Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to one (washingtonpost.com)

     Bill (not FB user)
     Sue (FB user)
     Jill (FB user)

     Sue: Bill is just so unreliable. He says things and doesnt do them.
     Jill: Yah he did the same to me!

(Notices Bill's ghost profile's trustworthiness score go down, without any interaction from Bill at all. What exactly do we do about that? We in the US have no rights like this. The corps can do whatever they want, and maybe just maybe, a decent law will be passed to protect us. Or likely not.)

Edit: Useds was name given by Stallman from https://stallman.org/facebook.html .

Also, -1? Where am I being wrong? Are ghost profiles being dismissed, or trustworthiness? Or is it the fact I'm putting these things together?

<GPS Location: Mistress' apartment>

trustworthiness_score -= 0.1

This certainly seems to fit.

Maybe the term isn’t as narrowly defined as your (former?) employer would like.

Edit: upon a bit more reflection, I do take for granted a desire to protect life and liberty (in that order), and anything that appears to threaten that view will draw special scrutiny, and potential abuse of reporting features.

Is it the third-party aspect that you take issue with, or the fact-checking? Or the combination of the two?

I'd say contrary - that would be so wrong for FB to verify facts in-house. This way they are more transparent

Not attempting to the arbiter of truth and falsehood would be one.

Or reporting on what users think of a story's truthfulness: "49% rate this story as true, 21% rate it as untrue".

Or, if they want to be honest, acknowledging that it is about policing taboo thoughts. "Smith, 4980203 Winston. This article is crimethink! Warning: If you read too many articles like it your Citizen Credit Score will be downgraded. You have been warned!". OK, maybe they won't go for that :-)

There's absolutely nothing nefarious about remembering previous interactions you had with someone. In fact it's impossible not to do so.

The problem with China is how it tears down the natural separation between different spheres of your life, how all-encompassing their panopticum can become because it has access to any data source it desires, and that the issues it engages with all seem to be of the this-doesn't-concern-you-and-nobody-is-actually-harmed variety, such as peoples' porn consumption or eating habits.

One _cannot_ in _any way_ infer a lack of good intentions from a single alleged phone call.

Besides, if I were a titan of industry I would do my best to call whoever the hell got elected president the night of the election regardless of my particular party affiliation. Especially considering most corporations lobby both of the main political parties to hedge their bets.

I imagine hardly any corporation lets ideology trump pragmatism – partisan individuals (we do not need to name names) notwithstanding.

For the love of all that is holy, can we please please focus on tech and policy and put identity politics and tribal politics to one side on HN? Please?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

They seem to demand a sort of proof from first principle for journalism, where every reader can (and must!) verify an article without any heuristics such as a medium's track record ("Argument from Authority!", they will complain, "FALLACY!").

Yet such a system is simply impossible. In practice, because nobody would ever have the time & energy to verify any meaningful fraction of the information they consume. But even in theory, there just aren't any methods to distribute "proof": you could be an eyewitness, which doesn't scale. You could inspect original documents, which also doesn't scale, and where almost nobody has the expertise to actually verify them. Oh, and then there are distributed ledgers, which could help around the margins but nobody knows how (Bitcoin, incidentally, is the outgrow of exactly the same mechanism, only for the financial system: the breakdown of trust in institutions such as the law or the FED, and the attempt to replace it with technology).

One of many incarnations of this dynamic the widespread criticism of the use of anonymous sources. And while the practice does have its problems, it's almost universally misunderstood by those criticising it today.

When journalists use anonymous sources, they substitute their own reputation, and that of their publication, for the source's. Which is why, when you go back and read articles from a year or so ago, you'll find that each and every single anonymously reported fact has actually been proven correct, or remains unknown. The system works (worked), because everyone in it is playing the long game.

But that would require trust. And people today aren't just distrustful. They completely deny the utility of the concept. They try to evaluate all information with complete disregard for the source (and fail). They assume equivalence between anonymous internet commentators and institutions such as universities, newspapers, or established politicians, without even noticing how this conflicts with their criticism of anonymity as described above.

This mindset is related to a perversion of the scientific method, one that denies the usefulness of all emotion, of the social sciences, and of all human relationships. It's perverse because even its proponents entirely fail to live by it: if you're more willing to let your spouse borrow you car than just any stranger, you're using the very same mechanisms (familiarity, the game theory of long-term relationships, reputation) that you otherwise reject.

So that's a long-winded way to say: these fact-checkers are supposedly different than whoever posted the material in question. You, and everyone else, can observe them over time, and they will have a reputation to defend. They will presumably also be recruited from the set of people and institutions that are established as trustworthy, at least among the minority that still believes in such a thing might actually exist.

Third party fact checkers seems like the best possible thing that could be in that box. It's not perfect, but there has never been a perfect system to determine truth so waiting until there is one is counterproductive. You do the best with the tools you have available.

I disagree that that is obvious, and, moreover, I would disagree with the idea that the author would have any way of telling whether someone flagging merely disagreed with some aspect of the viewpoint/presentation outside of the base facts or disagreed with both the viewpoint and the fact claims, seeing the latter as misrepresented to serve the former. Further, it's virtually impossible to cleanly separate disagreement on viewpoint from disagreement over facts, because the two mutually interact (particularly viewpoints not only shape perception of facts but also perceptions of the; relative importance of facts.)

For instance, there is a story right now circulating in even fairly mainstream, especially conservative, media (notably including Fox News) and being widely shared on social media alleging that a proposed California law would ban restaurants from serving children any drinks except the two choices of milk and water. This story is invariably couches in a lot of viewpoint around crazy nanny state liberals and other conservative stereotypes of California. It is very likely that lots of people would disagree strongly with the viewpoint of the story.

But the actual proposal, as one discovers with a few minutes of research, (1) doesn't limit what restaurants can offer to children (it limits “default drink options” for children's meal combos) and the limitation it proposes isn't to just milk and water (it includes milk, water, flavored water, and nondairy milk alternatives). It is, in other words, factually false in several dimensions.

Now, if one agrees with the viewpoint, one may be more likely to dismiss those factual errors, even if you are aware of them, as minor and tangential. If one disagrees with the viewpoint, one is likely more inclined to see them as significant and central and indicative of a deliberate distortion to push an agenda.

Where I was coming from was that there aren't, as far as I know, a codified set of rules for creating a stable institution. I was thinking that someone would say "there is no such thing" and ignore the advice so in my footnote I pointed out the the basic idea was in fact quite sound. I probably should have referenced the paper as well but assumed most people would already know about it.