological “free speech” people. Neither are political, though both historically voted left of center “by default.”

The acceptable range of discourse on these issues in the social circles inhabited by Facebook moderators (and university staff) is too narrow, and imposing that narrow window on normal people has produced a backlash among the very people who are key users of Facebook these days (normie middle age to older people). This is a smart move by Zuckerberg.

Re: Ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to Community Notes model

#94

Post by ben_w »

philjohn wrote: post #69
BryantD wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This exactly mirrors my thoughts, although I don't work in your field. One quote: "For example, in December 2024, we removed millions of pieces of content every day. While these actions account for less than 1% of content produced every day, we think one to two out of every 10 of these actions may have been mistakes (i.e., the content may not have actually violated our policies)." That is first order data and it's in…

Indeed. The human cost of a piece of content being taken down depends on the piece of content, and the reason behind posting it. In the case of someone posting about recovery from self injury and including a photo of their healed self-harm scars, having that taken down by mistake would be more harmful than someone who posted a cartoon depiction of suicide for the lolz.

Given how easy it is to take things out of context, I'm not so sure that the original context really makes a difference.

There's more people online than any of us has heartbeats, and the n^2 number of user-user pairs generates detrimental effects that track any positive effects.

Much better, I think, for each of us to have a small and private personal social network, not to hand everything over to a foreign* company trying to project its social norms worldwide.

* Facebook claims about 3 billion active users, so for 89%-93.5%** of its users, the fact that Facebook is American makes them foreign.

** https://thesocialshepherd.com/blog/facebook-statistics#:~:te....

Re: Ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to Community Notes model

#95

Post by notahacker »

aimazon wrote: post #17

Mark has looked at what has happened to Twitter since Musk took over, a notable decline in activity and value… and decided he wants a piece of that? Musk is begging people on Twitter to post more positive content, as it devolves into 4chan-lite. If Musk’s ideological experiment with Twitter had proven the idea that you can have a pleasant to use website without any moderation then Mark’s philosophical 180 would at le…

New government. So you've got lack of moderation driven by a fear of government intervention.

Re: Ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to Community Notes model

#96

Post by dagmx »

I’m less concerned by the change of fact checking to community notes, because meta had often neutered the ability of their fact checkers anyway.

What I am concerned about is their allowance of political content again.

Between genocides and misinformation campaigns, meta has shown that the idea of the town square does not scale. Not with their complete abandonment of any kind of responsibility to the social construct of its actual users.

Meta are an incredibly poor steward of human mental health. Their algorithms have been shown to create intense feedback loops that have resulted in many deaths, yet they continue down the march of bleeding as much out of people as possible.

Re: Ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to Community Notes model

#97

Post by multimoon »

coldpepper wrote: post #82
oliviergg wrote: post #54

Zuck claims "Europe has an ever increasing number of laws,institutionalizing censorship and making difficult to build something innovative" Ouch. As a European, I feel very wary of such a sentence and the implications. Time for Europe to wake up ? (edit: fix typos)

The faster we decouple from societies like american, the better we europeans will be. We europeans defend our European way of life, against the degenerate capitalism of the US.

I challenge you to find another economic system that has worked in history, because it sure isn’t communism if that’s what you’re referencing. This is also aside from the fact that Europe is also a subscriber to capitalism.

America is the most successful country on this earth and we bankroll most of the rest of the world but somehow we’re always the bad guys.

As an American I’d be very happy if my tax dollars stopped getting spent on Europe.

Re: Ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to Community Notes model

#98

Post by mongol »

oliviergg wrote: post #71
mongol wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are awake. We should decouple ourselves from the tech giants on the other side of the pond. They don't have our best interests in mind.

I'm not sure that we are awake. As a dev for a long time, I realized only 6 months ago, that all the tools I use daily are directly from US. My job and my life would be very very different without this technology. We are loosing ground, or more, we are falling down more and more quickly.

It is individual of course. But for example Emanuel Macron and Mario Draghi have sounded the bell quite clearly. As individual citizens we should try to buy European any time there is a European alternative.

Re: Ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to Community Notes model

#99

Post by tartoran »

gizmo wrote: post #33
jjulius wrote: post #21

If you think this move exists in a vacuum or is actually about "getting back to their roots with free speech", you're wrong. Alongside Dana White joining the board[0], it's clear that this is solely about currying favor with the incoming administration. [0] https://www.npr.org/2025/01/06/nx-s1-5250310/meta-dana-white...

It's not solely about currying favor. Many tech giants hate getting pushed around by politicians and courts around the world demanding censorship. Free speech rights in the US are much stronger than elsewhere in the world, and even businesses as large as Meta need political support to successfully push back on censorious overreach. For context, in Germany you can face up to 3 years prison time for insulting a politic…

> Many tech giants hate getting pushed around by politicians and courts around the world demanding censorship.

They may not like that but they also don't like to take responsibility either.

Re: Ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to Community Notes model

#100

Post by ColdTakes »

nunez wrote: post #86
ColdTakes wrote: post #50

This is my conspiracy theory but this is all in preparation for the end of Section 230 which will also inadvertently kill Blue Sky.

Can you elaborate?

There is a long history but the short of it is, before Section 230, platforms that moderated user content faced potential liability. Oakmont v. Prodigy[1] is a case where Prodigy was held liable for defamatory posts due to its moderation efforts. However, in Cubby v. CompuServe[2], the court ruled that platforms without active moderation, CompuServe were not liable for user-generated content because they were just hosting with no active involvement. Section 230 protected platforms from liability for user content, allowing them to moderate in good faith without being held responsible for all harmful material if they weren't able to moderate everything.

I believe Elon and Trump, being the internet's biggest liars, have the goal to remove Section 230 making moderating online more or less a crime that will open you to litigation and allow them and all of their followers to spread lies not only unchecked but with the threat of punishment if a company, like Blue Sky, were to try to moderate them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Prod....

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubby,_Inc._v._CompuServe_Inc.

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