If you want to decrease the spread of misinformation, or if you are at Facebook, Google, etc. and want your org to support this but it isn't doing enough — we are actively working on this (and have been since before the election) and would love to get in touch. We believe an impartial 3rd party can help with a few core problems in this domain.
One way to think about this is that some forms of communication amplify confirmation bias (and other cognitive biases). As we develop new forms of communication, we may need to compensate for these biases in new ways. Our motivation is to incentivize better public discourse.
This rings very "Ministry of Truth" to me. Scary stuff that companies even consider policing this when it's completely not their job. Our social networks should not be deciding what's true and what isn't for us.
Just out of curiosity - who do you think should be deciding that? Certainly not the individual, given the immense resource advantage of the organizations putting out false information.
Certainly the individual, assisted by the extreme ease of finding fairly accurate information from reputable organizations.
It's extremely worrying that anyone would propose anything else - how some refuse to think for themselves or vet information properly in this day and age I'll never understand.
When the ideal is more work than the default, most people won't behave ideally. So while I agree with you in spirit, who defines the reputable organizations? Individuals have an asymmetric losing fight here since the effort it takes to put out crap is far less than to deal with it. How can we make the process of finding & consuming news humane in that it works ideally for the average/below-average user?
That's the hard question, and I think it still remains.
Agree; I don't think a system has to take sides on what's reputable or not, but it can provide information on where the article originated, who funded the investigation, fact check stats, etc. without judgement. The challenge, in my opinion, is fundamentally one of user interaction. How do we provide these "stats" and "disclaimers" without fatiguing the user and adding to the original information overload issue we're trying to solve? If we fail to make it easy to do the right thing, we have done the wrong thing.
It's not a hard question, it's an easy one - We can't fix it. If you want accurate news you have to think, you have to be willing to know a site's history, who pays for it, what their usual bias is, how they compare with scientific research papers and compare with other news sources to see who's reporting. You have to do that foot work, if you can't do it, you'll never get accurate news. Once you know a few news sources that are generally trustworthy this gets a lot easier of course, with some exceptions. You only really have to do this once per source to get a basic feeling.
We can't just go out and do that for people either without introducing similar biases. It has to be done by every individual who wants an accurate depiction of the truth. Call it idealistic, but anything less is unacceptable in one way or another, so it's the way it has to be.
At best we could build vetting tools into social networks or perhaps better as browser extensions to allow you to filter and see general details about sources, it might be difficult to not introduce issues into these sorts of tools though.
Voting systems and public commenting offer a decent alternative in many ways, but often produce one set of biases that dominate completely. They're no replacement for proper research.
If you take a bunch of informed, critical thinkers who do their research and point them at the same group of sources, I wager you'd end up with a largely consistent set of questions being asked, and relatively "factual"(from the pov of an average American) group of answers (who owns them, how was this article paid for, etc). Through this, you could make whatever bias exists in a piece really explicit (loosely defined as relations & incentives).
So the "vetting" toolsets that make this easy and available are what make consuming news more humane.
I think the "ministry of truth" thought is valid, because an organization started off of good will and good intent might be that way for a while, but after it is cemented in and the people who run it filter out, the power structure it leaves is ripe for abuse. But this is what the hard question is: how might we tackle this, beyond just telling people to think better?
If you had to create a new "article" primitive, meaning, you had to have these things to be considered an article, what would you put in it to aid explicit bias and relieve the burden on informed thinkers? (Title, Author, Contents, ...)
>the extreme ease of finding fairly accurate information from reputable organizations.
The what now? Doesn't "finding fairly accurate information from reputable organizations" just mean handing your thinking over to the definition of "reputable"?
You can pretty much drop any fake news item into Google and immediately get back results from more reputable sites saying it's fake. Yes, you might have to do a little research into what's reputable, what their biases are, etc, but it's really not that hard and only has to be done about once or twice per major source. If you can't be assed to do that, yeah, you get fake news, enjoy it. I don't think a sizeable portion of the population is changing their political opinions over it, more that the bases are using it to confirm pre-existing biases.
How many do you discover via google.com vs social networking sites like Facebook? The logistics of switching between discovering an article on Facebook and verifying it on google.com is cumbersome enough with short attention spans on web. If you consume content passively on mobile (as an increasing number of people do), there's no reasonable expectation you can be held to, to switch between Safari/ Chrome and Facebook every time you read something.
Of all the articles you read in a day, how many do you yourself verify by looking them up? How many do you consider "plausible enough", hence never bother checking on their factuality? If something does conform to your pre-existing biases, you have zero incentive to actively look for something that challenges your opinion, but if a disclaimer was "right there", it might be harder for you to ignore.
I don't think so, Facebook is a platform, people treat it like one in my experience at least. Facebook doesn't write news so they can't become a reputable authority for news.
You can blame facebook about as much as you can blame the existence of the internet itself.
The problem in question existed in the form of e-mail forwards, usenet groups, and most likely existed in other forms before the internet.
You can't change the discourse without altering what people say or what people hear.. and nobody wants that.
The only solution is a better educated population. People that are able to determine fact from fiction, or at least the common sense to do their own research.
This is not a problem for a piece of software, this is a problem for those tasked with the education of future generations.
Wow. This was almost a non issue like two weeks ago. It is pathetic that the very media who tried so hard to distort perceptions is trying to blame fake news.
I don't think the issue is fake news. I think the issue is that there is nearly 0 crossover between the two political spheres. I haven't seen any posts about violence against Trump voters on election day (there was a surprising amount) on Facebook, and I haven't seen any posts about the uptick in hate crime on /pol/.
The problem is that social media has created 2 different countries that live next to each other.
Its not social media. My parents barely use the internet but they live in the same bubble /w fox news and conservative talk radio. Its existed for a long time, but now there are so many sources and outlets you can stay completely and entirely within the bubble.
One could argue about how much a bubble there is on the left... think for example the difference between CNN US and CNN international - one is relatively vapid lowest common denominator infotainment, and the other is hard news. I feel like infotainment/tabloidization and an uneducated populace is the biggest contributor to ignorance. Granted, its hard to know how much of a factor that's always been.
I'd love to actually see tags on facebook posts. "Extremely conservative", "Mostly Neutral", "Mostly liked by liberals" etc etc. At least make people think about why they're seeing these sources.
"I'd love to actually see tags on facebook posts. "Extremely conservative", "Mostly Neutral", "Mostly liked by liberals" etc etc. At least make people think about why they're seeing these sources"
I'd love to see that and a lot more. "Read by your neighbor twenty minutes ago.", "Shared by 40 people within 1 mile of you", "Most liked by self-identified christian conservatives between 42-59 that make 70-90K in combined household income"
But really, your suggestion will just allow people to self-filter even more. BreitBart readers aren't avoiding articles from Daily Kos because they think they are just copies of each other.
Its the hidden nature of the self filtering that allows people to not be aware they are in a bubble. Just simply the awareness that this is an inherently biased source can make you think about other perspectives. You may go to brietbart because you agree with them, but if half the links are for infowars or other sites that you may not know the biases of it would be extremely helpful to know.
Hell, even a browser extension giving you a bias bar with a sliding scale for each source would be super neat.
Is it? That's not a question I know the answer to. I might agree with you but I don't take your point of view as a given.
I try to read and listen to content from multiple perspectives but I avoid things that I "know" are wrong and/or ridiculous. It's not so much a judgment call on the validity of their viewpoint as it is the fact that I have limited time to read and ... oh wait, it is totally a judgement call on my part.
My thoughts have just turned way too philosophical for a comment to a comment on HN but why the heck do I read anything. I don't know. I need to think now.
This isn't a new problem, but more of a missed opportunity. I've spent the last 15 or so years in in incredibly liberal cities and so in real life I don't get exposed to differing opinions very often. The internet just reflects that.
Except that anyone who lives in a liberal/conservative area knows that they live in a liberal/conservative area. The vast majority of people have absolutely no clue how intense of a filter their Facebook feed has. This is amplified when 62% of American adults get their news from social media [https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/26/most-people-get-their-news...].
Clicked on Obama, got 2 stories from the left about the Michelle Obama "Ape" comments, and on the right a story about Obama supporting a border fence.
Then a bunch of other stuff from each side.
The one about the fence was from Breitbart, and it's an interesting example of the problem. Something that seems to have happened a lot with these emails is "BREAKING NEWS! SOMETHING HORRIBLE OR HYPOCRITICAL!" and then you read it and what the article is saying is "true". It's "true" because you can pick and choose sentences and build that narrative, but in context things are more complex.
> As you will see when you read this memo, we think that publicly pressuring the US and European AIDS drug companies to lower prices and bringing pressure to allow generic AIDS drugs into the United States will have limited if any success and could seriously jeopardize our negotiations to continually lower prices in poor countries. We also believe that there are other more impactful ways to address the US AIDS crisis today.
There is much more to it, it's a paragraph from an email not the entire thing. It still shows a very different picture.
So this isn't fake news, but to me it's still shitty journalism. It's very shallow, it doesn't really present any data (just the link to the emails, no analysis). I feel like you could make an argument from the America first perspective that we should be arguing for generics and lower prices, and worry about the effect elsewhere later. It doesn't do that though.
Exactly, one day people may wake up and realize that they were sold to the highest bidder. All of this media is shit. Zero investigative work is being done and it's written in a opinionated way. It's all opinion garbage (which at one time was much less in papers) geared to making you click on more garbage to render some more ads.
I seriously can not look at news online anymore. I used to use news.google.com religiously (I've never used FB or Twitter for my news) but even that shows the same shit. It's so bad now and has me very concerned. During the 80s and early 90s CNN Headline news did a good job I thought...it's garbage now.
FB and Google are kidding themselves if they think they can fix this as their bottom line demands it to function as is.
Simply stop giving them the page loads...boycotts work wonders my friends (and no, ad blocking will not suffice).
This is 100% true. I only get ads for Clinton, only see very liberal posts on Facebook, and receive a subset of news that is tailored to the fact that I live in New York.
It's kind of crazy, honestly. It's also sad - the brightest mind of an era, lying to me to increase Dwell Time.
Social media didn't create anything new. People are on these websites because they want to see specific things, not things they don't want. Social media want people to be engaged so they can sell ads. If they show unwanted content or irrelevant content, people will leave.
Agreed. I don't know why everyone is fixated on the fake news thing. The real news has multiple valid interpretations, but Facebook only puts the one in front of us that we're most likely to agree with.
Another difficult problem is that people can create very strong opinions about things faster than they can gather all of the relevant information, even if the media does do a good job. The black lives matter movement made "hands up don't shoot" their rally cry and stayed with it even after we found out later that narrative wasn't true.
There's a HuffPo article going around that is exactly that. The largest provider of fake news and clickbait, blaming fake news and clickbait. Not going to link to it, that would make me part of the problem.
Regardless of who won, can't we all agree fake news is bad?
Are you now in favor of fake news just because Trump won?
I don't understand why Hacker News has so many people defending fake news today. Should be a non-partisan issue, except for those looking to benefit from lies.
I see — I just think that aside from barring use of their ad platform by publishers of fake news, there's not much Facebook can do that would be effective.
A "verified news" (fact checked or otherwise endorsed) scheme could backfire for the intended demographic. It's not like most FB users are seeking news from verified publications.
It's even kind of a badge of honor: "we're bringing the news THEY don't want you to see!"
And frankly, I don't trust FB to not want to hide something.
Fake news is bad, but the issue is overstated. I believe that the real issue is preference falsification on both sides, which is well discussed in this HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12920496
A lot of subreddits (r/politics for example) have tags like "Misleading title". Maybe something like that?
Many of my friends sincerely believe the fake news they have read on these sites, because nothing suggests that it might be fake. It's so sad. When I ask them for sources for "facts" like "Obama is a Muslim", they send me a list of news articles that "proves it". Fact checking sites are "the corrupt media" and "liberal bias".
btw, these aren't uninformed people. They watch the news, debate with friends and vote. It's the sincerity that they believe the news with that's so depressing.
/r/politics is a really bad example because it was completely taken over by pro-Hillary sentiment during the campaign. Then it all flipped back to neutral after the campaign.
Sure, misleading title. We should also probably weight the score a little heavier so misleading news doesn't percolate to the top of people's news feeds. It's not filtering, it's just curating!
Weren't we angry at Facebook just a few months ago for doing just that?
Who gets to decide what's "relevant"? What's "misleading"?
I don't think that's true. There seems to be a view that nobody can try to be objective and the objective doesn't exist. I'm a scientist by training and trade, and in my experience the real world is pretty damn objective. Something happened, or it didn't. Something is true or it's not. I used to say as a grad student that nature didn't care whether I graduated.
Granted it's not always easy to get good data, and it's not always obvious what's clearly true. But where possible, we should embrace it, and where it's hard, then we should have a clear discussion about what we can and cannot believe.
Fact checkers in my experience do a good job of that, they present a clear picture of what is known and what isn't, and they take that responsibility very seriously. If someone tends to make more false statements than someone else, that doesn't mean pointing that out is biased, it's just reporting the facts. Sometimes reality is biased.
After looking at many fact checkers and the job they do, I could not disagree more.
People do not speak in simple statements that can be either scientifically "verified" or "not verified". When talking, people often use hyperbole. They speak in approximate numbers (e.g. 20% instead of 17%, simply because it sounds better). Not to mention people often talk about socially complex subjects that cannot be, in ANY way, verified as simply "true" or "false" without interjecting the fact checkers own personal opinion into the mix.
Fact checkers have tried to solve these issues by having "truthiness" ratings. For example, Politifact has the ratings "True, Mostly True, Mostly False, False, Pants on Fire". However, this is obviously a scale that has no objective meaning. As a result, these ratings are applied inconsistently and with a heavy bias towards the fact-checkers own agenda (which, for Politifact, is heavily left-leaning).
How do you objectively decide whether a hyperbole is true or not? How do you objectively decide that numbers are too far off the actual scientific numbers? What rounding is too much? How do you objectively decide the truth of complex social issues and statements, and what data do you trust for determining these "objectively true answers"?
It might be hard to determine a false statement from a pants on fire statement, but just because it's not purely objective doesn't mean its not useful.
What would are some Politifacts that you think were wildly off base? Like statements that you believe to be true that are labeled "Pants on Fire".
He is saying that the 'fact checking sites' are biased.
This is true. It's the old problem of "who guards the guards".
Snopes.com is supposed to be a fact checking site.
Snopes.com recently rated as 'mostly false' a notorious video of a Trump supporter being beaten up and suggested it was primarily about a traffic incident.
The guy who got beaten up actually offered his own testimony of what happened on camera later on. This is not mentioned in the 'fact check'. There is also the fact that his attackers are screaming at him that he is a Trump supporter and shouldn't be. They repeatedly shout "Don't vote Trump".
Then, just today, I see they have updated their rating to 'mixture' and added more text suggesting that the spread of the video is about racism. It's a pity I didn't take a screenshot from earlier.
So no. I don't take the 'fact checking' websites seriously.
Imagine for instance a white nationalist walked into a store with a Mexican shopkeeper, got into an altercation because the Mexican "didn't give the right change" when purchasing an item there, and then followed that up by bringing his friends to trash the store.
On the store's CCTV there is audio recording showing racial slurs are used. Furthermore the shopkeeper says to reporter they attacked his store because he was Mexican and denies that he gave back the incorrect amount of change. He claims they were looking for a fight.
Then along comes snopes.com and they make an article claiming this was really about a shoplifting incident. Police sources say the white gang stole some items when they left.
That is what this is like. The fact checker is obviously biased.
That Snopes entry is a perfect example of promoting a bias without specifically lying:
"The clip has since been shared by white supremacist publication The Daily Stormer..."
Is that relevant to the beating? No. Is that relevant to the truth or falsity of what preceded the beating? No. It is simply there to inflame one side using "guilt by association". A similar example was that an endorsement of Trump by some racist organization was widely reported, even though nothing else they had ever said or (even allegedly) done had been considered newsworthy to that point. Had Trump sought such an endorsement, that would be relevant.
Ultimately, selective reporting can be just as powerful as false reporting... and there is far, far more false reporting than most realize (especially misreporting on legislation). People need to remember that media have no legal obligation to report truth (let alone the whole truth) and, unless they libel or slander a specific entity, suffer no consequences for stating flat lies. For-profit media's primary motivation is maximizing profit, and accuracy often does not maximize return or profit, especially in the short term.
Not just their opinion, but how they arrived at that opinion. Links to Billboard's data on Jay-Z and Beyonce's concert attendance, and Trump's own claims about his crowds.
Reality doesn't always just come down to differing opinions. Many things are actually knowable, to anyone willing to investigate and entertain the possibility they are wrong.
Trump's statement could have been interpreted in two different ways. One, Politifact's interpretation, is that he draws bigger crowds than Beyonce and Jay-Z at their concerts and another is that his rallies are bigger than Hillary's rallies where Beyonce/Jay-Z performed. I don't know if the second interpretation is true or not (as I haven't done the research), but the whichever one you choose to analyze shows your bias. Probably most Clinton-leaning folks would pick the first interpretation of Trump's statement and most Trump-leaning folks would pick the second. So from the perspective of a Trump supporter Politifact looks biased, but from your perspective they're an impartial fact checker.
The point is THEY CITE THEIR SOURCES and lay out their analysis showing you exactly how they came to their conclusions. So the end result is the reader is more informed than before.
Also, Politifact sanely sticks to the common sense meanings of English words. Your interpretation of "bigger crowds than Beyonce and Jay-Z at Hillary's rallies" adds a qualifier beyond what was in the original quote.
Except that what Trump originally said was: "She's not getting any crowds so she gets Beyoncé and Jay Z, I like them, I like them and you know that they do, I get bigger crowds then they do. It's true. I get far bigger crowds," referring to a Clinton rally a couple of days earlier headlined by them. It was Politifact that edited out this reference to Clinton's rallies, starting their clip from his speech not just in the middle of a sentence but the middle of a word. They don't give readers an easy way to find the uncut version either - I'd have to find and dig through a video of the entire speech to link it here.
NBC's fact check provides better context despite being far shorter and not citing a single source: http://www.nbcnews.com/card/not-even-close-trump-said-he-dra... The stuff Politifact cited is easy to check even without the citations, but their omissions are much harder to spot.
Bias can appear both in what facts they decide to cover and in how they cover it. The first part is the one people usually ignore and the easiest to hide. You can just fact check one person on their every sentence and not fact check the opponent on their every sentence. You can also decide to only fact check mostly true or true statements for one person and mostly false or false statements for the other person. You'd be performing proper fact checking most of the time, but you'd be helping one person more than the other.
There already is a "Ministry of Truth", as you put it. The point of the article is that Facebook _already_ picks and chooses which shared items it promotes into your feed, so the news you get exposed to is already the product of human judgement. So, Facebook can't merely wash its hands of culpability in the propagation of fake news as the product of some "mathematically neutral algorithm". There's no such thing.
Not saying I agree 100%, but I think there's something there worth considering.
One newpapers for the democrat & One newpapers for the republicans. People will be able to read only the one they relate better to, just as with the internet :D
One distinction with newspapers is that people pay subscriptions for newspapers. This changes the relationship between the consumers, the publishers, and the advertisers.
+1 can't wait to get my friends and family back from their social media and infotainment addictions. The internet has so much potential to help human society.
Disclaimer: I'm an unabashed fan of Neal Stephenson's writing, to the point where I have read everything he's written more than once. That said...
Unsurprisingly, Neal Stephenson was ahead of the curve here yet again. From The Diamond Age, published in 1995:
> “One of the insights of the Victorian Revival was that it was not necessarily a good thing for everyone to read a completely different newspaper in the morning; so the higher one rose in the society, the more similar one's Times became to one's peers'.”
Despite its baity title, this looks like a relatively substantive article, so we won't penalize it unless the thread goes haywire.
As for the title, we've attempted to replace it with representative language from the article (see third paragraph). If someone can find a more accurate and neutral phrase from the article to serve as the title, we can change it again.
Edit: and since the claim is obviously contentious, we've appended a question mark to it. That is standard moderation practice btw.
I think a synthesized title like "Facebook, Fake News and Elections" is better than language from the article that includes numbers that are an opinion.
We do that in rare cases but I think the discipline of sticking to an article's own language is valuable for HN. If an article doesn't contain a substantive enough phrase to serve as its own title, it usually shouldn't be here to begin with.
Do you have any articles about it? A quick search only found that he attempted to start one and Trump supporters rejected the idea. I'm curious how much he spent compared to CTR's 4.5 million.
There's absolutely no doubt that my wife's Facebook feed was filled with misinformation on both sides of the election for weeks/months, and that many of her friends and family were using those images to prove their points or to publicly proclaim that it had strengthened their sentiments about this or that person or party or situation.
Stupid question: Isn't that benign as long as there's no systematic trend in the direction of the bias? For all (X, N), if N% of pro-X stories and N% of anti-X stories are false then ...?
Our democracy will function better if our populace is well informed about basic facts.
It's very possible both political parties propagate some of the same lies, or suppress the same inconvenient truths, because those facts don't reflect well on either party's policies.
We need to have a common set of facts to have a legitimate discussion about where we should go as a country. We can interpret facts differently, but the facts themselves should be concrete and real.
Probably, but there does seem to be a trend according to some.
Haven't taken the time to confirm myself, but John Oliver's team pulled out numbers where stories being surfaced on the right were false almost twice as much as those on the left, though he points out the numbers on the left are not insignificant which is obviously still worrying.
No - and even if it was, the bias is on the Trump side. As the BF review of 9 major news pages on FB showed:
- MSM: 99.3% mostly true or no factual content
- Left: 80.9% mostly true or no factual content
- Right: 62.3% mostly true or no factual content
This is just points on the number of articles though - there is then a major leverage effect where fake articles have higher virality, meaning the systemic bias on the right is significantly higher than the ~40% of published articles if you count eyeballs on the articles.
I'm curious, if a bigger publication like say CNN or Washington Post publishes a "false" article, would it be punished/banned, just like a random blog post would? Or would they receive "more weight" because they are "reputable publications"?
If so, then this solution would not work either (if we actually care about the truth). Most of the big publications have become propaganda machines for one party or the other, so the "reputable" thing has gone out of the window a long time ago. They should be treated the same way a random blog post would be when it comes to facts.
Right now, Google, at least, gives way more ranking power to these "reputable" publications in Google News than it gives random blog posts. So I hope they don't just slightly update the existing algorithm to add the fact-checking thing.
For example[0]: "The measure that's sure to evoke the most debate — and which has already done so — is his plan to extend the use of background checks to cover more sales at gun shows. In 2013, after a strong push from the president, the Senate blocked an effort to expand background checks at gun shows."
In fact, existing Federal laws for gun shows are exactly the same as for retail stores. What the claim attacks is gun shows themselves, as an event and meeting place ("nurseries of sedition and rebellion," as Charles II referred to coffeehouses).
It goes on to seek exactly one legal opinion -- from a prominent gun ownership opponent: "Here's where we are now: A guy who owns a gun store is a dealer and runs a background check. A guy who wants to sell his one rifle to his neighbor isn't a dealer and doesn't have to conduct one." In fact a dealer wouldn't have to do a background check on a rifle anyway, and it's not the individual owner who does a chack anyway when it is necessary (e.g. handgun transfers) -- it's a licensed dealer, accessing the DOJ system.
Later: "Gun shows are the embodiment of that loophole. He imitated a carnival barker. "'Minors! People with felony records! Step right up!'" Again, a flat lie decorated with a deliberately inflammatory example -- laws are the same inside or outside of gun shows.
One example is the almost universal prediction that Clinton would win. This (unfortunately) has the effect of suppressing opponent-voter turnout, as too many voters care about being on the "winning" side.
This was well-demonstrated in the 1994 election. As news of the Republican sweep (also not widely predicted) spread, Democrat turnout in Western time zones was reduced, favoring downballot GOP candidates. This was so pronounced in California, the GOP actually took the majority in the Assembly (a situation otherwise unheard-of in modern California). District 28 was decided by only 389 votes.
Isn't there a role for a non-political disributor of information? Can't Facebook shrug their shoulders and just say they want to be the dumb pipe? Do we really want a huge bureau of censors like China, because that's where we're going.
Sure, as long as they are clearly just that... a dumb spam pipeline.
Facebook likes pretending to be more, they want to be an unbiased automated news site. And they're failing miserably at that. They need to stop pretending, and either fix or embrace the problem.
I think Google News is more of what you're talking about. Everything they reported was from all the highly reputable mainstream. I tried to use them, but I gave up after I could not find a way to remove "top headlines" from my news feed. It's as if my payment for using their service was they could tell me what to think about. As Orwell said: "News is publishing someone doesn't want published. All else is public relations".
They could, but Zuckerberg has invested years in saying that sharing information on Facebook is somewhat meaningful towards making the world more connected.
So when Facebook does what Facebook does, he can't just shrug and has to justify it.
my 2 cents: he's definitely wrong this time around.
When you say "wants to make the world more connected" are you implying that Zuckerberg is an ideologically committed globalist? Maybe he's not and just meant it in a purely technical sense as in one big elaborate but dumb pipe from anybody to anybody.
Well, I am not in his mind. But everytime he mentioned "making the world more connected" he did look and argumented as he meant it from an ideological point of view.
Whether he really has purpose or is it just marketing speak to justify a dumb pipe, one could only speculate about that..
Isn't there a way to not be a censor, but also encourage truth? Some things are factually true and others are factually false. We have huge numbers of fact checkers out there, maybe there's a way to give that work a little more prominence?
Facebook is about bringing people together, figuring out a way for the community to have a real discussion from a common set of facts is a really important way of bringing people together.
This leads to the who watches the watchers problem. Also, what is the source of truth. What if the truth comes from Wikileaks? China can do this with tens of thousands of people aided by machine learning and other advanced technology, but they have a much more simple and unambiguous task that is largely guided by ideology. If there is a truth that contradicts the ruling ideology, it is also censored. If there is a small falsehood that confirms it, they let it pass.
The article is reasonably written but I believe the author makes his main points through false claims. Don't take my word for it; see for yourself.
The upshot of all this is to say that a 1–2%
difference in election results based on the assault of
the <1% of fake news articles on Facebook is an entirely
plausible outcome. We can’t know for sure, of course,
but there is real, hard science to back up this theory.
There isn't real hard science to back up that Facebook had a 1-2% difference in election results. There's real, hard science that long-running general marketing campaigns can sway consumers of popular brands (at least that's what he says in the previous paragraph)
Moving to news, then, let’s state the obvious. Saying
you’re 99% accurate in the news is a complete failure.
Can you imagine the New York Times, Wall Street Journal,
CNN or, hell, even Breitbart saying “hey, only 1% or so
of our stories are wrong.” Even one incorrect news story
is a terrible tragedy
Does the author read news? Reporters and news organizations are not injection molders. They don't churn out the same story over and over where the inputs are all clearly defined and subject to their own quality control. Actually, that's more true of the type of fake news the author is criticizing here. A 1% error rate would be amazing in a news organization.
And the real kicker of the whole thing
Thus far, all of your proposed solutions to these
very real problems are predicated upon a still-unproven
hypothesis: That communities at scale can police
themselves ... This is not true, and has never been true.
Well, I guess every democratic nation on earth is well and truly fucked. Get out the big black markers, fire up the government presses, turn back the clock 300 years[0].
Sorry, can you expand on this? You're saying NYT is the "king of fake news", but the email you're linking to is:
- not for the NYT, it's for NYT Magazine
- not about a news piece, it's for a family-friendly profile
And, even given that, the actual contents of the email is validating quotes - verifying quotes correctness and giving the subject an opportunity to retract is standard practice for a "friendly" profile like this, any interview subject sitting for a similar piece would get the same email.
"Mr. Rosenthal sent a digital copy of the recording to a newsroom editor whom he declined to name, with the reminder that there had been an agreement to treat portions of it as off the record."
Perhaps there is opportunity for someone to provide a service which fact checks news stories and provides an API that returns a simple score for a given article based on objective checkable facts.
I would guess that most image macros containing rhetorical arguments don't come from people who've based their beliefs on bad journalism. They come from people who've already made up their mind and want to reach as many people as possible
True, and they could've also come from fake news site that leveraged rage-induced clickbaits to earn massively from ads. (which is what happened during this election)
> What if it's not the news that's false, but memes and public opinion?
Uhm, but it's not. The article is about the objectively false content, as in: An article says something happened that objectively did not occur, or claims someone said something that they did not say.
> Are we going to start silencing opinion, because it's not factual?
And it's not about this either - anyone is free to keep sharing objectively false content on the platform. The change is that FB will no longer pay for content that is made up and does not make it clear that this is the case.
> Almost nothing comes down to just True and False
Indeed. As I said in another thread the other day - this is a hard problem and the answer is not, as I assume you're insinuating, that my ignorance is as good as your knowledge. Ignorance and lies should not be given equal weight and attention as factual statements and informed commentary by the media.
This is a solved problem, the courts make life-or-death decisions on patently subjective issues every hour. Any reputable school of journalism will be happy to give you detailed explanations for how to navigate the real world of truthisms, he-saids and halfway facts, they've been thinking about this for hundreds of years.
It's true, this is really hard. That said, there should be some way to counteract things that are explicitly and provably false. Perhaps integrating some sort of fact checking? I don't know, it's dangerous territory, but it's equally dangerous to have explicitly factually false stories running around unchallenged.
I saw yesterday around 10 post claiming trump won the popular vote and everybody that said otherwise was lying.
Today I saw a news article saying how the website where that fake news originated from is a conspiracy blog less than 2 months old run by one person. That was the "news" organization that said Trump won the popular vote.
And sometimes fact checking your own friends is a futile effort. "Oh, well it could have happened" or something equally dismissive is often the response that I get.
"This election was extraordinarily close. Within half a point."
No it wasn't and you're extraordinarily ill-informed about the US's political system to even make that claim. The US is a constitutional republic, not a direct democracy. The Electoral College is part of a carefully drawn up system by the Founding Fathers to prevent power from concentrating. For those who didn't learn and understand this at age 10 or so, check out Steve Farrell's series here:
Originally, it was more meant to concentrate power. The Electoral College was the Founding Fathers' solution to the "problem" that slave states would have been at a huge disadvantage in a popular vote, by virtue of a much smaller percentage of their populations being allowed to vote in the first place. "One person, one vote" didn't work for them. So instead, they came up with a system where a few people got to effectively vote as if they spoke for everyone else in their state, including the swaths of the population who were disenfranchised.
The way in which it functions has indeed changed a bit in the wake of a few constitutional amendments. But make no mistake: It was intended to work the way it worked 200-odd years ago, not the way it works now. The popular explanation, which tries to justify how it works now and projects that justification onto its original designers, is a retcon.
Fortunately, we live in a time where any of us can look over the notes people made at the Constitutional Convention itself.
Some of the various ideas and justifications follow:
Mr. SHERMAN was for the appointment by the Legislature, and for making
him absolutely dependent on that body, as it was the will of that which
was to be executed. An independence of the Executive on the supreme
Legislature, was in his opinion the very essence of tyranny if there was
any such thing.
Mr. WILSON renewed his declarations in favor of an appointment by the
people. He wished to derive not only both branches of the Legislature
from the people, without the intervention of the State Legislatures but
the Executive also; in order to make them as independent as possible of
each other, as well as of the States;
Mr. WILSON made the following motion, to be substituted for the mode
proposed by Mr. Randolph's resolution, "that the Executive Magistracy
shall be elected in the following manner: That the States be divided
into ______ districts: & that the persons qualified to vote in each
district for members of the first branch of the national Legislature
elect ______ members for their respective districts to be electors of
the Executive magistracy, that the said Electors of the Executive
magistracy meet at ______ and they or any ______ of them so met shall
proceed to elect by ballot, but not out of their own body ______ person
in whom the Executive authority of the national Government shall be
vested."
Mr. WILSON repeated his arguments in favor of an election without the
intervention of the States. He supposed too that this mode would produce
more confidence among the people in the first magistrate, than an
election by the national Legislature.
Mr. GERRY, opposed the election by the national legislature. There would
be a constant intrigue kept up for the appointment. The Legislature &
the candidates wd. bargain & play into one another's hands, votes would
be given by the former under promises or expectations from the latter,
of recompensing them by services to members of the Legislature or to [4]
their friends. He liked the principle of Mr. Wilson's motion, but fears
it would alarm & give a handle to the State partisans, as tending to
supersede altogether the State authorities. He thought the Community not
yet ripe for stripping the States of their powers, even such as might
not be requisite for local purposes. He was for waiting till people
should feel more the necessity of it. He seemed to prefer the taking the
suffrages of the States instead of Electors, or letting the Legislatures
nominate, and the electors appoint. He was not clear that the people
ought to act directly even in the choice of electors, being too little
informed of personal characters in large districts, and liable to
deceptions.
Mr. WILLIAMSON could see no advantage in the introduction of Electors
chosen by the people who would stand in the same relation to them as the
State Legislatures, whilst the expedient would be attended with great
trouble and expence
Mr. GERRY, according to previous notice given by him, moved "that the
National Executive should be elected by the Executives of the States
whose proportion of votes should be the same with that allowed to the
States in the election of the Senate." If the appointmt. should be made
by the Natl. Legislature, it would lessen that independence of the
Executive which ought to prevail, would give birth to intrigue and
corruption between the Executive & Legislature previous to the election,
and to partiality in the Executive afterwards to the friends who
promoted him. Some other mode therefore appeared to him necessary.
I cannot find any debate over suffrage until after these discussions.
The antidemocratic sentiment is the Convention was very strong - there was debate on whether even the House should be popularly elected, on the grounds that:
Mr. SHERMAN opposed the election by the people, insisting that it ought
to be by the State Legislatures. The people he said, immediately should
have as little to do as may be about the Government. They want
information and are constantly liable to be misled.
Mr. GERRY. The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy.
The people do not want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots.
In Massts. it had been fully confirmed by experience that they are daily
misled into the most baneful measures and opinions by the false reports
circulated by designing men, and which no one on the spot can refute.
One principal evil arises from the want of due provision for those
employed in the administration of Governmt. It would seem to be a maxim
of democracy to starve the public servants. He mentioned the popular
clamour in Massts. for the reduction of salaries and the attack made on
that of the Govr. though secured by the spirit of the Constitution
itself. He had he said been too republican heretofore: he was still
however republican, but had been taught by experience the danger of the
levilling spirit.
> In Massts. it had been fully confirmed by experience that they are daily misled into the most baneful measures and opinions by the false reports circulated by designing men
"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun."
A few hundred thousand votes would be enough to swing the electoral college the other way. The election was even closer than 1/2 a point of the popular vote.
And while the popular vote does not decide the presidential election, it is not irrelevant if you are trying to measure the sentiment of the people (a strong electoral college win with a narrow popular margin says something different than a strong electoral college win with a huge popular margin).
The election was close. Several states had margins of victory of right around 1%. I didn't look too closely but less than 500,000 votes is enough to flip the winner in a couple of states and swing the whole election. Considering you've got ~ 120 million votes that seems pretty close to me.
Edit: Looks like 147,029 votes is enough to flip Wisconsin and Florida and give Clinton the Electoral College.
> No it wasn't and you're extraordinarily ill-informed
> For those who didn't learn and understand this at age 10 or so
If you're going to provide corrections, please do so neutrally and without snark. Otherwise you degrade the discourse just like the non-factual comments do.
The electoral college is a bastardized form of it's original intent which has been around for a very long time.
In the original intent of the Representative Republic designed by the founders, your state would pick it's Electoral College and then they would pick any president. You didn't actually vote for one candidate.
The issue I have with people who argue the EC needs to stay is that they don't realize we're no longer in a representative republic because we took the power from the EC to pick a candidate.
Otherwise the EC could effectively pick Jill Stein if they felt like it, even though trump won the EC state count. But we don't let them do that any more.
We're in a representative republic because elected representatives decide policy (either directly or by appointing other people who do so) -- that's the representative part -- and because we don't have a monarchy -- that's the Republic part.
The formulas for allocating representatives and the exact details of the process by which some of them are chosen has changed over time, but its still a representative republic.
I was speaking strictly to the form the Electoral College supports our representative republic in that we don't directly vote for President, we vote for representatives who vote for our president.
The way that I consider it to be a bastardization of the Representative Republic is that we don't care who the representatives in the Electoral College are we only care who they vote for.
If we elected the EC as people who were allowed to make a choice then it would be more of a representative republic. Instead we have a democracy in that we are really just voting for president, but some people's vote count more than others.
>> and because we don't have a monarchy -- that's the Republic part.
That is wrong. There is such thing as a representative democracy. That is where the majority always wins. AKA Popular Vote.
> I was speaking strictly to the form the Electoral College supports our representative republic in that we don't directly vote for President, we vote for representatives who vote for our president.
The President is an elected head of state and government, a characteristic of a representative republic, whether he is directly or indirectly elected.
> There is such thing as a representative democracy
Yes, representative republics are a subset of representative democracies (Constitutional monarchies are usually also representative democracies, though not republics, because monarchy.)
> That is where the majority always wins.
No, democracy doesn't mean "the majority always wins", and the distinction you are trying to make between representative republics and representative democracies is not what those terms actually mean.
If you scroll down to the section on the Elections you'll see where I formed the opinion that an indirect election of the president conforms with the definition of republic I'm used to.
>> The indirect election of the president through the electoral college conforms to the concept of republic as one with a system of indirect election. In the opinion of some, direct election confers legitimacy upon the president and gives the office much of its political power.
So this is where I formed the (incorrect) idea that the word Republic had a hard and fast definition that corroborated this definition.
Obviously I was wrong, but I'd like to say that you are not correct either. Typically I hate being wrong, but through this exercise I was able to learn. So thank you for challenging me to dive deeper to find out why my definition didn't match the commonly accepted definitions and where'd I'd come to that conclusion.
In every thread about US elections, there is going to be the same "muh founding fathers, carefully crafted system, so perfect".
The truth is, the US system is pretty damn awful. The good news is, everything else is also pretty damn awful.
Also "This is a prescription for socialism and communism." makes me think that maybe the author of the article is a tiny bit biased. Also completely wrong.
It's damn near impossible in US for a person or group of people to start a new party and contest election and have a chance at winning it.
Compare that to India where current Chief Minister of Delhi is from a party that started to break monopoly of two big parties in India and actually won. It's a total different thing that he turned out to be just another politician.
One way to think about this is that some forms of communication amplify confirmation bias (and other cognitive biases). As we develop new forms of communication, we may need to compensate for these biases in new ways. Our motivation is to incentivize better public discourse.
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