Are you saying that Facebook is a government? By the same token as libelslander, censorship is a government task. Everything else is just business rules.
No, it's not. Courts are a last resort, when private mediation has failed, not the first line of action. If I publish news articles claiming "the sky is the color red, and only evil people disagree", courts do not need to be involved for Facebook to bury my articles. Most mischief is obviously classifiable without outside mediation.
You think the New York Times doesn't decide whether something is libel or slander before they print it in order to avoid having the "courts...decide whether something is libel or slander"? It's not a direct comparison, but close enough for me to dismantle the idea that only courts get a say on this.
Facebook is located in the USA, if Facebook institutes its own ministry of truth do you think its more likely that they will antagonize the government or work with it like they have done thus far and comply with the requests of Trump Administration?
It makes sense to reduce the effect of "cottage industries" getting paid to misrepresent the popularity of certain topics. I wouldn't call that censorship.
Unsurprisingly, Twitter's Safety Council members are predominantly left-leaning with ties to the (now defunct) Clinton campaign. I would presume there are plenty of seats to be filled now.
Ah yes, Twitter, the left-leaning echo chamber where alt-right types and racists don't bombard jews and black people constantly with death threats and gas chamber jokes. Free speech has been suppressed so vigorously by the Safety Council :(
(Spoiler alert: Twitter basically doesn't moderate anything and their department responsible for handling abuse reports doesn't do anything)
Okay but to be fair, there are something like 6000 tweets every second. Are they
not moderating because they believe in the principle of free speech, or because
it would be impractical?
I do think that they manually curate their trending sidebar. After Comey
announced that the emails on the Wiener laptop were cleared by the FBI, the
sidebar looked like this: http://i.imgur.com/9LW0iaU.png
Now, since when do hashtags get an explanation underneath them? Who wrote that
explanation and why? Why doesn't it show the amount of tweets below it like
every other trend? I had never seen that before.
And in this particular case, if they did manually put that there, I think
they're vindicated in the sense that they're actively trying to not spread
misinformation. Because if I had gone on twitter and saw "Comey" trending, and I
hadn't read about the announcement that she'd been cleared, I'd simply think
that a lot of Americans were talking about it within the context of an ongoing
investigation, and I'd get the sense that twitter users were collectively
rallying against Clinton, rather than for her.
And that, in essence, is the real problem that I have with manual curation by
FB/Google/Twitter/etc. People are underestimating how much trust the general
population puts into algorithmically produced content, and how much of a
betrayal of trust it is for them to inject something into that. They're
underestimating just how quickly we've learned to interpret algorithmically
produced content and infer certain things about it. And in spite of the fact
that the sidebar could have mislead you to think something else was being
expressed by those tweeting about Comey than was actually taking place, I also
think the public is more aware of the shortcomings of algorithmically produced
content than we give them credit for.
If I watch Fox/MSNBC/CNN/etc, I know that there's an implicit bias to the
pundits and the guests and the networks themselves. I factor that into whatever
content I receive from them.
But when you have Twitter trends that are organically produced 95% of the time,
and you silently inject something into that, you've done something much more
sinister than a news network leaning towards a particular angle. You've taken a
metric that a lot of Americans trust entirely to be reflective of the whole
country, and you've elevated a certain few or silenced a few others.
That's significantly more powerful. You can provide the illusion that millions
of people do or don't feel a certain way. It's the most dangerous thing to
happen this election cycle.
Isn't twitter moderation openly mocked for being, well, hardly functional at all? It's been a bastion of bigotry for the past year. It's Trump's main platform. If they're trying to suppress the right, they're doing a TERRIBLE job.
Oh they are doing a terrible job. And one of the reasons I don't use a platform that thinks its ok to name groups things straight out of "Fahrenheit 451".
This article criticizes Facebook for firing the human editors that had been keeping things sane. However they were pushed to that by accusations of bias in the right-wing media. Accusations that looked likely to lead to a Congressional investigation.
Now they are in a situation where they are damned if they do, damned if they don't. And people immersed in echo chambers will accuse them of bias no matter what.
But the entire system is fundamentally broken. Pay per ad incentives lead to rewarding viral content. And content that induces outrage is far more likely to go viral than pretty much anything else. Plus it goes viral before people do pesky things like fact checks. And the more of this that you have been exposed to, the more reasonable you find outrageous claims. Even if you know that the ones that you have seen were all wrong.
For an in depth treatment of the underlying issues, I highly recommend Trust Me, I'm Lying.
Yes. Remember that Facebook itself is essentially becoming what AOL used to be. AOL News was huge and it's still probably one of their most popular sites to this day.
No. The solution is to continue to provide news, to curate it, to shut down professional liars, and to tell the critics that if they don't like it, they are free to encourage their followers to use other social media.
I just don't know where the cutoff is for professional or habitual liars. There are many ways to mislead, cherry picking data, methodological errors, straight up confusion and overwhelming technical data. Do we need to model the frequency of offense or severity?
I'm not really going for the whole slippery slope aspect, more I feel like I'm miscategorizing the problem.
Maybe the metadata on misinformation looks different from the real deal. How quickly does it spread, and through which people? No need to actually judge the content.
Maybe one can claim it wasn't an intentional lie, but this guy is someone who really should have known better. So if it wasn't an intentional lie, they were negligent. Not sure where that leaves us.
>Maybe one can claim it wasn't an intentional lie, but this guy is someone who really should have known better.
It would be great if an algorithm could fight this type of content, but it probably can't.
But we can probably start with sites that publish stories like "Rudy Giuliani SLAPPED A REPORTER WITH HIS DICK last Tuesday" and that might solve enough of this problem to call it a decent win.
Yes, you can completely filter them out figuring it's not worth the effort, but the problem is that's how you form bubbles to begin with.
Might have more luck boiling them down to verifiable facts and stripping all opinions (especially every explanation of "why X did Y" or "what X means").
Agreed! They just need a panel of curators from a diverse background (men, women, race, religion, education...) who can provide different perspectives and reduce bias (I say reduce...human decisions will always have bias). Hell maybe an indepndent company does the creation so there's no bias for anti FB postings.
If there's no consensus on the "truthiness" then the default is benefit of the doubt that it's true.
I know we are all in IT, but not all problems are best solved by algorithms.
Yes, trying to solve this problem by creating a definition of "misinformation" sufficiently precise to act on it for all possible articles, then trying to remove it somehow is probably an AI-complete problem. If it's not AI-complete it's probably just plain an ill-formed question. That's before we ask questions about the biases that get embedded into the misinformation detector.
This can't be fixed at Facebook scales by building a platform that so highly incentivizes low-quality content of all kinds, then trying to stop the content so late in the cycle. The entire incentive structure has to be rethought. Unfortunately, that's probably a problem that Facebook is literally incapable of solving without going out of business, because Facebook the corporate entity is that incentive structure. To fix Facebook requires Facebook to become not-Facebook.
Yes. We're talking about a platform that at it's best is birthday wishes, vacation and cat pictures. It's running on a paid content model, with advertisers selling through viral videos and click-bait. It's good not to expect too much out of it.
We're actually not; that's simply false. No, Facebook is not "at it's best" [sic] when it sticks to birthday wishes and cat pictures.
It's actually at its best when it is truly social, in all senses of the word. When it facilitates real communication on real issues across a broad spectrum of people. When it spreads information, not misinformation.
Not trying to speak for the original poster, but what I took away from the argument is that when FB is "truly social", involving real issues, the potential rewards are sufficiently high that misinformation becomes valuable, thus dangerous. When it sticks to birthdays and cat pictures, there's no incentive to go hostile. Think of it as being somewhat similar to the arguments about the Flash Crash regarding HFT and liquidity: that HFT is great for liquidity until you need it, at which point it goes away[1].
I agree with others that detecting misinformation in the general case likely requires a theory of mind, and so something approaching "real" AI. I also agree that FB has a serious problem on their hands. And I'm so very glad I don't use it.
[1] I advance no comment here about the correctness of that; just a comparison to illustrate what seems like an overlooked point.
This is the same as reddit. As social platforms get larger they starts diverging from their original userbase (programmers/geeks for reddit, college students for facebook) to apply to a wider and wider audience. Eventually the wider audience starts to look a whole lot like the demographics of a whole country (or maybe the world), and it becomes a platform with as many arguments as society in general.
The solution to not becoming a battleground which is inherantly destabilizing to the platform is to not grow, or only grow in a single direction. State up front what your targeted user base is and keep to them. NeoGAF as a "gamers only" forum will survive a very long time, for instance.
Facebook has sidestepped it by becoming a personal community for each user, but whenever they try to connect that personal community to the wider world through "shared" news, "shared" trends etc that are not personalized it causes a big ruckus.
I have no doubt that a lot of social information is being transferred in a new way, much the same as the introduction of the telephone allowed a lot of social information to be transferred in a new way. My point is that true socializing and socialization are human, not digital experiences.
Not trying to be pedantic here. It's just important to sort out the terms used if any analysis is going to be useful. What's happening on facebook is not social. It's bits of data around being social. Different thing entirely. Perhaps we need a new term for whatever it is, but whatever we call it, it's not the same as face-to-face real socializing with real people.
Are you picking on me? Making a joke that we share? Challenging me to come up with a retort? Asking me to join in to a shared humorous narrative? Giving me a friendly jibe about an error or weakness you perceive?
We assume positive intent online because otherwise we get flame wars, but there's a helluva lot of body language and inflection that can take the comment you made and make it mean a dozen things. All of that is lost. And all of it is important.
In addition to the nuance, would I know severine if I saw them on the street? Miss them if they died? Remember the nice way they did X everytime we met?
We are exchanging written opinions and statements, yes. These exchanges also occur in social interactions. But we are not socializing. There's no bond here that's become stronger, no subtle nuance or interplay that we're managing at a subconscious level. For all either of us knows, the other one is a bot. Or an alien. There's no humanity here.
I disagree. For me, and I think for many, online interactions are a just as much a form of socialization as going out in person. For very small groups, I generally prefer the in person version, but for larger groups, I think I get more out of the online setting.
Let's take our relationship, for example. I've been cohabiting some of the same online spaces as you for at least the last decade. For me, you are a valued part of that ecosystem, more so than most of my physical neighbors who I chat with in person a couple times a year.
No, I wouldn't recognize you on the street, but I struggle with face blindness, so it's a weak criterion. Would I "miss you" if you died? No, but I'd certainly reflect sadly on your death if I learned about it. "Remember the nice way you did X"? No, but I have trouble coming up with such an X most people I interact with locally.
There's no humanity here.
I'm surprised you would say this. Is this a recent change in your view of online interactions or have you always felt this way? Quantitively I find about the same amount of humanity here as I do elsewhere, and qualitatively I prefer many things about what I find here to what I see when I go out in person. Are you OK?
(ps. I notice that many of the links in the sidebar of your site are broken.)
If it is truly social then it will spread misinformation like wildfire. That's what people do -- gossip game magnified. That said, maybe Facebook is best when it is just spreading obviously unimportant content (in the sense of national and global affairs), like birthday wishes and cat pictures. No harm if the cat is implicated in wild conspiracy theories.
It's not the cat pic sharing that is paid for by entities with motive and interest in spreading misleading messages.
When Facebook is at it's best is taking money from nefarious actors and fucking up democracy
In Poland, for good half year before our presidential election, then a year after I was getting obviously paid for posts from dozens upon dozens of right wing extremists.
I am left-centrist (although my dad jokes at me that im a bolshevik). I don't have many friends who skew righ-wing either. Yet, there was my wall, chock full of sensationalist bs, for over A YEAR
Wonder how much money Facebook earned in that time just from sad little Poland
Facebook completely controls the presentation priority, no? Bolt a Watson-like truth scoring system on to evaluate content and use the resulting confidence to boost or bury content in other's feeds.
It would absolutely have to be automatically generated, but it doesn't seem impossible (just much harder NLP that Watson playing Jeopardy).
It seems to me the hardest part would be separating truthiness from virality. How do they seed legit sources in the current media climate of racing to the bottom for eyeballs.
Well, to be more specific about what I mean is, Google's algorithm is successful if it finds the pages that people find valuable. It's sort of baked into the value proposition that the end user will be able to gauge the quality of results, so there is a sort of feedback loop. The problem with misinformation is there is no in-band signal for Google about its truthiness. I suppose there heuristics you can use related to fact-checking quality of certain publications, etc, but it's much trickier than general perceived quality.
Nevertheless, I agree that if anyone can do it algorithmically, it would probably be Google.
No, it doesn't. Sometimes, popularity blocks the process of scientific inquiry. As Kuhn pointed out. But in any case, there is no truth, as Popper pointed out.
If the scoring system does anything other than maximize engagement with Facebook, Facebook ends up making less money and performing worse on KPIs than they otherwise would. It'd be very difficult for any decision maker at Facebook to build, deploy, and maintain that feature. It'd be the sort of thing that'd only be there if otherwise the company would be under existential threat.
You mean government regulation a la China because some memes really are dangerous? If you increase the velocity of transmission, then even in a free system there are some dangerously infectious falsehoods that it might be in the public good to slow. Think War of the World on Facebook.
That, or a public reaction to their product (ie, clickbait fatigue - Facebook gets really good at local optimization for the most engaging news posts but creates a news feed that convinces people that Facebook as a whole isn't worthwhile).
It basically needs to be serious enough to overwhelm the internal incentives of maximizing key performance indicators.
I think there's the global maximum vs local maxima argument in favor of doing something too. Why do people ultimately spend time on Facebook?
I would say they don't do so because of micro-optimized KPI targeting: they do so because they feel time on Facebook is valuable and makes them happy. If Facebook can't deliver increases in that, then optimizations only take them so far.
Yup. There's definitely some Goodhart's Law going on here as well. Micro-optimized KPI targeting is an inexact measure of feeling like ones time on Facebook is valuable.
Ah, but herein lies the difference. Memes seem to universally promote freedom of communication, communication about freedom, and a way to react to the oppression of the status quo. In China, this is counter to the powers that be, but in America, this is fully aligned with the anti-regulation party that is sweeping through all branches of government. Memes play into their hands, and so Facebook would never be under existential threat.
Watson scoring something for truth is only as good as the data drawn from. Who decides that data? Jeopardy questions center around long-established, non-controversial information; how does a Watson-like system evaluate unprecedented breaking news? It's not a question of the language used, it's a much, much higher-order issue that current Watson sidesteps.
Agreed, much more difficult, but ultimately the same way we do so? We believe certain ideas to be facts (hopefully based on scientific sources), then we parse incoming information in light of those.
I can't imagine an unprecedented breaking news story that has no basis in any factual information. I'm not talking about an upvoter here, but primarily a downvoter (incongruence with accepted facts being easier to prove than vice versus).
Sure, and that's the higher-order problem. If we could make machines that solve any problem the way we do, we'd be a lot closer to AGI, but for now, it's still science fiction for a computer to have beliefs, and understand information in the context of those beliefs.
This is basically impossible given the current and near future state of the art.
The Allen AI group has been working on solving year 4 multiple choice science tests for about 3 years. They now score a bit over 60% correct, and that is a much easier task.
What I'm suggesting we start with is not exactly the same. The analogous question in that domain is "How accurate have they been in eliminating wrong answers?"
Everything has to be right for an answer option to be correct. Only one thing has to be wrong for it to be incorrect.
Like most false stories, there is a hint of truth to this but that doesn't make it true. Politfact spends 3 pages discussing it, and concludes:
Courts did object in three cases to decisions Kander made as secretary of state. But the specifics of those cases are much more nuanced than Blunt lets on. And the claim that Kander tried to manipulate the election is, at best, unproven.
A SOTA computer system could probably parse that last paragraph I posted, but couldn't get anywhere near getting close to doing the research needed to get to that conclusion. We are years off that (I work on research in this area)
I'm not surprised parsing something nuanced is beyond state of the art. But what about "illegal immigrants are committing an epidemic of rape against our children" or "we have a flood of illegal immigrants"?
A lot of claims that were made this cycle are rooted in measured quantities where the measurements we have disagree with the claims.
Define "epidemic of rape" or "flood of illegal immigrants".
If there is at least one rape or at least one illegal immigrant then it becomes subjective or contextual.
Is 3 rapes a flood? What if it is in a week in one town? What if one was by a former illegal immigrant? What if it is over the course of a year, but all 3 occurred in one day?
Is 20 illegal immigrants a flood? What if they all arrive in a town with a population of 100?
Who is "we"? Is a story about millions of illegal immigrants in Greece relevant? What if it about thousands of illegal immigrants working in Athens? What if Athens is in Georgia?
A real example:
"Broken Families: Raids Hit Athens' Immigrant Community Hard" vs "Athens crackdown shows no hospitality for illegal migrants"
One is a real headline from Georgia, the other from Greece. Can you tell which is which?
They can just form a group of truth checker, a ministry of sort, who's job is to inform people of the truth. They can call it the Ministry of Truth, where busy citizens who have no time to research can get their truths from.
This is a problem with human wetware - there are several cognitive biases [1][2][3][4] that make people engage more strongly with ideas that fit their preconceptions and discount ideas that don't. Add information-sharing to the mix and the aggregate effect you get is large information cascades that fracture the population into tribes that believe things not necessarily because they're true, but because they are stated early, vehemently, and frequently.
Remember that evolution favors individuals who survive & gain status, not those whose representation of the world is true. Someone who is right but killed for it (eg. Copernicus) is still dead.
The fix is for people to be aware of these cognitive biases in themselves, to actively seek out information that differs from their preconceptions, and to challenge inaccurate information (with evidence!) when presented with it. You can't outsource this to a communication platform, because it's inherently less comfortable and more effort for the reader, and the reader will just go to a competing communication platform that makes them feel better.
> The fix is for people to be aware of these cognitive biases in themselves, to actively seek out information that differs from their preconceptions, and to challenge inaccurate information (with evidence!) when presented with it.
You are right, but I hope you are aware that this would require a giant leap to an essentially superhuman state of rationality and clear thinking for a vast majority of people.
Just stop for a moment and look around you. Is that how most people actually function in this world?
Separate ideology (or whatever happens to be the object of bias) from identity, and you're halfway there. People are much more amenable to changing their minds if their identities aren't at stake. For example, most people can discuss the pros and cons of F-150s and Silverados fairly rationally; those with the Calvin pissing logos, not so much.
On a societal level, your guess is good as mine. Perhaps increased infrastructure spending so that high-skill, high-pay jobs are more evenly spread out and ideological segregation is reduced?
On an individual level, being active in (non-political) hobbies and volunteer groups can help, especially ones that attract both people from the cities and the countryside.
Who am I stereotyping? People with "Calvin pissing on Ford/Chevy/Ram logo" stickers? The vast majority of truck drivers don't really care about brand--they just want the most appropriate truck for their situation.
None of us function in this way. While part of the solution does have to involve people becoming better at vetting their information-sources, it is equally important to acknowledge that for everyone to do this individually would be absolutely impossible given time constraints.
What we need, fundamentally, is a media environment that can harness the collective capacity of humans to vet and debate new information in an organized fashion that can be trusted. This site is a good example where a knowledgeable community, and the simple mechanism of votes does some automatic, crowd-based content curation. But the Reddit-like model is very basic - so much more could possibly be done to allow individual users to contribute to a collective process of knowledge-building.
I think we need more development and discussion devoted to what kind of systems could be designed to encourage transparency, quality, and critical analysis in our news-making.
As a kid I learnt this and tried to be as rational and aware of my fallibalities as possible.
That makes you an alien to normal human beings. Conversation becomes impossible, processing fast enough becomes impossible, and the penalties for acting weird and communicating weird are huge.
Instead you need to find a way to act in a manner that allows you to blend in with people.
Maybe people confuse Copernicus with the advocate of related theories Giordano Bruno, who was killed in 1600 for his beliefs and advocacy (though not only for his beliefs about astronomy).
This is absolutely the right answer, but maybe Facebook can do some things to help. It's possible to gamify the process of learning to spot biases by presenting people with situations and getting them to think critically to solve the biases or fallacies. Especially on Facebook, people love filling out questionnaires that tell them something about themselves.
I'm not saying that one smart game is going to fix the entire problem, but adding the development of logic skills into the types of activities that people enjoy doing on Facebook is definitely possible.
It doesn't work that way. It assumes that what people are doing is wrong - it's not. The mental overhead to assess everything clinically is sufficient that faster thinkers can just outrun you. People/brains are making trade offs to deal with the world around them.
Other humans are taking advantage of those gaps to mobilize votes or advertisements.
There's no way out and I've been wondering when people would realize the depth and intricacy of the mess we're in. Hopefully people pay more attention to the way cognitive cheat code are being abused.
There's really an amazing amount of misinformation and manipulation going on. I think there's a place for people developing critical thinking skills, but there's also a limit to what people can sort through. There's a big need for more software to fact-check and compare sources across the Internet. Having Facebook run it is one part of the solution, but people need to have transparent software that they control to do the same kind of work so it isn't entirely centralized. Google, Amazon, and Facebook assistants are great, but we need personal assistants that work for us.
The fix is for people to be aware of these cognitive biases in themselves, to actively seek out information that differs from their preconceptions, and to challenge inaccurate information (with evidence!) when presented with it.
Exactly right. This should be strongly emphasized in our educational curriculum.
As any alien arriving in your world would immediately ask, why doesn't having a true representation of the world help you survive and gain status? And if it doesn't, why does it matter?
It's almost as if solving the problem of truth is antithetical to the notion of having a for-profit entity be the main channel of [legit|mis-]information in our world.
It's almost as if the way we understand and use money has hardened into a giant screwball of lies, base instincts, and perverse incentives.
this assumes their interest is in being fair, but I suspect their goal will gravitate mostly toward 'not being sued/investigated' which may very well create a selection bias.
Are you referring to wrong when they described what they thought was going on, which contains a large amount of opinion, or wrong on the facts as they exist?
Facts can be presented in a biases way (generally through omission of other contextual facts), but if what is said is factual, at least that bit of information is still correct. If combining multiple sources to generate a grouping of facts, that presentation bias way well disappear. If system weeds out people that present opinion as fact, all the better.
Frankly papers that lie through crafted contexts are much more dangerous because they give a false sense of authority due to their correctness at the micro level but incorrectness at the macro level.
Imagine I develope a newspaper that only reports crimes committed by a particular race and I excruciatingly fact check every incident and highlight when they are uneducated (but don't mention education otherwise). What will result is one of the biggest macro lies that will fuel racism through its broader message while everything will be perfect to a fact checker. This would rank perfectly in such a system while broader newspapers would get hammered for messing up picture captions and confusing Airbus A319s with 737s.
"This problem isn't that hard. You filter this stuff and rank it by its SOURCE, not by the content of individual articles."
I don't think reifying ad hominem into code is the solution to the problem.
Of course, if you don't mind a rare few false positives here and there on articles, I've got your filter right here:
def source_is_trustworthy(source):
return False
Remember as you sit here thinking through your exceptions what we're talking about; if your "trustworthy" source was confidently telling you about how Clinton was going to win, it's not one of the exceptions. I won't say I was confident Trump would win, but I was certainly less suprised than most; the fact that I generated this somewhat more predictive model by tossing out pretty much every "mainstream" news source is not a good sign for them. And to be honest, Trump news isn't the only thing that I find this useful for. Beyond the bare facts, most media outlets really aren't good for much anymore, and do you ever have to de-spin their news just to get those bare facts in the first place. (I can't, however, pack up into a recipe how to do this yourself. I think we're in a period of transition in the news industry, much greater than just "the internet makes the old dinosaurs stumble" makes it sound, and I'm at the moment not really all that confident in anything.)
To determine correctness, the adjudicator requires knowledge outside the system. In the scientific method, this is done by generating falsifiable hypotheses and performing the experiment. Failing that, you have to fall back on heuristics, like "what I already believe", Occam's razor (simplest theory consistent with observations wins), or reliance on authority/consensus.
Consistency is simply majority wins, which completely stifles new ideas or minority opinions.
> Consistency is simply majority wins, which completely stifles new ideas or minority opinions.
No isn't.
You don't need to have a "non objective view of the truth" - i..e you don't need the ability to ask the system "Is this statement true?"
You just need the ability to ask the system "Will I think this is true, given the other things I have claimed to be true?"
Maintaining internal complexity of your own claim graph gets really tricky unless you keep it as accurate as possible.
For example, consensus view was that trump would not win the election. Trump did win the election. Thus, those two claims:
* (before) Trump will not win
* (later) Trump won
These two are inconsistent. It's possible to rectify that inconsistency by marking the earlier statment cancelled. So now we have three statements
* (before) Trump will not win
* (later) Trump won
* (now) I was wrong to say, "Trump will not win."
The gap between "now" and "Before" can be used to compute "probability of a statement being retracted." The smaller those gaps, the more likely it is what whatever you say comes with an asterisk next to it, saying "the expected time to retraction of this statement is: x days"
Ah, you're only speaking of temporal consistency (or "constancy" - does the source's statement change over time).
I was speaking of consistency with the general body of knowledge in the system, (correspondence?).
In the specific case of evaluating major news sources for trust, I think the vast majority of their statements are never retracted/changed, and therefore they would rate highly on an overall "constancy" scale as well. Their many statements about Trump's likelihood of winning were very constant as well - for months they said he'd lose, then they changed, and forever after they will say he won.
Sounds very temporally consistent, with just a single change.
Not sure if the adjudicator could narrow it just to "trust of the source's future predictions about politics", but basically the whole country just got a negative feedback on the trust weighting for major media in that domain.
PageRank is also not unbiased, it has been played before many times and pure PageRank would be pretty easy to play - that's why Google keeps tweaking it years after it was invented. And still SEO industry exists. Now, SEOs just compete on being on the first page, not claiming something as grandiose as "truth" - add that to the mix, and all the biases there are, and you get pretty much hopeless task. And of course you get under a constant stream of criticism, and maybe also government regulation - it's one thing to just produce search results (even that is controversial, remember "right to forget"?), it's another thing to claim being able to "detect falsehood" - that's very sure a way to get sued and for the government to get involved.
As someone who vehemently opposes Trump, I feel that allegations of anti-Trump bias in the mainstream media were entirely correct and somewhat to be expected. Although Trump is certainly a name that sells papers, Trump's repeated threats to open up news media to broader libel laws were not well received. The news organizations' endorsements were pretty one-sided[0]. I don't want to take you too literally, but it seems to me pretty obvious that a model ignoring the MSM entirely would not be preferable to one that took into account the MSM opinions and then applied a correctional factor. I'm sure we agree that truth is a function of our means for determining truth, but I suspect we disagree strongly on the reliability of Internet news sources.
It won't be reached in practice, but if you make it the policy, you have an argument to take down any bullshit. With 50:50 it's going to be an endless quarrel over who has had enough so far, who is underrepresented and why everything is dominated by two polar opposites with no voice given to people who don't want to belong to either camp.
"source_is_trustworthy" applies to all sources, not just "MSM". As I said, I don't have anything right now that I can point to and say "If they say it, I trust it."
I used to try to apply a correctional factor, but I've found it not even worthwhile anymore. I honestly don't know entirely why. I don't know if the news has gotten that much more biased to the point where it almost swamps the signal entirely, or if the combined financial pressures away from expensive real reporting and towards click-bait headlines has removed the signal, or what, but beyond very bare facts they just aren't worth much anymore. It is also possible this has always been the case and I wasn't aware enough to realize it; there's some classic history stories that back that possibility up.
I do know primary sources are getting easier and easier to consult directly. Which could itself also be a reason my opinion of them has plummeted so much in the past 10 years; it was a lot harder to see through media spin and simplification (deliberately for their audience, and accidentally when they in fact don't understand what's going on themselves, see especially science journalism for that) when they were the only source of information.
You must have missed the leaked emails in which Clinton exerts massive influence on the media, planning every last details in exchange for all kinds of rewards [0]
I did miss that. Was that article intended to support that view? The incidents listed don't seem to have been terribly well planned or executed, or to have garnered any positive results. That seems difficult to reconcile with the idea of a powerful media conspiracy.
The case of news sources failing to predict events seems like a red herring in the larger debate here - news media is generally about reporting events that have actually happened. Predicting presidential elections or other uncertain events is a side hustle they've been dragged into because it sells. And if you throw out their predictive failures, I think it's pretty easy to compose a trustworthiness function based on overall factual accuracy. And sure, there may be lingering biases that need to be corrected for, but even so, the MSM biases generally don't extend into the realm of pure fabrication, whereas clickbait outrage farms absolutely do - and they are a large chunk of the problem.
Pretty much all mainstream media outlets did, at some point, publish something that can be qualified as "bad propaganda" by at least some of the observers. Now, either you filter out pretty much all the internet except maybe for bare statistics, numbers, math, etc., or you say "well, these guys are not as bad as those guys, because obviously being completely wrong about X much worse than being slightly less than right about Y", at which point you are just implementing your own biases.
Non-starter. The NYTimes and Washington Post, for example, are respected but have a very strong yet subtle bias.
On the one hand, they seem more interested in fact-checking. On the other, they propagate concepts like: on-balance the US is a force for good and should lead the world. This is highly contentious and non-obvious for many (most?) people outside the US.
Using the source to figure out whether something is accurate/correct has its own issues unfortunately. These include:
1. Editors/writers/management changes, since quite a few media publications have gone from being fairly reliable to biased as all hell based purely on who's taken over there. Or in some (rarer cases), the opposite has happened.
So you'd have to make sure older less biased pieces weren't being punished for the actions of the publication in the present.
2. A lot of sources are correct about some things but not about others. It's very possible to have a publication that's terrible at writing about politics in an accurate and unbiased way, but fantastic at writing about technology or sports. So ideally your system would have to detect the subject of the article as well as the publication.
However, I guess you could at least add known 'satire' and fake information sites to a 'non credible' list. Like the ones listed here:
I think I would argue that this is beyond an AI-complete problem, it is an unanswerable problem. For instance, consider the following spectrum of ideas:
- The earth is flat
- 9/11 conspiracy theories
- Barack Obama was born in Kenya
- Anti-vax
- Climate change denial
- Anti-GMO
- Denial of underlying quantum randomness in the universe
- The Clinton Foundation has been or is involved in some shady dealings
- Muslims want to implement Sharia law in Europe
- The minimum wage decreases employment
- Donald Trump has sexually assaulted a number of women
- Monetary policy impacts the real economy
- The sun will, on balance, probably rise tomorrow
I've sorted this in a (rough, personal) order of increasing plausibility / conformance with facts. Where is the line between misinformation and alternative information? As a human, it's pretty unclear to me.
Man, it must be me, but you ranked "Monetary policy" WAY more likely than I would (rates near zero for so long doing so little must at least put SOME doubt in your model), and "denial of quantum randomness" way less credible than I see it as. Like, man, reasonable people can disagree about pilot waves and many worlds.
Are there some confusing, emotionally laden, difficult questions of fact in there? Yes. Are some things ultimately unknowable (like what people want, which involves scrying into their minds)? Yes.
These, as it turns out, are not the things I can't help but be side-tracked on. I'm diverted by you claiming monetary policy has an effect with nearly the certainty of the sun rising.
Haha, sorry I knew this list would cause this sort of trouble. I'm a big believer in pilot wave theory myself, it's just very much not the 'mainstream' view. And I didn't mean to imply that the last two were close together, either. I do think monetary policy probably has some effect (whether we understand or can model that effect is another matter), but I didn't mean at all to imply that it was anywhere near the certainty of the sun rising, it just happened to be the closest :).
I think perhaps we disagree more about the probability of these two:
- The Clinton Foundation has been or is involved in some shady dealings
- Muslims want to implement Sharia law in Europe
Than the other two. I think both of those are, in some sense, almost certainly true. There are Muslims who want to implement Sharia law in Europe. The Clinton Foundation has been involved in transactions that at least have the appearance of moral uncertainty. The headlines that I listed are just overly strong statements/generalizations of those (IMO undeniable) facts.
I keep getting sidetracked by other issues, but you're statements are about certainty and uncertainty and where do you draw the line for heavy-handed intervention, so I might as well get into them:
There, Clinton denies the foundation has been engaged in anything shady. Boom, definitely not undeniable #hackernewsdrama, hahaha.
If you want a disagreement, though, I prefer many-worlds over pilot wave theories, largely because I'm not entirely sure _what_ the propagation speed of the pilot waves would be. 'Greater than the speed of light' either (1) doesn't really narrow it down at all or (2) narrows it down to having no options at all. But they should have _a_ speed, because I'm not sure you can even have standing waves if the disturbances propagate instantly.
Rates near zero is part of the reason the stock market has been on a tear the last few years. It also was a driver of the housing bubble.
It didn't cause the hyperinflation that a lot of people thought would come, but the Great Depression is Bernanke's area of expertise, and he had sound theoretical reasons to believe QE wouldn't spark serious inflation.
Rates were also comparatively low during the 2000s to juice the economy after the tech bust and 9/11. They got even lower after the crash and QE, but they were the lowest they had been in the 00s since the early 60s.
Fortunately, you don't really have to solve that problem. It would be sufficient to assess claims of actual fact about the actual world. I think the first step in writing the classifier would be to write something like
Your statement is that of an atheist. You don't seem to realize that many of the followers of these religions believe their assertions to be factual in every way. When I got off the subway today, at the Port Authority, in New York City, there were 2 women, holding up signs about Jesus. One of the signs literally said "Historical fact: Jesus rose from the dead".
Is it established that that is in fact what Twitter does? I see something non-chronological on Twitter and it hasn't been clear for years what criteria are used.
I think a lot of the problem arose because they kept the content editors close to home.
A lot could be solved by just adding people to that department, located across the country in states where they already have offices anyway, or hire editors to work from home. That way, the editorial content wouldn't have to be so biased by region.
Another problem is the type of people who would take this job. They must be literate, but not able to find a better job. This will be people with degrees in English, journalism, and similar -- giving a pretty obvious political bias. You won't be getting mechanical engineers, coal miners, patent lawyers, and stock traders.
That really seems like "abridging the freedom of speech" to me. Constitutional conservatives sure love pushing the limits of the constitution when it inconveniences them.
But, you know, the election is over so now that the right has total control we must all put aside our differences and work together.
It is kind of Orwellian to claim an investigation of suppression of speech is "abridging the freedom of speech." Nonetheless, it isn't the government's business, what Facebook does with its feed, and constitutional conservatives should recognize that.
I think if they control 60% of the news pipeline (and climbing), they're categorically different. The U.S. government regularly investigates similarly large entities.
Facebook, et al, campaigned to have internet access be considered a utility instead of a luxury. The UN is pushing it as a human right.
If you follow that line of reasoning, the companies who run the pipes and control the flow of information aren't just companies playing favorites. They're potentially influencing - if not outright regulating - human rights worldwide.. which means they should have a much higher level of scrutiny.
You don't have freedom of speech in Facebook, if Facebook doesn't want you to, it's their platform...
They may lose credibility doing that, and would be a worse place to discuss things, but that is up them unless you have some kind of contract with them that makes you entitled to something else.
That for me is the main problem, people just want to trust stuff blindly and get all jived up when that doesn't work. You're mad at your own stupidity folks.
There's a proper response to "accusations of bias" from alt-right white-nationalist thug media. Never mind whether the accusations "looked likely to lead to a Congressional investigation".
The response is to tell them to fuck off, and that the professional editors in your private company will continue to do their job however they see fit.
Telling people who aren't aligned to with the liberal intelligentsia to fuck off is exactly what got us in the current mess. Most people are reasonable, but when the reasonable and rational media ignores their issues, we leave the door open to demagogues and dictators. How else could a silver spoon like Donald Trump ever claim to represent the everyman?
I think you're misinterpreting me, and also distorting my words significantly, which I object to. I didn't say we should tell people "who aren't aligned with the liberal intelligentsia" to fuck off. I was speaking narrowly about lawyers from places like Breitbart; i.e., the kinds of folks who have been trying to apply pressure to Facebook and making accusations.
>Telling people who aren't aligned to with the liberal intelligentsia to fuck off is exactly what got us in the current mess.
I am so sick of this argument that Trump's victory is somehow the fault of bubble-trapped city-dwelling liberals for not understanding how the rest of the country thinks. Trump supporters are the ones who have either been manipulated to vote against their own interests; implicitly elected a Republican administration no different from the ones that they now claim to have rejected; ignored the obvious signs that Trump is of the same "elite" ilk that seeks to exploit them; been duped to amplify social hatred and reinforce the worst bigotry and sexism of the right-wing; benefited from many of the federal supports they claim to hate; or neglected the existential peril of their belief that the economy is more important than the planet's ability to sustain life; if not all of the above. Should the left have picked a candidate that is more aligned with the issues of the working class? Absolutely. Does that mean it's entirely on them? Hell no.
To put some perspective on this, I am from Minnesota, I was there in 1998 and I helped Jesse Ventura get elected. It had a remarkably similar vibe of unexpected victory up-ending the establishment. Of course Jesse Ventura is much more of a rational and thinking man than Trump, but the race was similar in that no one took him seriously and he won in a huge upset against the major party candidates.
The thing with Trump is that liberals everywhere still can't get over what an asshole he is and what a disaster this is, but that fact that an asshole like him gets elected is very telling. We need to observe and understand this. Saying that people were duped and are idiots is not an interesting story, it doesn't help us make a better future, and quite frankly Trump supporters are not all idiots and bigots. What the intelligent Trump supporter would say is that establishment politicians have duped everyone too, and that Hillary was not going to further your interests. Granted Hillary was definitely the lesser of evils, but I don't think there's a cut and dried case that her policy was going to help the low to middle classes. Plenty of blame to go around here.
If you want to know why Trump got elected, it's because most people don't have a basic clue as to how the foundations of this country actually works. Seriously, go ask 100 random people what the national debt is, and I doubt you'll get more than 1 or 2 who have any sort of clue.
>What the intelligent Trump supporter would say is that establishment politicians have duped everyone too, and that Hillary was not going to further your interests
And that is why your "intelligent" Trump supporter is still clueless in this case, because he just voted in a white house full of career politicians (Newt Gingrich? Are you kidding me?). It's clear that Trump was mostly a protest vote against the establishment, but it was an incredibly hollow one and made literally no sense if the supporters looked beyond catchy slogans and strongman signaling. And every Trump voter, no matter how intelligent or decent or caring, still cast a vote for a racist and sexist candidate and that is something I find to be unconscionable.
Again with the racist accusation. You are either trolling or you have no intention of ever understanding why Trump supporters supported Trump, or you're just venting your anger from Hillary's humiliating defeat.
Trump actually promised to surround himself with experienced people, so "a white house full of career politicians" should not surprise anybody. It's keeping a campaign promise.
There was little protest vote. This was about corruption, job loss in the heartland, and some very non-racial issues with immigration.
Personally I blame it on the left's constant, ruthless beratement and demonization of Christian|white|rural|blue-collar|conservative people. I'm not surprised they pushed back after a decade of bullying in the name of tolerance.
Oh yeah I forgot it was the evil left that was demonizing people during the past ten years. Certainly no Christians during that time berated and demonized someone just on the basis of say, their sexual orientation or religious beliefs.
Give me a break. The right lost the culture wars (for good reason as their regressive social policies trampled all over civic rights) and this is them sending our country into a suicide because they'd rather die than face the reality that America is no longer a white monoculture.
Your reasoning is basically "maybe if you weren't so mean to the white supremacists Trump wouldn't have happened". Are we supposed to appease neo-Nazis and ignorance now? There were racially motivated attacks across the country last night, all done in the name of Trump. It does not look good.
Have you been on Twitter lately? If you phrase one thing the wrong way you get branded as a bigot, racist, sexist, whatever, and the torches and pitchforks come right out. If you don't see the parallels between the extreme right and the extreme left and prescribed moral code of what ideas and views are acceptable to express then you are not as smart and objective as you think you are.
You guys wanted to have it too fast and too easy. You though you can change things by passing laws and silencing criticism with media hysteria. You celebrated your superficial legal victories while completely ignoring the fact that sentiments against "affirmative actions", "LGBT rights", feminists, Muslims, Blacks and whatnot had been steadily growing for ten years all over the West.
You gave voice to the most bitter representatives of minorities to sell them as victims to the general population and didn't mind that the venom they spill enrages everybody else. As if you completely didn't expect that one day somebody may give voice to the most bitter of your opponents.
That's the first-level analysis. Let's dig deeper...
Why would one believe a so-called "protectionist" who has actually off-shored jobs?
Why would one believe a billionaire who claims to not be part of the establishment? A billionaire who was a celebrated part of the establishment during the '80s, in New York. That den of conservative values?
Why would one trust a candidate who was essentially a left-leaning Democrat until he decided to run for President?
Why would one believe a candidate who contradicts himself, is difficult to pin down on any policy details, and who says different things to different groups to a degree that's unprecedented, even for a politician?
Anybody can say anything. If you believe someone this erratic, you almost have to be wilfully ignorant of human nature.
Well, for many of your examples I would say they fit both candidates, with small adjustments. So the only choice is to go with the one that currently states what the voters agree with.
I'm always fascinated that people don't realize that what one side says today the other side said yesterday.
First of all your use of biased language is ridiculous, you are as bad as the 'alt-right white-nationalish thug media' and I wish people like you had no place in rational discussions.
Second if you tell them to "Fuck off" you risk losing a significant chunk of your user base who believes their content and information is being manipulated against them. Facebook isn't in the politics business, they are in the social networking business. If Facebook is seen as political at all then a competing business will set up a service to sell to the other side. Look at what happened to mainstream media channels. Claims of liberal bias in the media giants directly led to the success of Fox News.
>And Facebook is already seen as political; that ship has sailed.
I don't think that's true. Certainly the extremes on each side will say that. But I think everyone in the middle doesn't. I don't. Certainly not in the same way as I see Fox News/CNN/MSNBC as political.
It's funny that you don't think people marching in the streets, blocking traffic, screaming obscenities and destroying things right now aren't bullies.
The only reason it looks alt-right white-nationalist to you is because anyone on the left who disagrees with prevailing left wing dogma is branded a heretic and a bigot, and shut down quickly.
Take The Guardian. They employ people like Jessica Valenti and Laurie Penny who publish feminist clickbait. Then they aggressively moderate comments which explain why those two are ill-informed at best and dishonest manipulators at worst. Then they do a "study" where they demonstrate how much harassment their female writers receive, by considering every deleted comment to be an instance of harassment.
Alternative hypotheses are not welcome, and there is no accountability. Actual studies like Pew's about the magnitude and nature of real harassment are ignored, or spun by cherry picking. The dogma remains: women have it worse, and it's because they are women. This system gets them more traffic and attention, so they are encouraged to continue, even as they insist it's terrible and someone should stop it.
I think The Guardian is a bad example of this. Their articles follow a particularly narrow group of viewpoints. They will never have the mainstream (liberal) appeal as the New York Times or the Washington Post.
I may be missing something here, but what do your two paragraphs of axe-grinding about women have to do with his remark about American "alt-right white-nationalist thug media"?
What does two paragraphs of axe-grinding about woman like Jessica Valenti and Laurie Penny have to do with American "alt-right white-nationalist thug media"? Take a look at the narratives they've been pushing about Truump and the evils of the alt-right lately.
You don't have to look to what they've said, you can look to Trump's own words. He wants to put all American Muslim on a list. That is evil. That is indefensible. Even if you don't identify as left, you have a moral responsibility to obstruct this man.
Your comment implies that the commentor was axe-grinding with women in general. The complaint was about two particular women writers at the guardian using their own sex and feminism as a shield against criticism and fuel for their own click bait.
> Your comment implies that the commentor was axe-grinding with women in general. The complaint was about two particular women writers at the guardian using their own sex and feminism as a shield against criticism and fuel for their own click bait.
So it's okay for you to infer what other people mean, but not okay for me to do it? Where did I say "women in general"? Why would my post imply what he said, when everyone can read exactly what he said and interpret it for themselves, just like you did?
He's grinding an axe (completely out of nowhere) about "feminist clickbait", "female writers", the "dogma" that "women have it worse", and singling out two women (and "people like" them) as examples. What am I supposed to do, pretend he's talking about men?
Likewise, why should I pretend that he said "some women" when he didn't? I have no idea what proportion of women he has a problem with.
None of this is relevant to my point though, which was that his rant about women (however many it may be) had absolutely nothing to do with what he was replying to, and was simply an attempt to inject this particular hobby horse of his into a thread where it doesn't belong.
How do you know he has a problem with (just) two women? Did he say that? No. Even now he hasn't said that. On the contrary, he specifically said "people like" the two examples he named.
Are you genuinely telling me you don't know what "people like" means in this context?
> It's you that made it ambiguous by claiming he had a problem "with women".
The words "with women" don't even appear in any of my comments, in any context at all, so I don't know where you're quoting that from. I actually said "I have no idea what proportion of women he has a problem with".
And if my understanding of another person's comment (which is still there, in his own words) somehow made that comment "ambiguous", why are you not finding it ambiguous?
Incidentally, which pew studies? In my anecdotal experience, harassment is a pervasive issue e.g. I personally dont know of any urban woman not adversely affected by street harassment. Like a lot of things, it is a couple of men doing a whole lot of damage.
I keep feeling like the whole alt-right anti-PC movement seems to be born of things people said online or corner case behavior in insulated Universities. Like, who cares? Most men I know who love the anti-PC movement would, in the moment, gladly intervene if a woman is getting verbally harassed and is visibly shaken up. Mention Valenti to the same person and they fly into a rage. Like wut?!
Most feminist and LGBT activists groups aren't talked about by Jezebel and are doing great work.
tl;dr: Message to alt-right activists everywhere: Talk to minority rights activists in person outside of emotionally charged protests. You'll find you don't disagree by much.
> Most men I know who love the anti-PC movement would, in the moment, gladly intervene if a woman is getting verbally harassed and is visibly shaken up. Mention Valenti to the same person and they fly into a rage. Like wut?!
I'm a man, I dislike men who are asses to women and women who are asses to men. I'm finding it consistent and deeply un-wut-worthy. Heck, it seems I sometimes even care about men vs men and women vs women too.
"they were pushed to that by accusations of bias in the right-wing media."
Accusations of bias? I think you mean to say that actual Facebook employees stated this as a fact. And the story was covered by ALL news outlets, starting with Gizmodo.
It could also mean he was simply running damage control on a bullshit accusation he had no way of denying.
If sites are spreading factually provable lies through Facebook as fact, and people are acting on it, should Facebook have any say in telling people "Hey, this is garbage"?
It's also partly a constitutional question. I want my friends and I to be able to share articles we find in whatever press on FB. I'll filter by friend. (Mea Culpa: I haven't read TFA yet, so I may be missing some context.)
> Now they are in a situation where they are damned if they do, damned if they don't. And people immersed in echo chambers will accuse them of bias no matter what.
You are making an assumption that algorithms can not be biased. Earlier, humans were biased. Now, algorithms are biased.
Provided the data isn't wrong, we can typically put tight statistical error bounds on the output of various ML algorithms. Most people's understanding of how algorithms can be "biased" is completely wrong. There was a whole furor a while back about algorithms discriminating due to language differerences in the data for people of different races. Guess what; if you give race as a parameter to any half-decent algorithms trained on that data, the algorithm will learn that the written data contains those biases. Decent algorithms trained on true data are pretty much guaranteed to have results within a very very small margin of reality.
> Guess what; if you give race as a parameter to any half-decent algorithms trained on that data, the algorithm will learn that the written data contains those biases.
You know what? Even if you do not give race as a parameter; an algorithm could be biased. It can easily learn race from secondary or tertiary parameters.
Having a human team being accused of bias (possible falsely) and pressured by politicians to change puts them in the same category as the NYT, the Wall Street Journal and every serious print and broadcast service on earth.
Algorithmically spreading exciting and blatantly false claims puts them in the category of the National Enquirer, and 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion'
One category is significantly less damned than the other.
Not only in social media. The trend of the news in what were once subscription-only papers is disturbing as well now that they're online and supported in part by online advertising and eyeballs. I agree. Great book, written by someone who's been there.
Just a reminder that anyone in the UK or with an interest in UK politics should subscribe to Private Eye.
Ian Hislop likely has the distinction of being the most-sued person in English legal history - almost entirely by people seeking libel writs in attempts to bury the truth.
There is a podcast and selected content online. Funnily enough, it's the only periodical in the UK that has seen a rise in readership.
It's seems pretty obvious to me that they replaced the human curated news section with a far (and intentionally) inferior product. They knew people would eventually begin complaining about the new system and ask for the old system back.
Human editors can separate sane from insane ? I dont think so.
The recent presidential poll fiasco is prime example. All the large media houses like CNN, ABC, WaPo, NYT complete failed to detect and acknowledge the silent righ-wing voters claiming Clinton would win hands down. This is not just about political bias of the media but more importantly their complete failure to judge the pulse of the nation. In my opinion the main stream media was just insane here.
On the contrary the media engaged in an active social bullying of conservative voters by calling them bigots,racists,misogynist and what not. Had this media been lot more sensitive and sane in understanding both liberal and conservative voters, had they focused on what issues really mattered to conservative voter-base instead of ridicule and bullying I am pretty sure it would have changed things.
I blame the social bullying by main stream media as the prime reason why country seems divided.
> The recent presidential poll fiasco is prime example. All the large media houses like CNN, ABC, WaPo, NYT complete failed to detect and acknowledge the silent righ-wing voters claiming Clinton would win hands down.
The fake news on Facebook is a whole different thing, it's easy to spot and literally news stories made specifically to game Facebook. It's insane that it has gotten this far.
I don't think the "bias" of mainstream media sources is solvable, it's not that problem we need to solve.
The problem we need to solve is the sharing of hysterical, blatantly false information, presented as facts, from specific, intentionally propagandistic sites. And I wouldn't hide or disallow it, I would flag it with a warning message.
Then we can ban all those sites on homeopath, acupuncture, astrology, stereotype threat and all that other pinko voodoo (the bulk of social "science" papers come to think of it).
It seems like the best thing to do would be penalize a site if it shows verifiably false content until it both updates the original story and issues a retraction. Facebook could prioritize retractions in its algorithm and ensure that people who saw the original story would see the retraction as well.
Content providers who abide by journalistic guidelines could be prioritized. Providers who actually have an editor could even associate the editor of each article with the post so that the editor's individual track record could be checked alongside the site itself, which would work better for large organizations who have multiple departments and don't deserve to be globally penalized for a single bad editor.
I guess it works as long as you agree with their choices, prioritization, and opinions but as we saw this cycle, there was a collusion between "journalists" and the Clinton campaign. Even if you see no problem with that, would you see a problem if the Trump campaign had done it?
Not particularly. Personally, I've always advocated for some type of "internet journalistic credentials" that could be embedded in meta tags to identify content producers, editors, originators and retractions according to a process of journalistic ethics that actually valued real journalism over content spam. Content originators over scraper and ad-farms.
I'd honestly envision something closer to the BBB to manage this type of thing and track membership, ratings, disputes and resolution that all browsers and search engines could tap into. The key would be that freelance journalists would need to be able to gain membership in the same way that journalists get officially credentialed to cover different types of events.
The BBB is just a way for angry consumer to snipe at vendors. It doesn't to any sort of investigation of issues, nothing close to Politifact or Snopes.
Gone are my Facebook, G+, Reddit accounts. I have a Twitter which I curate manually with numerous feeds from all over. I generally look at content like links first then read the Twitter discussion if any.
I treat posting as a personal catharsis anymore, and use throwaway accounts. IMO my online opinions are going to get lost in the crush so why bother curating an identity. One that just creates a signal trail for advertising and snoopers?
I talk to the people in my life more instead. These have been conscious decisions on my part and honestly I think I'm mentally happier and less frustrated "at the world" for it.
MMS is good enough for sharing pics with grandma and grandpa. Though I've asked them to keep most off social media. It's too creepy having the world ogle my kids.
They don't like it but abide. IMO despite being my mom she's old and has less life left than my kids. Nothing to worry about by posting her life on Facebook
My kids on the other hand have their whole lives ahead of them. I would rather it not be broadcast without their consent. If they get older and decide to go all Jayden Smith or Paris Hilton on social media so be it.
But these services are not what humanity needs to progress. They are today's fascination. And I am not into it. So fuck em
FB would need to abandon the algo-driven feed altogether. yes, manual forwarding is bad, but that existed in the email days.
nowadays you get all that suggested content which is driven by your past behavior, acting as a giant amplifier.
to go back to something idlewords is harping about - all of that is possible because of the persistent storage of user data. kill the deep profiles, kill the tracking, only use what the user directly, willingly entered.
>However they were pushed to that by accusations of bias in the right-wing media.
As per my previous comments on this subject. The sources that got "censored" _happened_ to be conservative. They were unreliable sources, and stories that turned out to be not true. But people still moaned about it.
The fact that more conservative sources report false information seems like a problem conservatives should want to fix, instead of crying censorship. We have too much false information flying around; it's yellow journalism.
I think that's a genuine concern, the only way I can think of that breaks this paradigm is by users to elect moderators.
This would also give a platform to new and grassroot politicians to rise up over time. Right now, grassroot enthousiasm seems to flow towards senators (ron paul, bernie sanders,..) because they didn't vote for something most of the other senators voted for.
Meanwhile having access to capital and connections to even become a senator is very constraint and unlikely to come without strings attached.
Anyway, having users elect moderators solves the problem of "trusting the moderator" and since I assume they would be a salaried position facebook can apply and enforce fairness guidelines.
Why exactly shouldn't it be beneficial if we let the market (the viewer) without any regulation decide which information should spread and which shouldn't?
If people prefer seeing outrageous stuff then let them have it.
The reason why governments and institutions want to control this is in order to control its people, all the other reasons given are just an attempt to mask this.
You just don't have enough contempt for humanity. The masses are unaccountable and will lie as much as they think they can get away with. It won't help them. They will lose sight of their self-interests as they become more and more detached from the facts of the world.
> Why exactly shouldn't it be beneficial if we let the market (the viewer) without any regulation decide which information should spread and which shouldn't?
1) It doesn't work. It leads to the lowest common-denominator winning.
2) Humans aren't rational.
3) The world is complicated enough that the median person simply doesn't know much about anything outside of their silo.
4) There are powerful forces conspiring to profit off of people's ignorance, rather than to turn them into less ignorant, more rational, more empathetic people, more curious people.
5) There are many people who simply aren't that curious. Left to their own devices, they will be overly susceptible to trickery and populism.
This might be a nice idea in a socially homogeneous group of a small number of like-minded farmers. It fails surely and predictably in a large group trying to make good decisions in a complex and technical world.
Read: Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes And How To Correct Them: Lessons From The New Science Of Behavioral Economics
It doesn't matter if I am rational or not, it is my freedom to consume information from whichever source I prefer just as it doesn't matter if it's justified to spend double the money on an Apple product over something from a competitor.
It's also irrelevant how you would like people to be (more rational, empathetic and so on), actually no one on this planet even cares about your opinion on that matter enough to actually change themselves. (and no one ever will, trust me)
What matters is that people are free to choose to be whatever kind of person they want to be.
Some of them choose to be persons that you don't like, well then don't be around them, issue solved.
You seem to believe that we exist to follow some great plan devised by other people who believe they are smarter and know what we should actually be instead of what we choose to be. This is not the case.
We've all seen the results of ideology that seeks to reach utopia by changing man into something elevated. (Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, North Korea, Rouge Khmer, Venezuela) It always failed in a catastrophic manner and caused often unimaginable suffering because of the authoritarianism inherent in this ideology.
We've learned enough neuroscience to know that humans make predictable systemic errors in judgement. This is when pursuing their own preferences, not someone else's preferences.
This has real effects that harm other people. Do what you want to yourself. The problem is when you harm others due to your own ignorance or avoidable biases.
None of the big bad movements you mention were genuinely trying to make humans into better thinkers. In fact, they all relied on humans not being such great thinkers.
That's why we have courts where you can claim damages.
> None of the big bad movements you mention were genuinely trying to make humans into better thinkers. In fact, they all relied on humans not being such great thinkers.
Oh really? The Soviet man, the Übermensch as understood by the Nazis and all similar Socialist concepts are then completely new to you? Some of these concepts are pretty close to what you described a person should be like.
You seem to be pattern matching on certain features and neglecting that details matter.
How can conscientious teachers or coaches exist in your worldview?
Surely educators are all evil because they dare to seek to improve people. Education has been used as a pretext to imprison people in oppressive regimes therefore education is evil. Absurd!
I have no issue with education and teaching without coercion, what you are proposing though is use of force to prevent spread of information you do not like or that might cause people to reject your ideology.
This is the real issue here. You are arguing in favour of using force (the basis of Socialism) while I'm arguing for freedom. (the basis of Capitalism)
And please don't tell me that censorship or regulating media isn't really using force. You go break censorship laws in countries that have them and lets see what they will do to you.
You can't win against clickfarmers and clickbait networks.
No machine learning will save you from botters as the lion share of commercial botters live in a country from which most of the math research behind machine learning is coming from.
In Russia, few people will start an advertising network startup in their sane mind, commercial scale clickfraud, farming, and botting give an order of magnitude higher returns.
The term "Internet marketing business" is used mostly as an euphemerism for all of the aforesaid here.
That's what happens when you try to control other's speech. You will be blamed for bias, and the worst thing the accusations would be completely correct, because humans are biased. Humans have opinions, humans have cognitive biases, humans are prone to groupthink and a long list of fallacies. It is extremely hard work to get even close to objectivity, let alone achieve it - professional scientists who are trained and have tons of tools to avoid biases still regularly fail and produce irreproducible results and wishful thinking papers that are then debunked - for somebody involved in politics where there's no such tools it's doubly hard. Hoping Facebook somehow magically solves this problem for us is naive at best.
Misinformation? They got caught using humans, to manually sort through the trending stories, and prune stories that were anti-Hillary. The stories they are referring to I'm guessing are wiki-leaks? Not fallacies, but instead, things that the authors didn't originally intend the public to see. There is a big difference. And the reason they had to stop tweaking the trending stories feed, was because they were creating a large mis-trust across their platform. They were literally doing the opposite of what this story claims..... They were censoring free speech, to further their agenda. What they were doing is no different then places like CNN claiming that certain Wikileaks are not based on fact. CNN went as far as to tell their viewers that it was illegal to read the Wikileaks emails. They claimed only employees of the media were permitted to legally read the emails. Facebook is now claiming that they should have censored things like wikileaks, without telling anyone, just delete them. However, CNN is not now claiming they should have told more people it was illegal to read the wikileaks that aren't true.(they were gmail dkim verified). But Facebook however now claiming that they should silently remove more stories which don't further their agenda. This is going to be a nightmare when shareholders start having an issue with stories like these. As soon as people start realizing the truth, people will flee the platform.
"This article criticizes Facebook for firing the human editors that had been keeping things sane."
Read your comment. Let's think. What you mean is, Facebook fired human editors, who they contracted out moderation to. They contracted this job out, and kept it on the down low, because it was a breach of their promise with users of their platform. "keeping things sane." What exactly does this comment mean? What you mean by that, I assume, is 'don't allow anything to trend that might upset the leftist 'social justice warriors.' In other words, keeping things sane, meant don't allow posts to trend, that contradict, or prove false, the beliefs of the people whose primary mechanism of accomplishing agenda, is to 'get triggered' or to freak out, cause a scene, cry foul. The primary class of posts that could have or as Facebook claims 'should have' been censored, were Wikileaks. The Wikileaks were DKIM verified, and of reliable source. They were however not in the best interest of the left. They helped Donald Trump win. They spread the word, that Hillary Clinton was lying about a plethora of different things. These "Social Justice Warriors' believe that the US, themselves, and Hillary herself deserve to be president. Their response to people posting anti-Hillary ads, memes, leaks, or posts, is to flame them. Attack them. So what you are claiming, is that Facebook should have done a better job, of keeping things sane; a better job of limiting contradictory ads, statements, and shares from Hillary's opponent or opposing voters. Facebook was extremely sane during the weeks leading to election. Any insanity before election day I assume, was people have arguments or conversations on each others posts, discussing who to vote for. Are you suggesting that we should have silenced these debates? Are you suggesting we should have blocked Trump ads? I pushed a lot of content on Twitter and Facebook, and the majority of it was generated by users on Reddit. I have a list of 75 top ten trending Hashtags, which were removed from twitter by moderators. They were removed from the trending list. The list of 75 hashtags, are entirely non-violent, non-harrassing, and simply brief descriptions of illegal or unsettling things that Hillary Clinton said or did during her time in office. They are summaries of quotes from Wikileaks emails. Are you telling me that removing those hash tags was simply a peace-keeping measure? Are you saying that this was not blatant censorship to push Twitter's own agenda?
> Now they are in a situation where they are damned if they do, damned if they don't. And people immersed in echo chambers will accuse them of bias no matter what.
What if they simply change the algorithm to perform some graph clustering/principal component analysis on the stories that are shared organically among groups and then inject let's say 10% stories that are disproportionally shared by other clusters, but not this one?
The granularity could be tweaked to chunk everything into let's say ~5 clusters per nationality and language.
The machines do not have to assess facts, they just have to allow people to see beyond their friend-horizon. So call it the bubble-burster.
Maybe their AI should be trained to fact check stuff posted on Facebook?
So if you post something that claim outrageous things, it would be visible right from the start that the claim is false.
The solution is simple, stop being gullible and stupid trusting things you hear or read without something credible to back it up.
Facebook has it's own bias, most people do. Some professional reviewers and political commentators try to be as unbiased as humanly possible, but why blindly trust them, even if that's their intention, there is nothing that say they cannot just be factually wrong.
Well that's patently not a true statement. The Guardian, the NY Times, and Der Spiegel are the first three publications that do important investigations that come to mind but they are not alone.
There are a lot of PR plants even in the more reputable newspapers, which is unfortunate, but there are still regular thorough investigations, which I assume are getting harder to do as money and resources continue to shrink.
The blind NYTimes bias has been readily apparent in this election cycle. WaPo as well. The entire media system missed this election.
A staffer in the Obama White House remarked on the quality of reporting now, as of a few months ago:
"All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus. Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing."
That said, NYT performed some significant investigative reporting. Though Gawker broke the Clinton private email server story, the New York Times vastly expanded the investigation and brought the story into the mainstream.
The statement that the entire media system missed the election is an exaggeration. One function of the NYT, the election prediction section, failed. It shouldn't reflect on the various investigative reporters doing actual digging.
I would recommend reading this commentary, from the political director of CBS News, today:
"The mood in the Washington press corps is bleak, and deservedly so.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that, with a few exceptions, we were all tacitly or explicitly #WithHer, which has led to a certain anguish in the face of Donald Trump’s victory. More than that and more importantly, we also missed the story, after having spent months mocking the people who had a better sense of what was going on.
This is all symptomatic of modern journalism’s great moral and intellectual failing: its unbearable smugness. Had Hillary Clinton won, there’s be a winking “we did it” feeling in the press, a sense that we were brave and called Trump a liar and saved the republic."
This. Their aggregator is ridiculously bad. Even the sources of news it shows you when you click on a "trending" item lead to really terrible sites. I'd rather the news feed be an actual news feed and show me legit news from legit agencies.
Let's be frank here: Free speech and facebook never go together. They want to present as a respectable forum where prominent people like politicians can have their platform (same with Twitter). That needs some kind of filtering. And, as we saw with pretty much the entire American press, as soon as you start filtering and selecting, you start to induce gross biases and distortions of the truth. The truth only comes out in a clutter of contradicting opinions, engaging discussions, pieces of evidence and leaked materials. Of course, that is an ugly mess not many people want to put up with.
> The truth only comes out in a clutter of contradicting opinions, engaging discussions, pieces of evidence and leaked materials
It feels like we're way beyond that. It's degenerated to the point of two tribes who no longer have any "shared truth" from which to argue. If I see a post of Facebook saying that Obama has instituted martial law in New York, how can I convince the 4364 people liking it that it's a lie? If I point out that the New York Times would probably write about it, I'll just get laughed at.
The truth seriously fared a lot better in times where newspapers and a few TV stations acted as completely undemocratic arbitrators.
I think it may be worse than two tribes. Its a million tribes with limited overlap in what they consider the truth, but all having a large megaphone that cuts across tribal lines while still building bubbles.
My analogy is breaking down. I don't think we understand how the complete removal of barriers to publishing are changing society. Nor do we understand how to cope with it. A bunch of folks just elected an authoritarian to "guide" the way.
I disagree. I think things like Wikileaks and independent, small blogs and feeds contributed a vast amount to this election - knowledge about Clinton that we would have never had otherwise. (And I say this as someone who supported neither candidate, and if I was an US citizen I would have probably thrown my vote away)
It seems abundantly clear that the problem isn't low-quality content in the feed. That's unavoidable. It's the very small trickle of high-quality content in the feed – content from actual people who want to contribute to Facebook. There isn't much of it. And Facebook wants to show a fresh feed every refresh.
Having uninstalled Facebook from my phone and being too lazy to login on it from my primary computer (2fa) I only look at the feed maybe once every other day. Amazing how much better it is. Relevant and interesting stuff from real friend I care about, no junk. I can recommend that to everyone.
You think the users are too stupid to fact check. But what makes you think the users care about the truth anyway?
More often than not they double down with "well it's emblematic of the greater problem" or something to that effect. They then look for new evidence to support their views. Like it or not, some sites are designed to build echo chambers and are not for general discourse.
When playing identity politics, agreeing with a blatant lie is expected when you need to affirm the narrative of your tribe. If you don't, you're a heretic and not a true believer.
A lot of people don't care. They believe an image on facebook that reaffirms their belief.
You try to counter with statistics from the FBI, DOJ, BLS, DOL, or any other organization and the numbers are 'made up'. And studies have been done that when presented with counter arguments it strengthens the original misperceptions.
Corrections also don't get much traction. I've seen many conspiracy theories pop up for a week, then die down. While the correct gets no traction at all.
>As a result, the corrections fail to reduce misperceptions for the most committed participants. Even worse, they actually strengthen misperceptions among ideological subgroups in several cases.
The problem is that there are no organizations that can give out unbiased facts. This includes the FBI, DOJ, etc. If you have grown up in a household that were in opposition to either of these organizations (and that could be either democract or republican, I can't imagine a poor black person in the Ghetto likes the FBI more than a Montana rancher), why should you trust their statistics? Heck even if you do trust them, don't forget the old saying: lies, damned lies and statistics.
Except it isn't just the spread of misinformation. Even more important (IMHO) is the insulating effect of showing people only like-minded opinions, effectively trapping everyone in a bubble. I can't think of any way Facebook can solve this problem without drastically decreasing their reliance on ad revenue. What are they going to do, force people to view opinions they disagree with?
Everyone should be responsible for the curation of their own timeline. I barely use Facebook but hate the idea that I didn't get a straight chronological feed.
I was a huge fan of Twitter but was driven away when they followed suit. My reasons had more to do with my own preference of how I enjoy using the service, but having algorithms manipulate the information I see so as to maximize engagement metrics is even more troubling.
It's illusory. They may or may not, based on their algorithms, bump something old to the top of your feed after it gets a like or a new comment. They call it "most recent" and they can define "recent" the way they want to.
It wouldn't even work. Reread the news you found that you agreed with - how much of it is simply restating the same basic things and calling the other side evil, stupid, etc, at least indirectly?
If somebody with different believes than you were forced to read those, do you think the resulting society was more or less polarized?
The kind of content you need to do that is already disadvantaged since it has to be toned way down, and that makes it less much less likely to be shared in the first place.
Can't wait until they do the opposite in case of free speech then get sued by people who can't deal with their emotions and accept them. Some of them are already out protesting (and some "protesting" with destroying property[1]).
But hey I guess helicopter parenting and after that safe-space culture they grew in can only get you so far.
Misinformation is not a right-wing phenomenon, as much as it appears to be a comfort food for the Left these days.
It's very telling that the "obvious" solution for the defeated party is a more powerful stranglehold on the flow of information, to appoint the "right" people to curate reality for those who cannot be trusted with it.
In which case, it's going to be a long sojourn in the wilderness my friends...
Good luck with that. Reddit's failed at it. Twitter's failed at it. It's almost always bundled with some sort of hate speech or political rhetoric that triggers swaths of people when they feel like they're being silenced.
I tend to agree—I think that the more we get upset by these sorts of behaviors, the more it encourages them. "Don't feed the trolls" is really the only thing that works, and it's a pretty miserable experience to have nothing you can do about harassment.
Which isn't to say I disapprove of reddit, twitter et al removing hate speech; just that it's a very late and reactive solution to a problem that seems inherent in social media.
Really, all we can do is improve filtering, and facebook seems almost ideologically opposed to increasing user control over the content they see. So I don't see facebook being a pleasant place to visit in the near future.
Err, citation needed. Preferably by someone employed by Reddit. If it's just the subreddit.... I don't know what to tell you beyond "find better ones".
It is a temporary aberration. In due course, people will come to realize that they can't believe everything they read on the internet (duh), especially where provenance is not clear, and Facebook will improve their algorithms.
Some kind of reasonable balance will be found.
People blaming Facebook for Trump is far more a reflection of themselves than of FB news algorithms.
I certainly do not blame Facebook for Trump, but I don't see any balance happening anytime soon. It's not just an issue of the Internet, but also with traditional forms of media like cable TV, talk radio and print. Distrust and misinformation are shoveled out daily. Even the local pastor is in on the action these days.
Wouldn't Facebook have the perverse incentive to define 'misinformation' to be any information which offends the most people, regardless of truth, in order to keep users from leaving
Of course. Worse, they actually have two different strategic factors that play poorly together:
1.) Retain users
2.) Have a personal bias about what will offend users
These two items can magnify each other in a false direction as they attempt to retain users that they perceive they have.
The timing of this announcement does not seem to help assuage fears that facebook was using its platform to push an agenda. It was this accusation that initially forced them to switch from human editors to an algorithm for trending news. I suspect that we as a country are going to have a conversation regarding the nature of privately held nearly public spaces on the internet and what their obligation to us is, if any.
this is what I would propose. Attach a very visible rating on each story shared from all news sources, the rating says how much the news source holds to it's journalistic integrity. There should be a very clear criteria that facebook holds it's news content providers to. If you click on the rating of a low rated news source, you should be shown exactly what extremely misleading articles they have published in the past, these reviews should also be tagged so you can view it directly if someone is spreading misinformation on the news feed.
I read somewhere that Facebook isn't liable for information posted there, that the user's posting the information is the liable party. Here in Sweden, that's not how news organizations work. Here, whatever they publish they are liable for, regardless of who originally wrote it.
I know Facebook isn't a news organization, but it's treading a fine line isn't it? At some point one might argue that by being an aggregator and driving a large portion of its engagement in the sharing of stories is akin to being a publisher, and thus should be held liable for the things it publishes – regardless of who pulled the trigger. Of course, this would be a huge liability for Facebook, and a growth inhibitor because all of a sudden, a story going viral isn't exactly a good thing if it means they can easily be sued for libel.
I'm not a lawyer (probably obvious given the above) but I think it's a bit strange that given Facebook's position they can so easily get away with a "wasn't me!" kind of attitude to misinformation and straight up lies being spread around presented as though the stories were in fact news.
I'm not a lawyer either, but I don't think what worked in Sweden will work for the US. Not only is it hard to sue people for libel, but content sites like YouTube fought pretty to hard to make sure they couldn't be responsible for things other people post on their sites (as long as they promptly respond to DCMA notices).
I think what you're miss is the safe harbor parts of the DMCA in the USA. They offer protection for any user generated content on the web provided the operators respond to DMCA requests within a certain time (24h?). Without these safe harbor provisions the idea is that the web would crumble under the weight of liability. Think about shared hosting companies, AWS, a public forum like this and then consider how much effort it would take to police the amount of content being created by users.
In corporate speak "misinformation" is defined as "any information that doesn't support our narrative". Certainly it is the goal of Facebook, the government, and every other large media corporation to control the flow of information. You need look no farther then Obama's recent statement that news needs to be "curated" by government appointed gatekeepers, to filter out all that pesky information that doesn't jive with government propaganda.
>"We are going to have to rebuild within this wild-wild-west-of-information flow some sort of curating function that people agree to," Obama said at an innovation conference in Pittsburgh.
Why do you think that the curation is going to be done by the government or by government appointed gatekeepers?
I can see that interpretation, but I don't think that's what he meant. To me, he's saying that those platforms should develop their own systems in a way that's acceptable to them.
Same noises coming from Europe -- today, it was Schäuble proffering this "lesson" from the US election. The degree to which the news in this country is censored or distorted is frankly maddening, and to my mind, ultimately self-defeating.
For example, until half a year ago, important details in articles about terrorism were left out, but you could still sort of fill in the blanks yourself. Now, every single article about an incident has the same stock phrase: "Hintergrund und Motiv der Tat sind noch völlig unklar", and nothing else.
The elision of all details is supported by the flimsiest of justifications, namely that the terrorists relish and are spurned by the media attention (as if their religious fanaticism doesn't play the major role). There is, of course, not a shred of evidence for this contention, except for the opinion of a handful of "experts". It seems to me that a terrorist attack is newsworthy. That newspapers refuse to report details (say, by interviewing a witness) is an awful abrogation of their duty. Sometimes reading the news here feels like living in Soviet Russia.
Yes. Tread lightly here. If you designate some power to determine what's good information and what's bad, you're headed down a pretty slippery slope.
Note: I really don't have an issue with Facebook doing this if they want. They're a company after all, not the government. I can just choose to get the information they deem 'bad' elsewhere.
I do object. They may be a private entity but they control a humongous amount of information flow which puts them in a very public position. We may argue where to draw the line but this extreme consolidation of user attention to a few gatekeepers is a problem for the public and needs to be dealt with by the public.
In order to be acceptable to the general public you need to represent a wide array of contradicting opinions. If your propaganda is too bland it will be rejected in increasing numbers and turning up the volume then will only make people close their ears. I don't think it is easy to run such a system but I do think it works pretty well most of the time.
"We are going to have to rebuild within this wild-wild-west-of-information flow some sort of curating function that people agree to," Obama said at an innovation conference in Pittsburgh.
"There has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those that we have to discard, because they just don't have any basis in anything that's actually happening in the world"
I have no ponies in this race. Counterbalance - charitable interpretation:
"We [the people or the government - does not matter really] are going to have to rebuild within this wild-wild-west-of-information flow some sort of curating function that people [the people] agree to,"
If I interpret "We" as "the government" it still does not matter if "the people" can agree on it as in functioning democracy.
"There has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we [the people] can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those that we [the people] have to discard, because they just don't have any basis in anything that's actually happening in the world"
I think it would be relatively easy to have an "auto-snopes" feature which detects a URL being shared and immediately attaches a post that says "this has been debunked by X"
For example - I've seen dozens of links to Michael Moore's trumpland speech which strategically ends with the phrase "America will elect Trump and it will feel great"
He concludes:
Yes, on November 8, you Joe Blow, Steve Blow,
Bob Blow, Billy Blow, all the Blows get to go
and blow up the whole goddamn system because
it's your right. Trump's election is going to
be the biggest fuck ever recorded in human
history and it will feel good.
EDIT - I feel like I should clarify I mean "auto-snopes" figuratively. Auto fair-balance might be a better descriptor. Something that links to an opposing opinion automatically, in cases of absolute falsehood the debunking, or even a CSS CLASS where there is a bright red "FALSE" wrapper.
Snopes doesn't have to be the automatic choice.
Breaking filter-bubbles & ensuring truth would be my goal on an idea like this. Not strictly "promoting liberal media"
I have personally asked an individual why they don't trust snopes.
Their claim is that it's a Democrat rag towel and shill.
I then ask, then what fact-checker would you trust?
Their response: None of them.
Congratulations. We've reached a point, for this individual, where "facts" as decided in the common forum are suspect and the only thing they trust is themselves (and whatever non-Mainstream Media they listen to). We have reached a point where the only truth is what they decide is the truth.
That is a non-trivial problem to resolve. If we can't even agree what basic facts are, there is no way to even have a discussion.
Well, for a start we'd need some form of fact checking that was actually about just the facts rather than political spin, and that's really hard to do once politics becomes involved. Even purely factual questions like whether someone said something or not become blurry.
For example, take the child rape trial Hillary Clinton was a defence attorney for, in which she claimed that an unspecified person had told her the victim "is emotionally unstable with a tendency to seek out older men and to engage in fantasizing" and "has in the past made false accusations" to justify putting her through a nasty court-ordered psychiatric exam. Is this the same as Hillary herself making the claims? The original viral version and the victim saw it this way. Snopes argued that this was a lie because the document showed that other people had made the claims, neglecting to mention that the interpretation and wording was Hillary's and the existence and honesty of these other people rested entirely on her word. Neither of these is inherently more truthful than the other, it's a question of which spin is politically convenient.
This is probably the most clear-cut example imaginable too, since it's about the contents of a court filing. Most of the world is a lot more factually unclear, visible only through a lens of conflicting evidence and multiple sources of information.
I have personally seen people turn away from Fox News after an excess of anti-Trump coverage; though I guess by now Fox is prolific enough to reliably called Mainstream Media.
Generally those fact checking sites will link to sources. It's much easier to find sources through them then to go digging through the emails manually.
However, I fail to see why Wikileaks is considered a Fact-checker, or how this pertains to a belief that NO fact-checker is reliable. Are you claiming that Wikileaks is trustworthy and can replace a fact-checker, but isn't a fact-checker? Because that seems a bit circular and oxymoronic to me.
Perhaps if you provided an alternative fact-checker source? The person in my original post has written off all fact-checking period.
You are being invited to look at "raw data" which is actually filtered, has important information retained for collateral and insurance, and decides when to release things for "maximum impact". To consider this alternative somehow a totally unbiased and impossible to refute thing just because it was founded in the internet era is absurd. It is run by human beings, it is not simply a "upload files here and instantly distribute them" tool. They have their own inherent bias and it is dangerous to consider receiving information that detailed and classified to assume that nobody else dealing in classified information has anything to hide. Obviously people will look bad if you get to snoop through all their trash, but the neighbour was the one who actually let you snoop in their trash, and they won't let you look in their trash either.
As you can see, journalistic integrity is lacking from both sides of the political spectrum. Please do not get all high-and-mighty and think you're better than everyone else, because you would be falling into the same trap you mock others for. I hope in the future you will examine sources with a more objective view and keep an open mind, and not just believe whatever someone wants you to believe so they can make a quick buck off of your ignorance.
In fairness, I should mention that by "auto snopes" I mean "implement an auto-debunker" or even just "auto fair balance" which automatically adds "the other side" to anything linked on facebook.
I have no hat in the ring with respect to which side publishes the truth, I just think that if something is FALSE facebook could alter their UI to immediately debunk something.
Like the other quote of Trump saying "I'd run as a republican because they're the dumbest" could have a big "FALSE - he never said that" right underneath.
People who thought it was funny could still post it until their hearts were content - but nobody would be FOOLED
Thanks for clarifying that! I don't have any skin in this game either, and I agree it might be helpful to have an auto-bias feature, but it needs to be completely transparent and open so we can fact-check the fact-check checkers ourselves :) Someone must fact-check the fact checkers, and facebook should do their best to ensure this is possible with any system they decide to implement.
Come on. You've highlighted one staff member as having once mentioned having a personal political leaning (like most people do) and that she once worked at a blog with a tarnished reputation and spun that into implying Snopes is untrustworthy. I'm sure you could meet this extremely low bar of "proof" for practically any news organization.
If you really want to present a case of bias, find some real evidence. Specific articles with specific instances of false or misleading information. Otherwise, you're just sowing doubt by casting aspersions based on vague associations.
This post wasn't meant to be a thorough debunking of Kim and snopes. I actually think snopes does a mostly good job of producing accurate information. However, it does show in some cases, such as the Hillary Libya "We didn't lose one person" question from the debate. http://www.snopes.com/hillary-clinton-benghazi-msnbc/
Snopes and Kim claim "Hillary Clinton overlooked Benghazi victims when she said that "we didn't lose a single person in Libya" during a campaign event on MSNBC." is false. However, reading the article for her evidence, you can observe that Kim accepts Clinton lying by omission by saying the conversation was not about Benghazi.
Looking at this from a high level, Clinton is implying the the Benghazi attack is a completely unrelated event from the USA's war in Libya. However, these two events are both part of the Libyan intervention and it's disingenuous from Clinton to make such a claim because as a result of the Libyan intervention, Americans did die. Clinton is obviously playing a political game to play down the negative consequences of the Libyan intervention. I don't blame her for doing this, by the way. I would too if I wanted to be president.
Just because they didn't die in the initial confrontation doesn't mean "No Americans died." Snopes fails to point out the fact that Clinton does not include Benghazi in the overall Libyan confrontation. Let's say I am in a car accident with someone, and they are injured. If 6 months later, they have complications and die from the injuries I caused with the initial car accident, I am still responsible for the death of the individual.
Left wing bias: No Americans died in the initial confrontation with the Libyan government.
Right wing bias: Clinton killed Americans in Libya.
Neutral bias: Clinton made a decision to support the invasion of Libya. As a result of the invasion, Americans died in Benghazi.
> Neutral bias: Clinton made a decision to support the invasion of Libya. As a result of the invasion, Americans died in Benghazi.
Even that statement could be twisted if you draw the conclusion that Clinton supported the invasion, people died, therefore she is partly responsible. And it's missing information about the "600 requests for additional security".
I do understand and agree with your point.
Perhaps the more important issue is that some voters have an overly simplistic world view. "Casualties from an attack on a diplomatic enclave in a volatile country" should be separate from "US Foreign policy had implications for the conflict in Libya".
Agreed, the unbiased statement could definitely use some more words to show it's an opinion that Clinton COULD be responsible for the result, but it's not black and white. It's just frustrating that people don't recognize that yes, snopes, in general, is a trustworthy source. However, snopes is a group of people, each with their own individual biases.
These biases can occasionally influence the content. To treat these sources as some kind of perfect "machine" that can just be unleashed onto facebook to automatically say "You're wrong, this is how it really happened." is a scary thought. Especially when the process and machine are blackbox and we don't have any way to verify which "facts" are being pushed, by whom, and for what reasons. And when you bring up the fact that there might be bias, you become one of _those_ people, like you're some kind of conspiracy nut for asking questions.
I think that happened this election. The polls all said "Clinton crushes Trump." Anyone that asked about the validity of those polls was mocked and laughed at and seen as some kind of rightwing conspiracy nut.
Well, turns out they were dead wrong and maybe if people recognized their unconscious bias, we wouldn't have a president Trump right now and people would have said "Holy $@&* these polls are wrong we need to change our strategy so we can win." I kept repeating to people, don't underestimate Trump, he's smarter than you give him credit for and he's a huge threat to Clinton. Nothing but jokes and mockery from the majority of democrats I talked to.
Trump was a massive supporter of going into Libya[1] and doing "something" about Gaddafi. These world leaders are stuck with the hard problem of satisfying dumb idiots at home who think that the US can wave a wand and stop people across the sea from killing each other because it sucks seeing the poor brown people kill each other, yet they are only doing so because we meddled in their affairs before, and yet we are proposing to solve it by meddling in their affairs more. The US, including Trump, asked for Libya, and now Clinton is on the hook because the US population is too misinformed to understand why Libya is on edge, why it was America's fault, and why there will be no easy solution because, again, until America stops doing this it won't stop.
This is the issue. Americans don't know what they want and are mad because they feel like they somehow have a special place in the world everyone else is "stealing" from them somehow. This attitude is "anti-American" because it is the unfortunate truth, and America just voted that the truth hurts but it would rather blame it on the immigrants and mexicans and muslims. This is scary. You cannot have the attitude that you somehow have a god-given "right" to jobs in your country, and that filthy immigrants are stealing them because they are bad people. Conservatives feel like the government is a credit card they can use to get more when they want it, no matter what the consequence for the rest of the world. This entitlement is a style of attitude and thinking that is guaranteed to cause global conflict, and is the inevitable end of a culture war between western thinking and other powers. Obama proposed to fix this by being basically an apologist and reparist for the rest of the world, but the rest of the world is so fucked up because of America's history of trying to decide what's best for it that it is starting to turn on America, and deciding it doesn't really need them any more. This stubborness is war-mongering and why it is better to have free trade and globalism rather than using literal direct conflict to solve perceived differences between countries.
The problem these 'fact' checkers have become leftist doctrines... You just point to snopes or politifact and that is end of discussion? That's not how the world works. Wikileaks is a far more credible source than either of these. People need to do their own research if they want to form conclusions not just little to prepackaged conclusions.
I would argue that wikileaks on it's own can also be very misleading. Reading emails out of context and without knowing if they've been altered is probably not the best way to get a full picture. The value add of media looking at them is they can also go and get other sources to add context or to corroborate what they are reading in the wikileaks releases. Sources which aren't available to everyone. It's also easy to be fooled into seeing things as nefarious which are in the end benign when given context.
Give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, and I would find something in them to have him hanged.
... and now Wikileaks has invited the whole internet to come play Richelieu with them, only with ten thousand times the ammunition the Cardinal (apocryphally) asked for. The online mob has been accusing (eg) Podesta and his correspondents of all kinds of insane things - from corruption & arms dealing to satanism & child abduction - based on the flimsiest of cherry-picked quotes, even when the context (beyond the leaks, within them, even in the very same email sometimes) showed without doubt that their claims were obvious bunk.
And Assange merrily fed into that: drawing spurious connections on his twitter feed; linking/retweeting the fever dreams of naked partisans; and dragging out a single dump into an episodic drip-fed spectacle, all the better to whip his fans into an inquisitorial vigilante frenzy.
"wikileaks on it's own can also be very misleading"? I can't argue with that - except perhaps to say it's far too charitable.
There's a lot of stuff in wikileaks that merits investigation but the MSM never did their job. Just wholesale dismissal from comedianchors like John Oliver. Not surprising that the MSM were asleep at the wheel when it came to predicting the outcome, or that most of the country no longer trusts them.
>... and now Wikileaks has invited the whole internet to come play Richelieu with them
But why do you think that the whole internet wants to play the part of Richelieu, everyone is allowed to choose the role they want and wikileaks does not hide the context of the emails, everyone is perfectly able to check the whole correspondence. If anything the mass media is hiding the context because of their format and time limits.
Wikileaks is being unbiased by claiming to be entirely unbiased on what they choose to release (yes, they CHOOSE what they want to release, what to save for insurance, etc.) yet not acknowledging the dangerous false equivalency of saying that this system implies there is no possible way that the other party would do the same things. Until we have equal information about both sides, this is dangerous. Wikileaks gets to be the unfair arbiter of truth while claiming total transparency that we know doesn't exist.
Oh I'm not saying that they could not be faked or altered. And to be honest when you have a supposedly accurate track record like this it's a perfect brewing storm for someone to come in and exploit it.
But dismissing them as Russian hacking didn't really give a lot of people the choice to make up for themselves. Yes I believe according to wikileaks that the DNC colluded with media and fact checking orgs and pushed their agenda too far. I read the information and made up my mind. So when someone points to Politifact again I'll do the same. Not saying they can't be saved but it's the idea of looking at it as doctrine from the start with a stamp of 'True' or 'False' that I don't like. Things are never that simple.
Wikileaks has it's own issues - the suggestions of Russian influence, the timing of their data releases, questions about Assages political bias against the US/Clintons etc.
"People need to do their own research if they want to form conclusions not just little to prepackaged conclusions." - I could not agree more.
The way I understand, they've been burned before by leaking all at the same time - there's an initial "shock", theneveryone forgets about it. If your purpose is generating the maximum amount of outrage and controversy (and, consequentially, change), it makes sense to publish things slowly.
Although I agree that the timing was probably connected with the US elections. But again, that's a good think - the only way organisations will change is if it will hurt them. Now both US parties know that they can easily be targets next time.
So is Wikileaks an organization interested in free information, or using "free information" for maximum political effect? If they are twisting the knife and trying to find out how to cause the maximum possible damage for one side only, then they are clearly not a neutral organization and obviously should be treated as such. If their goal is maximum political discourse, then they are obviously a political organization, not an information or "truth" organization.
Why do you think they wouldn't be causing damage for the other side, if they could? I mean, even if they had emails of the GOP, I doubt it would really hurt Trump in any way, it's not like he had their support anyways... Actually, it would probably help him!
I should also clarify that I'm not saying snopes is the end-all fact-checker. I would have been curious and explored any alternative, "non-liberal" fact-checker.
My point is that this individual has written off all fact-checking as an entire discipline. They are the final arbiter of truth. That fundamentally prohibits discussion of almost anything, or at least makes it extraordinarily labor intensive.
One might counter-argue, well, start with their beliefs and work outwards to illustrate contradictions and such. Very Kantian. Except that is 1) very labor intensive, and 2) doesn't cover all issues.
Well, is there a fact-checker that doesn't claim Trump's very unenthusiastic acceptance of war with Iraq when asked by surprise on the Howard Stern show means that Trump is somehow lying when he says he didn't support the war?
It's stuff like this, turning a single reluctant "I guess so" or "probably" or "it seems we should" into support, that make supposed fact-checkers suspect. Who will fact-check the fact checkers? The supposed fact-checkers were just another political weapon, tainted as could be.
Fact checkers are like certificate authorities. Once you lose credibility, you might as well close shop. You're done.
He said "I guess so" before the war started, and then started opposing it when others started opposing it. That's hardly the political courage he was attempting to convey here, especially when he says "I was against the Iraq war from the start"
I haven't seen the video yet, so this is just my interpretation.
Asking about Iraq war at the time was similar to asking "Should we try to stop ISIS?" now. I'd give 80% courage credits to whoever that dare saying "I'm not sure, I guess so".
All in all, unless Trump had access to more information than the general populace, it doesn't matter whether he opposed or supported it. We decidedly didn't have enough info to make a sound judgement, and the conclusion we made - be it correct or not - would merely be a metaphorical coin toss.
>Congratulations. We've reached a point, for this individual, where "facts" as decided in the common forum are suspect and the only thing they trust is themselves (and whatever non-Mainstream Media they listen to). We have reached a point where the only truth is what they decide is the truth. //
This is similar to the UK going in to the Brexit vote. Politicians that were promoting the break away from Europe were pushing hard the idea that "we don't need experts" and that listening to expert opinions was wrong (listening to experts like pro-Brexit economists who stated, in common with the anti-s, that Britain would be financially worse off leaving Europe).
It's like the media managed to spin the idea that all people who have rigorously studied something are not to be trusted. The biggest wtf is that it worked, writing a big fat lie in big fat letters on a bus trumps (heh!) countless professors of economics telling the people it's a lie.
The trap is to conclude that people are idiots, postmodernism is not really the reason either I feel. The reason IMO is that the media have become very very good at manipulating people's thought processes and feeding them a position with out resorting to having the person think through that position. Yay, we've won, the media can now make us all believe whatever they want.
But don't panic all those rich politicians and business people are sure to use their powers for good ... /s
Snopes did put out a lot of articles this season where the claim of "false" seemed to hinge on some sort of hair-splitting rather than the core of the claim being inaccurate.
It's reasonable to not trust a media outlet until it's earned your trust. Until then, cross check with the source material, as more often than not, journalists spin and filter the information in their product.
By the way, Snopes is not a common forum and is edited by a very small team. It is a single point of failure and is easily biased. No one entity should be the gatekeeper of truth.
I too don't trust "any of them". I don't trust news sites or channels at all anymore, because there aren't any that even _pretend_ to be impartial. The biggest loser by far in this election cycle is the media, especially on the left side of the spectrum. No one will trust them again in the foreseeable future. As someone joked on Reddit: "If Donald Trump walked on water, healed cripples and turned water into wine, the headline would be: "Trump can't swim, takes jobs from doctors, and is a raging alcoholic". That's essentially how Trump's supporters perceived the media towards the end of the campaign, and in my opinion, very deservedly so. They're shameless shills, pure and simple. For the record: I don't consider Breitbart or Fox News to be a valid news source either.
the problem is the deeper fundamental philosophical conversations about truth and the meaning of truth and relativism and biases etc aren't being discussed at in the tech community let alone at FB/Twitter HQ.
Having a lil fact checker isn't as easy as adding a button to snopes.
There's bias in language itself and how even a sentence is structured. But again a deeply complex conversation nobody seems to be having in this community.
My hope is for a similar thing to exist in real-time in future political debates, where live fact-checking spits back at anyone who speaks a mis-truth, nipping B.S. in the bud.
could we shock the candidates when 3/4 fact checkers disagree? Joking (mostly) aside. I like this idea as well. I think it could replace the useless and toxic chat/twitter feed that is put on websites hosting debate streams.
Unfortunately, sites like snopes and politifact also succumb to the same type of bias as the right-wing sites. See this article where politifact was handed propaganda material from the Clinton foundation and parroted it without doing any actual checking about AIDS drugs the Clinton foundation was funding:
Everyone has an agenda, follow the money, and trust no one. Whether it's right-wing like Alex Jones or Left-wing like the Tampa Bay Times a.k.a politifact, you need to be suspicious and do your own research if you want the truth.
On the days leading up to the election, my feed was full of fake news stories. Every single one that looked fishy to me, Snopes had debunked. I posted a few replies, but I felt like it was a Sisyphean task of shoveling shit against the tide of misinformation.
Is there any hope that Facebook will do the right thing and put information ahead of profits? As a libertarian at heart, it pains to to say this, but I think the only way to fix this is government regulations. Of course it will never happen under Trump, but how else can force them to be good curators with all the power they wield.
I don't understand how this is different than any other communication medium.
Telegraph operators shouldn't feel any onus to ensure that they stop the spread of misinformation, right?
In fact, I think it is VERY detrimental for them to step in and started editing posts, bringing back the human editors. Humans have biases, ML less so.
If an algorithm decides that something is trending, even if it is "incorrect" to some interpretation of the word, then it should be treated the same. It's just a matter of principles.
the elite mainstream media and the supposed-to-be-independent reporters are the biggest losers in this election, as they took sides so strongly that the other 50% will never bother to have anything to do with them. facebook needs improvement? sure, but more important, those biased media outlets will be irrelevant for most of the people due to not only technology advancement, but also what the news industry has been doing over the last few decades, i.e. they're all so biased, that you always know what they're going to say, why bother reading there.
anyone can tell me one true independent news source in US today? there is _none_.
What about the non-elite supposedly non-mainstream media ? Like Fox News ? Who perpetrated a false story days before the election and came back to apologize for it ? They are real winners right ?
for the record I don't read fox-news and don't know what you're talking about. I read Reuters but its US news is limited, I did some study and was educated it is probably the closest to be called as a neutral source.
oddly enough the two financial news wires, Reuters and Bloomberg were the least bias. Cause they give sterile news about markets, their customers want to know how markets will go, not hear what they want.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 327 ms ] threadPrivate communication / media organizations like Facebook deciding what's acceptable and what's not would only be censorship.
One mans mischief and the causing of trouble is another persons fight for freedom.
Seriously, that's slippery slope.
https://about.twitter.com/safety/council
https://blog.twitter.com/2016/announcing-the-twitter-trust-s...
Unsurprisingly, Twitter's Safety Council members are predominantly left-leaning with ties to the (now defunct) Clinton campaign. I would presume there are plenty of seats to be filled now.
(Spoiler alert: Twitter basically doesn't moderate anything and their department responsible for handling abuse reports doesn't do anything)
I do think that they manually curate their trending sidebar. After Comey announced that the emails on the Wiener laptop were cleared by the FBI, the sidebar looked like this: http://i.imgur.com/9LW0iaU.png
Now, since when do hashtags get an explanation underneath them? Who wrote that explanation and why? Why doesn't it show the amount of tweets below it like every other trend? I had never seen that before.
And in this particular case, if they did manually put that there, I think they're vindicated in the sense that they're actively trying to not spread misinformation. Because if I had gone on twitter and saw "Comey" trending, and I hadn't read about the announcement that she'd been cleared, I'd simply think that a lot of Americans were talking about it within the context of an ongoing investigation, and I'd get the sense that twitter users were collectively rallying against Clinton, rather than for her.
And that, in essence, is the real problem that I have with manual curation by FB/Google/Twitter/etc. People are underestimating how much trust the general population puts into algorithmically produced content, and how much of a betrayal of trust it is for them to inject something into that. They're underestimating just how quickly we've learned to interpret algorithmically produced content and infer certain things about it. And in spite of the fact that the sidebar could have mislead you to think something else was being expressed by those tweeting about Comey than was actually taking place, I also think the public is more aware of the shortcomings of algorithmically produced content than we give them credit for.
If I watch Fox/MSNBC/CNN/etc, I know that there's an implicit bias to the pundits and the guests and the networks themselves. I factor that into whatever content I receive from them.
But when you have Twitter trends that are organically produced 95% of the time, and you silently inject something into that, you've done something much more sinister than a news network leaning towards a particular angle. You've taken a metric that a lot of Americans trust entirely to be reflective of the whole country, and you've elevated a certain few or silenced a few others.
That's significantly more powerful. You can provide the illusion that millions of people do or don't feel a certain way. It's the most dangerous thing to happen this election cycle.
See, for example, http://thehill.com/policy/technology/279361-top-republican-d....
Now they are in a situation where they are damned if they do, damned if they don't. And people immersed in echo chambers will accuse them of bias no matter what.
But the entire system is fundamentally broken. Pay per ad incentives lead to rewarding viral content. And content that induces outrage is far more likely to go viral than pretty much anything else. Plus it goes viral before people do pesky things like fact checks. And the more of this that you have been exposed to, the more reasonable you find outrageous claims. Even if you know that the ones that you have seen were all wrong.
For an in depth treatment of the underlying issues, I highly recommend Trust Me, I'm Lying.
On the topic of "don't," an unspoken option is that Facebook simply not try to do news.
But the entire system is fundamentally broken...
Why would they persist in the face of this? Hamartia?
"If you're not a part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem."
See https://despair.com/products/consulting for the poster that I stole that from.
(I agree, though.)
(I couldn't resist)
I'm not really going for the whole slippery slope aspect, more I feel like I'm miscategorizing the problem.
Maybe the metadata on misinformation looks different from the real deal. How quickly does it spread, and through which people? No need to actually judge the content.
Would they really boot CNN?
CNN told us this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_X16_KzX1vE
They were laughably wrong: https://popehat.com/2016/10/17/no-it-is-not-illegal-to-read-...
Maybe one can claim it wasn't an intentional lie, but this guy is someone who really should have known better. So if it wasn't an intentional lie, they were negligent. Not sure where that leaves us.
It would be great if an algorithm could fight this type of content, but it probably can't.
But we can probably start with sites that publish stories like "Rudy Giuliani SLAPPED A REPORTER WITH HIS DICK last Tuesday" and that might solve enough of this problem to call it a decent win.
Yes, you can completely filter them out figuring it's not worth the effort, but the problem is that's how you form bubbles to begin with.
Might have more luck boiling them down to verifiable facts and stripping all opinions (especially every explanation of "why X did Y" or "what X means").
If there's no consensus on the "truthiness" then the default is benefit of the doubt that it's true.
I know we are all in IT, but not all problems are best solved by algorithms.
This can't be fixed at Facebook scales by building a platform that so highly incentivizes low-quality content of all kinds, then trying to stop the content so late in the cycle. The entire incentive structure has to be rethought. Unfortunately, that's probably a problem that Facebook is literally incapable of solving without going out of business, because Facebook the corporate entity is that incentive structure. To fix Facebook requires Facebook to become not-Facebook.
It's actually at its best when it is truly social, in all senses of the word. When it facilitates real communication on real issues across a broad spectrum of people. When it spreads information, not misinformation.
I agree with others that detecting misinformation in the general case likely requires a theory of mind, and so something approaching "real" AI. I also agree that FB has a serious problem on their hands. And I'm so very glad I don't use it.
[1] I advance no comment here about the correctness of that; just a comparison to illustrate what seems like an overlooked point.
The solution to not becoming a battleground which is inherantly destabilizing to the platform is to not grow, or only grow in a single direction. State up front what your targeted user base is and keep to them. NeoGAF as a "gamers only" forum will survive a very long time, for instance.
Facebook has sidestepped it by becoming a personal community for each user, but whenever they try to connect that personal community to the wider world through "shared" news, "shared" trends etc that are not personalized it causes a big ruckus.
I love idealists, but it's time to take an honest accounting of the differences between the promises of the internet and the actuality.
The fact is that large and increasing quantities of our social communication now occur online.
I'm not claiming this is salutary or calling it a good thing. I'm just stating the fact.
Not trying to be pedantic here. It's just important to sort out the terms used if any analysis is going to be useful. What's happening on facebook is not social. It's bits of data around being social. Different thing entirely. Perhaps we need a new term for whatever it is, but whatever we call it, it's not the same as face-to-face real socializing with real people.
We assume positive intent online because otherwise we get flame wars, but there's a helluva lot of body language and inflection that can take the comment you made and make it mean a dozen things. All of that is lost. And all of it is important.
In addition to the nuance, would I know severine if I saw them on the street? Miss them if they died? Remember the nice way they did X everytime we met?
We are exchanging written opinions and statements, yes. These exchanges also occur in social interactions. But we are not socializing. There's no bond here that's become stronger, no subtle nuance or interplay that we're managing at a subconscious level. For all either of us knows, the other one is a bot. Or an alien. There's no humanity here.
Let's take our relationship, for example. I've been cohabiting some of the same online spaces as you for at least the last decade. For me, you are a valued part of that ecosystem, more so than most of my physical neighbors who I chat with in person a couple times a year.
No, I wouldn't recognize you on the street, but I struggle with face blindness, so it's a weak criterion. Would I "miss you" if you died? No, but I'd certainly reflect sadly on your death if I learned about it. "Remember the nice way you did X"? No, but I have trouble coming up with such an X most people I interact with locally.
There's no humanity here.
I'm surprised you would say this. Is this a recent change in your view of online interactions or have you always felt this way? Quantitively I find about the same amount of humanity here as I do elsewhere, and qualitatively I prefer many things about what I find here to what I see when I go out in person. Are you OK?
(ps. I notice that many of the links in the sidebar of your site are broken.)
It's not the cat pic sharing that is paid for by entities with motive and interest in spreading misleading messages.
In Poland, for good half year before our presidential election, then a year after I was getting obviously paid for posts from dozens upon dozens of right wing extremists.
I am left-centrist (although my dad jokes at me that im a bolshevik). I don't have many friends who skew righ-wing either. Yet, there was my wall, chock full of sensationalist bs, for over A YEAR
Wonder how much money Facebook earned in that time just from sad little Poland
It would absolutely have to be automatically generated, but it doesn't seem impossible (just much harder NLP that Watson playing Jeopardy).
From an untrustworthy collection of input relationships, how do I produce the most reliably correct output?
Nevertheless, I agree that if anyone can do it algorithmically, it would probably be Google.
I'd like it if it was, but I've never witnessed popularity that embodies that statement.
Popular opinion is usually informed by the most often repeated narrative.
You mean government regulation a la China because some memes really are dangerous? If you increase the velocity of transmission, then even in a free system there are some dangerously infectious falsehoods that it might be in the public good to slow. Think War of the World on Facebook.
It basically needs to be serious enough to overwhelm the internal incentives of maximizing key performance indicators.
I would say they don't do so because of micro-optimized KPI targeting: they do so because they feel time on Facebook is valuable and makes them happy. If Facebook can't deliver increases in that, then optimizations only take them so far.
I can't imagine an unprecedented breaking news story that has no basis in any factual information. I'm not talking about an upvoter here, but primarily a downvoter (incongruence with accepted facts being easier to prove than vice versus).
There's no fundamentally creative step in deciding "How well does this new piece of information match pieces I previously had"?
The Allen AI group has been working on solving year 4 multiple choice science tests for about 3 years. They now score a bit over 60% correct, and that is a much easier task.
Everything has to be right for an answer option to be correct. Only one thing has to be wrong for it to be incorrect.
Choosing a random story from politifact: http://www.politifact.com/missouri/statements/2016/nov/06/ro...
Like most false stories, there is a hint of truth to this but that doesn't make it true. Politfact spends 3 pages discussing it, and concludes:
Courts did object in three cases to decisions Kander made as secretary of state. But the specifics of those cases are much more nuanced than Blunt lets on. And the claim that Kander tried to manipulate the election is, at best, unproven.
A SOTA computer system could probably parse that last paragraph I posted, but couldn't get anywhere near getting close to doing the research needed to get to that conclusion. We are years off that (I work on research in this area)
A lot of claims that were made this cycle are rooted in measured quantities where the measurements we have disagree with the claims.
If there is at least one rape or at least one illegal immigrant then it becomes subjective or contextual.
Is 3 rapes a flood? What if it is in a week in one town? What if one was by a former illegal immigrant? What if it is over the course of a year, but all 3 occurred in one day?
Is 20 illegal immigrants a flood? What if they all arrive in a town with a population of 100?
Who is "we"? Is a story about millions of illegal immigrants in Greece relevant? What if it about thousands of illegal immigrants working in Athens? What if Athens is in Georgia?
A real example:
"Broken Families: Raids Hit Athens' Immigrant Community Hard" vs "Athens crackdown shows no hospitality for illegal migrants"
One is a real headline from Georgia, the other from Greece. Can you tell which is which?
Remember that evolution favors individuals who survive & gain status, not those whose representation of the world is true. Someone who is right but killed for it (eg. Copernicus) is still dead.
The fix is for people to be aware of these cognitive biases in themselves, to actively seek out information that differs from their preconceptions, and to challenge inaccurate information (with evidence!) when presented with it. You can't outsource this to a communication platform, because it's inherently less comfortable and more effort for the reader, and the reader will just go to a competing communication platform that makes them feel better.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwagon_effect
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congruence_bias
You are right, but I hope you are aware that this would require a giant leap to an essentially superhuman state of rationality and clear thinking for a vast majority of people.
Just stop for a moment and look around you. Is that how most people actually function in this world?
For large majorities of voters, dropping that ballot in the box is over 90% an identity game.
On an individual level, being active in (non-political) hobbies and volunteer groups can help, especially ones that attract both people from the cities and the countryside.
How is this different from stereotyping then?
Fail to recognize that, and you've failed before you've started.
What we need, fundamentally, is a media environment that can harness the collective capacity of humans to vet and debate new information in an organized fashion that can be trusted. This site is a good example where a knowledgeable community, and the simple mechanism of votes does some automatic, crowd-based content curation. But the Reddit-like model is very basic - so much more could possibly be done to allow individual users to contribute to a collective process of knowledge-building.
I think we need more development and discussion devoted to what kind of systems could be designed to encourage transparency, quality, and critical analysis in our news-making.
As a kid I learnt this and tried to be as rational and aware of my fallibalities as possible.
That makes you an alien to normal human beings. Conversation becomes impossible, processing fast enough becomes impossible, and the penalties for acting weird and communicating weird are huge.
Instead you need to find a way to act in a manner that allows you to blend in with people.
He died of natural causes at 70. According to viral stories at the time, moments after having seen the first print of his book.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno
People may also confuse Bruno with Galileo Galilei, who was punished by the Inquisition for his defense of Copernican theory, but not executed.
I'm not saying that one smart game is going to fix the entire problem, but adding the development of logic skills into the types of activities that people enjoy doing on Facebook is definitely possible.
Other humans are taking advantage of those gaps to mobilize votes or advertisements.
There's no way out and I've been wondering when people would realize the depth and intricacy of the mess we're in. Hopefully people pay more attention to the way cognitive cheat code are being abused.
Hopefully a protocol to deal with it can be made.
Exactly right. This should be strongly emphasized in our educational curriculum.
It's almost as if the way we understand and use money has hardened into a giant screwball of lies, base instincts, and perverse incentives.
Almost.
This problem isn't that hard. You filter this stuff and rank it by its SOURCE, not by the content of individual articles.
It's not hard to figure out which online sources are pushing out most of the abjectly-bad propaganda, and de-rank them.
Facts can be presented in a biases way (generally through omission of other contextual facts), but if what is said is factual, at least that bit of information is still correct. If combining multiple sources to generate a grouping of facts, that presentation bias way well disappear. If system weeds out people that present opinion as fact, all the better.
Imagine I develope a newspaper that only reports crimes committed by a particular race and I excruciatingly fact check every incident and highlight when they are uneducated (but don't mention education otherwise). What will result is one of the biggest macro lies that will fuel racism through its broader message while everything will be perfect to a fact checker. This would rank perfectly in such a system while broader newspapers would get hammered for messing up picture captions and confusing Airbus A319s with 737s.
I think polling is pretty broken though. A lot has changed from 20 years ago when everyone had a landline phone.
I don't think reifying ad hominem into code is the solution to the problem.
Of course, if you don't mind a rare few false positives here and there on articles, I've got your filter right here:
Remember as you sit here thinking through your exceptions what we're talking about; if your "trustworthy" source was confidently telling you about how Clinton was going to win, it's not one of the exceptions. I won't say I was confident Trump would win, but I was certainly less suprised than most; the fact that I generated this somewhat more predictive model by tossing out pretty much every "mainstream" news source is not a good sign for them. And to be honest, Trump news isn't the only thing that I find this useful for. Beyond the bare facts, most media outlets really aren't good for much anymore, and do you ever have to de-spin their news just to get those bare facts in the first place. (I can't, however, pack up into a recipe how to do this yourself. I think we're in a period of transition in the news industry, much greater than just "the internet makes the old dinosaurs stumble" makes it sound, and I'm at the moment not really all that confident in anything.)Compare "{Candidate} up over 5000% in polls" vs "{Candidate} up over 15% in polls".
Baby steps. PageRank wasn't built in a day.
Here's a pagerank like reputation system i've built.
http://github.com/neyer/respect
Consistency is simply majority wins, which completely stifles new ideas or minority opinions.
No isn't.
You don't need to have a "non objective view of the truth" - i..e you don't need the ability to ask the system "Is this statement true?"
You just need the ability to ask the system "Will I think this is true, given the other things I have claimed to be true?"
Maintaining internal complexity of your own claim graph gets really tricky unless you keep it as accurate as possible.
For example, consensus view was that trump would not win the election. Trump did win the election. Thus, those two claims:
* (before) Trump will not win * (later) Trump won
These two are inconsistent. It's possible to rectify that inconsistency by marking the earlier statment cancelled. So now we have three statements
* (before) Trump will not win * (later) Trump won * (now) I was wrong to say, "Trump will not win."
The gap between "now" and "Before" can be used to compute "probability of a statement being retracted." The smaller those gaps, the more likely it is what whatever you say comes with an asterisk next to it, saying "the expected time to retraction of this statement is: x days"
I was speaking of consistency with the general body of knowledge in the system, (correspondence?).
In the specific case of evaluating major news sources for trust, I think the vast majority of their statements are never retracted/changed, and therefore they would rate highly on an overall "constancy" scale as well. Their many statements about Trump's likelihood of winning were very constant as well - for months they said he'd lose, then they changed, and forever after they will say he won.
Sounds very temporally consistent, with just a single change.
Not sure if the adjudicator could narrow it just to "trust of the source's future predictions about politics", but basically the whole country just got a negative feedback on the trust weighting for major media in that domain.
Sum (from: 0, to: PosInf, Enumerable: Source - Bias)
converges asymptotically to Truth
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_endorsements_in_the_...
What is the correct balance of endorsements? Is anything other than 50:50 incorrect?
It won't be reached in practice, but if you make it the policy, you have an argument to take down any bullshit. With 50:50 it's going to be an endless quarrel over who has had enough so far, who is underrepresented and why everything is dominated by two polar opposites with no voice given to people who don't want to belong to either camp.
I used to try to apply a correctional factor, but I've found it not even worthwhile anymore. I honestly don't know entirely why. I don't know if the news has gotten that much more biased to the point where it almost swamps the signal entirely, or if the combined financial pressures away from expensive real reporting and towards click-bait headlines has removed the signal, or what, but beyond very bare facts they just aren't worth much anymore. It is also possible this has always been the case and I wasn't aware enough to realize it; there's some classic history stories that back that possibility up.
I do know primary sources are getting easier and easier to consult directly. Which could itself also be a reason my opinion of them has plummeted so much in the past 10 years; it was a lot harder to see through media spin and simplification (deliberately for their audience, and accidentally when they in fact don't understand what's going on themselves, see especially science journalism for that) when they were the only source of information.
[0] http://observer.com/2016/08/wikileaks-reveals-mainstream-med...
On the one hand, they seem more interested in fact-checking. On the other, they propagate concepts like: on-balance the US is a force for good and should lead the world. This is highly contentious and non-obvious for many (most?) people outside the US.
1. Editors/writers/management changes, since quite a few media publications have gone from being fairly reliable to biased as all hell based purely on who's taken over there. Or in some (rarer cases), the opposite has happened.
So you'd have to make sure older less biased pieces weren't being punished for the actions of the publication in the present.
2. A lot of sources are correct about some things but not about others. It's very possible to have a publication that's terrible at writing about politics in an accurate and unbiased way, but fantastic at writing about technology or sports. So ideally your system would have to detect the subject of the article as well as the publication.
However, I guess you could at least add known 'satire' and fake information sites to a 'non credible' list. Like the ones listed here:
http://www.snopes.com/2016/01/14/fake-news-sites/
- The earth is flat
- 9/11 conspiracy theories
- Barack Obama was born in Kenya
- Anti-vax
- Climate change denial
- Anti-GMO
- Denial of underlying quantum randomness in the universe
- The Clinton Foundation has been or is involved in some shady dealings
- Muslims want to implement Sharia law in Europe
- The minimum wage decreases employment
- Donald Trump has sexually assaulted a number of women
- Monetary policy impacts the real economy
- The sun will, on balance, probably rise tomorrow
I've sorted this in a (rough, personal) order of increasing plausibility / conformance with facts. Where is the line between misinformation and alternative information? As a human, it's pretty unclear to me.
Are there some confusing, emotionally laden, difficult questions of fact in there? Yes. Are some things ultimately unknowable (like what people want, which involves scrying into their minds)? Yes.
These, as it turns out, are not the things I can't help but be side-tracked on. I'm diverted by you claiming monetary policy has an effect with nearly the certainty of the sun rising.
I think perhaps we disagree more about the probability of these two:
- The Clinton Foundation has been or is involved in some shady dealings
- Muslims want to implement Sharia law in Europe
Than the other two. I think both of those are, in some sense, almost certainly true. There are Muslims who want to implement Sharia law in Europe. The Clinton Foundation has been involved in transactions that at least have the appearance of moral uncertainty. The headlines that I listed are just overly strong statements/generalizations of those (IMO undeniable) facts.
"undeniable" does not mean what you think it means. Example: http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/hillary-clinton-defends-founda...
There, Clinton denies the foundation has been engaged in anything shady. Boom, definitely not undeniable #hackernewsdrama, hahaha.
If you want a disagreement, though, I prefer many-worlds over pilot wave theories, largely because I'm not entirely sure _what_ the propagation speed of the pilot waves would be. 'Greater than the speed of light' either (1) doesn't really narrow it down at all or (2) narrows it down to having no options at all. But they should have _a_ speed, because I'm not sure you can even have standing waves if the disturbances propagate instantly.
It didn't cause the hyperinflation that a lot of people thought would come, but the Great Depression is Bernanke's area of expertise, and he had sound theoretical reasons to believe QE wouldn't spark serious inflation.
If this correct I assume that there are also problem that are classified as AI-hard?
Some people can multiply ten digit numbers in their head. Some can't even tell you what a number is. There's a very wide bell-curve here.
The Jews say they are waiting for the Messiah.
The Christians say the Messiah came once and will come again.
The Muslims say there is only one God and Muhammad is his Prophet.
Which of these groups is correct?
I would love to see the AI algorithm that can finally settle this issue! Seriously, mad props to the programmer who writes that code!
Some of their statements pass the first filter, far fewer pass the second.
I'm however doubtful that a "successful" social network would learn from struggling one. Well C'est la vie.
A lot could be solved by just adding people to that department, located across the country in states where they already have offices anyway, or hire editors to work from home. That way, the editorial content wouldn't have to be so biased by region.
Another problem is the type of people who would take this job. They must be literate, but not able to find a better job. This will be people with degrees in English, journalism, and similar -- giving a pretty obvious political bias. You won't be getting mechanical engineers, coal miners, patent lawyers, and stock traders.
That really seems like "abridging the freedom of speech" to me. Constitutional conservatives sure love pushing the limits of the constitution when it inconveniences them.
But, you know, the election is over so now that the right has total control we must all put aside our differences and work together.
http://thehill.com/policy/technology/279498-some-conservativ...
If you follow that line of reasoning, the companies who run the pipes and control the flow of information aren't just companies playing favorites. They're potentially influencing - if not outright regulating - human rights worldwide.. which means they should have a much higher level of scrutiny.
And they walked right into that one.
They may lose credibility doing that, and would be a worse place to discuss things, but that is up them unless you have some kind of contract with them that makes you entitled to something else.
That for me is the main problem, people just want to trust stuff blindly and get all jived up when that doesn't work. You're mad at your own stupidity folks.
The response is to tell them to fuck off, and that the professional editors in your private company will continue to do their job however they see fit.
Period, paragraph.
Right now they have false-equivalency bias that drives fake stories.
Because, like it or not, Facebook has become a trusted news source. Because of that, they have a duty to accurately report the news.
Their human editors fell down by vanishing stories they found politically uncomfortable.
Their algorithmic editor fell down by promoting stories that were false.
What other trusted news source has this "duty?" What other trusted news source does not have biased editors?
All of them.
> What other trusted news source does not have biased editors?
None of them, of course. Man is a fallible creature.
But other news sources try, most of the time, to be objective and accurate.
NOT the general population.
I am so sick of this argument that Trump's victory is somehow the fault of bubble-trapped city-dwelling liberals for not understanding how the rest of the country thinks. Trump supporters are the ones who have either been manipulated to vote against their own interests; implicitly elected a Republican administration no different from the ones that they now claim to have rejected; ignored the obvious signs that Trump is of the same "elite" ilk that seeks to exploit them; been duped to amplify social hatred and reinforce the worst bigotry and sexism of the right-wing; benefited from many of the federal supports they claim to hate; or neglected the existential peril of their belief that the economy is more important than the planet's ability to sustain life; if not all of the above. Should the left have picked a candidate that is more aligned with the issues of the working class? Absolutely. Does that mean it's entirely on them? Hell no.
The thing with Trump is that liberals everywhere still can't get over what an asshole he is and what a disaster this is, but that fact that an asshole like him gets elected is very telling. We need to observe and understand this. Saying that people were duped and are idiots is not an interesting story, it doesn't help us make a better future, and quite frankly Trump supporters are not all idiots and bigots. What the intelligent Trump supporter would say is that establishment politicians have duped everyone too, and that Hillary was not going to further your interests. Granted Hillary was definitely the lesser of evils, but I don't think there's a cut and dried case that her policy was going to help the low to middle classes. Plenty of blame to go around here.
And that is why your "intelligent" Trump supporter is still clueless in this case, because he just voted in a white house full of career politicians (Newt Gingrich? Are you kidding me?). It's clear that Trump was mostly a protest vote against the establishment, but it was an incredibly hollow one and made literally no sense if the supporters looked beyond catchy slogans and strongman signaling. And every Trump voter, no matter how intelligent or decent or caring, still cast a vote for a racist and sexist candidate and that is something I find to be unconscionable.
There was little protest vote. This was about corruption, job loss in the heartland, and some very non-racial issues with immigration.
Give me a break. The right lost the culture wars (for good reason as their regressive social policies trampled all over civic rights) and this is them sending our country into a suicide because they'd rather die than face the reality that America is no longer a white monoculture.
Your reasoning is basically "maybe if you weren't so mean to the white supremacists Trump wouldn't have happened". Are we supposed to appease neo-Nazis and ignorance now? There were racially motivated attacks across the country last night, all done in the name of Trump. It does not look good.
Talk about reality checks.
You guys wanted to have it too fast and too easy. You though you can change things by passing laws and silencing criticism with media hysteria. You celebrated your superficial legal victories while completely ignoring the fact that sentiments against "affirmative actions", "LGBT rights", feminists, Muslims, Blacks and whatnot had been steadily growing for ten years all over the West.
You gave voice to the most bitter representatives of minorities to sell them as victims to the general population and didn't mind that the venom they spill enrages everybody else. As if you completely didn't expect that one day somebody may give voice to the most bitter of your opponents.
If an unemployed factory worker votes for a protectionist who promises to bring back factories, how is he voting against his own interests?
Why would one believe a so-called "protectionist" who has actually off-shored jobs?
Why would one believe a billionaire who claims to not be part of the establishment? A billionaire who was a celebrated part of the establishment during the '80s, in New York. That den of conservative values?
Why would one trust a candidate who was essentially a left-leaning Democrat until he decided to run for President?
Why would one believe a candidate who contradicts himself, is difficult to pin down on any policy details, and who says different things to different groups to a degree that's unprecedented, even for a politician?
Anybody can say anything. If you believe someone this erratic, you almost have to be wilfully ignorant of human nature.
I'm always fascinated that people don't realize that what one side says today the other side said yesterday.
> Most people are reasonable
Is blatantly false. People are tribal.
Second if you tell them to "Fuck off" you risk losing a significant chunk of your user base who believes their content and information is being manipulated against them. Facebook isn't in the politics business, they are in the social networking business. If Facebook is seen as political at all then a competing business will set up a service to sell to the other side. Look at what happened to mainstream media channels. Claims of liberal bias in the media giants directly led to the success of Fox News.
And Facebook is already seen as political; that ship has sailed.
I don't think that's true. Certainly the extremes on each side will say that. But I think everyone in the middle doesn't. I don't. Certainly not in the same way as I see Fox News/CNN/MSNBC as political.
Take The Guardian. They employ people like Jessica Valenti and Laurie Penny who publish feminist clickbait. Then they aggressively moderate comments which explain why those two are ill-informed at best and dishonest manipulators at worst. Then they do a "study" where they demonstrate how much harassment their female writers receive, by considering every deleted comment to be an instance of harassment.
Alternative hypotheses are not welcome, and there is no accountability. Actual studies like Pew's about the magnitude and nature of real harassment are ignored, or spun by cherry picking. The dogma remains: women have it worse, and it's because they are women. This system gets them more traffic and attention, so they are encouraged to continue, even as they insist it's terrible and someone should stop it.
So it's okay for you to infer what other people mean, but not okay for me to do it? Where did I say "women in general"? Why would my post imply what he said, when everyone can read exactly what he said and interpret it for themselves, just like you did?
He's grinding an axe (completely out of nowhere) about "feminist clickbait", "female writers", the "dogma" that "women have it worse", and singling out two women (and "people like" them) as examples. What am I supposed to do, pretend he's talking about men?
Likewise, why should I pretend that he said "some women" when he didn't? I have no idea what proportion of women he has a problem with.
None of this is relevant to my point though, which was that his rant about women (however many it may be) had absolutely nothing to do with what he was replying to, and was simply an attempt to inject this particular hobby horse of his into a thread where it doesn't belong.
How do you know he has a problem with (just) two women? Did he say that? No. Even now he hasn't said that. On the contrary, he specifically said "people like" the two examples he named.
Are you genuinely telling me you don't know what "people like" means in this context?
> It's you that made it ambiguous by claiming he had a problem "with women".
The words "with women" don't even appear in any of my comments, in any context at all, so I don't know where you're quoting that from. I actually said "I have no idea what proportion of women he has a problem with".
And if my understanding of another person's comment (which is still there, in his own words) somehow made that comment "ambiguous", why are you not finding it ambiguous?
I keep feeling like the whole alt-right anti-PC movement seems to be born of things people said online or corner case behavior in insulated Universities. Like, who cares? Most men I know who love the anti-PC movement would, in the moment, gladly intervene if a woman is getting verbally harassed and is visibly shaken up. Mention Valenti to the same person and they fly into a rage. Like wut?!
Most feminist and LGBT activists groups aren't talked about by Jezebel and are doing great work.
tl;dr: Message to alt-right activists everywhere: Talk to minority rights activists in person outside of emotionally charged protests. You'll find you don't disagree by much.
I'm a man, I dislike men who are asses to women and women who are asses to men. I'm finding it consistent and deeply un-wut-worthy. Heck, it seems I sometimes even care about men vs men and women vs women too.
Accusations of bias? I think you mean to say that actual Facebook employees stated this as a fact. And the story was covered by ALL news outlets, starting with Gizmodo.
If sites are spreading factually provable lies through Facebook as fact, and people are acting on it, should Facebook have any say in telling people "Hey, this is garbage"?
It's an open question.
That's like saying "the truth of this information is at least 0"
You are making an assumption that algorithms can not be biased. Earlier, humans were biased. Now, algorithms are biased.
You know what? Even if you do not give race as a parameter; an algorithm could be biased. It can easily learn race from secondary or tertiary parameters.
If an ML algorithm notices a disparity along e.g. racial lines, it's because it's actually there, not because a human imagined it.
The level of damnation differs significantly.
Having a human team being accused of bias (possible falsely) and pressured by politicians to change puts them in the same category as the NYT, the Wall Street Journal and every serious print and broadcast service on earth.
Algorithmically spreading exciting and blatantly false claims puts them in the category of the National Enquirer, and 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion'
One category is significantly less damned than the other.
Ian Hislop likely has the distinction of being the most-sued person in English legal history - almost entirely by people seeking libel writs in attempts to bury the truth.
There is a podcast and selected content online. Funnily enough, it's the only periodical in the UK that has seen a rise in readership.
The recent presidential poll fiasco is prime example. All the large media houses like CNN, ABC, WaPo, NYT complete failed to detect and acknowledge the silent righ-wing voters claiming Clinton would win hands down. This is not just about political bias of the media but more importantly their complete failure to judge the pulse of the nation. In my opinion the main stream media was just insane here.
On the contrary the media engaged in an active social bullying of conservative voters by calling them bigots,racists,misogynist and what not. Had this media been lot more sensitive and sane in understanding both liberal and conservative voters, had they focused on what issues really mattered to conservative voter-base instead of ridicule and bullying I am pretty sure it would have changed things.
I blame the social bullying by main stream media as the prime reason why country seems divided.
The fake news on Facebook is a whole different thing, it's easy to spot and literally news stories made specifically to game Facebook. It's insane that it has gotten this far.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became...
The problem we need to solve is the sharing of hysterical, blatantly false information, presented as facts, from specific, intentionally propagandistic sites. And I wouldn't hide or disallow it, I would flag it with a warning message.
Then we can ban all those sites on homeopath, acupuncture, astrology, stereotype threat and all that other pinko voodoo (the bulk of social "science" papers come to think of it).
Where do I sign the petition?
Content providers who abide by journalistic guidelines could be prioritized. Providers who actually have an editor could even associate the editor of each article with the post so that the editor's individual track record could be checked alongside the site itself, which would work better for large organizations who have multiple departments and don't deserve to be globally penalized for a single bad editor.
I guess it works as long as you agree with their choices, prioritization, and opinions but as we saw this cycle, there was a collusion between "journalists" and the Clinton campaign. Even if you see no problem with that, would you see a problem if the Trump campaign had done it?
I'd honestly envision something closer to the BBB to manage this type of thing and track membership, ratings, disputes and resolution that all browsers and search engines could tap into. The key would be that freelance journalists would need to be able to gain membership in the same way that journalists get officially credentialed to cover different types of events.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ofWFx525s
Gone are my Facebook, G+, Reddit accounts. I have a Twitter which I curate manually with numerous feeds from all over. I generally look at content like links first then read the Twitter discussion if any.
I treat posting as a personal catharsis anymore, and use throwaway accounts. IMO my online opinions are going to get lost in the crush so why bother curating an identity. One that just creates a signal trail for advertising and snoopers?
I talk to the people in my life more instead. These have been conscious decisions on my part and honestly I think I'm mentally happier and less frustrated "at the world" for it.
MMS is good enough for sharing pics with grandma and grandpa. Though I've asked them to keep most off social media. It's too creepy having the world ogle my kids.
They don't like it but abide. IMO despite being my mom she's old and has less life left than my kids. Nothing to worry about by posting her life on Facebook
My kids on the other hand have their whole lives ahead of them. I would rather it not be broadcast without their consent. If they get older and decide to go all Jayden Smith or Paris Hilton on social media so be it.
But these services are not what humanity needs to progress. They are today's fascination. And I am not into it. So fuck em
nowadays you get all that suggested content which is driven by your past behavior, acting as a giant amplifier.
to go back to something idlewords is harping about - all of that is possible because of the persistent storage of user data. kill the deep profiles, kill the tracking, only use what the user directly, willingly entered.
in SV speak: utter heresy.
As per my previous comments on this subject. The sources that got "censored" _happened_ to be conservative. They were unreliable sources, and stories that turned out to be not true. But people still moaned about it.
The fact that more conservative sources report false information seems like a problem conservatives should want to fix, instead of crying censorship. We have too much false information flying around; it's yellow journalism.
This would also give a platform to new and grassroot politicians to rise up over time. Right now, grassroot enthousiasm seems to flow towards senators (ron paul, bernie sanders,..) because they didn't vote for something most of the other senators voted for.
Meanwhile having access to capital and connections to even become a senator is very constraint and unlikely to come without strings attached.
Anyway, having users elect moderators solves the problem of "trusting the moderator" and since I assume they would be a salaried position facebook can apply and enforce fairness guidelines.
If people prefer seeing outrageous stuff then let them have it.
The reason why governments and institutions want to control this is in order to control its people, all the other reasons given are just an attempt to mask this.
1) It doesn't work. It leads to the lowest common-denominator winning.
2) Humans aren't rational.
3) The world is complicated enough that the median person simply doesn't know much about anything outside of their silo.
4) There are powerful forces conspiring to profit off of people's ignorance, rather than to turn them into less ignorant, more rational, more empathetic people, more curious people.
5) There are many people who simply aren't that curious. Left to their own devices, they will be overly susceptible to trickery and populism.
This might be a nice idea in a socially homogeneous group of a small number of like-minded farmers. It fails surely and predictably in a large group trying to make good decisions in a complex and technical world.
Read: Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes And How To Correct Them: Lessons From The New Science Of Behavioral Economics
It's also irrelevant how you would like people to be (more rational, empathetic and so on), actually no one on this planet even cares about your opinion on that matter enough to actually change themselves. (and no one ever will, trust me)
What matters is that people are free to choose to be whatever kind of person they want to be.
Some of them choose to be persons that you don't like, well then don't be around them, issue solved.
You seem to believe that we exist to follow some great plan devised by other people who believe they are smarter and know what we should actually be instead of what we choose to be. This is not the case.
We've all seen the results of ideology that seeks to reach utopia by changing man into something elevated. (Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, North Korea, Rouge Khmer, Venezuela) It always failed in a catastrophic manner and caused often unimaginable suffering because of the authoritarianism inherent in this ideology.
This has real effects that harm other people. Do what you want to yourself. The problem is when you harm others due to your own ignorance or avoidable biases.
None of the big bad movements you mention were genuinely trying to make humans into better thinkers. In fact, they all relied on humans not being such great thinkers.
That's why we have courts where you can claim damages.
> None of the big bad movements you mention were genuinely trying to make humans into better thinkers. In fact, they all relied on humans not being such great thinkers.
Oh really? The Soviet man, the Übermensch as understood by the Nazis and all similar Socialist concepts are then completely new to you? Some of these concepts are pretty close to what you described a person should be like.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Soviet_man
So it seems to me that you basically share many of the views of a Hitler or a Stalin on questions like these.
How can conscientious teachers or coaches exist in your worldview?
Surely educators are all evil because they dare to seek to improve people. Education has been used as a pretext to imprison people in oppressive regimes therefore education is evil. Absurd!
This is the real issue here. You are arguing in favour of using force (the basis of Socialism) while I'm arguing for freedom. (the basis of Capitalism)
And please don't tell me that censorship or regulating media isn't really using force. You go break censorship laws in countries that have them and lets see what they will do to you.
No machine learning will save you from botters as the lion share of commercial botters live in a country from which most of the math research behind machine learning is coming from.
In Russia, few people will start an advertising network startup in their sane mind, commercial scale clickfraud, farming, and botting give an order of magnitude higher returns.
The term "Internet marketing business" is used mostly as an euphemerism for all of the aforesaid here.
Read your comment. Let's think. What you mean is, Facebook fired human editors, who they contracted out moderation to. They contracted this job out, and kept it on the down low, because it was a breach of their promise with users of their platform. "keeping things sane." What exactly does this comment mean? What you mean by that, I assume, is 'don't allow anything to trend that might upset the leftist 'social justice warriors.' In other words, keeping things sane, meant don't allow posts to trend, that contradict, or prove false, the beliefs of the people whose primary mechanism of accomplishing agenda, is to 'get triggered' or to freak out, cause a scene, cry foul. The primary class of posts that could have or as Facebook claims 'should have' been censored, were Wikileaks. The Wikileaks were DKIM verified, and of reliable source. They were however not in the best interest of the left. They helped Donald Trump win. They spread the word, that Hillary Clinton was lying about a plethora of different things. These "Social Justice Warriors' believe that the US, themselves, and Hillary herself deserve to be president. Their response to people posting anti-Hillary ads, memes, leaks, or posts, is to flame them. Attack them. So what you are claiming, is that Facebook should have done a better job, of keeping things sane; a better job of limiting contradictory ads, statements, and shares from Hillary's opponent or opposing voters. Facebook was extremely sane during the weeks leading to election. Any insanity before election day I assume, was people have arguments or conversations on each others posts, discussing who to vote for. Are you suggesting that we should have silenced these debates? Are you suggesting we should have blocked Trump ads? I pushed a lot of content on Twitter and Facebook, and the majority of it was generated by users on Reddit. I have a list of 75 top ten trending Hashtags, which were removed from twitter by moderators. They were removed from the trending list. The list of 75 hashtags, are entirely non-violent, non-harrassing, and simply brief descriptions of illegal or unsettling things that Hillary Clinton said or did during her time in office. They are summaries of quotes from Wikileaks emails. Are you telling me that removing those hash tags was simply a peace-keeping measure? Are you saying that this was not blatant censorship to push Twitter's own agenda?
What if they simply change the algorithm to perform some graph clustering/principal component analysis on the stories that are shared organically among groups and then inject let's say 10% stories that are disproportionally shared by other clusters, but not this one?
The granularity could be tweaked to chunk everything into let's say ~5 clusters per nationality and language.
The machines do not have to assess facts, they just have to allow people to see beyond their friend-horizon. So call it the bubble-burster.
Facebook has it's own bias, most people do. Some professional reviewers and political commentators try to be as unbiased as humanly possible, but why blindly trust them, even if that's their intention, there is nothing that say they cannot just be factually wrong.
"Bullshit flies halfway around the world before the truth has even gotten its pants on."
There are a lot of PR plants even in the more reputable newspapers, which is unfortunate, but there are still regular thorough investigations, which I assume are getting harder to do as money and resources continue to shrink.
A staffer in the Obama White House remarked on the quality of reporting now, as of a few months ago:
"All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus. Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2016/05/...
The statement that the entire media system missed the election is an exaggeration. One function of the NYT, the election prediction section, failed. It shouldn't reflect on the various investigative reporters doing actual digging.
"The mood in the Washington press corps is bleak, and deservedly so.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that, with a few exceptions, we were all tacitly or explicitly #WithHer, which has led to a certain anguish in the face of Donald Trump’s victory. More than that and more importantly, we also missed the story, after having spent months mocking the people who had a better sense of what was going on.
This is all symptomatic of modern journalism’s great moral and intellectual failing: its unbearable smugness. Had Hillary Clinton won, there’s be a winking “we did it” feeling in the press, a sense that we were brave and called Trump a liar and saved the republic."
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/commentary-the-unbearable-smugne...
Could news.facebook.com be an actual content-producer with real journalism?
Large, investigative projects on what is possibly the world's largest distribution platform.
It feels like we're way beyond that. It's degenerated to the point of two tribes who no longer have any "shared truth" from which to argue. If I see a post of Facebook saying that Obama has instituted martial law in New York, how can I convince the 4364 people liking it that it's a lie? If I point out that the New York Times would probably write about it, I'll just get laughed at.
The truth seriously fared a lot better in times where newspapers and a few TV stations acted as completely undemocratic arbitrators.
My analogy is breaking down. I don't think we understand how the complete removal of barriers to publishing are changing society. Nor do we understand how to cope with it. A bunch of folks just elected an authoritarian to "guide" the way.
More often than not they double down with "well it's emblematic of the greater problem" or something to that effect. They then look for new evidence to support their views. Like it or not, some sites are designed to build echo chambers and are not for general discourse.
You try to counter with statistics from the FBI, DOJ, BLS, DOL, or any other organization and the numbers are 'made up'. And studies have been done that when presented with counter arguments it strengthens the original misperceptions.
Corrections also don't get much traction. I've seen many conspiracy theories pop up for a week, then die down. While the correct gets no traction at all.
>As a result, the corrections fail to reduce misperceptions for the most committed participants. Even worse, they actually strengthen misperceptions among ideological subgroups in several cases.
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~nyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf
People don't want news, they want to hear what they already 'know'.
I was a huge fan of Twitter but was driven away when they followed suit. My reasons had more to do with my own preference of how I enjoy using the service, but having algorithms manipulate the information I see so as to maximize engagement metrics is even more troubling.
If somebody with different believes than you were forced to read those, do you think the resulting society was more or less polarized?
The kind of content you need to do that is already disadvantaged since it has to be toned way down, and that makes it less much less likely to be shared in the first place.
Can't wait until they do the opposite in case of free speech then get sued by people who can't deal with their emotions and accept them. Some of them are already out protesting (and some "protesting" with destroying property[1]).
But hey I guess helicopter parenting and after that safe-space culture they grew in can only get you so far.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1d9lm-T87AQ
Misinformation is not a right-wing phenomenon, as much as it appears to be a comfort food for the Left these days.
It's very telling that the "obvious" solution for the defeated party is a more powerful stranglehold on the flow of information, to appoint the "right" people to curate reality for those who cannot be trusted with it.
In which case, it's going to be a long sojourn in the wilderness my friends...
There probably is no right way to do it.
Which isn't to say I disapprove of reddit, twitter et al removing hate speech; just that it's a very late and reactive solution to a problem that seems inherent in social media.
Really, all we can do is improve filtering, and facebook seems almost ideologically opposed to increasing user control over the content they see. So I don't see facebook being a pleasant place to visit in the near future.
On many subreddits, being in opposition to illegal massive immigration is being considered as a 'hate speech' and is a reason for ban.
> find better ones
It's not that simple, having in mind that:
1. Current moderators clique holds the most adequate name for pan-Europe subreddit.
2. Everyone registering account from Europe-located IP address is being automatically subscribed to this subreddit.
Drawing expert opinion into the equation, and looking at how concepts spread, and who spreads them, might be useful.
Some kind of reasonable balance will be found.
People blaming Facebook for Trump is far more a reflection of themselves than of FB news algorithms.
These two items can magnify each other in a false direction as they attempt to retain users that they perceive they have.
No one needs to get their news from Facebook
I know Facebook isn't a news organization, but it's treading a fine line isn't it? At some point one might argue that by being an aggregator and driving a large portion of its engagement in the sharing of stories is akin to being a publisher, and thus should be held liable for the things it publishes – regardless of who pulled the trigger. Of course, this would be a huge liability for Facebook, and a growth inhibitor because all of a sudden, a story going viral isn't exactly a good thing if it means they can easily be sued for libel.
I'm not a lawyer (probably obvious given the above) but I think it's a bit strange that given Facebook's position they can so easily get away with a "wasn't me!" kind of attitude to misinformation and straight up lies being spread around presented as though the stories were in fact news.
>"We are going to have to rebuild within this wild-wild-west-of-information flow some sort of curating function that people agree to," Obama said at an innovation conference in Pittsburgh.
Why do you think that the curation is going to be done by the government or by government appointed gatekeepers?
I think it's clear that's he's asking for a rebuilt mainstream media so that people can at agree on facts.
For example, until half a year ago, important details in articles about terrorism were left out, but you could still sort of fill in the blanks yourself. Now, every single article about an incident has the same stock phrase: "Hintergrund und Motiv der Tat sind noch völlig unklar", and nothing else.
The elision of all details is supported by the flimsiest of justifications, namely that the terrorists relish and are spurned by the media attention (as if their religious fanaticism doesn't play the major role). There is, of course, not a shred of evidence for this contention, except for the opinion of a handful of "experts". It seems to me that a terrorist attack is newsworthy. That newspapers refuse to report details (say, by interviewing a witness) is an awful abrogation of their duty. Sometimes reading the news here feels like living in Soviet Russia.
Facebook is leaking, I can already imagine what the clickbait headline looked like...
"Obama to assemble government censorship agency"
Note: I really don't have an issue with Facebook doing this if they want. They're a company after all, not the government. I can just choose to get the information they deem 'bad' elsewhere.
"We are going to have to rebuild within this wild-wild-west-of-information flow some sort of curating function that people agree to," Obama said at an innovation conference in Pittsburgh.
"There has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those that we have to discard, because they just don't have any basis in anything that's actually happening in the world"
Obama in Pittsburgh PA 10/13/2016
https://duckduckgo.com/?q="We+are+going+to+have+to+rebuild+w...
What do you think "we" refers to?
"We [the people or the government - does not matter really] are going to have to rebuild within this wild-wild-west-of-information flow some sort of curating function that people [the people] agree to,"
If I interpret "We" as "the government" it still does not matter if "the people" can agree on it as in functioning democracy.
"There has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we [the people] can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those that we [the people] have to discard, because they just don't have any basis in anything that's actually happening in the world"
For example - I've seen dozens of links to Michael Moore's trumpland speech which strategically ends with the phrase "America will elect Trump and it will feel great"
Sample: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-25/michael-moore-trump...
but the truth is that is not what he CONCLUDEDHe continues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVLTQIUMq18&t=30 [sic]
EDIT - I feel like I should clarify I mean "auto-snopes" figuratively. Auto fair-balance might be a better descriptor. Something that links to an opposing opinion automatically, in cases of absolute falsehood the debunking, or even a CSS CLASS where there is a bright red "FALSE" wrapper.Snopes doesn't have to be the automatic choice.
Breaking filter-bubbles & ensuring truth would be my goal on an idea like this. Not strictly "promoting liberal media"
Their claim is that it's a Democrat rag towel and shill.
I then ask, then what fact-checker would you trust?
Their response: None of them.
Congratulations. We've reached a point, for this individual, where "facts" as decided in the common forum are suspect and the only thing they trust is themselves (and whatever non-Mainstream Media they listen to). We have reached a point where the only truth is what they decide is the truth.
That is a non-trivial problem to resolve. If we can't even agree what basic facts are, there is no way to even have a discussion.
For example, take the child rape trial Hillary Clinton was a defence attorney for, in which she claimed that an unspecified person had told her the victim "is emotionally unstable with a tendency to seek out older men and to engage in fantasizing" and "has in the past made false accusations" to justify putting her through a nasty court-ordered psychiatric exam. Is this the same as Hillary herself making the claims? The original viral version and the victim saw it this way. Snopes argued that this was a lie because the document showed that other people had made the claims, neglecting to mention that the interpretation and wording was Hillary's and the existence and honesty of these other people rested entirely on her word. Neither of these is inherently more truthful than the other, it's a question of which spin is politically convenient.
This is probably the most clear-cut example imaginable too, since it's about the contents of a court filing. Most of the world is a lot more factually unclear, visible only through a lens of conflicting evidence and multiple sources of information.
- How do we get broad, bi/cross/multi-partisan support?
- Is there any precedence for news articles having citations/eligible for peer-review (post-published, of course) similar to scientific papers?
Either that or find a common enemy, such as Mexico (after the civil war).
However, I fail to see why Wikileaks is considered a Fact-checker, or how this pertains to a belief that NO fact-checker is reliable. Are you claiming that Wikileaks is trustworthy and can replace a fact-checker, but isn't a fact-checker? Because that seems a bit circular and oxymoronic to me.
Perhaps if you provided an alternative fact-checker source? The person in my original post has written off all fact-checking period.
Wikileaks is not the fact checker in this case, you are.
You were being invited to look at the raw data and draw your own conclusions/truths from it, not somebody else's.
As for Kim, she describes herself as "...an openly left-leaning individual myself", if you ctrl+f for those words here: http://www.inquisitr.com/402558/scandal-envy-behind-petraeus...
As you can see, journalistic integrity is lacking from both sides of the political spectrum. Please do not get all high-and-mighty and think you're better than everyone else, because you would be falling into the same trap you mock others for. I hope in the future you will examine sources with a more objective view and keep an open mind, and not just believe whatever someone wants you to believe so they can make a quick buck off of your ignorance.
I have no hat in the ring with respect to which side publishes the truth, I just think that if something is FALSE facebook could alter their UI to immediately debunk something.
Like the other quote of Trump saying "I'd run as a republican because they're the dumbest" could have a big "FALSE - he never said that" right underneath.
People who thought it was funny could still post it until their hearts were content - but nobody would be FOOLED
If you really want to present a case of bias, find some real evidence. Specific articles with specific instances of false or misleading information. Otherwise, you're just sowing doubt by casting aspersions based on vague associations.
Snopes and Kim claim "Hillary Clinton overlooked Benghazi victims when she said that "we didn't lose a single person in Libya" during a campaign event on MSNBC." is false. However, reading the article for her evidence, you can observe that Kim accepts Clinton lying by omission by saying the conversation was not about Benghazi.
Looking at this from a high level, Clinton is implying the the Benghazi attack is a completely unrelated event from the USA's war in Libya. However, these two events are both part of the Libyan intervention and it's disingenuous from Clinton to make such a claim because as a result of the Libyan intervention, Americans did die. Clinton is obviously playing a political game to play down the negative consequences of the Libyan intervention. I don't blame her for doing this, by the way. I would too if I wanted to be president.
Just because they didn't die in the initial confrontation doesn't mean "No Americans died." Snopes fails to point out the fact that Clinton does not include Benghazi in the overall Libyan confrontation. Let's say I am in a car accident with someone, and they are injured. If 6 months later, they have complications and die from the injuries I caused with the initial car accident, I am still responsible for the death of the individual.
Left wing bias: No Americans died in the initial confrontation with the Libyan government.
Right wing bias: Clinton killed Americans in Libya.
Neutral bias: Clinton made a decision to support the invasion of Libya. As a result of the invasion, Americans died in Benghazi.
Even that statement could be twisted if you draw the conclusion that Clinton supported the invasion, people died, therefore she is partly responsible. And it's missing information about the "600 requests for additional security".
I do understand and agree with your point.
Perhaps the more important issue is that some voters have an overly simplistic world view. "Casualties from an attack on a diplomatic enclave in a volatile country" should be separate from "US Foreign policy had implications for the conflict in Libya".
These biases can occasionally influence the content. To treat these sources as some kind of perfect "machine" that can just be unleashed onto facebook to automatically say "You're wrong, this is how it really happened." is a scary thought. Especially when the process and machine are blackbox and we don't have any way to verify which "facts" are being pushed, by whom, and for what reasons. And when you bring up the fact that there might be bias, you become one of _those_ people, like you're some kind of conspiracy nut for asking questions.
I think that happened this election. The polls all said "Clinton crushes Trump." Anyone that asked about the validity of those polls was mocked and laughed at and seen as some kind of rightwing conspiracy nut.
Well, turns out they were dead wrong and maybe if people recognized their unconscious bias, we wouldn't have a president Trump right now and people would have said "Holy $@&* these polls are wrong we need to change our strategy so we can win." I kept repeating to people, don't underestimate Trump, he's smarter than you give him credit for and he's a huge threat to Clinton. Nothing but jokes and mockery from the majority of democrats I talked to.
This is the issue. Americans don't know what they want and are mad because they feel like they somehow have a special place in the world everyone else is "stealing" from them somehow. This attitude is "anti-American" because it is the unfortunate truth, and America just voted that the truth hurts but it would rather blame it on the immigrants and mexicans and muslims. This is scary. You cannot have the attitude that you somehow have a god-given "right" to jobs in your country, and that filthy immigrants are stealing them because they are bad people. Conservatives feel like the government is a credit card they can use to get more when they want it, no matter what the consequence for the rest of the world. This entitlement is a style of attitude and thinking that is guaranteed to cause global conflict, and is the inevitable end of a culture war between western thinking and other powers. Obama proposed to fix this by being basically an apologist and reparist for the rest of the world, but the rest of the world is so fucked up because of America's history of trying to decide what's best for it that it is starting to turn on America, and deciding it doesn't really need them any more. This stubborness is war-mongering and why it is better to have free trade and globalism rather than using literal direct conflict to solve perceived differences between countries.
[1]: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/...
... and now Wikileaks has invited the whole internet to come play Richelieu with them, only with ten thousand times the ammunition the Cardinal (apocryphally) asked for. The online mob has been accusing (eg) Podesta and his correspondents of all kinds of insane things - from corruption & arms dealing to satanism & child abduction - based on the flimsiest of cherry-picked quotes, even when the context (beyond the leaks, within them, even in the very same email sometimes) showed without doubt that their claims were obvious bunk.
And Assange merrily fed into that: drawing spurious connections on his twitter feed; linking/retweeting the fever dreams of naked partisans; and dragging out a single dump into an episodic drip-fed spectacle, all the better to whip his fans into an inquisitorial vigilante frenzy.
"wikileaks on it's own can also be very misleading"? I can't argue with that - except perhaps to say it's far too charitable.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media...
But why do you think that the whole internet wants to play the part of Richelieu, everyone is allowed to choose the role they want and wikileaks does not hide the context of the emails, everyone is perfectly able to check the whole correspondence. If anything the mass media is hiding the context because of their format and time limits.
But dismissing them as Russian hacking didn't really give a lot of people the choice to make up for themselves. Yes I believe according to wikileaks that the DNC colluded with media and fact checking orgs and pushed their agenda too far. I read the information and made up my mind. So when someone points to Politifact again I'll do the same. Not saying they can't be saved but it's the idea of looking at it as doctrine from the start with a stamp of 'True' or 'False' that I don't like. Things are never that simple.
"People need to do their own research if they want to form conclusions not just little to prepackaged conclusions." - I could not agree more.
Although I agree that the timing was probably connected with the US elections. But again, that's a good think - the only way organisations will change is if it will hurt them. Now both US parties know that they can easily be targets next time.
My point is that this individual has written off all fact-checking as an entire discipline. They are the final arbiter of truth. That fundamentally prohibits discussion of almost anything, or at least makes it extraordinarily labor intensive.
One might counter-argue, well, start with their beliefs and work outwards to illustrate contradictions and such. Very Kantian. Except that is 1) very labor intensive, and 2) doesn't cover all issues.
It's stuff like this, turning a single reluctant "I guess so" or "probably" or "it seems we should" into support, that make supposed fact-checkers suspect. Who will fact-check the fact checkers? The supposed fact-checkers were just another political weapon, tainted as could be.
Fact checkers are like certificate authorities. Once you lose credibility, you might as well close shop. You're done.
Asking about Iraq war at the time was similar to asking "Should we try to stop ISIS?" now. I'd give 80% courage credits to whoever that dare saying "I'm not sure, I guess so".
All in all, unless Trump had access to more information than the general populace, it doesn't matter whether he opposed or supported it. We decidedly didn't have enough info to make a sound judgement, and the conclusion we made - be it correct or not - would merely be a metaphorical coin toss.
This is similar to the UK going in to the Brexit vote. Politicians that were promoting the break away from Europe were pushing hard the idea that "we don't need experts" and that listening to expert opinions was wrong (listening to experts like pro-Brexit economists who stated, in common with the anti-s, that Britain would be financially worse off leaving Europe).
It's like the media managed to spin the idea that all people who have rigorously studied something are not to be trusted. The biggest wtf is that it worked, writing a big fat lie in big fat letters on a bus trumps (heh!) countless professors of economics telling the people it's a lie.
The trap is to conclude that people are idiots, postmodernism is not really the reason either I feel. The reason IMO is that the media have become very very good at manipulating people's thought processes and feeding them a position with out resorting to having the person think through that position. Yay, we've won, the media can now make us all believe whatever they want.
But don't panic all those rich politicians and business people are sure to use their powers for good ... /s
By the way, Snopes is not a common forum and is edited by a very small team. It is a single point of failure and is easily biased. No one entity should be the gatekeeper of truth.
Having a lil fact checker isn't as easy as adding a button to snopes.
There's bias in language itself and how even a sentence is structured. But again a deeply complex conversation nobody seems to be having in this community.
My hope is for a similar thing to exist in real-time in future political debates, where live fact-checking spits back at anyone who speaks a mis-truth, nipping B.S. in the bud.
http://www.politifactbias.com/2016/11/the-daily-caller-polit...
The problem is a lack of education by the consumer. I suggest everyone read this book as an intro on the topic:
https://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/03...
Everyone has an agenda, follow the money, and trust no one. Whether it's right-wing like Alex Jones or Left-wing like the Tampa Bay Times a.k.a politifact, you need to be suspicious and do your own research if you want the truth.
so you might get a panel with
SNOPES : FALSE NYT: FALSE HUFF: MIXED DAVID AVOCADO WOLFE: QUANTUM CRYSTAL HARMONIZED
Is there any hope that Facebook will do the right thing and put information ahead of profits? As a libertarian at heart, it pains to to say this, but I think the only way to fix this is government regulations. Of course it will never happen under Trump, but how else can force them to be good curators with all the power they wield.
Telegraph operators shouldn't feel any onus to ensure that they stop the spread of misinformation, right?
In fact, I think it is VERY detrimental for them to step in and started editing posts, bringing back the human editors. Humans have biases, ML less so.
If an algorithm decides that something is trending, even if it is "incorrect" to some interpretation of the word, then it should be treated the same. It's just a matter of principles.
anyone can tell me one true independent news source in US today? there is _none_.
Oh wait...