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 censorship to protect me from manipulation become manipulation itself?
Facebook is fighting a losing battle if they think they will survive a battle with their own users. This is way past censoring Alex Jones. You can't possibly censor every crackpot conspiracy theorist. Actually, we're probably all crackpot conspiracy theorists in some way. We probably all believe some conspiracy about 9/11 or the NSA or elections or vaccines or masks or aliens or royal families or whatever.
The rate of censoring is almost certainly accelerating faster than facebook's growth, and once you've been censored once, you're likely to radically curb your use of that platform. I can't imagine that FB doesn't have stats on how many people keep using FB after they've been censored just once.
FB only works when you and 99% of your social group are on there.
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 some content over others. It’s totally optional and is also a powerful form of censorship. A link that shows up in no one’s “algorithmic timeline” is worthless, even if it is not actually removed from the platform.
The essential lie is that the algorithm is neutral. It’s not; it is intentionally biased to favor Facebook’s goals: increase ad inventory and the data used to target ads.
Facebook is removing content because they wanted to make money with a website, and the job of statecraft fell in their laps in the process. They didn't volunteer, they aren't qualified, nobody told them they were signing up to run a kingdom, let alone the world. So they don't produce lofty, philosophical, well-thought-out positions on free speech and human rights. They don't carefully manage the public square with the long term good of humanity in mind. They make the same expedient, best-effort, unenlightened, sounds-good-to-me decisions that literally every poorly qualified there-for-the-wrong-reasons ruler in all of history has made. Your majesty, people are dying because cats are vessels of Satan! By royal decree, kill the cats. That's all this is.
I think they are trying, and I wish they had a Thomas Jefferson on staff and saw themselves as needing one. But they don't.
It's a much bigger problem than than merely content promotion and aggregation.
There are countries where Facebook is the entire internet. Maybe they tried to make it happen and maybe they didn't - but however it happened, they are effectively the Ministry of Information now for that country. They probably shouldn't be. Everyone agrees on this, even them. But like the child-kings of history, it is still the situation. Avoiding the job is simply doing it badly.
Google, Twitter, others, are in a similar boat. They find themselves effectively running branches of government now, not of countries but of the world. Nobody has ever done that before. Nobody knows how to do it correctly, least of all people that mainly want to make money on a website.
The censorship is not because they're evil. It's because one of their subjects approached them saying their stuff is getting people killed and they were like, "Aaugh, I'm just a web site! I don't deal in such matters! Get it off me!" Because they think they're a web site. A political philosopher or an expert statesman would weigh philosophically how to maximize freedom and minimize harm while understanding that freedom gets some people killed, with an eye towards avoiding atrocities. Facebook isn't thinking about the historical risks associated with censorship because they still think they're a web site.
They don't know how to drive this thing - nobody does - and they are going to drive it straight into wars and catastrophes and atrocities. At least, that's the risk. There are countries whose actual ministry of information communicates matters of public safety primarily through Facebook. Or hosted on Amazon. Or whatever. And that company is going to make some minor change intended to protect transgender people in Wisconsin or something, and accidentally massively empower an oppressive government in Africa. That's the problem space. You think you're miserable because people in California are currently effectively setting policy in Arizona? Imagine you live in India. Heavy hangs the head that wears the crown, and this might be one of the biggest crowns ever made. It would be nice if we could find a way to destroy the ring. I definitely don't see another serious answer. In the mean time, the situation is what it is. The rest of us are idiots if we sit around criticizing them for not being perfect. We should be figuring out how to help!
Regarding the Ministry of Information concept, I recently realized that one potential motivation for the large-scale end-to-end encryption agenda is to move the "keys to the kingdom" for the world's trillions of chat messages (and attached media) to end-user devices, *and* loudly signal that this shift has taken place by taking advantage of the very loud minority of security-conscious folks that implicitly trust and signal-boost E2E everywhere they find it. My theory for why this may have become existentially necessary was exactly the sort of "get it off me!" ideology you describe, except from the perspective of protecting from coordinated attacks by multiple cooperating nation states. Of course, all this now means general interest in pwning all smartphones everywhere is now that much higher :(. (Medium-size wall of text version at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25522220, also referenced in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27841760.)
Regarding perspective mismatches because Facebook "still thinks it's a web site", thought-experiment nitpick: do Facebook really believe this, or is their problem a) that they are expected to behave as a website by the very same governments they're (optimistically) trying to support, and/or b) that they're afraid to stand up and behave how everyone's pining for them to do because doing so would "rock the boat", so to speak, and trip all over large swathes of plausible deniability that are still comfortably nestled in shadows and grey areas?
I don't think Facebook literally thinks they're a web site -- I think they know something extraordinary is going on. Probably much better than I do. But I do know that what they set out to do, and what they found themselves doing, are very different, and the head shift has been difficult. This is why, when people come to them with questions and requests and complaints that seem a little more appropriate to ask a judge or monarch or a legislature, they make expedient and historically and politically short-sighted decisions. They don't recognize them as questions of political philosophy, opportunities to think about the right way to architect a global community. They don't even draw on the considerable existing wisdom we have about how governments should work. They fumblingly reinvent ideas from ancient Babylon so they can get back to doing what they think they do and what they want to do.
It's hard to blame them. The head shift is difficult. They didn't ask for this responsibility, and finding themselves at the wheel of something enormous they aren't qualified to pilot, shrink from the task. Any sane person would. I only write about it here in the hopes that we all can start taking these problems seriously. How should a global information community work?
It's not literally true that Facebook is a branch of government, either. It's just the closest analogy I have, and it's closer to the truth than where we started. Really, they are something new. Something nobody knows how to manage correctly yet. I am not the only one to understand that the stakes are high, which is why people keep passing the buck. Facebook wants the government to tell them what's expected and allowed, and the government refuses -- or acts in small-minded expedient ways, too. They don't know either.
This disinformation and censorship question is one of a hundred with deep philosophical and legal elements. What Facebook thinks about the value of free speech, how they decide disputes should be adjudicated, what they do in small cases of deception and fraud and political manipulation, actually matters a lot more to us practically than what our own laws say. This is a shame, because our legal thinkers actually have a lot more experience with being wise and just when it comes to such matters. Facebook has the power to set policy in a way no one ever has before, and they do not seem to be thinking in terms of implications for humanity. They seem to be thinking in terms of how to get people off their back because this sort of thing isn't what they do. Or perhaps more charitably, because the people coming to them with problems are so terrifyingly powerful and the problems are so terrifyingly high stakes. There have been complaints about minor changes in advertising policy throwing elections in far-flung countries. Would you want that responsibility?
This is why I say we need a Thomas Jefferson. What I really mean is, we need a political philosopher who sees the moment and its dangers and opportunities clearly, and can try to help us do things fairly and right. I don't know where you'd find one, though.
You're right that it isn't as easy as that -- people's expectations play into it. Governments', yes, and people's too. While I say Twitter should be creating a legislature and courts and a constitution, we'd all think they were insanely arrogant to do so. Even though now that I say it, you can probably see that it probably is getting to the point where that's needed. But they aren't ready for it and we aren't either -- inertia and expectations. A Thomas Paine could fix that. I don't know where you'd find one of those, either.
We are at a time of great change in history. The information revolution is in full swing. The internet had been a tool for research, then a toy for nerds, then a novel technology full of opportunity. Now it is changing the way society organizes itself. Some people think these digital communities will supplant nations, or exist alongside as something equally important. I don't know. I suspect the change is as profound as the one that ended the middle ages, when we transitioned from the church as a primary social organization to nations. But living in the middle of history, who's to say?
It took us a while to figure out how to run nations, too. We really shouldn't expect too much for a generation or two at least.
My main hope in writing this is to encourage people to take the problem seriously, and think of it as belonging to the space of political philosophy -- which it does. If you work for one of these organizations, learn something about the history and philosophy of government -- why we have laws, why we have courts, why we have elections, why we have bills of rights. You are running a community bigger and more diverse than any nation, with totally novel powers and limitations, totally novel ways to be unfair and evil that you need to avoid, and you do not have the resources to do it right, nor can anyone even tell you what doing it right even looks like. It has to be invented. Get help -- from history, from scholars, from anywhere you find it. If you find Thomas Jefferson living under a rock, hire him immediately.
The rest of us are living under the feet of a giant struggling while trying to carry far too many boulders. We yelp when he steps on us -- and we should -- but we should also be trying to figure out if we can build something that will help carry that load. The boulders are there regardless and the guy is hardly up to the task. Running massive communities fairly is hard and complicated. We need widsom and principled understanding. Attacking the overwhelmed monarch is not how you get peace and justice -- you get that by finding him advisors and engineers that can help him build it.
The situation as it stands is untenable. We need a better way. But until we have one, the situation is what it is and we should help the poor guy stuck managing it.
Political neutrality is a charitable assumption, made because even in this (best) case, the problem is obviously so horrific and difficult that we will need everyone's help and cooperation (especially including Facebook's) to navigate it humanely. You cannot live in a society this large and complex without some give and take, and affection and good faith are the glue that hold us together through those moments of giving and taking. We need it to be true that Facebook intends to do right by everyone, even those they politically disagree with.
Fortunately for us, Facebook believes in its own political neutrality and very much wants us to believe it too. It is a conceit and a fiction -- I think we all know that -- nothing in the world is ever actually politically neutral, and the behavior of these entities is, at times, over the line of how close to perfection you might expect someone making a reasonable and principled effort to get. (An understatement, I know. I still choose to interpret what is happening as a sign of distress, not malice, on Facebook's part.) But we should nonetheless take their conceit at face value, hold them to that standard, expect them to try hard to get close to that ideal, and even assume they were trying and made a human error when they fall short and help and expect them do better. It is a tremendous gift that they are trying and think it is worth it to try. Even if that effort is not principled and sincere -- even if they're just trying to make others think they're politically neutral -- it's a massive gift. Run with that. Take it for all it's worth. Believe them and help them succeed and tell them that you're willing to believe they mean well if they act, not even perfectly, but reasonably. The alternative -- a world in which they cannot win and might as well not try, in which we have an openly and unapologetically politically non-neutral entity with this much power -- is far worse.
Facebook may have a lot of power, but it is not so much that going to war with half their countrymen is a good idea -- this is true both for them and for society. Perhaps they would be within their rights to do it, but the effect would be very bad for everyone. The predictable result of that scenario -- the establishment of a competing social media option with a competing flavor of censorship -- eliminates the possibility of healthy, democratic discourse. Our traditional media is in this state right now, which is why both sides are so useless. They cannot talk to each other. They can only talk to themselves. They cannot think high-mindedly about what is best for society. They can only talk about how wrong their enemies are. In an echo chamber and a war, everyone goes crazy, no matter how right they were at the beginning or overall. We need to be able to listen to each other, and choosing to fight instead would just hurt everyone. Loud bias on two sides does not moderate towards reason -- it accelerates towards two flavors of insanity.
We need each other. If we fight, all we will do is break the system, and -- as we see in traditional media -- this isn't worth it. As we navigate society-wide issues, it is easy to see that it would be really nice to have an information infrastructure that worked, but alas, in a short-sighted effort to win an election here or an issue there, we broke it. This is unfortunate because a functioning and rational information infrastructure would be a really helpful tool to have when you need to address a bigger problem like a pandemic. Even looking just domestically, the truth is that neither side needs to win half so badly as they need to be able to trust each other, and need the wisdom that they can come up with together. But of course, this information problem is not primarily domestic. It is revolutionary and it is global. We absolutely cannot afford to fight bitterly over stupid, provincial issues while trying to think about the sort of massive political and philosophical problem that is private companies in California pretending they are not running information infrastructure in Burma. Putting that infrastructure in the center of a US-based political war is a horrific idea to contemplate.
We can't go down that road here. Can't. And even if it looks like Facebook is going down it, responding by fighting is going down it with them. We have no choice but to figure out how to get along. We need high minded wisdom, we need the ability to listen to a huge, global community and make sacrifices for each other. We need excellent vision, and we need good ideals, and we need pragmatic political understanding. Affection and trust and good faith and cooperation are too important to sacrifice. We cannot fly apart, we cannot become enemies, we cannot take offense over small things. The only way to get to where we need to be is to insist on expecting everyone to be doing their best to get along and to accept nothing less. Facebook may be politically biased, but I refuse to accept that. To the degree that it is the case, they can do better, and I believe they want to, and I will help.
The cynical attitude may be true, but the deeper truth is that we cannot afford it.
A chronological timeline is still based on an editorial algorithm. A simple algorithm, but an algorithm nonetheless. It's no less editorial than any other algorithm, like (hypothetically) putting posts in alphabetical order or whatever.
Yes, Facebook has found itself wielding power that it could have never imagined. Nobody is prepared or qualified for that kind of power. That's why it took 700 years from the Magna Carta until the US Constitution to formulate a reasonable contract to limit such power.
Now you have the most dangerous combination of all. The two ingredients which when combined has resulted in horrific atrocities.
The paradox of tyranny
1) The desire to make the world a better place
2) The power and means to actually do so
The private company defense might become a moot point. There are numerous lawsuits now alleging these companies as state actors and some with actual receipts showing direct government communication and result action.
And just last week we have the white house essentially openly confirming state involvement.
> The private company defense might become a moot point. There are numerous lawsuits now alleging these companies as state actors and some with actual receipts showing direct government communication and result action.
Arguably, any entity that submits articles of incorporation to any jurisdiction is an extension of the that jurisdiction.
And in practice, it works out this way. Modern examples: CCP board members on top china tech co's and NSA PRISM integrations with top US tech cos…
Nice comment. I’m not sure that having a Thomas Jefferson on staff would be enough to make a difference though. The real Jefferson had one goal: build a sustainable democratic country that respects the civil rights of its citizens. Your Facebook Jefferson would still have to build an online system that prioritizes facebook’s financial health. Respecting the rights of users would be secondary.
It’s not though. Companies function with significant amounts of waste that are related to internal fiefdoms and have very little relationship to the bottom line.
All of this is also true for our actual government[0]. I have zero confidence that if our government were in charge of running Facebook/Twitter/any other social media app the results would be better.
I agree. I don't think our government is qualified to make these sorts of decisions. I don't know who is. I am not advocating for nationalization of these services.
I am only saying that these people never signed up to have to make decisions about such impactful matters. They are not political philosophers, and they are stuck making decisions of that gravity. I can be mad when they do it wrong, but I can also recognize how tragically outmatched they are. At least governments have judiciaries and cabinets and checks and balances and constitutions and stuff. These guys were just trying to make money on the internet, and suddenly human rights in China became their problem. Nobody seriously expects Twitter to have a full blown judiciary and legislature for processing bans. Nobody expects them to write a constitution which becomes a treasure of a historical document, on how to properly govern the flow of the world's conversation. But at this point, those things would actually be appropriate. It's not surprising they're struggling trying to solve the problem with algorithms. I don't think anyone could succeed at that, and they don't even realize they have the responsibility and opportunity -- they're just trying to do their best to be socially responsible and then get back to making money on the internet.
The best suggestion I have for them is to hold out their hands to humanity and say -- "Look, we have a tremendous opportunity here, and it's bigger than just us. How should we use it?"
Facebook have tried this. They have made am independent governing board that theoretically can tell Facebook what to do w.r.t. content censorship decisions.
No surprise, it appears to be staffed by people who were selected for their middle-of-the-road "you must censor a bit but not too much" type of views. It gave them a limp wristed rap on the knuckles when they banned Trump, said it was arbitrary and didn't follow the same rules enforced on everyone else, but that they still agreed with doing it.
I think what we're seeing here is what happens when you lack some sort of free speech libertarian fundamentalism. Facebook don't have to engage in "statecraft", whatever that is, no more than the designers of SMTP did. They could choose not to. They could say "we will shut down accounts when under court order to do so, end of story". Then governments who think a citizen is breaking a law about speech would have to go to court, win, and then the judge would say, here is an order requiring Facebook to shut down the account of this law breaker (which could automatically hide all content they created). All the evolved mechanisms, the checks and balances of the actual state would be in effect.
But Facebook is based in Silicon Valley and like most firms there, has systematically made deals with far-left devils in order to hire them and put them to work, often without really understanding if it's worth the cost. Does Google actually need 144,000 employees for example? It hardly seems more productive than when I started there and it had 10,000. Their "hire first ask questions later" approach inevitably leads to hiring lots of extremists and wingnuts, people who are there primarily to get closer to a nexus of power they can wield for their own political agendas. The constant dramas we see emanating from Mountain View, Palo Alto and San Francisco are the inevitable consequence.
Tech firms could fix this problem very quickly if they wanted to: just announce a renewed commitment to freedom of speech, platform principles and passive moderation. Any employee who doesn't like it can leave. Many would, but those companies are so over-staffed they'd barely notice, and the environment for those who remain would be drastically more pleasant.
The problem with that is if Facebook committed to free speech then users would post a lot of offensive content which drives away mainstream advertisers. We've already seen that happen. Facebook tightened their censorship several years ago specifically because large advertisers were leaving the platform over concerns about their ads appearing next to user generated content that negatively impacted their brands. Obviously Facebook isn't going to do anything that puts advertising revenue at risk.
That's a rather fundamental flaw in their whole business model, isn't it? Advertisers who don't want their ads appearing next to user generated content, on a social network, have missed something rather important.
It's obviously not a flaw. Facebook is highly profitable. The vast majority of user generated content is inoffensive. We're just discussing a small minority of edge cases.
The government, in theory, is bound by the first amendment. FB being run by a government bound by traditional first amendment restrictions would be worlds better than what we have now.
If the majority of people here are software engineers, would it surprise people that someone has automated the job of crafting believable bullshit? Not to mention disseminate it faster and better than we have ever been able to?
I see it as a problem that we can iterate “content” faster, identify “audience groups”, run marketing analytics, A/b test “narratives”, all to craft believable, plausible “content” and then mass broadcast it.
We’ve built systems that create content faster and better than a normal human BS filter can block.
How does this have anything to do with the First Amendment? How do free speech rules bring the balance of power back to individual human levels of filtering?
Mind you the First Amendment is an American construct. It does nothing for things like genocides in Myanmar, or journalist suppression or hate crimes and the like.
> We’ve built systems that create content faster and better than a normal human BS filter can block.
Maybe so, but I just don't trust that the "BS filter" big tech has constructed will block only "BS" and not true things inconvenient to a certain strident brand of west coast morality. The NY Post story from last year certainly wasn't "BS".
I don't think algorithmic BS is anywhere near as big a risk as you think it is, and I think the risk of outright censorship is far larger than you imagine. Big tech should be a common carrier and viewpoint discrimination in moderation should be illegal.
And my answer to people who believe this is always the same - please volunteer your their time to an active subreddit of your choice, preferably one with an active political aspect.
Look, I am not unsympathetic. I have personally gone through the whole cycle - I started from "the antidote to bad speech is more speech, not censorship", To advocating for better tools to handle misinformation.
I would honestly LOVE for the world to work how I thought it did. I worry about the tools we create to clean our "gardens". Yet, without those tools I know most large communities would fail to be governed.
I am largely tired, of these debates on HN where old arguments are rehashed, un-tempered with empirics. Heck, people should be upset that the data that can answer these questions is under NDAs.
> please volunteer your their time to an active subreddit of your choice, preferably one with an active political aspect.
Why reddit? That site is a soup of immaturity, did you expect otherwise? On reddit you have people with 5 accounts creating conversations to control narratives and make it look like you have a larger group than you do supporting your case. This is more difficult to do on FB because they do a bit of account validation and other measures.
And your example of a political forum on reddit is a great example of why we don’t want censorship. On reddit admins ban for simply not speaking to the narrative or saying something that is not misinformation yet the admins don’t like. This is literally the same problem we have with FB now. The moral of the story is, stop censoring. It’s ok someone doesn’t say what you think is the truth, I promise the world will keep spinning.
How does that work? reddit speech is not worthy of being heard? Its too immature to be even worth experimenting with moderation?
If people are creating 5 accounts to create a narrative, well then thats the job isn’t it? Stopping those 4 fake accounts.
But that would be censorship. So what is your solution for the problem you yourself have described?
Plus, If your first option is to choose a forum where you self select out of dealing with messy problems, then your experience is invalid for guidance on dealing with messy problems - no?
I can’t seem to see anything but a contradiction of your own purposes here.
Perhaps you see how these things are not contradictory>?
> How does that work? reddit speech is not worthy of being heard? Its too immature to be even worth experimenting with moderation?
I didn't say it wasn't worthy of being heard, I said it's immature and there's zero cost to account creation and therefore you have literal children going to that site and spitting nonsense. Moderating that site is like herding cats.
> If people are creating 5 accounts to create a narrative, well then thats the job isn’t it? Stopping those 4 fake accounts.
But that would be censorship.
Yup, banning them would. Did I say ban them? It was used as a reference to immaturity, because immature / crazy people create accounts to make a cohort that does not exist.
> So what is your solution for the problem you yourself have described?
In short, change the way these people are raised. Change what they're being taught in schools that enables this behavior. It's unacceptable to throw online temper tantrums when you don't get your way. It's also unacceptable to attempt to force those into your beliefs. So start by teaching children that instead of raising the entitled society that we have today.
For those, seemingly like yourself, who thinks the world will end if a group of people start believing the world is flat, I'd say learn to ignore people.
> Plus, If your first option is to choose a forum where you self select out of dealing with messy problems, then your experience is invalid for guidance on dealing with messy problems - no?
I can’t seem to see anything but a contradiction of your own purposes here.
Perhaps you see how these things are not contradictory>?
How about let me speak for myself and quit carrying the conversation forward using assumptions from yourself?
Without access to specialized knowledge, like being an expert in a subject, users will either check the authority/standing of the speaker, the emotional appeal of an argument, or the underlying logic of it.
In my simple way of putting it - creating a website, or creating a post, and then having it disseminated is dirt cheap today. You can get an article on a news website, having it referenced by a youtube channel, have that sent to a twitter feed.
That alone is sufficient to discuss an increase in the volume of content being created - however, that volume also gets disseminated as fast as it is created, which is what accounts for the speed.
This is also without looking into the fact that people tend to use superficial traits to assess whether information is credible online.
"Yet, research shows that people rarely engage in effortful information evaluation tasks, opting instead to base decisions on factors like web site design and navigability. Fogg et al. (2003), ... They argue that because web users do not often spend a long time at any given site, they likely develop quick strategies for assessing credibility."
From: Credibility and trust of information in online environments: The use of cognitive heuristics, (Miriam J.MetzgerAndrew J.Flanagin)
So a good looking website, with content that purports to be endorsed by known authorities, and hits the right cultural blind spots for its audience will get past their filters.
If you’re gathering information faster than your BS filter can process it, then you’ve also exceeded your capacity to process the information your receiving. Assuming BS filter means some extension of comprehension
Yes, I think so too. However people still will consume content as long it gives those dopamine hits. The brain makes you think you are doing something, even if its not really comprehending what its consuming.
Which is getting closer to the problem as I see it - the tech infrastructure has out scaled the default biological tools we are born with.
If you’re consuming information but comprehending it then this is listening vs hearing. This is my original problem with this “faster than BS filter”. If you claim that information is coming too fast for them to comprehend then they are not comprehending it and therefore not getting the information. Which would make this all false.
I think a lot of people would prefer a Facebook that showed what your friends post in chronological order, and wistfully say so now and then.
I'm not sure, but it might have once been that way, before I used it.
There is a string you can append to the URL (?sk=h_chr) to get a chrono view, but it doesn't seem to work well; for instance it doesn't go very far back and it's not clear to me that it's complete.
If my friends were posting lots of "spam, porn, and shock videos", I think I'd rather know it, whether or not I could tolerate it.
A lot of people do say that but I frankly don’t believe them when they say it. It’s well known inside and outside of technology that customer descriptions of their own behavior are often far out of step with reality and I think people would find Facebook less engaging and fun to use if it didn’t tune what it showed them based on their perceived interests and their activity. I would guess most people are friends with people they know but don’t actually want to hear from all that much, and it wouldn’t be ideal to be put in a position to have to remove family members because their posts are boring.
> It’s well known inside and outside of technology that customer descriptions of their own behavior are often far out of step with reality
How do you get from "people may not be reliable witnesses of their own preferences" to "I know their preferences better"?
The first doesn't sound that improbable, but the second is a non sequitur, even if a popular one. If it's easy to lie to yourself, doesn't that suggest it's even easier to lie to yourself about what others think?
My previous comment suggested multiple reasons why people might not choose the chronological ordering even if they prefer it. Most people surely aren't aware of the trick, and using it limits the number of posts available. It's not clear that it shows all of them within a range either. I myself only use it about half the time, not because I don't want things in order, but because I have the sense that I'm missing something either way.
>I think people would find Facebook less engaging and fun to use if it didn’t tune what it showed them based on their perceived interests and their activity
I think an important point is that "engaging" is not at all the same thing as "fun to use". Meth is engaging, but in the long run, not that fun. The conflation of the two is useful for apologetics but not necessarily convincing to a lay individual.
>it wouldn’t be ideal to be put in a position to have to remove family members because their posts are boring
"Boring" sounds like a different sort of thing from "spam, porn, and shock videos". That kind of post does sound more plausible.
But Facebook provides controls to filter people if you want, and there is no reason that if they stopped choosing what you see that the user's controls would have to go away.
What is the rational argument that Facebook knows which family members of nearly 3 billion people are "boring", though?
The rational argument is pretty simple. They have data about what things you click on, comment on, react to, etc., and use these to show you more similar things and show you fewer things you just scroll past. I'm not sure how you argue against what seems like pretty objective data.
>I'm not sure how you argue against what seems like pretty objective data.
I commend you for crystallizing the argument which I think is indeed representative of what the industry believes about itself and many others reject.
Virtually everything in computing, or the real world, for that matter, is solving some sort of optimization problem, explicitly or implicitly.
I'd paraphrase your comments as, Facebook solves an optimization problem, they make billions of dollars doing it, so it is objectively the optimum.
There are two objections I think that capture most of the opposition.
- Real optimizers can't promise a true optimum every time; they sometimes converge on a local optimum. This local optimum may not be within any particular distance from the global optimum either.
- "Fewer things you just scroll past" is not necessarily what the *user* wants to optimize. It is not in fact what I want to optimize. I'm not sure if I made it clear, but the *existence* of things that I don't actually read is important contextual information. So is the relative order, the timing, the source...
These points are really abstract and general - virtually anything can have these two issues - they're not optimizing the right thing, and they're not finding the global optimum.
I think non technical people sometimes get angry because they intuitively feel that people claim objectivity without justification, but I think it's possible to provide a bloodless, abstract, logical, and specific critique more suitable for a software engineer's mentality, and that's what I tried to do above.
[One other general issue I thought of - optimizers can have the wrong constraints; everything in life normally has rules and limits on how you can pursue a goal. The ends don't necessarily justify the means. So this is another thing that is not covered by simply saying the optimizer produces the optimum]
> I think a lot of people would prefer a Facebook that showed what your friends post in chronological order
A lot of people say they want this... but so far every study has come back with the result of “even the people who say they want it, consistently rank their experience as lower-quality when they get it”
Quite a few people do want that. Even if they didn't, some content is outright illegal to host, so they can't take an entirely user directed approach even if they wanted.
I mostly don't, but there is still a disconnect here.
Who wants to not know the sort of group they belong to?
Censoring things that are not acceptable at all is different from censoring (or reordering) things that are determined to be sub-optimal for a particular person to see, that come from members of the group who are not going to be banned.
So if you go to a listing of groups, without some active curation, how do you prevent it from being that kind of content, or hate groups, or other undesirable content? The standard gets real blurry real fast.
As I contemplate the subject, I think I draw the line between a set of human-understandable rules, enforced by some combination of human and machine partners, versus a set of goals that drive a ruthless optimization process that is opaque.
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.
Yes. The US has managed fine with exactly such a dichotomy. The reason it’s easy to draw a bright line at obscenity/porn is because you know it when you see it.
> What about hate speech? Should that go there?
No, but speech inciting violence is pretty easy to recognize. Again, First Amendment jurisprudence has developed clear rules for this.
It’s not illegal to post shock videos. It’s protected by the first amendment. The same is true of porn, for the most part (while “you know it when you see it” is a suggested standard for obscenity the concept differs greatly from one observer to another — see what answers you get from Los Angeles and Karachi about what’s manifestly obscene and I bet the answers are different). I still don’t think most people want to go to a site overrun with this kind of content.
Are you really attempting to justify censorship to keep porn off of the site? We’ve had algorithms for years now that can detect nudity. It’s a simple filter that can be added that allows the user to select if they want to see it or not. Much like DDG and Google image search.
There's a difference between nudity and porn. Facebook banned the famous "Napalm Girl" photo, and then later un-banned it. Rules appear to be arbitrary and constantly changing.
Yea child nudity is going to be a difficult one for all algorithms as they lack context. The only reason that picture is allowed is because of the context. If it were a random naked child in a field it would and should be banned.
The point of this example is to poke holes in what appears to be an ironclad, simple, and consistent principle by pointing out that few advocates for it actually wish for what it implies.
I don’t find it very persuasive for people to baldly post “that’s different” when my whole idea is that the line between these things is not so bright as we like to imagine.
>the line between these things is not so bright as we like to imagine
In practice, the line exists, whether or not it's clear to you, it is clear to Facebook, because they already (and always will) act differently depending on their judgment of which side something falls on.
There are things that are totally outside the pale, and then there is the practice of curating peoples' feeds amongst the stuff that is allowed.
Some people specifically don't like the second thing, even if it would lead to some metric declining.
What principle? Are you saying you weren't disputing the principle that there are two different kinds of things that people call "censorship", in practice and in theory?
It is a difference in kind, not degree.
You can have an arbitrary number of rules, enforced by human and machine, for acceptable behavior in a forum. I think that's basically the case on HN or reddit.
But if you have an optimizer that filters and reorders things on top of that, then any particular item that is moved or removed is not against any rule. And nobody can really say why, even if they are informed of what happened.
The latter thing is what many people, including me, think is terrible, and the distinction is not fuzzy even if you can call it all "censorship" or "curation".
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.
What about those who have never stepped foot on the platform yet are still hesitant? Not everybody is on Facebook.
Also while we're here, if you are what you say you are, add the military forcing vaccinations, people witnessing side effects while being forced to continue duty, and the network effects this has on them and their friends / family after leaving the service. Look at how many people try to go the route of court martial to avoid some vaccines only to change their mind later when they're literally sitting in jail and have no rights. Then think about how this plays out in a civilized society when you can't throw the person in jail.
> What about those who have never stepped foot on the platform yet are still hesitant? Not everybody is on Facebook.
No, but many (most?) people are. So many of "those who have never stepped foot on the platform yet are still hesitant" may well have gotten much of their hesitancy from people who are on Facebook and got much of it from there.
You can generally trace it back to someone they know on Facebook or Tucker Carlson. Dems would serve themselves better by not trying to point fingers on where to aim the ban cannon. This is only going to cause more mistrust.
Actually visit the areas with hesitancy, then come back and see if you say the same. I know some 100 people that are hesitant. Not a one of them are on FB, nor listen to anything FOX puts out. It's gov mistrust fueling it. Not Tucker Carlson. That's the most ridiculous thing I've heard lately.
I’ve done 15 12 hour shifts at vaccine clinics, designed clinics around the country, and regularly talk with unvaccinated individuals but thanks for the advice.
Nobody's suggesting military members have an option for vax, but are you denying the network effects this can have? In the US veterans make up some 7% of the population. Expand that from their network effects and we get closer to the 40% or so that are hesitant. Clearly not all military members and veterans are hesitant so this is nothing more than an estimate than anything. But it still holds, you see your friend get the shot then have a bad reaction and ultimately leaves deployment because of it then it stays with you. You see it 2 times, and you're ready to swear off most vaccines.
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?
No, most of the pro-vaccine content doesn’t persuade people because it’s not crafted right. There are some interesting efforts in the field now with promising effects.
But being on the fence/ skeptical and seeing disinformation that aligns with your fears does move someone from the hesitant to resident category
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.
No idea why you got downvoted so much. This is very much so a reason people are untrusting.
One method a Black pastor and I came up with for our county and surrounding ones was to bring the parishioners to a county vax clinic with white folks also present, and let them point in the pan of pre-drawn needles for which one they wanted, so they didn’t have to fear they were getting a “Black” vaccine
Most likely, I presume, is that telling people whose livelihood depends on the internet that other people do not research on the internet everything they develop beliefs about is apparently not a great idea if you are concerned about fake internet points.
That's an excuse, not a reason. The reason for both whites and blacks acting like idiots is lack of mastery of even kindergarden-level critical thinking among US adults.
> my profession is vaccine hesitancy and persuasion researcher
Can't get if this is sarcasm or not. If true, it's scary how fast micro-fields are created and funded once there is a political purpose behind it, so that policies can be rubber-stamped as science. If false, nice troll.
The antivax movement existed long before COVID and Facebook was a huge contributor to its spread. There is nothing scary about someone researching that.
Because some people have witnessed rushed vaccines first hand, some have the the test subject of other vaccines. Sometimes this doesn’t go well (see anthrax vax). So some of us want to wait to allow others to be the test subject. You definitely can’t count on a Dr telling you something is safe, it didn’t work out for us in the military there either.
Anecdata: I've seen several people in my circle who have never identified as anti-vax in the past, who reject SARS-CoV-2 vaccines on the grounds of "they were made too quick, we didn't have enough time for testing". Of course this argument completely falls apart when you know how vaccine development works, but it's an argument that genuinely only applies to this specific group of vaccines.
This is where politicization is so dangerous: it’s reasonable to have questions in that regard but the odds of them getting bad advice go up massively when there’s a billion dollar propaganda machine pumping out false claims faster than they can be debunked. A share on Facebook or political news can take hours to reason through a concern, find the supporting evidence, etc. even if someone is available to help. My wife has done this with her biology students and it’s a really good education for how science works but it’s also a job.
> Of course this argument completely falls apart when you know how vaccine development works, but it's an argument that genuinely only applies to this specific group of vaccines.
So if this is true then there should be no testing period right? We should know out the gate if a vaccine is safe or not right? Clearly this is incorrect.
If you like testing vaccines, join the military. Then let’s see after you’re injected with various chemicals and get a 100% disability from it if you feel the same way and attempt to force others into your line of thought.
> We're already past the testing period. The phase 3 trials of multiple vaccines are concluded and analyzed.
From the FAQ on the Pfizer vax:
"The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine is an unapproved vaccine..."
"The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine has not undergone the same type of review as an FDA-approved or cleared product. FDA may issue an EUA when certain criteria are met, which includes that there are no adequate, approved, available alternatives. In addition, the FDA decision is based on the totality of scientific evidence available showing that the product may be effective to prevent COVID-19 during the COVID-19 pandemic and that the known and potential benefits of the product outweigh the known and potential risks of the product...."
Not to mention this trial period along with vaccine development was accelerated.
Also, from actual mouths of those hesitant, the reason is mostly gov mistrust. Which is yet again another problem of this divide dems have been building.
> Isn't that the better option anyway, if you don't trust the government?
/me reviews history of Fauci speaking…
Nope.
When approval gets completed and the left quits trying to force the vaccine on people and implying they are too stupid to understand why they need it, when they quit trying to censor information they don't like (what do you think the #1 cause of gov mistrust is these days? how do I know the paper you posted isn't gov propaganda? you see how deep and dangerous censorship is?) maybe you’ll get more traction.
Further what you’re implying with these types of statements is that science never makes a mistake. We both know that’s not true don’t we? So while in aggregate the risk to an individual is limited, individually it’s their life and the only one they get. Let them make their own decisions. With delta now we can’t get herd immunity anyways.
And while we’re here, how many people do you know that have had COVID? Also stop telling people they need an expert to explain it to them.
> I said to read it yourself or get an expert, the latter meaning one you choose.
Great! Don't tell someone to get an expert unless you want them to not listen to you. OK?
> I didn't say anything about Fauci, and I didn't say you need an expert.
I did say something about Fauci. He's an expert no?
> If that's the worry why does FDA approval matter?? this doesn't make any sense.
Because that's why some people are hesitant, lack of approval. Others like myself won't believe pretty much anything put out by the left.
> And the rest of what you said about trying to convince people isn't related to what I said.
It 100% is, you're just avoiding it because it's difficult. Just like before you weren't downvoting and yet now you are. It's pretty clear the convo didn't go the way you wanted it to.
> Great! Don't tell someone to get an expert unless you want them to not listen to you. OK?
Does the 'or' not make sense here? If you don't feel qualified, you can get anyone you trust that is. If you do feel qualified, then go read it yourself.
> I did say something about Fauci. He's an expert no?
In a way that makes no sense as a counterargument. If I say you can fix your own car or get a mechanic to do it, there's no reason for you to name some famous mechanic you hate and act like I meant them.
> Just like before you weren't downvoting and yet now you are.
It's impossible to downvote replies to your own comments.
> It's pretty clear the convo didn't go the way you wanted it to.
This conversation just confuses me. All I wanted to do is explain that the vaccine is tested. And there are plenty of non-'left' people that can confirm the numbers and the underlying science, if you're honestly looking for the truth.
> Does the 'or' not make sense here? If you don't feel qualified, you can get anyone you trust that is. If you do feel qualified, then go read it yourself.
OK so I'll try again. If you want someone to listen to anything you have to say, do not start off implying they need someone to interpret information for them. Fix your language or not, I don't really care anymore.
> In a way that makes no sense as a counterargument. If I say you can fix your own car or get a mechanic to do it, there's no reason for you to name some famous mechanic you hate and act like I meant them.
Famous mechanic? Just curious, can you list any famous mechanics that anybody would know? Anyways, since this one is too difficult for you (see how offensive that is?) I'll explain more. Last year how many times did these people step on their toes when speaking to the public? That mask vs no mask thing early on in the pandemic. What became clear is that these "experts" will say whatever is needed to get people to do what they want. Be it get vaccinated or stay indoors. They lied to attempt to control people, and destroyed all the trust they had on the way.
> This conversation just confuses me. All I wanted to do is explain that the vaccine is tested. And there are plenty of non-'left' people that can confirm the numbers and the underlying science, if you're honestly looking for the truth.
It is tested in that we've stuck in in arms and most people don't die. Please explain to me in excruciatingly great detail what will happen to our bodies as a result of this shot in 5 years. When you can answer that question, then it's tested
Vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of human lives. Human lives are valuable. Refusal to get vaccinated against things like measles, polio, smallpox, or COVID-19 cause a lot of unnecessary deaths, which destroys a lot of valuable things.
Just as spending on loss prevention in stores can easily produce a net positive impact on the store's balance sheet, reducing the rate of unnecessary destruction of human life (or other forms of permanent damage short of death) from diseases for which vaccines exist produces net positive impacts on the tax rolls/life insurance balance sheet/quality of life.
I guess "produce profit and avoid unnecessary misery and harm" is a political purpose, but I don't understand how anyone could speak derisively about it.
The thing that really hammers home that there's something to study here is that we basically eliminated polio through vaccination campaigns, and we did this in my lifetime. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative was launched in 1988 (one year after I was launched), and since then the number of annual cases has dropped by 99.9%, from 350/year to a handful. 2% of the people that contracted polio suffered paralysis, which would necessitate living in an iron lung to keep breathing.
Before last year, I would have said that the clear and obvious harms of polio were the reason so many people got vaccinated that polio is basically eradicated. But since the start of COVID, over 10 million humans have died miserable deaths from COVID, yet so many people reject the vaccine.
There's an extremely grave threat, but there's also an easy way to gain near complete invincibility to that threat, but tens of millions of people in just the US are refusing invincibility to COVID. 99.2% of US COVID deaths now are among the unvaccinated [0]! 99.2%!!! Clearly there's something going on to make so many people make such an irrational choice, and that's worth studying, as the benefit of getting a few more people to embrace invulnerability is worth so much more than the cost of funding some research and outreach.
> since [1988] the number of annual [Polio] cases has dropped by 99.9%, from 350/year to a handful
And what's more, that's not even the impressive part of the curve in terms of magnitude. Polio was once so commonplace that the idea of being anti-vax would have been completely absurd to everyone just some 40/50 years ago, when you had someone crippled by childhood paralysis (of which Polio is the most common cause) living in basically every city block. And even in the White House, from 1933 to 1945.
Vaccine hesitancy is largely irrational, however polio and COVID-19 are hardly comparable. Polio has a 2 - 5% infection fatality rate for children and young adults, whereas the COVID-19 IFR for the same age group is close to 0. We're talking about multiple orders of magnitude difference in relative risk.
There's a global pandemic killing thousands of people and there's a sizeable portion of the American population spreading misinformation that's causing a significant number of people to not get the vaccine, in turn endangering both themselves and others.
It seems obvious to me that there would be people researching how to either stop this misinformation being spread, or educate people enough to stop believing it. This isn't some conspiracy theory - this is just sane people doing sane things in response to a very real threat.
It’s not like I wanted to do this, more a moral obligation. When a former EBOLA colleague texted me last February and said he was putting the team back together I had a small panic attack knowing this bullshit cycle of unmitigated spread and disinformation was about to be my life again for 2+ years. On our first Zoom one guy just banged his head on his desk for a solid 2 minutes to give us a bit of comic relief.
Doesn’t even pay well - like at all. Dunno why you got downvoted so much.
Actually that's average number of DAILY deaths from the past 7 days, not the number of deaths in the past 7 days. As a lot of people take the weekends off, reporting of new cases and deaths decreases sharply on weekends and increases on Mondays, but in reality people are not dying at a lower rate on weekends. That's why the stats are averaged over 7 days.
For reference, there are about 15k homicides per year in the US, or about 41 per day, which is about 13% of the 316 daily COVID death rate reported by the CDC (and on the front page of the NYTimes site).
The issue is an increasing infantilization world-wide where some group thinks it needs to "protect the others", assuming they are the single source of truth and that it's obvious they are. It's a well known bias which for some reason aligns with the current zeitgeist. As everything before, it shall too pass at some point.
Institutions of ordered information (papers, publishers, tv) have been disrupted by a New tech - the internet
What we see now is a knee-jerk reaction to reestablish order by the establishment.
This happened too with the creation of the gutenberg printing press. New tech disrupted established information sources.
Approx 60 years after the printing press creation, a relatively minor religious squabble ended up in a huge conflict that engulfed most major powers in europe.
Truth is power. The institutions that that control the truth will fight to maintain their power.
While I don't disagree about the knee-jerk reaction, the Guttenber comparison isn't quite apples-to-apples:
When Guttenberg made the press, access to it's output had a strong filter: most people couldn't read, and anyone who could read was highly educated for the times. Social media doesn't have a filter like that, and higher levels of education generally correlate to lower levels of belief in things like conspiracy theories.
Also keep in mind that the T+60 years conflict you're referencing, while greatly assisted by the printing press, was also greatly pushed along by the masses being told what to think by their preachers or by powerful elite looking to destabilize the status quo to their own benefit. The peasants of the peasant revolution weren't reading criticisms of the Catholic Church and coming to their own country conclusions, they were given emotional polemics by people like Storch sparking extreme levels of fanaticism.
So, yes, there is a lot in both situations about power struggles with the established order, but most people are being influenced more by emotionally charged arguments and tribal loyalties than they are by increased access to level-headed rational presentations of an issue.
> Also keep in mind that the T+60 years conflict you're referencing, while greatly assisted by the printing press, was also greatly pushed along by the masses being told what to think by their preachers or by powerful elite looking to destabilize the status quo to their own benefit. The peasants of the peasant revolution weren't reading criticisms of the Catholic Church and coming to their own country conclusions, they were given emotional polemics by people like Storch sparking extreme levels of fanaticism.
That part seems very much apples-to-apples with what's happening now.
That... Yes, thanks for pointing that out. Took me a second to realize I'd somewhat argued around my initial point. I suppose my initial point was simply that with the printing press, it all still required a direct middleman: most people still didn't have much greater access to the required material to make up their own minds. These days with the internet, that access actually exists, yet most people aren't really seeking it out. Possibly because, given that access, people are more likely to feel they've made an informed choice even if to more comprehensive information goes u used? Maybe?
I'm not sure, but there's a different dynamic at play. Both "revolutions" had (and have) great potential to allow individuals to make more informed choices, but in the case of Guttenberg the educational bottleneck to get there was still narrow... These days for some reason the bottleneck is more if a self-imposed barrier.
Although education is still a factor: I try to read news sources from the full range of points of view, but they all may report on something like the latest bit of research-by-PR release differently. I have enough of an education to know I should seek out the research publication itself and I understand how to approach a formal writeup of research to provide me with at least a low pass filter against poor quality work. I have enough of an education to be skeptical of simple solutions to complex problems and instead thing about edge cases and failure modes or poor incentive structure.
I can absolutely still be wrong, but if I'm wrong I will still have failed after going through a more rigorous process in an attempt to figure things out. I'm still more likely to ultimately accept a result that runs counter to my initial-- perhaps emotionally charged-- response on an issue as a result.
And perhaps of equal importance at a time where tribal loyalty often demands complete condemnation if anyone outside the group, I understand enough to realize that people with another viewpoint aren't inherently bad/evil/anti-patriotic because reasonable people can disagree, less reasonable people are still complex and not one-dimensionlly defined by a particular belief, and lines between spectrums if belief and just that-- on a spectrum rather than clear cut all or nothing lines in the sand.
I don't know... Maybe that's just me patting myself on the back. But even if educationally institutions can be inadvertently biased towards specific viewpoints, I still believe they expose people to many more ways of looking at something from multiple directions, in a less emotionally charged venue than social media in the internet. I've had teachers that I consider to be the model for how that should occur when I found out afterwards that the points of view they were encouraging me to consider went completely counter to their own strongly held beliefs.
Absent straw men, you aren't going to get anything near that approach from whatever talking head you're watching on TV or YouTube, or captioned meme photo that comes across your social media feed.
What institutions and who's the establishment? Facebook is the censor but also the disruptor of those institutions, so it can't be them.
The world isn't necessarily controlled by some illuminati-like organization. That belief comes from a cognitive bias called "Agent-detection bias" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_detection
It may simply be that free information created a bit of a power vacuum (perhaps the same as with the printing press?) so there's a scramble for power by all the people engaged in the culture war, not just existing powerful people but anyone who sees an opportunity.
Those are huge portions of the population, not some powerful individual bosses. Everyone who advocates for free speech is part of that power struggle fighting against everyone who wants censorship of ideas they don't want to become popular.
The internet will kill most every institution that predated it. Citizen journalism killed media. Netflix/YouTube killed Hollywood. Blockchains will replace 51% democracy with 100% democracy.
Dying inherited institutions are grasping to stay relevant with appeals to authoritarianism. Free speech is now a hinderance and a liability to their existence. As their relevance dwindles, tyranny becomes their only tool.
None of this is accurate. Craigslist killed newspapers (it took their ad revenue). Citizen journalism hasn't replaced that; buzzfeed-style sites did. Hollywood is thriving. Netflix is also thriving. If Netflix is killing anything, it's cable providers. Blockchains have produced nothing of worth, especially if you consider anything outside of cryptocurrency (but let's be real, cryptocurrency is also worthless)
> Craigslist killed newspapers (it took their ad revenue) Citizen journalism hasn't replaced that; buzzfeed-style sites did.
Craigslist killed classified ads (in the US). Twitter and Substack replaced investigative pieces, leaving legacy media companies reduced to peddling outrage for clicks.
> Hollywood is thriving.
The Golden Globes are over. Last year's Emmys saw the lowest viewership of any Emmy ceremony in the Television Academy’s history[1]. COVID killed the cinema[2]. AI is diminishing any production advantages that remain.
> Blockchains have produced nothing of worth, especially if you consider anything outside of cryptocurrency (but let's be real, cryptocurrency is also worthless)
That's demonstrably untrue given Bitcoin has a market cap larger than all but 20 countries[3]. Blockchains allow, for the first time in history, humans to coordinate at scale without human intermediaries. Only dead weight bureaucrats, machiavellian statists, and the innumerate who have been sold lies from the former would argue that blockchains are worthless.
Can you expand on that 100% democracy part? It doesn't seem like any system would allow 100% of the people to all be governed by their preferred set of rules when at least some of those rules would always conflict with ones that others want to live with.
1. With your ballot: very small chance of changing policies (1 vote)
2. With your wallet: small chance of changing policies (n votes through political donations)
3. With your feet: guaranteed chance of changing policies
The internet facilities 100% democracy as it simplifies voting with your feet (remote work, social networks), allowing likeminded individuals to congregate and influence policy. Blockchain furthers this, unlocking the ability to have a referendum on every issue, which maximises consent.
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 relative early days on that tech though, and amidst "Blockchain" being attached to anything anyone wants to hype, I have ended up being a bit skeptical of claims they can fit a given purpose until it goes beyond the conceptual stage.
> Political representation becomes obsolete with blockchains that can facilitate a referendum on every issue without the need for centralised trust
The choice of representative democracy was not because of the difficulty of counting votes. The founding fathers very clearly rejected what you're proposing. It's because most people are grossly ignorant about most things, and their opinion shouldn't be counted. If you can't pass a high school math class, I honestly don't care about your opinion on climate change.
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.
Have you personally destroyed the climate because of what one of those people said? Or are you immune to it through some kind of superiority of intellect or luck of living in the one final correct culture of true information in all of history?
Can't respond to the first, but it's pretty clear that those groups that think they are the single source of truth would probably include any self-proclaimed "fact checkers", which seems to now also include Facebook itself -- and would normally also include the CDC (excepting the ironic title of this thread, of course!)
Are you saying that people who check facts believe they are the single source of truth? Why would you need to check facts if you were the source of truth?
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that the fact checkers believe that there is an external source of truth (i.e. facts) which they are checking?
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but the CDC doesn't see themselves as a single source of truth.
They defer to the scientific consensus of people who specialize in understanding how viruses work, how pandemics work, and who have a process for learning facts by interrogating reality.
The irony of your statement is that you can only make this accusation now because the scientific community did not stop there and diligently continued working to improve the consensus.
Science converged on heliocentrism as quickly as it possibly could once we had instruments precise enough for heliocentrism to be the simplest model. The only reason the Earth-centric system overtook previous heliocentric theories was that it was most consistent with observable facts.
Do you have some other system you'd like to propose that ignores observable facts? Maybe you'd like to consult a Shaman?
The obesity epidemic isn't created by science, it's created by economic and food policy. The root problem is essentially the same one as with Facebook: scientific information gets crowded out because people stand to profit from misinformation.
Seriously, what alternative to science are you suggesting? Political populism? Let a bunch of outrage-addicted conspiracy theory junkies determine the truth with no regard to whether it matches reality? Do you really think there's an alternative system that better arrives at the truth than making and checking your predictions against reality?
The people who check facts, empirically at least, believe there is a single source of truth on any topic and see their role as guiding people towards it and/or whacking people who are talking about a topic but not considered that single source.
Very few fact checking organizations appear to actually use critical thinking of any kind. They claimed they would be but they're just journalism interns normally, so they just degrade to assuming that whatever the government or ideologically aligned academics say, is the truth, and anything else is wrong.
Yes. 'some group thinks it needs to "protect the others"'.
Virtual signaling and safetyism. Hilarious how the virtue signaling elite regularly close their conference calls with "everyone stay safe". Oh, I know you (don't) care about me.
If I never hear the term "virtue signaling" again it will be too soon. Adds about as much to the conversation as calling someone a sissy (or other ruder names I'm sure you can think of) for caring about something and the intent is hardly any different.
If asking people to take a specific step that has a good chance of protecting them from disease or even death is “virtue signaling” and therefore evil, the concept has lost any meaning it may or may not have had.
Labeling something “virtue signaling” implies acceptance that the action in question is beneficial. So you agree that getting vaccinated is a good idea, but somehow manage to still take issue with people saying as much in a slightly more direct manner?
Yes, the group of unvaccinated people, making up 99.5% of recent US deaths even though they only represent about 40% of the population is, almost tautologically, in need of protection. Considering the US has, once again, managed to neatly divide into the same ideological camps as on any other issue, there is no obvious selfish motive for people of the one group to care for the other. This leaves the latter group stumped, because they can’t think of any non-selfish motives, forcing them come up with I’ll-defined terms such as “safetyism”.
The term you’re grasping for is “altruism”, by the way. Although I’ll freely admit, limited to me, personally, that it’s supply is running low and I mostly want people to get vaccinated to finally get this over with.
"If asking people to take a specific step that has a good chance of protecting them from disease or even death"
Most people under the age of about 65 are being asked to take a vaccine for a disease that is extremely unlikely to hurt them, and the vaccine itself can have severe side effects, with deaths and injuries from these vaccines now greatly exceeding the deaths and injuries from every other vaccine programme in the last 10 years combined.
Over-simplifying this situation down to "people need to be protected [from themselves]" is exactly the sort of misinformation that Facebook believes it's fighting.
"This leaves the latter group stumped, because they can’t think of any non-selfish motives"
Non selfish motives? Their demands are incredibly selfish. They've convinced themselves, against all actual data and biological theory, that the unvaccinated people are dangerous to themselves, the vaccinated, and thus individual choice over people's own bodies must be removed by force. There is no basis for this belief but they apparently want to reach this conclusion via any means, fair or foul. Despite that they are the same people who are usually insistent that women be given choice over 'their own bodies' in abortion debates.
Yes, that's probably more than "all vaccine programmes in the last 10 years combined" because, contrary to popular believe, vaccines are incredibly save.
It's also 1/100th of daily COVID deaths, or about 15 minutes' worth.
In the years before, how often were you vaccinated? Exactly: you probably weren't. Millions of vaccinations were given ib the last few months, orders of magnitude more than usual. And while most are usually given to toddlers, now the 60 to 95 year-olds got most of the vaccinations.
You know what happens a lot to 80 year olds in the six months after they are vaccinated? They die.
You know what happens a lot to 80 year olds in the six months after eating ice cream? They die.
Also, as has been reported plenty of times, read by you (in, for example, the article above), and ignored because it doesn't fit your worldview, is that VAERS is, as the URL says, "open". It's a relic from a time where people tended to be sane, and wouldn't just submit all sorts of imaginary things to a medical database.
The article cited above summarises what the people collecting that data have concluded from it. How can you make an argument about the data they collect and publish, implying that you trust them, and then, in the very next breath ignore them and, I assume, next accuse them of being either too stupid or corrupt to say anything about that data?
> If asking people to take a specific step that has a good chance of protecting them from disease or even death is “virtue signaling” and therefore evil, the concept has lost any meaning it may or may not have had.
At this point it's not even so much about protecting them anymore as it is about protecting them from continuing to mutate and spread a virus that kills people. The "anti-vaxxer" folk are choosing to not only be a danger to themselves but to potentially anyone they come in contact with. What's worse is that they're actively trying to spread their ignorance about vaccines to other people, thereby growing the danger and the problem.
Quote: "Infections in vaccinated Americans also may be as transmissible as those in unvaccinated people."
That doesn't mean that vaccinated people are spreading the disease as much as the unvaccinated. Only the infected vaccinated people do.
But, as happens with vaccinations, infections are, while possible, far less common among vaccinated people. Even the worst numbers put vaccine efficiency at 65%+ for infection. (85%+ for hospitalisation, 95%+ for death).
By the way, for everyone else who - like me - doesn't have a NYT subscription and thus don't know what the above comment is talking about, the Washington Post has what looks like an equivalent version of the same story:
Internal CDC documents have leaked. Here are some quotes from the report:
"It cites a combination of recently obtained, still-unpublished data from outbreak investigations and outside studies showing that vaccinated individuals infected with delta may be able to transmit the virus as easily as those who are unvaccinated. Vaccinated people infected with delta have measurable viral loads similar to those who are unvaccinated and infected with the variant."
"The breakthrough cases are to be expected, the CDC briefing states, and will probably rise as a proportion of all cases because there are so many more people vaccinated now. This echoes data seen from studies in other countries, including highly vaccinated Singapore, where 75 percent of new infections reportedly occur in people who are partially and fully vaccinated."
"The presentation highlights the daunting task the CDC faces. It must continue to emphasize the proven efficacy of the vaccines at preventing severe illness and death while acknowledging milder breakthrough infections may not be so rare after all, and that vaccinated individuals are transmitting the virus. The agency must move the goal posts of success in full public view."
There are some other points worth noting from the presentation:
1. The frequent and very US specific claim that "99% of hospitalizations are in the unvaccinated" isn't true. CDC stats show 15% of hospitalizations are from vaccinated people and the number is growing. Why are they claiming otherwise in public?
2. The confidential data is not really surprising, because it brings the USA into line with what every other country is seeing.
There's a good summary of some of the latest non-US data from UK and Israel here. Efficacy against infection and "mild illness" keeps falling:
That's not correct. Why assume I read the NYT? I'm referring to data from places with very high vaccination rates but summer waves of equal/greater size to prior waves, like Iceland. The only way that's possible is if vaccination doesn't slow down transmission at all.
See for yourself. Google [iceland covid] and look at the graph. Cases go near vertical starting 16th July and are now the biggest wave they've ever had. Then click through to the vaccinations tab. They had vaccinated 70-75% of their population by that date (depending on whether you count first dose or second).
If 75% of the population are vaccinated yet case curves are bigger than before, the vaccination is not stopping transmission.
Edit: Also, recent data from the UK suggests effectiveness against infection has fallen to <20% in the over 50s. The calculations based on PHE data can be found here:
By the way, are you flagging all my posts? Do you realize that's against the rules? Nothing in my last three posts is a flaggable offence yet suddenly they are all flagged. Do you want me to do the same to you if so?
There have always been rules like this. Turn off your lights when the air raid siren is running, for example. What you're noticing now is a significant portion of the population simply throwing away common sense because obeying common sense somehow infringes on their rights.
>What you're noticing now is a significant portion of the population simply throwing away common sense because obeying common sense somehow infringes on their rights.
It's not common sense, it's mass brainwashing. If you'd asked people two years ago what they thought about the idea of locking the whole country down indefinitely for a virus with a 99% survival rate (and over 99.9% for people under 50), the vast majority would have said it's a crazy idea.
Calling getting vaccines and wearing masks indoors "locking the whole country down indefinitely" is definitely hyperbolic. Is the germ theory of disease really not common sense anymore?
I'll be sure to tell all the thousands of small business owners who were forced to permanently shutter their business that it was just a simple mask mandate after all.
You're attacking a strawman here. Nothing that was marked as misinformation was about the economic effects of lockdowns. If those effects concern you, you should be concerned with vaccine misinformation prolonging lockdowns, whether those lockdowns are government-enforced or due to individuals concerned about risk.
>If you'd asked people two years ago what they thought about the idea of locking the whole country down indefinitely for a virus with a 99% survival rate (and over 99.9% for people under 50), the vast majority would have said it's a crazy idea.
>Calling getting vaccines and wearing masks indoors "locking the whole country down indefinitely" is definitely hyperbolic.
You can say that not everything is still locked down (some stuff still is), but don't pretend like 6 months ago you would have been against the lockdowns that actually happened.
Once again, don't pretend that lockdowns is what the argument is about. That is a straw man. It is about whether companies should be obligated to spread misinformation about vaccines and diseases without getting to mark that as misinformation — they aren't. It is about whether that "infantilization" of the users of the platform is new — it isn't.
No, it isn't. Both you and logicchains keep trying to make the discussion about that, but that has nothing to do with whether posts should be marked as misinformation because people ignore common sense.
20 years ago at a national park with signs "don't feed the wildlife" with a parent teaching her 3 year old to feed the wild life within 3 feet of such a sign. I said "do you see the sign? why are you doing this?" She scoffed, pouted, and ran with her child to her car and drove away.
We treat her like a child because so many adults act like children. They seek what their parents never gave them, and unfortunately keep barking up the wrong tree, but you can't just refrain from sugggesting they not feed wildlife or it leads to mayhem.
Today we have so many humans defecating in the lakes near Maroon Bells that the park might close. For at least a decade that park has a "pack it out" policy, including your own poop. There are that many people pooping in the woods, and it's not good enough to dig holes. People so infantilized they lack the emotional coping skill to poop in a sack and pack it out, so they swim out in a lake with numerous "do not swim" signs and take a dump.
People are fucking stupid. If you don't tell them this, they think it isn't true, and the rules for for someone else.
Are you sure those people are stupid (ie. they care about the environment and want to do the right thing but mistakenly do the wrong thing instead) or simply putting their personal convenience above the convenience of others? To be stupid, I think it would have to be an action that goes against their own interests.
Tragedy of the commons isn't caused by stupidity but by selfishness. It's different.
It does go against their own interests when feeding animals is more likely to attract dangerous animals that attack tourists.
People don't always make the decision they know to be in their best interest. If they don't actually know what's in their best interest, then I'd say it's less an issue of stupidity and more about ignorance.
Attack other tourists. If you feed a duck then leave, you're not attracting a bear to attack you personally. You won't step in your own poo either. Somebody else will.
But people can also be very smart. I'm sure the people blatantly ignoring signs are the minority. There's so many people in the world that even a minority can cause issues (e.g. defecating in the woods), but it's still a minority.
It's different people, and moreover, different situations involving the same person. There are so many things considered "common sense" that basically everyone will miss at least one thing considered common sense.
So yes, you have to accommodate and prepare for the stupid people. You have to patrol the national parks to yell at people for doing things the signs right in front of them say not to. But you also have to accommodate and prepare for the smart people, and realize that you'll sometimes be stupid.
In Facebook's case, they think they're smarter than everyone else by choosing what content everyone can see. Flagging "vaccines are 5G microchips" was fine. But flagging official CDC guidelines implies Facebook is smarter than the CDC, which is probably not true.
So "Stop" signs should say "Stop because there might be another car coming from another direction and you'll be able to avoid it if you stop and see it coming".
I'm not sure that type of explanatory thing would work with most signs. Instead, we need:
1) people we trust to determine what the signs should say so that we are willing to listen to the signs.
2) Easy access to more details explanations of why/what the sign means.
3) An easy method of questioning the sign makers and and getting them changed or removed when they when either the sign maker was wrong or it's simply no longer needed.
Information is pretty easily available, especially as it pertains to things like the "don't feed the animals" sign in the GGP post, and it's not unreasonable to expect people to seek out an explanation (e.g. park staff) rather than just ignore the rule. The problem often comes down to people-- at all stations of society-- believing they shouldn't have to follow certain rules all of the time. People know that going 20mph/30kmh over the speed limit is more dangerous for themselves and others, but lots of people still do it. On more complex topics, explanation are available. But most people want simple answers, and complex issues don't have them. So when they disagree with something but don't have the full explanation to understand and determine things for themselves, they will listen a person who gives easy answers. And they'll tend to listen to whichever person gives an easy answer they already agree with. 99% of political rhetoric is about giving easy answers to complex problems, most of which would have been solved long ago if there was an obvious easy answer instead of countless details and edge cases and other factors to consider.
I don't know how you solve this problem. Human nature means most people don't spend a ton of time trying to understand all aspects of a problem that may only vaguely impact them personally. I don't expect anyone but a very small minority will study geopolitical history & current circumstance enough to have a well-informed opinion on something like whether the US should stay in, or withdraw, from a missile treaty. There's countless other examples of that sort too.
involved in the decision-make process
I'm not sure how you get around the lawmakers problem. Everyone can't weigh in individually on decisions made in a massively complex society. Being involved in the decision-making process means voting for people to handle those things. Are there other models of citizen involvement that better limit the impact of corrupt/biases/stupid lawmakers?
The purpose of a nature preserve, unsurprisingly, is to preserve nature as it exists within this space. Any human interference with nature inside the preserve runs the risk of tipping the scales of the natural lifecycle's balance.
If someone were to bring their dog into the preserve and hunt and kill some rabbits, it would probably be quite obvious that they would be disturbing the natural balance that the nature preserve is supposed to protect. Leaving your excrements is prohibited for the same reason, although on a subtler level. Your excrement can contain germs not native to the area which could start an epidemic if stuff goes really bad.
Just today, there was news that the National Forest Service estimates half of all deer to already have been infected with SARS-CoV-2. Now thankfully, Covid-19 does not seem to be a dangerous disease in deer. Just imagine if it weren't that benign and a significant amount of deer had been wiped out by it nationwide (or even worldwide). That's the kind of low-probability-but-high-danger scenario that packing it out is supposed to prevent.
Are humans not part of nature? What evidence do we have that nature is ever at any time "in balance?" This is a common trope that is deeply rooted in the western mind. Perhaps it is connected to old ideas like geocentrism.
Here is another way of looking at things: the world is constantly changing. Do I advocate pooping on a crowded beach? No. Is the ocassional defacation of a back country backpacker a problem? No.
It is not like humans are some toxic alien not native to planet earth.
Humans are part of 99% of nature. Nature reserves are the control group that helps us understand which effects are caused by us specifically, and which are not.
No. Humans are supranatural when it comes to our influence on the planet. While this power is not absolute, it's significant enough to make humans an edge case in nature.
>Is the ocassional defacation of a back country backpacker a problem? No.
In the example given, it's not occasional, but occurs a significant minority of the time that nature can't cope with the volume of human feces.
So plants are supranatural then too? Their influence far exceeds ours.
Humans are part of nature. Nature is never in balance. Change is the only constant. As pre-Socratic Heralcitus said you "never step in the same river twice."
If humans exceed the carrying capacity of their ecosystem, the system will reduce the number of humans.
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.
They used to do that, but the "problem" they ran into is that the people the average person knows in real life don't produce enough Facebook updates to keep users glued to Facebook all day. Time spent on Facebook = money for Facebook (more ads can be shown) so it's more profitable for them to push "recommendations" for more "engagement."
The discussion about the algorithmic feed seems to be out of context for this thread (i.e., Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”)
I don't believe the problem is facebook recommending anything -- the problem is facebook trying to ban certain content entirely (at least in the context of this thread -- algorithmic feeds are a separate problem.)
I fully agree with this. It flys in the face of what I have even seen recommend on HN for TikTok. I’ve seen posts saying the algorithm on TikTok is the best and it gives great suggestions. I guess my question to you is, do you think TikTok has a superior algorithm to Facebook/YouTube or is promoting content on any level going to lead to misinformation?
Just as a foreign newspaper can be the best way to find out the actually important things going on in your country/culture, maybe a foreign algorithm (or rather algorithm-moderation complex - I suspect facebook recommendations have a lot more manual tuning than anyone would admit) will be better at recommending in a neutral way. (TikTok of course has blatant biases on particular issues - but they're issues that are less relevant to most westerners than the things which Facebook/YouTube recommendation is biased about).
> I'm not making the connection between an algorithmic feed and anything I wrote.
> The title of this thread is 'Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”'.
> I don't believe the problem is facebook recommending anything -- the problem is facebook trying to ban certain content entirely
You say you don't believe (a), and you state that the problem is (b). I'm seeing "belief" without substantiation in both of those sentences. I'm also actively not taking username "gunapologist" as related to the merits of beliefs or statements in any way.
Finally, it's not clear to me that Facebook is a censor. I hold they have a right to promote or not promote whatever they want. Give someone a megaphone, suddenly anyone not handed a megaphone cries censor. No, just not amplified. Commercially, choosing not to promote a thing is much like a TV channel choosing not to run an ad or sponsor an event, something they choose to not do all the time.
I'd rather FB promote nothing, go back to a timeline of posts from my connections, and seems like "a problem" (one of many) is solved.
> I'm also actively not taking username "gunapologist" as related in any way.
rotfl touché
> I'm seeing "belief" without substantiation in both of those sentences.
that's why I said "believe". my opinions about what facebook should and shouldn't be doing are simply that.. opinions.
if I were to say any of this on facebook, it's possible that I could immediately be banned, and where's the fun in that. (that's a serious question.. isn't facebook supposed to be a fun place to communicate? if we have to worry about the ban hammer, how is it either?)
Moderation should be like HN: light, but still there. If it gets too heavy, civil discourse dies. If it disappears, then the place might turn into lord of the flies. (although, I hope a place like that always exists, too.)
I have a friend who posts once in a blue moon. When he posts, it's usually the first thing on my feed, even many days later. My wife's cousin posts batshit stuff multiple times a day. I fail to see how a strict timeline won't result in my stream being more looney?
Before the algo feed they’d already implemented filtering so you could stop seeing social addict connections’ posts. You could also do groups with different notifications and post filtering. If you really wanted to catch up on your wife’s cousin’s train-wreck of thought, you could still click into her.
You claimed the algorithm is responsible for increasing virality of dumb thoughts. Yet my counterexample is that it reduces it. I believe removing the algorithmic feed alone is not going to solve the problem of misinformation.
This idea seems to a weird new talking point that just... doesn't make any sense?
If you post porn to Facebook they'll delete it from your album, even if you've chosen for it to skip the newsfeed altogether, or if it's only flagged long after it appeared in anyone's newsfeed.
Nobody believes that something showing up in their newsfeed somehow implies approval by Facebook. Nor would some time-ordered newsfeed convince anyone that it's impossible for Facebook to remove individual items and get them off the hook when they don't act on harmful content.
The idea that any form of "curation" or "ordering" somehow creates full liability for content is some entirely arbitrary brainworm that's infecting people. Do you take full responsibility for all incoming e-mails that your spam filter doesn't flag? Is Google responsible for every single website that appears in any SERP? Is the firewall you configured reason enough to sue you if anyone gets past it and into the network?
No, none of these would make any sense. And in those cases it is, I presume, obvious that these are "best efforts" that can be useful without being 100% right, all the time. And that demanding perfection is tantamount to just outlawing the practice altogether.
Honest question: who's fact checking the fact checkers in FB? No offense, but those fact checkers are not necessarily smart or knowledgeable in every subject. They don't necessarily know the difference between DNA and RNA, allele or gene, second international vs third international, and the list goes on. The fact checkers may be ideologues themselves. They fact checkers may not even make it through college courses. So, I really don't get why they think they know the truth of everything and can tell FB users what is misinformation and what is not.
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 moment.
My guess is that fact checking falls on low paid workers with high "performance metrics" they're expected to meet to keep their job-- not managers. At least, that seems to be the model used when the curtain has been pulled back on social media QA.
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 or manually flagged based on user reports of misinformation.
2. Fact checking organizations take up fact-checking of the article for a small fee.
3. In this case for the organization I am personally aware of, the fact checking company has a large number of independent contractors who can research a "batch" of claims/articles.
4. Usually the jobs are broken up into simple questions.
5. You along with many others provide answers and must provide pertinent factual sources supporting the veracity of your assessment that this is either true, partly false, or false along with other categories such as if it is clearly and obviously satire.
6. Your answers are judged vs the final determination. Those who consistently skew in any direction are dismissed from eligibility to participate in the future.
7. The fact checking organization once it has enough answers for confidence has higher-level employees double-check the answer and source information.
8. The fact checking organization submits it's formal assessment on the article/opinion to the IFCN.
9. Companies like Facebook use multiple IFCN assessments and perhaps other fact check assessments to provide pertinent information that corrects misinformation that has spread rampantly over the last year like "Joe Biden wants to defund police departments across the US" with corrections like "After being asked if "We can reduce the responsibilities assigned to the police and redirect some of the funding for police into social services, mental health counselling, and affordable housing." Mr Biden has answered "Yes" to a question about whether he agrees with this redirecting of funding.
I may be slightly off in how this works but the overall program is the same for most social networks that care about misinformation. There is more information in the sources below:
Sources:
> 6. Your answers are judged vs the final determination. Those who consistently skew in any direction are dismissed from eligibility to participate in the future.
And if it later turns out that the final determination was wrong, do they go back and reverse this?
I'm sure that there's any amount of process in place, but ultimately if you rely on comparing people to the consensus of their peers then you're going to get the politically approved answer rather than the truth.
I am fairly certain they aren't naive about setting up their fact checking organization. They want to be taken up by anyone trying to verify facts so it's not in their interest to integrate bias.
Yes, there are revisions and the fact checkers fact check the fact checkers. They aren't colluding to implement left or right bias here. They are just making matter of fact statements like "it's false that the pfizer vaccine modifies your DNA" and providing sources that verify the claim and "no, politician X did not say Y"
There's no explicit collusion, but they operate in a particular social culture and the biases of that culture will permeate everything they do. The news organisations that they're fact-checking have the same reasons to become reputable suppliers of truth; I don't see how a fact checker would end up any less biased than a newspaper, since they're ultimately subject to the same incentives.
> They want to be taken up by anyone trying to verify facts so it's not in their interest to integrate bias.
Yes, there are revisions and the fact
This isn’t true. It’s easier to get business if you’re a “fact checking” organization that always fact checks in a favorable direction to a major political view.
The people who want truth is a much smaller group than the people who want their views reinforced.
> FB only works when you and 99% of your social group are on there.
You can choose whatever social group you want on social media. The days of physical presence and limited supply of peers are over.
Your IRL friends don't believe that the government is made up of lizard people? Go find yourself a Facebook, Telegram, Discord, etc. group, you will find plenty of like-minded people and "proof" there. People can and do survive on online contacts alone, so being shunned is not a problem for them. At least not in the medium term.
Unfortunately, I think this is true but not realized.
I found out that my brother was "going to do his own research" on the COVID-19 vaccines, which really is just code for, "I'm going to look online at sources in my echo chamber." (Because how many people really do their own research by talking with virologists, epidemiologists, etc.?)
It wasn't until he had some social pressure and the death of two acquaintances that he decided it was important to go get vaccinated.
Facebook is censoring because politicians who are also murmuring about tech antitrust are demanding that they do. They're just trying to survive the rage cycle.
edit: So since they don't have any overarching philosophy about what to censor, some of the choices they make are overzealous or bizarre.
> 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?
I mean, having watched family members descend into raving about the Pope and George Soros harvesting children for adrenochrome despite no previous interest in current events, yeah, I think people can be manipulated by obviously bogus information. You can decide for yourself what you think should or shouldn't be done about it but I don't think that point should be in doubt anymore.
Plus its not “people” will believe whatever bits of misinformation is out there.
Take it this way from marketing speak:
—————-
Content is being made and iterated upon rapidly, over social media to find new and innovative ways of winning “mindshare” among consumers.
With new technology we can cluster user groups and tailor make perfect user experiences after extensively a/b testing content to most closely match user preferences.
All of this can be done cheaply and at scale, for increasingly new types of content and complexity levels.
————
That is the problem. It’s not whether people will believe misinformation, its that content creation is faster at changing and sounds plausible enough to slip past your typical bullshit filter.
Most people have their minds made up and just look for articles supporting it. I can't help but feel we are doomed in this respect. Only teaching critical reasoning can help combat this and I fear most countries aren't up for the challenge.
It is the winning move in the long or even medium term, for the same reasons as not paying Dane-geld. Once you start censoring politically unacceptable content there will be no end of demands for you to censor more and more.
Usually if there is no scientific proof of something, there will be a conspiracy theory on it. Like Bigfoot, no scientific data that he exists. Just some big footprints that someone made with modified shoes.
> do they just think that everyone else is so easily manipulated, but somehow they're above the fray?
Based on my own anecdotal evidence, it’s exactly this. The people that went down the rabbit hole of QAnon on YouTube are, in their mind, the informed ones. They’re the ones that went out of their way to do the research and the rest of us are just lemmings. Thus, spending hours staring at an algorithmically generated video feed is actually a positive attribute rather than the obviously negative one the rest of us see.
I think there's also a tendency for the targeting of any given scam/psyop/sales pitch/etc. to make targets look foolish to non-targets. That is, the more narrowly targeted it is to bypass your bullshit filter, the more obvious it seems to someone else. So they walk away from hearing about your situation thinking that they're too smart to be fooled... only to fall for something that was designed to bypass their bullshit filter, possibly without even realizing it.
If you believe "the vaccine turned people into the Hulk", thats a mental health problem.
But when inconvenient claims, like "vaccines can cause blood clots in rare cases", often flagged as misinformation, you don't instil much confidence with the public.
And so they go out and get information from other sources.
> If you believe "the vaccine turned people into the Hulk", thats a mental health problem.
Can you identify anyone who actually believes that? Keep in mind that people don't always have logically consistent beliefs, and they sometimes exaggerate their beliefs so they're not even true at all. If I really believed that claim, I would be making a bet with somebody who doesn't believe it and prove myself right by finding this hulk and asking them to punch a hole in a brick wall of flip a car over or something like that. Are there people who have put their own skin in the game like that to support that belief? If not, you're probably strawmanning.
> Can you identify anyone who actually believes that?
I'm not sure if you are trolling but even though Hulk is a hypothetical example, people believe equally strange things, such as invisible microchips inside face masks, viruses being spread by 5G cell towers, that the world is flat and Australia does not exist.
But do they stake something of significant value on those beliefs or just say them on the internet and it's you who is incorrectly believing their claims of their beliefs to be true? People often willingly enjoy false beliefs for emotional reasons and wouldn't actually act on them if the outcome was going to materially affect them.
I used to have a conversation with a crank who kept almost inventing perpetual motion machines. But every time he had nearly finished one, he somehow didn't quite do the last few steps. He talked like he believed they would work but somebody who actually believed that would be chomping at the bit to finish one and prove it working. They'd be richer than God. It seems like some part of him knew it wouldn't and he preferred to enjoy the fantasy of being an unrecognized genius. Does that kind of thinking count as a belief or not? I don't think it's really clear cut. You see a similar inconsistency with religious people who "believe" they'll go to heaven when they die but they still try not to die.
Has "vaccines can cause blood clots in rare cases" been flagged as misinformation? I don't think it has. I get the impression that the misinformation filter is 99% accurate.
There are crazy things that people believe (not necessarily vaccines turning people into the Hulk, but still) that, in the past, I would have assumed were mental health issues.
But when massive numbers of people believe these things, blaming it on individual problems is not so productive. About 300 people a day are dying because intense political polarization has caused people to believe whatever best feeds their tribal urges. The same thing caused an attack on the US seat of government, and a very large percentage of the population thinks that's ok.
I don't know the solution, short of us declaring that the internet and cable tv was a bad idea and we need to go back to simpler times of unconnected computers and 3 TV networks. But I'd agree that facebook, Twitter, etc has to do something.
Read your comment again, but consider a hypothesis that you are entirely wrong about most things - how would you know? Everyone seems to lack a consideration that there is even a possibility they could be wrong.
If they are exposed two sides, and you one, how do you know you are right? You probably are. But… it’s the absolutism that is starting to become obvious to me.
Maybe you will see it, but many people get their news from social media. Seeing how Facebook is now censoring the CDC website (or at least a certain page) many people will not.
While there is disinformation out there, it is rare to see completely fabricated primary sources. For example, when a bunch of news sources are saying things like the election was rigged, you can go to the published court cases and the handwritten affidavits. You can then see that 87 judges of all types totally rejected the ridiculous arguments. You can then read through about 250 pages of affidavits and see that they are nothing but vaguely racist, speculative garbage.
Regarding things like the covid vaccine, you can look at the 96% vaccination rate of doctors or you can listen to basically every single immunology or virology expert. It is quite telling that pretty much the only doctors making the media rounds fear mongering about the vaccine are gastroenterologists, opthalmologists, or other unrelated fields.
So no, nothing is certain, but some things are pretty close to certain.
>You can then see that 87 judges of all types totally rejected the ridiculous arguments.
Not one election fraud case was rejected on merit and claims. None were heard. All were denied via process. This isn't a surprise. All lower courts are going to boot them, they aren't the place to hear this, I watched the hearings where the judges rejected and immediately facilitate getting the time sensitive paperwork ready for appeals. The higher courts rejected even the idea of hearing them for various reasons including the establishment right wanted Trump to remain in office as much as the establishment left.
Including the Supreme Court that ruled that potential federal election fraud or process violations in states wouldn't effect another state. So in this case despite Texas correctly pointing out that other states unquestionably and admittedly violated Article2 by approving election protocols without the consent of their legislatures, that Texas had no standing to sue.
This doesn't mean there was fraud. Doesn't mean there wasn't. But in terms of the scotus case, that was bullshit of the century and if you don't understand what happened (McConnell picked "Trump's" judges and McConnell wanted Trump gone as fast as possible) then you will never understand what really happened.
But to just wave your hands and say "They didn't win trial, all fake!" without admitting none were ever heard, is a willfully ignorant view of what happened. Even the courts sympathetic to Trump weren't going to rock the boat like that. It was always going to go to scotus and they signaled bright and early they weren't going to do it.
>Not one election fraud case was rejected on merit and claims
That's not true and you obviously have not read through the cases if you think that. Quite a few of the cases were rejected because the judge found the merits so lacking that it didn't even warrant a trial. That's a HUGE indicator that your cases have ZERO merit. Especially when we are talking about sympathetic judges. They didn't just reject the cases for lack of merit, the excoriated many of the attornies that were pushing such garbage into the court system.
In addition, many of the lawyers who brought those cases forward are seeing disbarment and serious sanctions for such frivolous cases. You don't get disbarred or sanctioned for filing a meritorious case with the wrong court. You get them for serious malpractice and bad faith.
> Not one election fraud case was rejected on merit and claims. None were heard. All were denied via process.
Do you mind expanding on what you mean by "[not] rejected on merit and claims", "none were heard", and "all were denied via process"? There are multiple arguments that these are incorrect:
- In the US court systems, dismissal due to failure to state a claim is a decision on the merits (Federated Dep't Stores v. Moitie)
- At least one court did hear claims (barring you and me using different definitions of "hear claims"), and specifically addressed them in their decisions (e.g., Law v. Whitmer included depositions and explicitly ruled on the merits)
- Multiple decisions included an analysis of the claims in addition to analysis of the procedural failings (e.g., the decision in King v. Whitmer addresses 11th Amendment immunity, mootness, laches, abstention, and standing, and also goes on to describe why even if the complaint did not suffer from the previous issues the plaintiffs would not be granted their requested relief).
> The higher courts rejected even the idea of hearing them for various reasons including the establishment right wanted Trump to remain in office as much as the establishment left.
Can you cite anything that would support the latter half of that sentence being a reason appeals courts tended to rule the way they did?
> Including the Supreme Court that ruled that potential federal election fraud or process violations in states wouldn't effect another state.
This is an incorrect reading of the Supreme Court's decision. They said Texas lacked Article III standing, which is not the same thing as what you said. For example, the Supreme Court could agree that potential election fraud or process violations could affect another state, while still ruling that Texas lacks Article III standing due to failing the injury-in-fact requirement (injury is not a) concrete and particularized and b) actual or imminent).
> So in this case despite Texas correctly pointing out that other states unquestionably and admittedly violated Article2 by approving election protocols without the consent of their legislatures
This is almost certainly not as unquestionable as you make it sound; for example, Texas claimed that Pennsylvania's Secretary of State "unilaterally abrogated several Pennsylvania statutes requiring signature verification for absentee or mail-in ballots" without the approval of the legislature, but the Pennsylvania Supreme Court pointed out that the Pennsylvania Election Code does not permit the rejection of mail-in ballots based on signature, so if anything the SoS's guidance is aligning with state law more than before.
Facebook cares about their bottom line more than anything else. In a vacuum, they're pro free speech because there's more content to serve ads off of. However, presently people will get companies to boycott ads on your platform if they see something on it they don't like. Also Biden just blamed Facebook for not censoring enough so they're likely facing pressure from Washington as well.
It's important to remember the history here. In 2015 social media was basically the wild west. You could get away with saying all sorts of crazy stuff and nobody cared.
After the 2016 election all of the big social media CEOs were dragged in front of Congress to testify about fake news, Russian propaganda, etc. They were directly threatened by lawmakers that if they didn't shape up by censoring us that lawmakers would bring the hammer down.
What we are experiencing now is 5 years of development on that threat. The social media CEOs are in a position where if the media manages to make a big fuss about some sort of "misinformation" then Congress will respond by dragging their butts back to testify and/or regulation.
This has turned the social media CEOs into slaves of the corporate press. All it takes is a few tweets from the right people asking Zuck why he's platforming "Nazis" or whatever they are calling moderate Republicans and anti-war leftists these days and these companies will jump.
This is the censorship that the government demanded, and they can't escape. I'm not sure what the answer is, because if we all jump ship from FB/Twitter/etc onto a "new" platform, it won't be long until that new CEO gets dragged before Congress and is given the same threats.
There seems to be this pervasive myth that conservatives are being censored on sites like Facebook. That's at odds with the fact that far right misinformation still dominates those websites. Just what evidence would be sufficient to convince conservatives that they aren't being unduly censored?
> “Republicans, or more broadly conservatives, have been spreading a form of disinformation on how they're treated on social media. They complain they’re censored and suppressed but, not only is there not evidence to support that, what evidence exists actually cuts in the other direction,” said Paul Barrett, deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, which released the report Monday.
I don’t believe there is anything I or anyone else could say that would change your mind.
Out of curiosity, when I said "anti-war leftists" did you perceive that to mean something negative/radical about them relative to when I said "moderate Republicans"? Also, what gave you the impression that I meant one of those was getting censored more than the other?
You didn't imply one was censored more than another. You claimed it's moderate Republicans being called Nazis and throwing in the anti-war leftists as false equivalence in an attempt to sound moderate. There are very real signs of fascism growing within the Republican party. From aligning against an "other" enemy to telling people they are the only ones who can stop the onslaught to telling people to be strong in resisting the election results to passing laws in 18 states to restrict voting. Over 60% of Republicans in the House voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election and over 70% of Republicans believe the election was stolen. This is tens of millions of people deluded by an obvious con-man with no sign of sanity in sight. I think the time for "both side" and false equivalence is well past over.
Conservatives are vaccinating at a fraction of the rate they should be, and it's pretty much directly attributable to directed misinformation. Yeah, I think there's plenty of evidence to suggest misinformation works, and it's potentially extremely damaging. How many more people have died due to Covid because of people downplaying the virus? We still have Trump supporters claiming it's not real.
If stuff people see on Facebook has absolutely no effect on their believes, then, yes, it wouldn't make sense for Facebook to delete disinformation.
It also wouldn't make sense to post any dis- or -information on Facebook. And it wouldn't make any difference if Facebook deleted anything or not, so people could stop complaining about "censorship" for exactly the same reason you want people to stop demanding action from Facebook.
The fact that the latter two aren't happening seems to suggest nobody–you included–believes it's all quite as meaningless.
"Censoring" is a fairly hyperbolic way of describing marking a post as misinformation.
As far as the business analysis, I'm sure there are some number-crunchers at Facebook who looked at lockdown usage of the platform, the lockdown's effect on ad revenue, declining use due to deaths, how much marking misinformation changed a poster's beliefs, how much marking misinformation changes a poster's usage, and figured out whether marking misinformation made financial sense. I don't think they care at all about what you might think is freedom or what someone else might think is moral, and the idea that some other commenters have put forth that marking misinformation would affect antitrust litigation seems just as wacky as some of the Facebook posts I've seen about vaccines and 5g.
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 censorship to protect me from manipulation become manipulation itself?
Facebook is fighting a losing battle if they think they will survive a battle with their own users. This is way past censoring Alex Jones. You can't possibly censor every crackpot conspiracy theorist. Actually, we're probably all crackpot conspiracy theorists in some way. We probably all believe some conspiracy about 9/11 or the NSA or elections or vaccines or masks or aliens or royal families or whatever.
The rate of censoring is almost certainly accelerating faster than facebook's growth, and once you've been censored once, you're likely to radically curb your use of that platform. I can't imagine that FB doesn't have stats on how many people keep using FB after they've been censored just once.
FB only works when you and 99% of your social group are on there.
And the network effect works in reverse, too.