That doesn't matter though, because most people 'live' in this new space via Facebook, in the same way that a plurality of people 'live' in the physical world we inhabit via the nation of China (PRC being the most populous nation). Simply because of that, we cannot discount the over-influence of Facebook.
Even more poignant, Facebook's dominance in this regard is much more disproportionate than China's dominance of the world population. (Facebook having a little under half the world's population).
Even though I don't live on planet Facebook anymore, the truth is Facebook heavily affects my life. I don't see how anyone can reasonably argue against this.
The submitted postimg.cc screenshot had the following cdc.gov link [0], which appears to be flagged as false information. The following text was on that cdc page:
> After December 31, 2021, CDC will withdraw the request to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of the CDC 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel, the assay first introduced in February 2020 for detection of SARS-CoV-2 only. CDC is providing this advance notice for clinical laboratories to have adequate time to select and implement one of the many FDA-authorized alternatives.
> Visit the FDA website for a list of authorized COVID-19 diagnostic methods. For a summary of the performance of FDA-authorized molecular methods with an FDA reference panel, visit this page.
> In preparation for this change, CDC recommends clinical laboratories and testing sites that have been using the CDC 2019-nCoV RT-PCR assay select and begin their transition to another FDA-authorized COVID-19 test. CDC encourages laboratories to consider adoption of a multiplexed method that can facilitate detection and differentiation of SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses. Such assays can facilitate continued testing for both influenza and SARS-CoV-2 and can save both time and resources as we head into influenza season. Laboratories and testing sites should validate and verify their selected assay within their facility before beginning clinical testing.
I'm personally not sure what to make of all this, the cdc link doesn't seem controversial, and perhaps flagging this as false information was done in error? But screen shots are lame so I figured I'd repost as a link and the text for convenience.
I assume it has been claimed on FB that this is proof that the flu didn't disappear but just got misdiagnosed as Covid, and/or that the Covid tests results couldn't be trusted at all, hence they have been withdrawn.
> If that’s true, then, how can we be sure that flu hasn’t been misdiagnosed?
Because I haven't seen anything on Facebook, or self-censoring HN for that matter, validating those claims. So they must be but only false but really out-there wacky conspiracy theories.
Yes, it does state that. However, there is the word 'and' between detection and differentiation.
The original could not detect, so therefore differentiation is a moot point.
Also, the test for flu was a separate test. So it would have had no effect on the lower flu incidence assuming we didn't test for flu at a lesser rate.
>assuming we didn't test for flu at a lesser rate.
Do we have any numbers on this? I would imagine a lot of people who went to the doctor or whoever complaining of flu like symptoms would have been tested for covid.
They've archived past weekly reports going back to 1999-2000 (not sure if that's when the weekly report started or just when the archive starts), although the formatting and specific information has changed over the years. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/pastreports.htm
It does not imply that. It would be effectively impossible for that to happen. PCR testing is a crude form of genetic test. Influenza viruses and coronaviruses are not closely related. It's more likely that a genetic test would confuse influenza for ebola (another negative sense single strand RNA virus) than for a coronavirus infection.
> Isn’t implying that the test can’t tell the difference between flu and covid?
they are strongly convinced that this is the case, quoting papers or research showing that in some rare cases with some methods you could have tests which could sometimes confuse Covid with other Corona Viruses (not flu, completely ignoring that this might not apply to the tests they are speaking about or that the probabilities are negligible.)
I had to realize that the majority of people (which haven't studied something where they had to learn it) do not understand stochastic at all, but believe they have some basic understanding of probabilities (which they don't have).
Furthermore it's not uncommon for people to reject truth which do not fit into their world view.
Not to long ago I realized that a relative of mine does not understand the difference between false positives and false negatives and that they are not equally likely. They knew the (fast, non PCR) test can be wrong and as such believed it can be equally wrong in all directions including false positives. So because it was confirmed that the test have many false negative they believed that they also must have many false positives and as such the increase in cases must be because of this false positives...
I tried to reach out to them and explain them that false positives and false negatives are not the same and just because something can likely fail in one way
it doesn't mean it will also fail likely in another way. But I completely failed to reach them, they insisted on their opinion being correct and went very fast into a defensive mode where it's impossible to reach them no matter what how reasonable and convincing your arguments are.
> This is the underlying problem we're dealing with.
What's the underlying problem? How are we dealing with it? As someone who does not and has never had a facebook account, I have very little context to understand what you are talking about.
someone on facebook: "SEE! THE CDC/FDA/CIA/IRS HAS BEEN LYING TO US ALL ALONG! THEIR TEST FOR THE VIRUS WAS RIGGED! NOW THEY'RE TRYING TO HIDE THAT BY TELLING EVERYONE TO USE A DIFFERENT TEST! DON'T BE A SHEEP, KNOW TEH TURTH AND SET YOURSELF FREE!"
and then cites this link from the CDC as "context"
Anyone flagging this because they think it's an exaggeration, well, I envy you not having direct counterexamples in your immediate family. Paul is almost pitch-perfect explaining posts which real people make in all seriousness.
I don't think it's an exaggeration, and I wouldn't flag it, but I worry about the attitude. Officials are telling the truth about the danger of the coronavirus, but sometimes they do lie! We can't afford to cultivate an attitude that only raving lunatics accuse government agencies of lying.
No, but I think it’s important to do that by relying on reason and evidence. Anyone known to repeat lies is unlikely to be right about deep secrets, just as the Snowden leak didn’t validate the people convinced that the government was reading your emails on behalf of the Trilateral Commission and aliens in Area 51.
I mean... didn't it? One of the things Snowden revealed was an international conspiracy called Five Eyes, where intelligence agencies across the Anglosphere coordinate to covertly guide world events in their preferred direction, leaning on each other to handle things such as domestic espionage which would be illegal in their home countries. I'm not sure we can mark this as a loss for the conspiracy theorists, even if they were wrong to think the Trilateral Commission was involved.
I don’t think it validated anyone: they didn’t contribute any new facts about the groups, reasons, or methods. The fact that there was a government spy agency spying doesn’t mean any of those details were less wrong or that the conspiracy theorists are trustworthy sources of information about anything in the future.
Part of what makes conspiracy theories spread well is mixing in real details to make the invented parts sound reasonable. Five Eyes and ECHELON weren’t secret so they were great for making it sound more like you knew what you were talking about, things like PRISM, MUSCULAR, and XKeyscore were but none of the conspiracists had detailed anything like that.
This is the same dynamic we’re seeing now with antivax and QAnon types digging through things like CDC bulletins. They can use details to sound like they’re more informed and find odd phrasing or terms of art which can be confusing to normal people in a way which supports their narrative. Imagine how it’d sound if someone started writing stories about a dark cannibal-murder conspiracy among Linux admins forking and killing children, based on someone’s mailing list posts about troubleshooting some C code. If they correctly identified fork(2) and you knew that Reiser had actually killed someone, would that make you trust them about anything because a few details could be stretched to cover something real?
More often than not, they aren't "lying". It's presented that way, but there's a real challenge explaining policy to a hostile audience. I mean, that's the job, so not much pity for them, but most of the time is an oversimplification (a classic form of propaganda). Their incentives are such that it is way easier to tell the truth.
> CDC encourages laboratories to consider adoption of a multiplexed method that can facilitate detection and differentiation of SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses
Used to claim that many positive test results were not covid cases, but were flu cases.
This _isn’t_ the case — the CDC is now recommending tests that can check for multiple infections rather than just one.
But the wording does leave it open to being a possibility, on first reading that may even be a sensible assumption.
So the problem is complicated —
1) this is an official and authoritative source posting wording that’s explaining what’s changing with ambiguity about what the status quo is.
2) Amid that ambiguity, people are posting information that is not true, using this as a source.
3) Facebook’s response is the “Fake News” label, when while the source has its faults it is not Fake or News, it’s just having meaning attributed to it that’s not there
> 3) Facebook’s response is the “Fake News” label, when while the source has its faults it is not Fake or News, it’s just having meaning attributed to it that’s not there
I would also be unsurprised to learn that this is something like an original conspiracy post being correctly flagged as fake news and subsequent posts with the same URLs either being auto-tagged or suggested as the same to a reviewer who is almost certainly overworked and underpaid.
All of the big tech companies like to rely on automation to avoid hiring more people and it's really easy to imagine this repurposing infrastructure which was originally built to quickly block things like spam or malware links being shared where the presence of a particular URL does in fact mean the post is highly similar.
If I understand correctly it means that the old tests tested only for covid and the new ones test for covid and influenza at the same time. This makes them more efficient because you won't have to test twice to detect each virus separately.
That's not why they are decommissioning this test though. There's no reason that both this test, and a covid/influenza test cannot coexist.
CDC is explicitly decommissioning this test, and it's not clear why in their announcement.
I'm just trying to gain more context here.
It's pretty easy to see how this could imply that the current PCR test could have issues.
The consequences of this is not neutral because false positives were treated for Covid. No one knows what the consequences of that medical misapplication of treatment was.
Which wording? The one quoted above? That means "if you are switching tests anyways, consider using one that does multiple things so you don't waste (somewhat) scarce and expensive testing capacity on double-testing"
I see a picture of a link with a "false information" notice. What are you seeing that I am not that causes you to interpret all of this ostensibly harmful missing context?
Sure, you can use this fact to make a misleading claim. But literally any piece of information can be used in a harmful manner. I guess we need someone to round off the points on all of our scissors so we can't hurt ourselves?
Yes, I know what you're talking about, but it has nothing to do with the post. Someone posted a link to a CDC page on Facebook, and Facebook flagged it as misinformation.
Maybe someone, somewhere used this link to argue something misleading, but as I said before, you can do that with any fact.
Oh. I'm not defending labelling the link as fake news. And my post wasn't an argument in favour of this being ok. Just adding an example for the poster and any other readers who haven't seen the "context problem" first hand
>
timr 8 hours ago | parent [–] | on: Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links ar...
I see a picture of a link with a "false information" notice. What are you seeing that I am not that causes you to interpret all of this ostensibly harmful missing context?
Sure, you can use this fact to make a misleading claim. But literally any piece of information can be used in a harmful manner.
That is the gist of the problem.
It's not quite entirely true, as taking a quote from an astronaut about how the ground on the moon didn't feel like anything on earth isn't going to convince anyone that the moon is made of green cheese who didn't think that anyway, but that is the general problem.
Huge chunks of the American public are refusing to take a vaccine that could end the pandemic and save tens-to-hundreds of thousands of lives because people are lying to them on forums like Facebook (also right here on HN) and telling them it's dangerous.
Is it? I don't think "people sometimes make wrong arguments" is a problem Facebook should attempt to solve, or could solve if they did attempt it. The problem of fake news is fabricated nonsense, not arguments which end up being flawed upon further thought.
I think you misunderstand. It's not about whether one can easily imagine it being used to create a false narrative, but whether those false narratives are being broadly deployed. In other words, it's an empirical, not theoretical model.
i think the problem is that facebook doesn't actually fact-check anything. they abdicate that responsibility to third parties that they designate as "fact checkers", and designated fact checkers include some organizations who may not have an entirely firm grasp on what's true.
People were spreading misinformation about the link. Just to be clear, there is no recall. The test is not defective. The test can be used through the end of the year. The CDC recommends using tests that can detect flu as well as COVID.
The current PCR test from the CDC does not detect flu at all, or other coronaviruses. The test is very specific. See pages 40 on in the Instructions for Use[1] if you are interested. The test sequences were compared (by computer) to hundreds of thousands of genomes of flu, the human genome, and other organisms, as well as tested on physical specimens.
Here is a sample of messages that were shared on Reddit:
> The FDA announced today that the CDC PCR test for COVID-19 has failed its full review. Emergency Use Authorization has been REVOKED. The FRAUDULENT PCR Test has finally been ruled a Class I Recall. This is the most serious type of recall. All measurements based on PCR Testing should come to an end ASAP:
> CDC retracts PCR test as it can't differentiate between COVID and the flu. It was all a Lie.
> CDC pulls PCR tests because they can’t distinguish Covid from the flu. We finally caught the SOBs who have lied to us about the coronavirus numbers the last year.
> The Pandemic narrative is unravelling... The FDA announced today that the CDC PCR test for COVID-19 has failed its full review. Emergency Use Authorization has been REVOKED. It is a Class I recall. The most serious type of recall. Too many false POSITIVES. This is the test that started the pandemic!
> CDC to Withdraw Emergency Use Authorization for PCR Test Because It Cannot Distinguish Between SARS-CoV-2 and the Flu.
> Watch the panicked minority bombard the comments with establishment talking points to try and refute this tweet.. PCR is being rescinded as a test, vaccinated people are filling hospitals, and our government officials are still urging us to get tested using PCR and get jabbed with the Covid vaccines. Alrighty then.
There are people which distribute false information which use extreamly clever highly manipulative methods which more often then not show a clear understanding of the matter in question. And I feel that it's a degree of understanding of both the topic and method about how to subtitle manipulate people that I think they themself should be clearly aware about them spreading false information.
One method often used is to take some "official" article, paper, etc. which is not targeting a general-public audience but a audience of people with specialized knowledge and then twist what it supposedly says and spread it to people which in general do not have this specialized knowledge but
where they know that with the given combination of
pre-feed misinformation and non-understanding of the content and complex language/terminology their targets will see it as proof for the false information. Even if it might proof the exact opposite.
Examples include:
- this link
- a case where two very different statistics of the CDC (from different sources) used the same "label name" for a graph with similar but very different data
- cases of studies showing that e.g. some vaccine is not perfect in some very specific situations being taking as proof that it's not working at all
- same for tests etc.
- court cases won due to formalities being taken as proof that vaccines don't work (e.g. anti-vaccer creating a bounty for a proof of them being wrong but intentionally formulating the requirement for the bounty submissions subtle in a way that no submission is ever valid for submission and as such they won the court case about not paying out the money, even through the submission proofed them wrong)
A commonly used fallacy of the mind is that people jump from "this solution is not perfect" to "this solution MUST be replaced" to "a solution which is perceived to be the opposite is therefore true".
Like "this test has wrong results in rare cases" => "this test can not be trusted at all" => "all tests of this kind are untranslatable" => "there is no need to test because all tests are fake anyway" => "covid doesn't exists".
As a side not I have seen that kind of thinking to often in IT too like: "this library turned out imperfect once we knew more about it" => "we must replace this library" => "this other library which used the imperfection of the first library in it's advertisements but of which we don't know anything about is correct and must be used".
I believe it's of upmost importance to improve science to general-public communications and argument all kinds of reports, articles and papers with a section targeting the general public. As well as rehabilitating state organs which are focused on providing easy understandable content and explanations, while being vowed (by law required) to objectivity and transparency and making it highly punished for politicians, other state organs or well any kind of institution trying to influence it.
Either way they play arbiter with no transparency as to how they do it. They mostly outsource the "truth finding" but then pay them so its all a huge mess and simply not what people want them to do.
I dont use FB but I would not want HN to decide whats true and what not. If wrong stuff is postedon here we (the user) figure it out just fine.
Then when you log in, you see a (0) after your user name. Not much else. You can still post.
If you've been posting abusive comments or otherwise breaking the site rules, you may get banned, but that's not triggered by your karma (so far as I know).
And this is why Facebook has no business being part of fact checking.
While it may look different, this is no different than two folks on the phone getting interrupted by ATT and being told they are incorrect on their assumptions about topic X.
Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are the carrier, and should be treated as such.
The problem is that one of the main differentiating factors of these platforms is selecting which post to present to the user at a particular moment. It's a valuable service - there are lots of posts - but it means the platforms are always somewhat going to be in the business of choosing one post over another.
> While it may look different, this is no different than two folks on the phone getting interrupted by ATT and being told they are incorrect on their assumptions about topic X.
There are many ways in which this is different, most of which relate to the differences between audio and visual communication mediums.
-Facebook isn't legally required to fact check.
-The CDC position is sufficiently controversial that this is well within the margin of error we'd expect of a fact checker.
-AT&T isn't amplifying your phone call to millions by selective algorithms that enhance the most controversial and hateful messages
-Carriers are heavily regulated, in part because they enjoy natural monopolies (in AT&T's case, only so many companies should be digging trenches and connecting physical wirelines into homes and businesses)
This argument I see everywhere "Facebook amplified your voice, a phone line does not" misses a key point: Facebook chooses to amplify voices. All any of us wanted really was for our friends to see what we say, if they choose to see it. So really, Facebook and similar entities at creating the problem deliberately and then claiming they're entitled to solve it by placing scarlet letters around their site.
This starts to get to the issue here. FB is not a carrier (like a telephone company). Their business model isn't built around carrying information or broadcasting it.
FB is a content platform who is about making ad revenue. They are crafted around that and how to make that the most profitable possible.
We need to differentiate the recommendation algorithm parts of these products from the communication parts. If Facebook is recommending something, that's on them, and if they want to not recommend my content to anyone, so be it; but I should be able to post something seen only by the people who opted in to following me without them getting in the way.
I would take this a step further and say that all social media recommendation algorithms should be publicly reviewable.
The claim is that this algorithms are neutral. But we know many contain ways for the owner to artificially boost preferred content. And algorithms tend to have the biases of their creators in them.
Controlling what people see is an important power and one that should be regulated.
I agree that the algorithms should be publicly reviewable. But I'm not sure that solves the central issue which is that there's a tension between what's financially good for social networks (algorithms that increase engagement - which disproportionately favors echo chambers, controversial and shallow content, etc.) and what's good for the general public.
Social networks aren't in the business of showing you what's "good for you." They're in the business of showing you what's good for them (e.g. things that will increase your engagement).
I don't see how this will help. FB et. al. work by shoehorning complex nuances into intentionally crude metrics like "engagement.". If they show the engagement-focused algorithm, that shows they're "just trying to engage users."
What would the algorithm show that isn't already apparent?
Most people that want to see the algorithm want that knowledge to use it for their own ends. They are forgetting about the second-order effects where literally everyone will also be doing that, and then they are gaming each other instead of "The Algorithm".
Yes. The entire point of government is to delegate important functions that cannot be handled correctly by a "free market" to elected officials, which would include appointing regulators. So that would be the system working as intended.
I don't really think there's enough reason for recommendation algorithms to be publicly reviewable, in many cases the algorithm itself is the most important asset of the product, and in a competitive business environment, you can't really force them to disclose it.
What would be ideal is to think of an incentive for these companies to give users an option to disable the use of their algorithm, aka natural flow. That's unfortunately not the trend things are moving, and even services that still have something like that employ dark-patterns to throw user back into their "controlled" timeline (Twitter for example reverts you back "Home" after a few days with a tiny message that is barely noticeable.)
I'm even willing to pay for a feature that "turns off" the algorithm, unfortunately that would never happen because it'd entail these companies admitting that they design their algos not for the benefit of the user but for stickiness and the dreaded "engagement", which shouldn't be a problem in itself, but then it'd quickly become obvious when they're acting sanctimonious.
There are two (or more) feeds of information on facebook:
- The main one, which only shows posts sent to the "recommend this to people queue" based on facebooks recommendation algorithms.
- Messenger, which directly sends messages to people in a FIFO fashion, which I assume facebook doesn't censor as heavily (though I can't say I've tested).
The fact that the recommendation based stream is more popular is a reflection that facebooks curation is actually useful, but it doesn't mean messenger doesn't exist.
Nor do I see that messenger must exist, facebook isn't morally obligated to provide a "non recommend feed" to you if that isn't the product they want to sell you. Perfectly good alternatives even exist, in the form of "blogs" (say, substack).
I assert that content I post to my timeline and which you see on your feed as my friend shouldn't be subject to Facebook's commentary or opinions. I take strong issue with the claim that to obtain that I have to use Messenger--which is an entirely different content paradigm--and I think it is outright dishonest to try to claim that people posting to timelines means that "the recommendation based stream is more popular".
Facebook wants to recommend content to me from random people: that's their issue, and they should take responsibility for it--whether legally or simply morally--and thereby should have to be careful with what they show people (maybe to the point where they simply can't scale it to the scale they are at automatically! I will not cry over their loss). Facebook also shows me content from my "friends"... I opted in to the content from my friends: if I don't like my friends, I can and should unfriend them, as they were my responsibility, not Facebook's (in the same sense that if I call someone on the phone I don't whine to AT&T about how much they suck). I should not get labels from Facebook telling me my friends' content--content I explicitly wanted to see--is scary or wrong, and they certainly should not be banned from showing it to me.
I think the most egregious category error you are making here is to equate messaging with communication... the entire mechanism of social media to followers is primarily direct communication! We can see how ridiculous this has become by looking at how, even if you have a private account--one random people aren't even allowed to see!--Facebook, Twitter, and Google currently consider it their business what we post there... an account you post things to and which other people follow is identical to a chat channel that happens to maintain a buffer.
(FWIW, to steel man your argument as best I can, "yes": Facebook also applies recommendation algorithms to friend feeds. Twitter I believe still doesn't. Instagram didn't, but then started... AFAIK people don't like it that much, but it might be more profitable for Facebook? Either way: it is helping me reorder content I already curated, and so I don't feel a need to claim that this is something they published. There is simply still a fundamental difference from platforms surfacing "trending" content or suggesting new people or channels I might want to follow / posts I might want to see, and acting as an intermediary for content from people I was directly linked to from people I am communicating with. The former might as well be illegal as far as I am concerned, while the latter needs to be sacrosanct.)
Point of fact first, twitter does filter tweets via a recommendation algorithm [1]. If you troll through HN you should be able to find threads with people complaining about that too... I assume instagram does too but don't use it and haven't verified [edit: It does https://later.com/blog/how-instagram-algorithm-works/].
> Facebook also shows me content from my "friends"... I opted in to the content from my friends: if I don't like my friends, I can and should unfriend them
This is not the service Facebook offers, nor has it ever been. Facebook has forever been about friending everyone you are actually friends with (and then some), and you (or at least the vast vast majority of people) do not want to swallow the entire firehose of content that their facebook friends post. Facebook doesn't want people unfriending people to avoid seeing their content, that's not how the model works - doing so would break all of other facebooks services like acting as a birthday reminder, event planner, and so on and so forth. Even the language is indicative of this, "unfriend" (I don't like you anymore) not "stop showing me these posts" (I don't like what you post).
> the entire mechanism of social media to followers is primarily direct communication!
On the contrary, the entire mechanism of the majority of successful social media companies is curated communication. As it turns out 99% of everything (e.g. posts) is crap, and people go to the sites where less than 99% of what they see is crap.
Types of curation vary, but the existence of it is very consistence. To create some categories: algorithms (facebook, tiktok, youtube, twitter), community upvotes + community moderation (reddit, HN, slashdot), just straight up heavy moderation (many forums, forum.nasaspaceflight.com comes to mind as one that is still going strong). Also worth pointing out that most of these platforms actually mix it up, e.g. youtube, twitter, and facebook all have forms of upvotes, and facebook has forms of community moderation.
But if you want direct communication, that exists. I.e. the previously mentioned facebook messenger (which admittedly doesn't do followers) and substack (which is a competitor of sorts that does).
Direct communication is not what facebook is offering as their main product (but is what they are offering with messenger), it's never been, and I don't see that you have any right to demand that it becomes what their main product does.
If everyone involved in the conversation wants to be involved, and no laws are broken, and the platform interferes, then it's censorship.
If there's some kind of algorithm putting the content in front of people who didn't ask for it (e.g. not followers/friends/subscribers/whatever), then you have a point.
Facebook is a private company that allows you to sign up to use its wholly-owned platform, and it's allowed to censor for whatever clever/asinine reasons it comes up with. Your only recourse is to disengage.
Not being allowed to do things is called being regulated. So Facebook shouldn't be regulated in the same way that ATT is because they currently aren't being regulated in the same way that ATT is?
The reason the private-company argument is really tired is that it's simply not something that we take to its logical end in society; the returns of company freedoms are diminished and even counter-productive when a company reaches ultimate freedom to do whatever it wants. A diverse society isn't sustainable if people from different backgrounds don't have the same opportunities to participate in society. This is exactly why, no, you can't only allow whites into your business and you can't ignore the needs of the disabled, among any number of things. It would work excellent under a feudalist system, however.
Likewise, if companies like Facebook get so large and influential that they (and a small number of other NGOs) provide the only meaningful channels of communication between groups, we are dooming freedom of expression if Facebook, Google, or whomever are free to silence you in order to pander to politics and advertisers. Especially not when Facebook works for the federal government and gets tax breaks and subsidies. Your individual rights mean more than the right of a giant corporation to make lots of money and have undue amounts of power.
> In the United States the statement is often heard, that “corporations are private businesses, so they can do whatever they want.” This assertion is particularly false when referring to entities like Facebook, Amazon, Exxon, and Pfizer, because…
> - the phrase goes directly against a basic knowledge of the history of incorporation — corporations were originally designed and granted special legal privileges by government, only because they were expected to serve a pubic good.
> - the phrase goes directly against the dictionary definition, and investment industry terminology — a public company is defined as a company whose shares are traded freely on a stock exchange, hence the term IPO (initial public offering).
> - the phrase ignores real-world government involvement—many large corporations are state and federally sponsored (e.g. subsidized, bailed out, and given perks), by money which ultimately comes from the tax-paying public.
> In reality, all big corporations are some combination of state-chartered, publicly-traded, and government-sponsored. By definition many are public companies, while others have complicated hybrid characteristics.
Unless I put her account on snooze, I regularly see posts that my (literally) abolish-money/anarcho-communist ex shares, even those from groups which I have repeatedly marked as “block all content from this group”.
So just unfollow her. It sounds like you have some major issues with her personally anyway so how is this a failure by the platform and not just you subjecting yourself to a negative situation?
The stuff she writes directly (rather than liking memes from groups she’s in) is as interesting as any other friend’s posts. Reason I mention her politics is because they’re about as extreme as you can get.
The problem is that Facebook is convinced that I, a British citizen living in Berlin, want to see “Bernie Sanders Dank Memes” (or whatever it was, there are many) even though I’ve clicked on the button labeled “don’t show me ‘Bernie Sanders Dank Memes’“.
The “even though I’ve clicked on the button” is especially egregious, in this context.
Yes, I hate how Facebook (and especially Twitter!) have now chosen to not just show me my friends' posts, but posts they like and respond to. A like has basically become a retweet.
Technology changes - magnifies, accelerates, projects, distorts - many social effects. One of those is removing the previously invisible, small cost of spreading an idea.
If two people want to have a conversation or exchange a letter, or one person wants to speak to everyone within earshot or post a sign for people walking by to read, that's one thing. Maybe you say something dumb, and it gets shot down, or maybe it gets propagated, but it needs to have an R0 greater than 1 to endure. If you need some level of capital and agreement to have a publisher run a thousand pamphlets with your idea, that's another, you can leverage previous efforts to amplify weak ideas, but more people are involved and able to provide some sort of sanity filter. On the Internet, the cost to promote an idea is near zero, and algorithms can amplify something dumb but catchy to millions of people in a heartbeat.
It used to require a few seconds of talking per person you wanted to reach, now it costs a few seconds to post a message that might be seen by millions. The difference is minuscule in absolute value (perhaps a monetary value of a few cents) but huge in relative terms (how many percent less than a few cents is zero cents?).
Maintaining policy on censorship while ignoring this massive change in the landscape is shortsighted. Yes, a physical public venue ought not censor someone who wants to talk to other people there, but a digital platform with an audience of millions should think carefully about the effects of messages that their technology amplifies.
You only have two choices, let all information be available regardless of whatever downside there may be, given that at least you still have some control over how to deal with that, or live in a truly Orwellian society in which you have no control over what you know.
Can you substantiate this? It seems pretty loaded, and I'm reminded of that fallacy where you state there are only two extremes possible as outcomes, you doing that on purpose or what?
How to propose there is a middle ground? What everyone imagines is that if we only censor what is reasonable to censor it will be fine.
The fallacy is that we always view this from our personal perspective, yet we will not be the ones who make those choices. We give up that role to someone else.
Who has this role over society has immense power. Some would argue greater than governments themselves. It is only a matter of time before that vector will be exploited. It is in principle the same idea as regulatory capture, yet the incentives for capturing speech are far greater than a typical regulatory body.
The world isn't a black and white place and there are a variety of more nuanced stances between those two extremes. Any amount of censorship doesn't necessarily and immediately devolve into 1984.
Free speech issues are never simple - but their solutions is never found in the extremes. We've already, as a society, compromised free speech to make exceptions for discriminatory speech and violent destabilizing speech - we're already compromising how available all information is and it's necessary to have a functioning society.
Right now the US, specifically you guys - most of the rest of the world is handling this better - has a huge issue with false information around vaccine efficacy and dangers. This issue must be resolved if you want to be included in an open world once again - some level of censorship is going to be required.
> has a huge issue with false information around vaccine efficacy and dangers
It is fascinating your viewpoint here, as the false information identified in the US is true information elsewhere. The reason for this is precisely the censorship and information control.
This is a case of an algorithm doing stupid stuff and misclassifying things - it's also perfectly fair to criticize whether FB should actually control the classification algorithm for this particular type of statement. A misbehaving algorithm doesn't prove the lack of a system though - it just proves that the current one is broken.
Another nuance is that due to Facebook post privacy settings, an individual post can be restricted to a limited friend list, and not viewable by the general public. However the "fact checking" appears to apply to both private and public posts.
The fact checking aspect of it is new twist, but Facebook's servers already checks the contents of messages and will disappear messages if the content is deemed bad. It started off as protection against spreading viruses/malware which are unequivocally bad and has evolved from there to include urls to sites with extreme political views and other controversial content.
That said, SMS carriers filter and block TONS of messages and have been doing it for years. Our startup works in that space so we have to deal with this problem all the time and I can tell you last November if you tried to send a text message with the word "election" in it in an automated fashion, it was most likely getting blocked.
Yes, and now the U.S. mobile telcos are applying a completely subjective "reputation" "brand trust score", which sounds a lot like the Chinese social credit score. Oh, and they're charging a ton more for the privilege of sending a small number of texts, too.
I guess when you engage in price-fixing in the open and call it "setting a standard", then anti-trust rules don't apply..
I promise you there is tons of actual keyword based content filtering going on. We had to build an AI just to detect which keywords different carriers block. Anything socially contentious, like "BLM", "election", "covid" increases the chances your message will get a 30008 error aka carrier-level content blocking. More disturbing is that plenty of carriers will also block messages but report them back to Twilio as delivered.
The view of "if we just implement it right" it will be fine is a fallacy.
These organizations represent immense power through influence. By their very existence arises the conflict power and truth. If you can have influence over the fact checkers, then you have influence over truth. Who would you trust to form such an organization? Where is the oversight? Who monitors the monitors?
We are seeing what "reasonable censorship" actually looks like. It is an oxymoron.
>The view of "if we just implement it right" it will be fine is a fallacy.
Good thing I didn't say that then. The original comment that I was challenging said there was no such thing as fact checking. "Fact checking is hard" is not an argument in support of the idea that fact checking doesn't exist as a concept.
>We are seeing what "reasonable censorship" actually looks like. It is an oxymoron.
What is your definition of censorship? Because there is plenty of speech that I think is reasonable to censor. Obviously there is the illegal speech. Should Facebook be forced to host threats, defamation, copyright infringement, child porn, etc? What about the speech that is not illegal but is objectionable in some way? Should Facebook be forced to include hardcore porn in people's feeds if someone posts it? Once we establish that not all speech is appropriate in all contexts, censorship sure starts to seem reasonable. We just don't call it censorship because of the negative connotation. We call "reasonable censorship" moderation.
Yes, what is bound by law is not an option. However, in most cases the law should handle it. Meaning that the post remains unless some legal action is taken as the host often can't just know the legal status except in the more obvious case of child porn etc.
It is censorship when it is out of the control of users. It is filtering when the user has a choice.
Yes, users want to see or not see some categories of content. That certainly is not a problem when it is presented to the user as a choice.
There are platforms that operate mostly in this method, like MeWe.
The problem is the poorly-considered but extremely widespread epistemology that goes something like "whether a claim is true depends on how convinced certain people are of that claim."
> Once you create a fact checking entity, it will decide for itself what are object truths.
No, it will just make claims, which may be true or false. There's nothing mysterious or troubling about this. They're not "deciding" what's true.
It is exactly what they are doing. You are playing with semantics. The public as well as private companies use the claims as an argument for validation of truth.
The troubling aspect is it comes with some level of authority backing the claims. There are consequences for not aligning with the positions of the claims.
It very well may be an explanation of the truth, and there's nothing wrong with that. If that's what you mean by "validation" then that's great! But if you mean that whether a claim is "valid" depends on any one person or source's position on the claim, then you're back to that bad epistemology I described.
> But if you mean that whether a claim is "valid" depends on any one person or source's position on the claim, then you're back to that bad epistemology I described.
No, I'm not asserting that view. However, what you are stating I think is the viewpoint of most people. They will accept the claim as valid.
> However, what you are stating I think is the viewpoint of most people.
Do you think that most people think that whether a claim is true depends on Facebook's stance on that claim? That would be extremely shocking to me. My impressions is the opposite: that there is mainstream repulsion to Facebook (and Twitter, etc.) being so bold as to take any stance on factual issues.
People do leverage Facebook's claims when they align with their own. You are probably right in that it doesn't directly change anyone's opinion that disagrees.
However, it does reinforce confirmation bias. Those that align with Facebook's viewpoint will be less likely to listen to other user's opposing viewpoints as the feel emboldened that they viewpoint has some official support.
So I think it has an indirect effect in that it weakens user to user influence.
> Once you create a fact checking entity, it will decide for itself what are object truths
okay, so what? What do you think a court does? The guy who reads the meter at the water sanitation plant or someone who hands out parking tickets?
A fact checker is nothing but an institution with the authority to adjudicate on some questions which are relevant for the maintenance of the platform, no different from any other authority that manages public conduct. Where is the problem?
And of course fact-checkers are not unaccountable. Like in this case their behavior itself is topic of public discourse.
There is objective truth. The earth is objectively not flat. There are people who don't agree with that (or at least who say they don't), but the earth is objectively not flat, whether or not some people don't agree. Not only that, it's provably not flat. So those who don't agree, well... they prove the contrariness of human nature, I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The Earth is objectively and unironically flat from the point of view of some, in fact many, narratives.
Certainly the architectural drawings of my house do not include a "bulge" in the basement due to heretical sphericalness.
All discussion of my basement floor being flat within about 1/2 inch need to be censored by big brother to save us all from free and independent thought.
The purpose of arguing about what should be censored is to distract from the argument of should there be censorship at all. Classic divide and conqueror strategy. Nobody ever gets asked if they should have concentration camps or not, they only argue about competing paint schemes and honorary mottos.
The problem is that almost any positive statement can be shown to be objectively wrong. "F=m * a", "x^2 = -1 has no solutions", "light travels in straight lines", etc. There are always conditions under which those are true or are good approximations for specific purpose.
Spelling out those applicability conditions explicitly is critical in research publications (but even then, only used for the topic under investigation). In all other contexts such pedantry is impossible. My 2c.
For all intents and purposes there is always an objective truth, the hard question is when you consider it proven.
Even for the flat Earth theory it's hard to dismiss it offhand. I mean sure there are plenty of experiments you can do to show that it is pretty close to a sphere. But who do you trust to do those experiments?
Either the person fact-checking needs to do the experiments/research themselves (which doesn't scale well) or they need to trust other people to have done the experiments. However at that point you're simply placing the word of some people above the word of others, which is not objective at all.
And even assuming you've actually picked honest people acting in good faith you're still relying on people to not be confidently incorrect, which I can fairly confidently say is always going to go wrong at some point.
> Even for the flat Earth theory it's hard to dismiss it offhand. > I mean sure there are plenty of experiments you can do to show that it is pretty close to a sphere. But who do you trust to do those experiments?
All the various people who have done them, some of which can be repeated by anyone motivated enough, and all the technology that relies on it being the case. This was known to the ancient Greeks. One even calculated the circumference within a reasonable accuracy.
No, that just means that some people ignore or discount objective facts for ideological reasons. The Earth is roughly a sphere, and that is empirically provable.
The arbiter should be well established science, history, math and logic. Of course there is still room for plenty of debate where the matter is not already settled by overwhelming evidence. That's where there shouldn't be an arbiter. But for factual matters like the Earth being (roughly) spherical, there's no actual debate. Just belief that goes contrary to the evidence.
Facts don't care about feelings. Feelings do care about facts.
Fact: the Earth is an oblate spheroid (roughly round) undergoing human-caused climate change.
Example contrary feeling: I live in the arctic circle, it's cold and all I can see is a flat ice-scape. How can the Earth be warming and round when this is all I experience?
There are at least two facts that are creating cognitive dissonance here:
1) I feel cold.
2) I can't see the whole Earth from the surface.
What we feel guides us to question the world (which is healthy) but we shouldn't cling to what we feel is right when we can prove our feelings are wrong. Turns out that being cold on one point of the Earth is an experience that has nothing to do with the global average temperature rising. Also, we are living on a giant rock whose size is so much larger that it locally feels flat. We can also only see so far before our vision is impeded by the atmosphere.
Flat-Earthers are wasting all of our time IMO because there is a lot of well established evidence to prove the Earth is round (ish) and much bigger than us. It's even easy to visually verify if you spend time/money to go high enough to see it for yourself.
The real issue here is that the facts are more complex than just repeating what "feels" true. Humans (much as all animals) are lazy and often don't pursue rigor.
It is really a fact. It's a provable fact. It's a fact that was proven thousands of years ago. Here's a whole-ass section on Wikipedia with evidence[0].
Well the obvious response to that is at one point in human history the objective truth was that the Earth was flat.. you could literally be killed if you denied the Earth was flat.
There is great danger in giving one group of people the power to choose what is "objective truth"
Not sure if that’s a good comparison: 1) the lab leak theory is only incidentally political since the two sides decided to make it into yet another hot button issue; 2) the media did cover the emails story extensively and it was never prematurely “fact checked” as false.
Everyone loves to mock the flat Earthers, but I believe the theory deserves more respect.
For the typical person, who roams around on some small patch of the Earth's surface, but who isn't launching rockets or traveling between continents, the flat earth theory is more useful than the spheroid earth theory. When you walk a short distance, your path's deviation from planar geometry due to the earth's global curvature is orders of magnitude smaller than the deviation due to local surface roughness, and hence the global curvature is irrelevant in practice. Let's say you walk 5km (about 3 miles); the difference between your path as predicted by the planar-earth theory versus the spherical earth theory is about one tenth of a millimeter. For 99% of what we do, invoking the spheroid Earth theory would be like using general relativity to model a baseball's trajectory in the presence of air resistance.
And if you happen to be far from the earth, on a length scale greater than about 10**9 km, then the point-earth theory is probably going to be the most useful model to you.
In short, it's all a matter of perspective. "Objective truth" isn't a thing; all that matters is how effective your model is at describing the properties that are relevant to you.
"When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." - Isaac Asimov
Except as soon as the started curating their content (algorithmic feeds; like/comment sharing) they started become publishers. If they solely made connections and forwarded messages, then they'd be carriers.
Frankly, does anyone have business in fact checking at this point? Who checks the fact checkers? I can't think of any source that hasn't repeatedly bungled information over the past year. What we have is consensus checking, at best.
Well… I’d answer, but how many downvotes do you want me to get?
If fact checkers are operating with political bias, the people that call it out will be the ones who feel they’re targeted for their beliefs. They aren’t going to police themselves.
By adding content to user's newsfeed, they ( facebook's algorithm ) have made a explicit decision to share the piece of content and implicit decision that they deem the post safe for sharing. In that case shouldn't a speaker operator be responsible for the voices they amplify?
You only see things in your newsfeed from people you've explicitly added to your network (i.e. explicitly opted in to receiving content from). Is facebook wrong for showing you the things you said you want it to show you?
It’s moderation through omission. No different than traditional TV news choosing to only produce stories painting their politically allies positively or foes negatively. Any form of selection can be a means for bias.
I think this is an unhelpful framing of the situation, because as you imply Facebook is of course not wrong.
If you have one friend and your feed is entirely full of their posts, Facebook is off the hook. But, for most users, the situation is far more complex. People have many friends, they may also be in groups. They probably will not be on facebook long enough for them to see all of the posts and, if they are, their attention levels will differ over the entire corpus.
In this situation facebook begins to have agency - which is different from being wrong. They didn't make the content, they didn't create the link that brought the content to you, but of all the content they could show they did show you this and not that. It's a relatively new kind of agency, one that we didn't have a lot of practical experience with before very recently, so they can be forgiven somewhat for their difficulty grappling with it. However, they're an important part of the chain of information organization and it would be foolish to pretend they have no responsibility.
> You only see things in your newsfeed from people you've explicitly added to your network (i.e. explicitly opted in to receiving content from).
Eh, I'm pretty sure see random posts from political Facebook groups that were commented on by a Facebook friend I added in like 2006 when that sort of "content proliferation" didn't exist yet (or at least wasn't anywhere near as prominent). I explicitly added that friend, yes, but I definitely didn't explicitly consent to receiving every single piece of Internet content that that friend ever interacts with.
I don't follow enough users to have a flourishing newsfeed, so facebook gives me suggestions to follow pages and shows posts from those pages. These suggestions are purely based on what facebook thinks I may like.
With people having enough sources to feed their newsfeed, facebook decides the order and cherry picks what posts are shown.
> Is facebook wrong for showing you the things you said you want it to show you?
I do agree with this. Coming to a solution to this would be hard problem. Users will have to give finer information about types of posts people like from a creator. I doubt there are any real work incentives for a big company to build a system like this.
>While it may look different, this is no different than two folks on the phone getting interrupted by ATT and being told they are incorrect on their assumptions about topic X.
Well, it proves the problems and downsides of the entire idea. It doesn't necessarily prove it's futile, and it doesn't even necessarily prove it's a bad idea, but those of us who pointed out the problems are proven right that they are in fact problems...
> Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are the carrier, and should be treated as such.
They are not "carriers" nor are they "publishers" because those concepts aren't legal terms, outside a very narrow field of law and the imagination of the tech community.
Besides, "carriers" aren't as free from intervention as you make it out to be. AT&T can and does, and sometimes is required to, block spam or fraudulent calls, for example/
Carriers do not have any staff monitoring the content being posted, nevermind the largest such staff in the world
Carriers do not have algorithms seeking out what content on what phone call creates the most 'engagement' (which is probably inversely correlated with truth value) and then actively interrupting your other calls to pushing that content into your stream. Again, nevermind that FB has the largest such feed-selecting algorithm on the planet.
Carriers do not select and push one news source over another, based on the level of times it gets mentioned on the calls.
These are all editorial functions, far more selective and influential than any newsroom editor.
The idea that they should be treated as carriers may have been originally true when the feeds were absolute literal timelines of items posted by 'friends' you selected, in strict chronological order.
But once they (FB, Twitter, etc.) started tracking "likes" and activity, and favoring one bit of content over another to surface and emphasize/de-emphazise in your feed, they became editors.
That point was decades ago, and it is time to stop treating them with that old trope. The fact that they fail at their fact checking is no reason to say that they shouldn't do it (and yes, if they would go back to strict chronological feeds fully selected by us, with no algorithmic prioritizing, I'd agree that we should again treat them as carriers).
They should not be able to have it both ways -- being the largest editors in the world = all the power, but treated as innocent carriers = none of the responsibility.
I don't see how (although I might not object to some values of your quote).
It seems a straightforward choice:
1) Go forward as a Carrier and delete ALL features with a hint of editing, promotion, or recommendation, i.e., a simple straight chronological feed of other members' posts/feed specifically selected by each user, and maybe a search function.
2) Go forward as a Publisher and select, edit, recommend, promote, annotate etc. as much as they want.
With Option-1 they can avoid all responsibility for content, merely doing takedowns on items for which they get notices. With Option-2, they have the same responsibility of any publisher for their content (e.g., newspapers are still responsible for the 'Letters to The Editor' that they choose to publish, and I'm sure edit out profanities, etc.)
I expect that users would actually strongly prefer Option-1, although actual "engagement" numbers could decline, it might actually be a better advert platform.
It also seems that viral content would still exist, but be more 'natural', i.e., not enhanced by algorithms, since you Alan could see something from Bob and repost it, which would be seen by Chris, who is subscribed to Alan but not Bob, and Chris could repost it to be seen by Debbie, who subscribes to neither Alan nor Bob...
So, I'm curious how you see that this would this kill/outlaw social media?
I think option 2 is a non-starter. If you're going have newspaper-like liability, I don't think anyone can afford to do that.
That leaves option 1. I suppose such a thing could exist, but it would be very different from social media as it exists. It sounds like a mash-up of twitter (accounts, follows, retweets) and 4chan (minimal moderation). Which would be interesting.
But you're still talking about basically making anything resembling current social media sites illegal.
You're also probably making any niche forum illegal too, unless it's niche enough that the operator can reasonably subject every post to prepublication review to try to avoid liability.
For sure, the same rapid-promotion algorithms would not be workable at scale if they were to run at current speeds.
But would it be so bad to have a system that is primarily unmolested by algos (i.e., mostly Opt-1) but with a slower algo that promotes more judiciously might make for a much less toxic SocMed environment?
This not completely correct because while a carrier transport anything indescrminately, social networks manipulate and control information exchange, for instance giving more priority to a content wrt to another.
> this is no different than two folks on the phone getting interrupted by ATT
Those entities aren't comparable. Internet and telecom operators, much like the post, is a carrier in a legal sense. Not sure about your jurisdiction, but in many countries this is an actual law, secrecy of correspondence.
Facebook however, is operating a publishing service on the web, much like Nature or NY Times. Nature isn't obliged to publish your article just because you upload it, and they certainly do a fair amount of fact checking.
To continue the parable you started, while AT&T isn't allowed to snoop the article you upload to NY Times, the latter is allowed to refrain from publishing it on their web. Stretching the definition of carrier to encompass Facebook and Twitter would have wide reaching consequences and risk making it much more difficult to operate a web page.
If all my phone calls were on party lines, and the carrier made me listen to the most outrageous trolls, carefully selected to instigate fights, then ya your analogy holds.
IDK about a warning on private messages. But I do know there are political links and websites you can not send over PM/DM on the big players. So, IDK, is that worse?
The problem everyone is dancing around by trying to say Google, Twitter, or Facebook is a common carrier is that they filter and weight what you see anyway
It’s literally the service Google provides.
If they could decouple the information store from the display, and allow third parties to algorithmically filter and sort, then we could designate them as common carries for the first half. Maybe.
This depends how you interact with the site though. "fake news" warnings will appear on links even if you navigate directly to the page of the person who posted it. Even worse, Twitter has blocked certain stories from being sent via direct message in the past. The algorithmic feeds may make up a much larger portion of the practical problem, but I think regardless of where you stand on that issue some of these sites have already overreached with how they moderate personal pages and private messages.
Same with Google. I searched a covid-related question, and Google's preferred answer at the top was "There is no evidence of this", while the next two links were medical journals that did show evidence that directly contradicted Google's statement.
They're not just a carrier, they're created their own version of the Internet which they now have to police.
The Internet was fine without Facebook, it was largely self-governing and people could choose to browse others self-hosted content. Their decision to create the platform and use algorithms to direct peoples attention was totally self made, clearly problematic and now they have to workout how to cope with the fallout.
Sure. But what would be your position, if, as a neutral carrier and a profit making business, FB sets up a system of taking money & promoting content (whatever the content) ?
Would you be ok with FB promoting glorification of white supremacy? Because, as a neutral carrier, it is not supposed to look at the content.
Would you support it promoting a content piece that is a fluff of falsehoods resting on a thin layer or truth (They are making all the frogs gay !) ?
FB could always argue that it is not responsible for content on its servers and can always argue that the counter point is also allowed.
What if corporations, with their infinite marketing budgets start using FB to start promoting that climate change is actually good for the world?
I'd rather them try than do nothing. If you aren't on facebook regularly you simply don't understand how much crap they do find and cut. Also the sheer number of groups they have to remove to prevent complete misinformation and terrorist groups like qanon is insane.
It isn't just the social media giants. It applies to most if not all the corporate giants. Google's search and YouTube, Apple news, Netflix, Disney, etc...
I think i would restrict it to "X narrative, where X is chosen from spectrum of acceptable opinion dictated by appointed board of directors, USA, inc.".
OK, random thought experiment. As someone without a facebook it's hard for me to evaluate, but how much damage would really be caused if facebook just disappeared one day?
Absolutely zero. People would find another way to communicate, socialize, or whatever. The loss of Facebook would be a loss of jobs and income for people, but that’s it. Facebook serves no positive purpose in society, and it seems the best thing a person can do, is to delete their Facebook account.
Zero damage? No way. Millions of people would lose contact with friends and family that they have no other connections with. Companies that depend on Facebook advertising would disappear. People would be locked out of OAuth accounts on thousands of websites.
> Millions of people would lose contact with friends and family that they have no other connections with.
Not at all.
> Companies that depend on Facebook advertising would disappear.
Good.
> People would be locked out of OAuth accounts on thousands of websites.
OK? If you were federating your auth via Facebook it was only a matter of time until you were locked out for one arbitrary reason or another. This just seems like an acceleration of a good thing.
> It would be catastrophic.
From your perspective, I can see that. But there are other perspectives out that that are not completely beholden to Facebook.
Some people rely on their relationships with other people. They build support systems, form groups, and take comfort in the company of others. Being cut off suddenly and with no means to reconnect would isolate many people. This would be extremely damaging from a mental health perspective alone.
In addition, so many people have reconnected with old friends, family, teachers. One friend of mine used Facebook to find her birth parents. That avenue disappears completely.
I don't know why you would say it's "good" for these companies to disappear. These aren't megacorps. It's small, local companies that rely on FB advertising. Bed and breakfasts, wineries, anything that depends on tourism. They're always hit the hardest. Walmart isn't going to care if they can't advertise on FB anymore.
Your comment shows a lack-of-understanding and compassion for your fellow human.
Actual research shows the opposite effect on mental health from what you are saying.
When you don't have Facebook your friends and family just txt or email. I mean Facebook book hasn't even been around that long. To pretend it is something like water or electricity is just preposterous.
Many do not text or email, they use Facebook's messaging system. They would not even have the information required to connect elsewhere.
There is also a huge difference between people making the decision to stop using social networking, and being suddenly and unexpectedly cut off from a support network. The former can have positive effects on mental health, the latter will certainly not.
I say this as somebody who deleted their Facebook account over a decade ago.
While I agree that FB disappearing wouldn't be that big a deal, the idea that email is an "obvious" alternative is quite problematic for the younger folk.
Data point: In 2009, the admin assistant in my department at university told me she's been getting quite a few upset incoming freshmen because of the requirement to have an email address for university classes - many of them had never used email before, and had communicated only via text, and IM apps. This was over 10 years ago.
I agree email isn't the best for social communication, but I find it silly young people would get upset about needing an email address. It seems pretty obvious to me that an email is required for a number of basic adult functions, especially if one doesn't want to make a lot of phone calls. I was in high school in 2009 and my entire peer group was already using email for things like summer job applications and booking appointments.
Also, I'm surprised the university wasn't assigning them .edu emails anyway. My younger brother is in college now and he loves the school email for getting student discounts.
They were assigning them .edu addresses. Their complaint was more about the school requiring them to use email (e.g. to get updates from classes, registration, etc).
I'm not saying all those who complained did not have email - likely many/most did. They didn't like being required to use it. However, there were quite a few who claimed they had never used email. I suspect that they likely had, but only for a few formal things (university applications, etc) - something they used perhaps once every few months. They probably didn't like the idea they'd have to check their emails so frequently.
You've managed to ignore all possible context and depth in your sarcastic answer.
The question is not "Could Facebook be replaced?". The question is "What happens were it to disappear one day". They're different questions with very different answers.
Facebook has taken up much of the local classifieds business that Craigslist took from local newspapers 15-20 years ago.
For me, the most effective directory of contractors is through Facebook. I hate it, because Facebook does a bad job of building and presenting that directory, but it's the largest and most relevant one.
Would they? If I'm looking for a restaurant, and Facebook suddenly disappeared, I'd still be looking for a restaurant. I just would have to use Google Maps or something to find one.
Facebook going down means losing contact with my friends overseas. I myself am studying as an international student, and many of my former classmates are studying in another countries as well. Messenger (and consequently Facebook) is pretty much the place that people in my home country hang out at.
Maybe? Messenger is just an instant messaging platform like iMessage or Whatsapp. Technically speaking you can stumble upon group chats that disseminate misinformation, but Messenger doesn't show you group chat recommendations like Facebook.
I do not think FB is a "government agent" from everything I've read. They operate within government rules and regulations, and they're certainly going to listen to the government, but listening is normal for any company. They can still do what they want.
Fact checking is just so Orwellian, how is it even possible that intelligent-seeming people have fallen for this trick? And what happens when the media lies, such as when they told us a year and a half ago that "masks actually spread COVID?"
This is all so unbelievably ridiculous. I no longer trust the authorities and fact checking is just making it worse.
I mean, once they are in the business of fact checking, I don't see why any specific source would be off limits.
On the other hand I think this shows the absurdity especially of labeling things as inaccurate without saying what specifically you are actually calling inaccurate because how would you know if the fact check is valid or not.
Right, if they have to fact check anything, it seems like they'd have to fact check everything, and then if Facebook is capable and required to fact check every single thing on it's platform and arbitrate the truth it's like they'd have to be some kind of omniscient truth knower.
If they aren't in some privileged position of truth holding all you've got is facebook applying its narrative layer on top of everyone else's narrative layer. You're exactly where you started.
I guess a better way to say this is that I think the idea that Facebook is capable of arbitrating the truth is at its core, philosophically, a nonsense proposition.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 388 ms ] threadEven more poignant, Facebook's dominance in this regard is much more disproportionate than China's dominance of the world population. (Facebook having a little under half the world's population).
Even though I don't live on planet Facebook anymore, the truth is Facebook heavily affects my life. I don't see how anyone can reasonably argue against this.
> After December 31, 2021, CDC will withdraw the request to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of the CDC 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel, the assay first introduced in February 2020 for detection of SARS-CoV-2 only. CDC is providing this advance notice for clinical laboratories to have adequate time to select and implement one of the many FDA-authorized alternatives.
> Visit the FDA website for a list of authorized COVID-19 diagnostic methods. For a summary of the performance of FDA-authorized molecular methods with an FDA reference panel, visit this page.
> In preparation for this change, CDC recommends clinical laboratories and testing sites that have been using the CDC 2019-nCoV RT-PCR assay select and begin their transition to another FDA-authorized COVID-19 test. CDC encourages laboratories to consider adoption of a multiplexed method that can facilitate detection and differentiation of SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses. Such assays can facilitate continued testing for both influenza and SARS-CoV-2 and can save both time and resources as we head into influenza season. Laboratories and testing sites should validate and verify their selected assay within their facility before beginning clinical testing.
I'm personally not sure what to make of all this, the cdc link doesn't seem controversial, and perhaps flagging this as false information was done in error? But screen shots are lame so I figured I'd repost as a link and the text for convenience.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dls/locs/2021/07-21-2021-lab-alert...
If that’s true, then, how can we be sure that flu hasn’t been misdiagnosed?
What percentage of Covid cases were classified using PCR tests?
Because I haven't seen anything on Facebook, or self-censoring HN for that matter, validating those claims. So they must be but only false but really out-there wacky conspiracy theories.
The original could not detect, so therefore differentiation is a moot point.
Also, the test for flu was a separate test. So it would have had no effect on the lower flu incidence assuming we didn't test for flu at a lesser rate.
Do we have any numbers on this? I would imagine a lot of people who went to the doctor or whoever complaining of flu like symptoms would have been tested for covid.
In 2020-21 there were 1.11M flu tests over 33 weeks.
Results: Essentially a 0% positive test rate vs a peak of over 25%. A peak of about 125 cases vs 20,000 cases.
1: https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/54973 2: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/weeklyarchives2020-2021/data/...
> Isn’t implying that the test can’t tell the difference between flu and covid?
they are strongly convinced that this is the case, quoting papers or research showing that in some rare cases with some methods you could have tests which could sometimes confuse Covid with other Corona Viruses (not flu, completely ignoring that this might not apply to the tests they are speaking about or that the probabilities are negligible.)
I had to realize that the majority of people (which haven't studied something where they had to learn it) do not understand stochastic at all, but believe they have some basic understanding of probabilities (which they don't have).
Furthermore it's not uncommon for people to reject truth which do not fit into their world view.
Not to long ago I realized that a relative of mine does not understand the difference between false positives and false negatives and that they are not equally likely. They knew the (fast, non PCR) test can be wrong and as such believed it can be equally wrong in all directions including false positives. So because it was confirmed that the test have many false negative they believed that they also must have many false positives and as such the increase in cases must be because of this false positives...
I tried to reach out to them and explain them that false positives and false negatives are not the same and just because something can likely fail in one way it doesn't mean it will also fail likely in another way. But I completely failed to reach them, they insisted on their opinion being correct and went very fast into a defensive mode where it's impossible to reach them no matter what how reasonable and convincing your arguments are.
What's the underlying problem? How are we dealing with it? As someone who does not and has never had a facebook account, I have very little context to understand what you are talking about.
and then cites this link from the CDC as "context"
Part of what makes conspiracy theories spread well is mixing in real details to make the invented parts sound reasonable. Five Eyes and ECHELON weren’t secret so they were great for making it sound more like you knew what you were talking about, things like PRISM, MUSCULAR, and XKeyscore were but none of the conspiracists had detailed anything like that.
This is the same dynamic we’re seeing now with antivax and QAnon types digging through things like CDC bulletins. They can use details to sound like they’re more informed and find odd phrasing or terms of art which can be confusing to normal people in a way which supports their narrative. Imagine how it’d sound if someone started writing stories about a dark cannibal-murder conspiracy among Linux admins forking and killing children, based on someone’s mailing list posts about troubleshooting some C code. If they correctly identified fork(2) and you knew that Reiser had actually killed someone, would that make you trust them about anything because a few details could be stretched to cover something real?
> CDC encourages laboratories to consider adoption of a multiplexed method that can facilitate detection and differentiation of SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses
Used to claim that many positive test results were not covid cases, but were flu cases.
This _isn’t_ the case — the CDC is now recommending tests that can check for multiple infections rather than just one.
But the wording does leave it open to being a possibility, on first reading that may even be a sensible assumption.
So the problem is complicated —
1) this is an official and authoritative source posting wording that’s explaining what’s changing with ambiguity about what the status quo is.
2) Amid that ambiguity, people are posting information that is not true, using this as a source.
3) Facebook’s response is the “Fake News” label, when while the source has its faults it is not Fake or News, it’s just having meaning attributed to it that’s not there
I would also be unsurprised to learn that this is something like an original conspiracy post being correctly flagged as fake news and subsequent posts with the same URLs either being auto-tagged or suggested as the same to a reviewer who is almost certainly overworked and underpaid.
All of the big tech companies like to rely on automation to avoid hiring more people and it's really easy to imagine this repurposing infrastructure which was originally built to quickly block things like spam or malware links being shared where the presence of a particular URL does in fact mean the post is highly similar.
If labs want they can still test them separately.
Sure, you can use this fact to make a misleading claim. But literally any piece of information can be used in a harmful manner. I guess we need someone to round off the points on all of our scissors so we can't hurt ourselves?
https://i.imgur.com/8TEAXQW.png
I think another commenter's idea is reasonable - people are flagging false claims like this, and the link is being punished by association
Maybe someone, somewhere used this link to argue something misleading, but as I said before, you can do that with any fact.
I see a picture of a link with a "false information" notice. What are you seeing that I am not that causes you to interpret all of this ostensibly harmful missing context? Sure, you can use this fact to make a misleading claim. But literally any piece of information can be used in a harmful manner.
That is the gist of the problem.
It's not quite entirely true, as taking a quote from an astronaut about how the ground on the moon didn't feel like anything on earth isn't going to convince anyone that the moon is made of green cheese who didn't think that anyway, but that is the general problem.
Disinformation is a hell of a drug.
Huge chunks of the American public are refusing to take a vaccine that could end the pandemic and save tens-to-hundreds of thousands of lives because people are lying to them on forums like Facebook (also right here on HN) and telling them it's dangerous.
Is that the standard to determine whether to censor the speech?
The current PCR test from the CDC does not detect flu at all, or other coronaviruses. The test is very specific. See pages 40 on in the Instructions for Use[1] if you are interested. The test sequences were compared (by computer) to hundreds of thousands of genomes of flu, the human genome, and other organisms, as well as tested on physical specimens.
[1] https://www.fda.gov/media/134922/download#page=41
Here is a sample of messages that were shared on Reddit:
> The FDA announced today that the CDC PCR test for COVID-19 has failed its full review. Emergency Use Authorization has been REVOKED. The FRAUDULENT PCR Test has finally been ruled a Class I Recall. This is the most serious type of recall. All measurements based on PCR Testing should come to an end ASAP:
> CDC retracts PCR test as it can't differentiate between COVID and the flu. It was all a Lie.
> CDC pulls PCR tests because they can’t distinguish Covid from the flu. We finally caught the SOBs who have lied to us about the coronavirus numbers the last year.
> The Pandemic narrative is unravelling... The FDA announced today that the CDC PCR test for COVID-19 has failed its full review. Emergency Use Authorization has been REVOKED. It is a Class I recall. The most serious type of recall. Too many false POSITIVES. This is the test that started the pandemic!
> CDC to Withdraw Emergency Use Authorization for PCR Test Because It Cannot Distinguish Between SARS-CoV-2 and the Flu.
> Watch the panicked minority bombard the comments with establishment talking points to try and refute this tweet.. PCR is being rescinded as a test, vaccinated people are filling hospitals, and our government officials are still urging us to get tested using PCR and get jabbed with the Covid vaccines. Alrighty then.
Thanks for that collection.
One method often used is to take some "official" article, paper, etc. which is not targeting a general-public audience but a audience of people with specialized knowledge and then twist what it supposedly says and spread it to people which in general do not have this specialized knowledge but where they know that with the given combination of pre-feed misinformation and non-understanding of the content and complex language/terminology their targets will see it as proof for the false information. Even if it might proof the exact opposite.
Examples include:
- this link
- a case where two very different statistics of the CDC (from different sources) used the same "label name" for a graph with similar but very different data
- cases of studies showing that e.g. some vaccine is not perfect in some very specific situations being taking as proof that it's not working at all
- same for tests etc.
- court cases won due to formalities being taken as proof that vaccines don't work (e.g. anti-vaccer creating a bounty for a proof of them being wrong but intentionally formulating the requirement for the bounty submissions subtle in a way that no submission is ever valid for submission and as such they won the court case about not paying out the money, even through the submission proofed them wrong)
A commonly used fallacy of the mind is that people jump from "this solution is not perfect" to "this solution MUST be replaced" to "a solution which is perceived to be the opposite is therefore true".
Like "this test has wrong results in rare cases" => "this test can not be trusted at all" => "all tests of this kind are untranslatable" => "there is no need to test because all tests are fake anyway" => "covid doesn't exists".
As a side not I have seen that kind of thinking to often in IT too like: "this library turned out imperfect once we knew more about it" => "we must replace this library" => "this other library which used the imperfection of the first library in it's advertisements but of which we don't know anything about is correct and must be used".
I believe it's of upmost importance to improve science to general-public communications and argument all kinds of reports, articles and papers with a section targeting the general public. As well as rehabilitating state organs which are focused on providing easy understandable content and explanations, while being vowed (by law required) to objectivity and transparency and making it highly punished for politicians, other state organs or well any kind of institution trying to influence it.
Just because some info appears on a the CDC page doesn't mean it can't be erroneous.
It is not as though health authorities have always been correct on every thing, have they?
If you've been posting abusive comments or otherwise breaking the site rules, you may get banned, but that's not triggered by your karma (so far as I know).
While it may look different, this is no different than two folks on the phone getting interrupted by ATT and being told they are incorrect on their assumptions about topic X.
Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are the carrier, and should be treated as such.
> While it may look different, this is no different than two folks on the phone getting interrupted by ATT and being told they are incorrect on their assumptions about topic X.
There are many ways in which this is different, most of which relate to the differences between audio and visual communication mediums.
-Facebook isn't legally required to fact check. -The CDC position is sufficiently controversial that this is well within the margin of error we'd expect of a fact checker. -AT&T isn't amplifying your phone call to millions by selective algorithms that enhance the most controversial and hateful messages -Carriers are heavily regulated, in part because they enjoy natural monopolies (in AT&T's case, only so many companies should be digging trenches and connecting physical wirelines into homes and businesses)
It's more nuanced than that because ATT doesn't repeat a phone call it has deemed interesting to millions of other people.
FB is a content platform who is about making ad revenue. They are crafted around that and how to make that the most profitable possible.
The claim is that this algorithms are neutral. But we know many contain ways for the owner to artificially boost preferred content. And algorithms tend to have the biases of their creators in them.
Controlling what people see is an important power and one that should be regulated.
I personally don't really care what facebook (or anyone else) believes is good for me.
I'll be the judge of that, thank you very much.
And if I want to eat chocolate all day, I'll do that, too.
What would the algorithm show that isn't already apparent?
This will give the power of what people see to the regulators.
What would be ideal is to think of an incentive for these companies to give users an option to disable the use of their algorithm, aka natural flow. That's unfortunately not the trend things are moving, and even services that still have something like that employ dark-patterns to throw user back into their "controlled" timeline (Twitter for example reverts you back "Home" after a few days with a tiny message that is barely noticeable.)
I'm even willing to pay for a feature that "turns off" the algorithm, unfortunately that would never happen because it'd entail these companies admitting that they design their algos not for the benefit of the user but for stickiness and the dreaded "engagement", which shouldn't be a problem in itself, but then it'd quickly become obvious when they're acting sanctimonious.
There are two (or more) feeds of information on facebook:
- The main one, which only shows posts sent to the "recommend this to people queue" based on facebooks recommendation algorithms.
- Messenger, which directly sends messages to people in a FIFO fashion, which I assume facebook doesn't censor as heavily (though I can't say I've tested).
The fact that the recommendation based stream is more popular is a reflection that facebooks curation is actually useful, but it doesn't mean messenger doesn't exist.
Nor do I see that messenger must exist, facebook isn't morally obligated to provide a "non recommend feed" to you if that isn't the product they want to sell you. Perfectly good alternatives even exist, in the form of "blogs" (say, substack).
Facebook wants to recommend content to me from random people: that's their issue, and they should take responsibility for it--whether legally or simply morally--and thereby should have to be careful with what they show people (maybe to the point where they simply can't scale it to the scale they are at automatically! I will not cry over their loss). Facebook also shows me content from my "friends"... I opted in to the content from my friends: if I don't like my friends, I can and should unfriend them, as they were my responsibility, not Facebook's (in the same sense that if I call someone on the phone I don't whine to AT&T about how much they suck). I should not get labels from Facebook telling me my friends' content--content I explicitly wanted to see--is scary or wrong, and they certainly should not be banned from showing it to me.
I think the most egregious category error you are making here is to equate messaging with communication... the entire mechanism of social media to followers is primarily direct communication! We can see how ridiculous this has become by looking at how, even if you have a private account--one random people aren't even allowed to see!--Facebook, Twitter, and Google currently consider it their business what we post there... an account you post things to and which other people follow is identical to a chat channel that happens to maintain a buffer.
(FWIW, to steel man your argument as best I can, "yes": Facebook also applies recommendation algorithms to friend feeds. Twitter I believe still doesn't. Instagram didn't, but then started... AFAIK people don't like it that much, but it might be more profitable for Facebook? Either way: it is helping me reorder content I already curated, and so I don't feel a need to claim that this is something they published. There is simply still a fundamental difference from platforms surfacing "trending" content or suggesting new people or channels I might want to follow / posts I might want to see, and acting as an intermediary for content from people I was directly linked to from people I am communicating with. The former might as well be illegal as far as I am concerned, while the latter needs to be sacrosanct.)
> Facebook also shows me content from my "friends"... I opted in to the content from my friends: if I don't like my friends, I can and should unfriend them
This is not the service Facebook offers, nor has it ever been. Facebook has forever been about friending everyone you are actually friends with (and then some), and you (or at least the vast vast majority of people) do not want to swallow the entire firehose of content that their facebook friends post. Facebook doesn't want people unfriending people to avoid seeing their content, that's not how the model works - doing so would break all of other facebooks services like acting as a birthday reminder, event planner, and so on and so forth. Even the language is indicative of this, "unfriend" (I don't like you anymore) not "stop showing me these posts" (I don't like what you post).
> the entire mechanism of social media to followers is primarily direct communication!
On the contrary, the entire mechanism of the majority of successful social media companies is curated communication. As it turns out 99% of everything (e.g. posts) is crap, and people go to the sites where less than 99% of what they see is crap.
Types of curation vary, but the existence of it is very consistence. To create some categories: algorithms (facebook, tiktok, youtube, twitter), community upvotes + community moderation (reddit, HN, slashdot), just straight up heavy moderation (many forums, forum.nasaspaceflight.com comes to mind as one that is still going strong). Also worth pointing out that most of these platforms actually mix it up, e.g. youtube, twitter, and facebook all have forms of upvotes, and facebook has forms of community moderation.
But if you want direct communication, that exists. I.e. the previously mentioned facebook messenger (which admittedly doesn't do followers) and substack (which is a competitor of sorts that does).
Direct communication is not what facebook is offering as their main product (but is what they are offering with messenger), it's never been, and I don't see that you have any right to demand that it becomes what their main product does.
[1] (Turn of js to avoid the paywall, this can be done with ublock origin for just this domain by clicking the "</>" button) https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/08/01/twitters...
If there's some kind of algorithm putting the content in front of people who didn't ask for it (e.g. not followers/friends/subscribers/whatever), then you have a point.
That said they are allowed to do quite a bit such as blocking calls between individuals.
That's a bit pedantic.
The other recourses are that our lawmakers threaten them with law changes until these platforms start acting like platforms.
I am sure that we can come up with some laws that are constitutional, if we are creative enough, that will damage these companies.
Lots of people hate these platforms these days. We'll pass some law, eventually.
Likewise, if companies like Facebook get so large and influential that they (and a small number of other NGOs) provide the only meaningful channels of communication between groups, we are dooming freedom of expression if Facebook, Google, or whomever are free to silence you in order to pander to politics and advertisers. Especially not when Facebook works for the federal government and gets tax breaks and subsidies. Your individual rights mean more than the right of a giant corporation to make lots of money and have undue amounts of power.
> In the United States the statement is often heard, that “corporations are private businesses, so they can do whatever they want.” This assertion is particularly false when referring to entities like Facebook, Amazon, Exxon, and Pfizer, because…
> - the phrase goes directly against a basic knowledge of the history of incorporation — corporations were originally designed and granted special legal privileges by government, only because they were expected to serve a pubic good.
> - the phrase goes directly against the dictionary definition, and investment industry terminology — a public company is defined as a company whose shares are traded freely on a stock exchange, hence the term IPO (initial public offering).
> - the phrase ignores real-world government involvement—many large corporations are state and federally sponsored (e.g. subsidized, bailed out, and given perks), by money which ultimately comes from the tax-paying public.
> In reality, all big corporations are some combination of state-chartered, publicly-traded, and government-sponsored. By definition many are public companies, while others have complicated hybrid characteristics.
[0] https://ptolemy3.medium.com/but-corporations-are-private-com...
The problem is that Facebook is convinced that I, a British citizen living in Berlin, want to see “Bernie Sanders Dank Memes” (or whatever it was, there are many) even though I’ve clicked on the button labeled “don’t show me ‘Bernie Sanders Dank Memes’“.
The “even though I’ve clicked on the button” is especially egregious, in this context.
If two people want to have a conversation or exchange a letter, or one person wants to speak to everyone within earshot or post a sign for people walking by to read, that's one thing. Maybe you say something dumb, and it gets shot down, or maybe it gets propagated, but it needs to have an R0 greater than 1 to endure. If you need some level of capital and agreement to have a publisher run a thousand pamphlets with your idea, that's another, you can leverage previous efforts to amplify weak ideas, but more people are involved and able to provide some sort of sanity filter. On the Internet, the cost to promote an idea is near zero, and algorithms can amplify something dumb but catchy to millions of people in a heartbeat.
It used to require a few seconds of talking per person you wanted to reach, now it costs a few seconds to post a message that might be seen by millions. The difference is minuscule in absolute value (perhaps a monetary value of a few cents) but huge in relative terms (how many percent less than a few cents is zero cents?).
Maintaining policy on censorship while ignoring this massive change in the landscape is shortsighted. Yes, a physical public venue ought not censor someone who wants to talk to other people there, but a digital platform with an audience of millions should think carefully about the effects of messages that their technology amplifies.
The fallacy is that we always view this from our personal perspective, yet we will not be the ones who make those choices. We give up that role to someone else.
Who has this role over society has immense power. Some would argue greater than governments themselves. It is only a matter of time before that vector will be exploited. It is in principle the same idea as regulatory capture, yet the incentives for capturing speech are far greater than a typical regulatory body.
Censorship went from censoring crazy conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in 2017, to affecting everyone in the public as well as heads of state.
I said this was going to happen the very day he was deplatformed. With great power comes great temptation and abuse nearly a certainty to follow.
Right now the US, specifically you guys - most of the rest of the world is handling this better - has a huge issue with false information around vaccine efficacy and dangers. This issue must be resolved if you want to be included in an open world once again - some level of censorship is going to be required.
I would call that a functioning prison. Not a society.
Freedom is extremism in a world of tyranny
It is fascinating your viewpoint here, as the false information identified in the US is true information elsewhere. The reason for this is precisely the censorship and information control.
Reasonable censorship is an oxymoron
Another nuance is that due to Facebook post privacy settings, an individual post can be restricted to a limited friend list, and not viewable by the general public. However the "fact checking" appears to apply to both private and public posts.
I guess when you engage in price-fixing in the open and call it "setting a standard", then anti-trust rules don't apply..
True, it doesn't. Instead, AT&T repeats millions of phone calls it carries to a party deemed interested.
>but it's a private company!
No, the executive branch has come out and said that they're the ones organizing this censorship.
Sometimes there is objective truth and sometimes there isn't.
Within a fact checking entity you essentially have the same issue as regulatory capture.
These organizations represent immense power through influence. By their very existence arises the conflict power and truth. If you can have influence over the fact checkers, then you have influence over truth. Who would you trust to form such an organization? Where is the oversight? Who monitors the monitors?
We are seeing what "reasonable censorship" actually looks like. It is an oxymoron.
Good thing I didn't say that then. The original comment that I was challenging said there was no such thing as fact checking. "Fact checking is hard" is not an argument in support of the idea that fact checking doesn't exist as a concept.
>We are seeing what "reasonable censorship" actually looks like. It is an oxymoron.
What is your definition of censorship? Because there is plenty of speech that I think is reasonable to censor. Obviously there is the illegal speech. Should Facebook be forced to host threats, defamation, copyright infringement, child porn, etc? What about the speech that is not illegal but is objectionable in some way? Should Facebook be forced to include hardcore porn in people's feeds if someone posts it? Once we establish that not all speech is appropriate in all contexts, censorship sure starts to seem reasonable. We just don't call it censorship because of the negative connotation. We call "reasonable censorship" moderation.
It is censorship when it is out of the control of users. It is filtering when the user has a choice.
Yes, users want to see or not see some categories of content. That certainly is not a problem when it is presented to the user as a choice.
There are platforms that operate mostly in this method, like MeWe.
The problem is the poorly-considered but extremely widespread epistemology that goes something like "whether a claim is true depends on how convinced certain people are of that claim."
> Once you create a fact checking entity, it will decide for itself what are object truths.
No, it will just make claims, which may be true or false. There's nothing mysterious or troubling about this. They're not "deciding" what's true.
The troubling aspect is it comes with some level of authority backing the claims. There are consequences for not aligning with the positions of the claims.
No, I'm not asserting that view. However, what you are stating I think is the viewpoint of most people. They will accept the claim as valid.
Do you think that most people think that whether a claim is true depends on Facebook's stance on that claim? That would be extremely shocking to me. My impressions is the opposite: that there is mainstream repulsion to Facebook (and Twitter, etc.) being so bold as to take any stance on factual issues.
However, it does reinforce confirmation bias. Those that align with Facebook's viewpoint will be less likely to listen to other user's opposing viewpoints as the feel emboldened that they viewpoint has some official support.
So I think it has an indirect effect in that it weakens user to user influence.
okay, so what? What do you think a court does? The guy who reads the meter at the water sanitation plant or someone who hands out parking tickets?
A fact checker is nothing but an institution with the authority to adjudicate on some questions which are relevant for the maintenance of the platform, no different from any other authority that manages public conduct. Where is the problem?
And of course fact-checkers are not unaccountable. Like in this case their behavior itself is topic of public discourse.
So sure we can suppose that there is an objective truth (ironically this point is also debated), but who do you trust to be its arbiter?
Certainly the architectural drawings of my house do not include a "bulge" in the basement due to heretical sphericalness.
All discussion of my basement floor being flat within about 1/2 inch need to be censored by big brother to save us all from free and independent thought.
The purpose of arguing about what should be censored is to distract from the argument of should there be censorship at all. Classic divide and conqueror strategy. Nobody ever gets asked if they should have concentration camps or not, they only argue about competing paint schemes and honorary mottos.
And when they argue that the earth is flat, they aren't arguing about whether it's flat on the scale of my basement.
Spelling out those applicability conditions explicitly is critical in research publications (but even then, only used for the topic under investigation). In all other contexts such pedantry is impossible. My 2c.
Even for the flat Earth theory it's hard to dismiss it offhand. I mean sure there are plenty of experiments you can do to show that it is pretty close to a sphere. But who do you trust to do those experiments?
Either the person fact-checking needs to do the experiments/research themselves (which doesn't scale well) or they need to trust other people to have done the experiments. However at that point you're simply placing the word of some people above the word of others, which is not objective at all.
And even assuming you've actually picked honest people acting in good faith you're still relying on people to not be confidently incorrect, which I can fairly confidently say is always going to go wrong at some point.
All the various people who have done them, some of which can be repeated by anyone motivated enough, and all the technology that relies on it being the case. This was known to the ancient Greeks. One even calculated the circumference within a reasonable accuracy.
The arbiter should be well established science, history, math and logic. Of course there is still room for plenty of debate where the matter is not already settled by overwhelming evidence. That's where there shouldn't be an arbiter. But for factual matters like the Earth being (roughly) spherical, there's no actual debate. Just belief that goes contrary to the evidence.
Fact: the Earth is an oblate spheroid (roughly round) undergoing human-caused climate change.
Example contrary feeling: I live in the arctic circle, it's cold and all I can see is a flat ice-scape. How can the Earth be warming and round when this is all I experience?
There are at least two facts that are creating cognitive dissonance here:
1) I feel cold.
2) I can't see the whole Earth from the surface.
What we feel guides us to question the world (which is healthy) but we shouldn't cling to what we feel is right when we can prove our feelings are wrong. Turns out that being cold on one point of the Earth is an experience that has nothing to do with the global average temperature rising. Also, we are living on a giant rock whose size is so much larger that it locally feels flat. We can also only see so far before our vision is impeded by the atmosphere.
Flat-Earthers are wasting all of our time IMO because there is a lot of well established evidence to prove the Earth is round (ish) and much bigger than us. It's even easy to visually verify if you spend time/money to go high enough to see it for yourself.
The real issue here is that the facts are more complex than just repeating what "feels" true. Humans (much as all animals) are lazy and often don't pursue rigor.
Is that really a Fact? Or is the sphere-ness of Earth a mental artifact, a simple model used to work around humans' limited perception of spacetime?
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Earth#Effects_and_em...
There is great danger in giving one group of people the power to choose what is "objective truth"
For the typical person, who roams around on some small patch of the Earth's surface, but who isn't launching rockets or traveling between continents, the flat earth theory is more useful than the spheroid earth theory. When you walk a short distance, your path's deviation from planar geometry due to the earth's global curvature is orders of magnitude smaller than the deviation due to local surface roughness, and hence the global curvature is irrelevant in practice. Let's say you walk 5km (about 3 miles); the difference between your path as predicted by the planar-earth theory versus the spherical earth theory is about one tenth of a millimeter. For 99% of what we do, invoking the spheroid Earth theory would be like using general relativity to model a baseball's trajectory in the presence of air resistance.
And if you happen to be far from the earth, on a length scale greater than about 10**9 km, then the point-earth theory is probably going to be the most useful model to you.
In short, it's all a matter of perspective. "Objective truth" isn't a thing; all that matters is how effective your model is at describing the properties that are relevant to you.
Well… I’d answer, but how many downvotes do you want me to get?
If fact checkers are operating with political bias, the people that call it out will be the ones who feel they’re targeted for their beliefs. They aren’t going to police themselves.
Top of my factchecker wtf is Hunter Biden’s laptop which was agreed to be Russian fakenews before the election, and after the election we have… https://en-volve.com/2021/07/26/watch-hunter-biden-accidenta...
I think this is an unhelpful framing of the situation, because as you imply Facebook is of course not wrong.
If you have one friend and your feed is entirely full of their posts, Facebook is off the hook. But, for most users, the situation is far more complex. People have many friends, they may also be in groups. They probably will not be on facebook long enough for them to see all of the posts and, if they are, their attention levels will differ over the entire corpus.
In this situation facebook begins to have agency - which is different from being wrong. They didn't make the content, they didn't create the link that brought the content to you, but of all the content they could show they did show you this and not that. It's a relatively new kind of agency, one that we didn't have a lot of practical experience with before very recently, so they can be forgiven somewhat for their difficulty grappling with it. However, they're an important part of the chain of information organization and it would be foolish to pretend they have no responsibility.
Eh, I'm pretty sure see random posts from political Facebook groups that were commented on by a Facebook friend I added in like 2006 when that sort of "content proliferation" didn't exist yet (or at least wasn't anywhere near as prominent). I explicitly added that friend, yes, but I definitely didn't explicitly consent to receiving every single piece of Internet content that that friend ever interacts with.
With people having enough sources to feed their newsfeed, facebook decides the order and cherry picks what posts are shown.
> Is facebook wrong for showing you the things you said you want it to show you?
I do agree with this. Coming to a solution to this would be hard problem. Users will have to give finer information about types of posts people like from a creator. I doubt there are any real work incentives for a big company to build a system like this.
That's absurd
It's why you probably deactivated your spam filters the first time some signup email accidentally got caught in it.
They are not "carriers" nor are they "publishers" because those concepts aren't legal terms, outside a very narrow field of law and the imagination of the tech community.
Besides, "carriers" aren't as free from intervention as you make it out to be. AT&T can and does, and sometimes is required to, block spam or fraudulent calls, for example/
Carriers do not have any staff monitoring the content being posted, nevermind the largest such staff in the world
Carriers do not have algorithms seeking out what content on what phone call creates the most 'engagement' (which is probably inversely correlated with truth value) and then actively interrupting your other calls to pushing that content into your stream. Again, nevermind that FB has the largest such feed-selecting algorithm on the planet.
Carriers do not select and push one news source over another, based on the level of times it gets mentioned on the calls.
These are all editorial functions, far more selective and influential than any newsroom editor.
The idea that they should be treated as carriers may have been originally true when the feeds were absolute literal timelines of items posted by 'friends' you selected, in strict chronological order.
But once they (FB, Twitter, etc.) started tracking "likes" and activity, and favoring one bit of content over another to surface and emphasize/de-emphazise in your feed, they became editors.
That point was decades ago, and it is time to stop treating them with that old trope. The fact that they fail at their fact checking is no reason to say that they shouldn't do it (and yes, if they would go back to strict chronological feeds fully selected by us, with no algorithmic prioritizing, I'd agree that we should again treat them as carriers).
They should not be able to have it both ways -- being the largest editors in the world = all the power, but treated as innocent carriers = none of the responsibility.
It seems a straightforward choice:
1) Go forward as a Carrier and delete ALL features with a hint of editing, promotion, or recommendation, i.e., a simple straight chronological feed of other members' posts/feed specifically selected by each user, and maybe a search function.
2) Go forward as a Publisher and select, edit, recommend, promote, annotate etc. as much as they want.
With Option-1 they can avoid all responsibility for content, merely doing takedowns on items for which they get notices. With Option-2, they have the same responsibility of any publisher for their content (e.g., newspapers are still responsible for the 'Letters to The Editor' that they choose to publish, and I'm sure edit out profanities, etc.)
I expect that users would actually strongly prefer Option-1, although actual "engagement" numbers could decline, it might actually be a better advert platform.
It also seems that viral content would still exist, but be more 'natural', i.e., not enhanced by algorithms, since you Alan could see something from Bob and repost it, which would be seen by Chris, who is subscribed to Alan but not Bob, and Chris could repost it to be seen by Debbie, who subscribes to neither Alan nor Bob...
So, I'm curious how you see that this would this kill/outlaw social media?
That leaves option 1. I suppose such a thing could exist, but it would be very different from social media as it exists. It sounds like a mash-up of twitter (accounts, follows, retweets) and 4chan (minimal moderation). Which would be interesting.
But you're still talking about basically making anything resembling current social media sites illegal.
You're also probably making any niche forum illegal too, unless it's niche enough that the operator can reasonably subject every post to prepublication review to try to avoid liability.
But would it be so bad to have a system that is primarily unmolested by algos (i.e., mostly Opt-1) but with a slower algo that promotes more judiciously might make for a much less toxic SocMed environment?
Those entities aren't comparable. Internet and telecom operators, much like the post, is a carrier in a legal sense. Not sure about your jurisdiction, but in many countries this is an actual law, secrecy of correspondence.
Facebook however, is operating a publishing service on the web, much like Nature or NY Times. Nature isn't obliged to publish your article just because you upload it, and they certainly do a fair amount of fact checking.
To continue the parable you started, while AT&T isn't allowed to snoop the article you upload to NY Times, the latter is allowed to refrain from publishing it on their web. Stretching the definition of carrier to encompass Facebook and Twitter would have wide reaching consequences and risk making it much more difficult to operate a web page.
It’s literally the service Google provides.
If they could decouple the information store from the display, and allow third parties to algorithmically filter and sort, then we could designate them as common carries for the first half. Maybe.
It amazes me.
The Internet was fine without Facebook, it was largely self-governing and people could choose to browse others self-hosted content. Their decision to create the platform and use algorithms to direct peoples attention was totally self made, clearly problematic and now they have to workout how to cope with the fallout.
Would you be ok with FB promoting glorification of white supremacy? Because, as a neutral carrier, it is not supposed to look at the content.
Would you support it promoting a content piece that is a fluff of falsehoods resting on a thin layer or truth (They are making all the frogs gay !) ?
FB could always argue that it is not responsible for content on its servers and can always argue that the counter point is also allowed.
What if corporations, with their infinite marketing budgets start using FB to start promoting that climate change is actually good for the world?
- ‘Too Big to Fail’: Russia-Gate One Year After VIPS Showed a Leak, Not a Hack
- Siri plays dumb about documentary “Hillary's America”
And posts anticlimate change articles.
The parent comment is only a one sentence opinion, and I'm unsure if any additional context is required to discuss it.
I get you're pointing out OP has some colourful post history, but what does that achieve?
if true, that is maximum irony and exposes the folly of Facebook's positioning as an arbiter, or exposes the power of their positioning
Seems like at minimum the opposite should never happen, and that's negatively flagging .gov domains.
Edit: why the downvotes? If you disagree, please post a comment so we can have a healthy dialogue.
My rating: True
2. S&P 500 will go down 2.5% the very instant FB disappears. Further consequences for financial markets are hard to predict.
Would anything actually improve?
It would be catastrophic.
Not at all.
> Companies that depend on Facebook advertising would disappear.
Good.
> People would be locked out of OAuth accounts on thousands of websites.
OK? If you were federating your auth via Facebook it was only a matter of time until you were locked out for one arbitrary reason or another. This just seems like an acceleration of a good thing.
> It would be catastrophic.
From your perspective, I can see that. But there are other perspectives out that that are not completely beholden to Facebook.
Some people rely on their relationships with other people. They build support systems, form groups, and take comfort in the company of others. Being cut off suddenly and with no means to reconnect would isolate many people. This would be extremely damaging from a mental health perspective alone.
In addition, so many people have reconnected with old friends, family, teachers. One friend of mine used Facebook to find her birth parents. That avenue disappears completely.
I don't know why you would say it's "good" for these companies to disappear. These aren't megacorps. It's small, local companies that rely on FB advertising. Bed and breakfasts, wineries, anything that depends on tourism. They're always hit the hardest. Walmart isn't going to care if they can't advertise on FB anymore.
Your comment shows a lack-of-understanding and compassion for your fellow human.
When you don't have Facebook your friends and family just txt or email. I mean Facebook book hasn't even been around that long. To pretend it is something like water or electricity is just preposterous.
There is also a huge difference between people making the decision to stop using social networking, and being suddenly and unexpectedly cut off from a support network. The former can have positive effects on mental health, the latter will certainly not.
I say this as somebody who deleted their Facebook account over a decade ago.
Data point: In 2009, the admin assistant in my department at university told me she's been getting quite a few upset incoming freshmen because of the requirement to have an email address for university classes - many of them had never used email before, and had communicated only via text, and IM apps. This was over 10 years ago.
Also, I'm surprised the university wasn't assigning them .edu emails anyway. My younger brother is in college now and he loves the school email for getting student discounts.
I'm not saying all those who complained did not have email - likely many/most did. They didn't like being required to use it. However, there were quite a few who claimed they had never used email. I suspect that they likely had, but only for a few formal things (university applications, etc) - something they used perhaps once every few months. They probably didn't like the idea they'd have to check their emails so frequently.
Yea! How did people communicate or companies advertise before Facebook!? They couldn’t.
I mean, maybe some old fashioned things no one remembers, but we’d be talking all the way back to 2004 here.
The question is not "Could Facebook be replaced?". The question is "What happens were it to disappear one day". They're different questions with very different answers.
For me, the most effective directory of contractors is through Facebook. I hate it, because Facebook does a bad job of building and presenting that directory, but it's the largest and most relevant one.
(This might have improved since my last road trip, late 2019. YMMV)
* FB is a company, not a government, so they can more or less do what they want.
* It's concerning that one company has so much influence. "Just go somewhere else" is tough with the network effects that a system like theirs has.
* FB is responsible for tons of misinformation spreading and is very toxic in a lot of ways.
I'm not really sure what, if anything we should do, but it'd be nice to read a bit more elevated discussions about the problems with social media.
Sure FB, you can do what you want. It'd just be a shame if it were determined you were a monopoly, sure would be a shame.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2020/12/ftc-s...
This is all so unbelievably ridiculous. I no longer trust the authorities and fact checking is just making it worse.
If this pun was intentional, well done.
On the other hand I think this shows the absurdity especially of labeling things as inaccurate without saying what specifically you are actually calling inaccurate because how would you know if the fact check is valid or not.
If they aren't in some privileged position of truth holding all you've got is facebook applying its narrative layer on top of everyone else's narrative layer. You're exactly where you started.
I guess a better way to say this is that I think the idea that Facebook is capable of arbitrating the truth is at its core, philosophically, a nonsense proposition.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27984908