From bad to worse. Meta is probably one of the single largest funders of fact checking. Now that appears to be coming to an end. Third parties will no longer be able to flag misinfo on FB, Instagram or Threads in the US.
I think internet discussion worked far better without fact checkers, where some of them cannot really be called accurate. The community notes are the better approach. They aren't always correct either, but it certainly is the better fit for freedom of expression and freedom of speech. Fact checkers are the authority approach that just does not fit.
I haven't seen a single discussion be worse off due to fact checking, but I've seen tons of discussions where having it would improve things. I have seen people get mad because they can't post BS without it being challenged.
To claim internet discussion worked better without fact checking is something I haven't seen any actual evidence for, just opinions like yours.
Community notes is just a watered down, more easily 'ignored' version that appeases people that were angry about fact checkers to begin with.
Hopefully there is a push-back, likely from EU legislation. Between the AI generators many of these companies are implementing and changes like this, platforms need to be held more accountable for what they allow to be posted on them.
Claims are challenged all the time by other users and there are enough cases where fact checkers were wrong or heavily biased.
EU legislation tries to introduce "trusted flaggers". A ridiculous approach, an information authority by a state-like entity doesn't work, even if they paint these flaggers as independent. They simply are not, a trusted and verifiable fact.
Community notes provide higher quality info, it is the better approach. That is an opinion of course.
We will probably see community notes on trusted flaggers.
>Claims are challenged all the time by other users and there are enough cases where fact checkers were wrong or heavily biased.
I've only seen a handful of cases where they were wrong of heavily biased, but I've seen hundreds of cases where the poster refuses to accept they are wrong and the fact checkers are right.
>Community notes provide higher quality info, it is the better approach. That is an opinion of course.
Roughly the same info but from less trusted sources and with less controls being higher quality sounds like a big bag of wishes but not grounded in reality.
>We will probably see community notes on trusted flaggers.
I expect lots of partisan complaining and yelling, but not a lot of actual valid challenges.
I don't know. I believe the average internet user has less to gain to feed me wrong info. It happens of course, that is why you shouldn't believe everything you read on the internet.
A fact checker however has economic incentive towards their employers. You can paint them as independent, but the will always be in a precarious situation or are influenced by third party financiers. This does not at all evoke more trust than a random internet person. Trusted source is pretty subjective, but for me "official" fact checkers don't have too much of that.
> I haven't seen a single discussion be worse off due to fact checking
The idea that there is some official governing body that has access to undisputable facts and they have the power to designate what you or I or anyone else can talk about is preposterous and, frankly, anyone on a site called Hacker News should be ashamed for supporting it.
A voice of sanity in a cacophony of madness. I hold no sympathy for Meta but it's laughable that so-called "fact-checkers" are anything but "status-quo enforcers".
>The idea that there is some official governing body
Platforms were encouraged to create their own departments, and have. There is no "one" or "governing" body here, so this is more hyperbole in this already flagrantly absurd discussion.
>have the power to designate what you or I or anyone else can talk about is preposterous
No one is stopping you from posting bullshit, fact checkers simply post the corresponding challenge or facts that allow others to see the lack of truth in your statements.
The idea you can say whatever you want, lie all you want, and be unchallenged as some form of right is absurd. Claiming because you can be challenged is censoring you or preventing you from talking is also completely absurd.
>and, frankly, anyone on a site called Hacker News should be ashamed for supporting it.
Frankly anyone on this site should be able to separate hyberbolic strawmen from reality.
> Platforms were encouraged to create their own departments, and have. There is no "one" or "governing" body here, so this is more hyperbole in this already flagrantly absurd discussion.
> Finally, in the midst of operating or considering up to three different avenues of “misinformation reporting” (switchboarding, EI-ISAC, and the “misinformation reporting portal”), by early 2020, CISA had dropped any pretense of focusing only on foreign disinformation, openly discussing how to best monitor and censor the speech of Americans.
> The EIP repeatedly used its fourth category, in particular, to justify the censorship of conservative political speech: the “Delegitimization of Election Results,” defined as “[c]ontent that delegitimizes election results on the basis of false or misleading claims.”166 This arbitrary and inconsistent standard was determined by political actors masquerading as “experts” and academics. But even more troubling, the federal government was heavily intertwined with the universities in making these seemingly arbitrary determinations that skewed against one side of the political aisle.
So please, let's not pretend that the fact-checking organizations, the information streams they themselves depended upon and the pressure that was applied to all of the social networks was organic "encouragement" meant to challenge bullshit posted online - it was a censorship campaign by the United States government, plain and simple.
"only on foreign disinformation". Focusing on "internal disinformation" not "American speech" would have been the proper description.
As for that laughably partisan report from many of the politicians aligned with the biggest sources of American disinformation claiming their lies as political speech, nice pile of garbage.
Exposure to many viewpoints, including wrong ones, provides a counterbalancing effect. When you actively try and suppress information you create a “forbidden knowledge” effect where people seek out silos where extreme and wrongheaded information gets passed without the “sunlight is the best disinfectant”—-it grows faster…becomes more wrong, more extreme, and more dangerous.
Seems to me in my experience after decades of watching and participating in online discussion extremism really only became more problematic when fact checking and active efforts to suppress took hold. Whatever the good intentions may have been, the results were worse.
There's some academic research to the contrary; banning /r/fatpeoplehate and /r/coontown on Reddit reduced incidents of hateful speech across the platform.
> There's some academic research to the contrary; banning /r/fatpeoplehate and /r/coontown on Reddit reduced incidents of hateful speech across the platform.
That does not imply it reduced hateful speech overall, maybe the censorship just increased antipathy and drove that speech underground or to other platforms where it couldn't be seen.
That's still just a conjecture of a meaningful effect. Recruiters are able to change tactics in response you know. You're just naively assuming that those old tactics worked better just because reddit itself changed, but it could very well be the case that the more extreme rhetoric only attracted people who were already extremist and turned off moderates, but a more moderate approach that's now required could funnel more moderate people into an extremist pipeline.
"Off reddit" is just a win for reddit's PR, and that's why they did it, and no other reason and no other effects can be inferred.
The claim you are addressing is a separate one from the fatpeople hate story.
And that claim is evidenced, It’s not conjecture. I dont have it handy on me, but we have mapped out the ways people are recruited, and things like fatpeoplehate, coontown, are the funnels for groups to find new recruits.
There’s several others on things from ISIS to hacktivists. The mechanism is the same, heck - “red pill” is the term for this, it’s actually quite known.
Not necessarily. If it drives the content off Reddit but onto another platform that's friendly to only these extremists and their views then you may just end up radicalizing the members of the original banned subs even more.
I don't know if that's what happened and there's probably a lot more research to do here but I'm not convinced that deplatforming is actually a good outcome societally without more data.
I wasn‘t aware that society means surgery. Likewise that veiled means literal. By extension, ethnic cleansing probably means giving certain parts of a population a well deserved bath?
Edit: I did not want to imply that you meant it that way. But in a different context, or coming from the wrong person, it may sound like a dog whistle.
No, you should actually go and read the paper. It didn't just reduce the type of content posted in the subreddit, they tracked individual users that were active and their behavior overall changed, including in other subreddits compared to before.
Essentially what it showed was that if you pull people out of a particular echo chamber, then that had a sustained effect on how they behaved. Which is evidence contrary to the often made claim that they'd just leave and go somewhere else. It's in line with the theory that the internet fosters extremism because it enables insular pathological communities that in the analog era you'd have been slapped out of long ago by people who aren't nuts.
> Essentially what it showed was that if you pull people out of a particular echo chamber, then that had a sustained effect on how they behaved.
So…silos and echo chambers are bad. Seems to me that was part of my original point. I am suggesting that censorship of information leads people to the silos.
No I am saying that when you censor/suppress debate in the public square you drive people underground where they land in echo chambers and develop extreme views because they don’t have public debate.
You don’t need to ban people from echo chambers if they don’t land there in the first place.
Your solution is reactive to a problem you caused. My solution is don’t create the problem in the first place.
So I have done the leg work to see what happens and it turns out that if you give space to extremist views they overtake other conversations and dominate the community.
What people don’t seem to grasp is that all speech is not equal, and that our brains react very predictably to certain arguments and content.
For example, your argument is not supported by the paper, which I have read. Because the paper shows behavior of the bad actors changed across the site, and became less hateful.
However the argument is complex, and goes against commonly held beliefs, such as sunlight is the best disinfectant etc.
More exposure results in more reinforcement of popular ideas, until something happens externally.
When you feel the need to censor or suppress information all you are doing is admitting that your argument is just not as persuasive as the opposition and requires handicapping. People see that as the same thing as your argument being false which is why they always work their way tirelessly around your efforts to suppress and censor.
If you get to the point where you feel you need to censor, suppress, or outright ban voices to be heard, you have already lost the communication high ground and no matter how true or good your opinion/idea/position. It will lose in the court of public opinion…and frankly should…because you did not put the appropriate effort in to be persuasive.
Someone shared a picture of a dead baby in my community a few days ago. They were part of pictures describing the conditions of an ethnic conflict that is largely unremarked upon.
As mods, we removed it, since it’s traumatic to simply see it, and it’s out of scope for our community. It’s not an ‘acceptable’ argument and it was removed. That was censorship.
Should pro beastiality arguments be allowed? Am I admitting the anti beastiality argument is not as persuasive as the beastiality argument, when I choose not to give them space in my communities?
What about when children are engaging with an experienced cult recruiter?
Users are spamming your community with random content, to bury headlines about a heinous rape case that makes the ruling party look bad. That’s fundamentally more speech and it is acting as an antidote for ‘bad’ speech.
How do you address roving bands of users who go around Reddit, and downvote all negative news about China and India on r/worldnews? The demographics and time they are online, are sufficient to shift the news.
What would your conscience have you do? Have you been in a position to make similar decisions? I have, so I can give these examples.
This.. isn’t an attempt by me to prove you wrong. These aren’t hard questions, but pretty common place ones. Its just that all mod choices are essentially censorship.
I believe you are defending a principle. If you choose not to moderate/ censor in those examples I would respect you for holding to your principle.
If you decide to censor, I would be fine with it too.
Because you would still be making a decision based on a principle.
I’ve struggled with the idea of censorship since I first volunteered as a mod nearly 15 years ago.
I valued free speech as a core principle to enable humanity succeed and thrive.
I have, stopped seeing free speech as an end to itself. I had to reconcile the limited options with the results I saw in communities.
I hated it. Eventually I had to ask why we value free speech in the first place.
And we value it because we value a fair marketplace of ideas. I see the goal as being able to have fair debates and exchanges of ideas between normal people.
And they suffer failings and weaknesses possible in any market place. So the goal is to ensure the marketplace is effective at being fair.
Perhaps you would have a different idea, and I am happy to hear it. If only to see a different solution.
And if you agree with me to some degree and also think that having effective market places is a good idea, thats fine too.
We Sure as heck need the average person to decide what principles need to be held up, and at what costs.
> I believe you are defending a principle. If you choose not to moderate/ censor in those examples I would respect you for holding to your principle.
I am of the opinion that net positive benefit of free expression outweighs negatives when it’s allowed and the negatives of censorship outweigh the positives of it when it’s practiced.
Also, generally I think civil people will simply reject spaces where uncivil discourse or “not appropriate” content to them is present. If I was a moderator I can see where that would create a challenge of balance towards censorship, because you would want your forum to thrive and not dry up from the garbage.
Ultimately it’s not a decision I would need to make, I don’t moderate anything, nor would I. Even here on HN, I only upvote. I am not a fan of how HN handles the downvoting (content dimming), but at least I can still see it if I choose to. I also use a feed reader for HN post delivery so, flagged/dead posts still make it to me and I can choose whether those posts are worth my time.
I think its pretty critical that people who believe in Free speech get their blasted hands dirty.
I cant be amongst the few people trying to communicate the stupid complexity of this issue! If you believe in free speech, then you really really have to see how the sausage is made, so that you can articlate the issues to people who believe the same thing!
I'm serious! To an extent I know its uncomfortable to be put on the spot, but please at least consider it.
Back to our main point:
>I am of the opinion that net positive benefit of free expression outweighs negatives when it’s allowed and the negatives of censorship outweigh the positives of it when it’s practiced.
I would like to think we both agree, but there is much that hinges on what you mean by positives.
I ended up reading everything from court cases to research papers to reconcile the options mods have, with the principles of free speech. I eventually had to lean heavily on the analogy of the market place of ideas from the Abrams dissent, to reconcile the two.
That means the good engendered by free speech, is primarily to enable the exchange of ideas - which in turn is what serves the ultimate goals of humanity. Free speech is a subordinate principle to the free and fair exchange of ideas.
To illustrate -I can and do have users flood the front page with content, to suppress content that is hurtful to their ideas and image. This is speech meeting more speech.
Any action I would take to stop this, is censorship and the prevention of the free expression of users.
This happened over and over again, for all content critical of positions by the ruling party.
The frameworks I had to figure out helped me navigate this choice, but how would you approach it?
would you stop the users who are coordinating the multiple submissions of topics to prevent visibility of a post?
Or would you let that behavior continue?
Or would you find a way to signal boost the content that is being suppressed?
I am way too old, opinionated, and my ability to “suffer fools gladly is long in my past”
But, I do appreciate your point that it’s good to see the sausage being made. Then again, I am a person who knows exactly what is in scrapple and how it’s made, but when I am in Philly if I go to a diner it’s what I order and scarf up every morsel.
It’s the reconciliation and articulation of principles reasoning.
Look you may not do it.
But there is a contradiction at the heart of modern American society between principles and how conversations actually function online.
And this needs to be articulated by normal people for normal people. Otherwise it’s always going to be an imposed reality,
Or think of it this way. Unless people who care about free speech don’t reassure mods that the consequences of not modding are acceptable - that they will also be the conscience keepers when inevitably society turns around and says “oh you should have modded more”
And that has to be an informed choice.
And consider that you are crotchety and old but get annoyed by free speech discussions.
You aren’t crotchety and old and annoyed by discussions on ancient Roman mining methods.
There’s things we can be sort of arsed to do which are within range of our interests.
I acknowledge there would be conflicting forces and its a complex machine, but knowing myself and how important liberty has been to me for my entire adult (and even before as a teenager) life, I am confident that I would not interfere and would rather let a forum wither and die or leave moderation of it if the content presented fell outside my moral belief system rather than get in the way of people communicating where they want to communicate.
That doesn't "get in the way of people communicating where they want to communicate"? If 99.9% of a forum likes the "no child porn" rule, that's not enough?
Maybe it reduced hate on this single metric, but the complaint is more about the errors in fact checking.
And single subreddits aren't really convincing about the reliability of fact checkers if their independence is in question. In the end they do rely on a truth-authority, which is problematic, especially for political content. And Meta reported that political demands increased.
> Seems to me in my experience after decades of watching and participating in online discussion extremism really only became more problematic when fact checking and active efforts to suppress took hold. Whatever the good intentions may have been, the results were worse.
Seems like the opposite. Traditionally we only had siloed forums which were often heavily moderated by volunteers who considered the forums their personal fiefdom, read every single thread and deleted stuff for being "off topic" never mind objectionable, plus the odd place like /b/ which revelled in being unmoderated. Then you ended up with more people on big platforms that were comparatively-speaking, pretty lightly and reactively moderated. Then you ended up with politicians weighing in against moderation with the suggestion even annotating content published on their platform was a free speech violation, let alone refraining from continuing to publish it.
The difference between antivax sentiment now and circa 2005 isn't that nobody ever determined that they weren't having that nonsense on their forums or closed threads with links to Snopes back then or that it's become difficult to find any references to it outside antivaxxer communities since then. Quite the opposite, the difference is that it's now coming from the mouth of a presumptive Health Secretary, amplified on allied news networks and now we have corporations running scared that labelling it a hoax might run the risk of offending the people in charge. Turns out sunlight is a catalyst for growth
> The difference between antivax sentiment now and circa 2005
The antivax movement literally grew exponentially when vaccine information started to be actively censored on the largest social media platforms and you think that is because there wasn’t enough censorship? People were literally driven into antivax information silos because a bunch of idiots decided that vaccine criticism should be forbidden in the public square
Sorry, but I live in a country using exactly the same social media providers as you, subject to exactly the same (actually pretty limited) censorship and without widespread, committed and politically-aligned antivax sentiment
People in the US didn't need to be "driven into antivax information silos", because those antivax information silos were their favourite talk show hosts and some of the country's most prominent politicians. Turns out that promotion of antivax sentiment as an important issue that must be discussed and constant attacks on public health officials doesn't "disinfect" people against the belief that there might be some truth to it...
So you are arguing for exactly what? You don’t want freedom of speech? You don’t want body autonomy? You want authoritarian control of the populace?
Not sure where you live, but if those are the things that are important to your leaders and people, I wouldn’t want to live there or even visit. Sounds awful.
I don't recall expressing any of those sentiments you've attributed to me, but I'll note it's quite a shift on your side from "sunlight is the best disinfectant" to "your country's mainstream media and politicians didn't encourage antivax sentiment enough to reduce vaccination levels or increase death rates to US levels? Sounds horrible"
I note that the original topic was about Zuckerberg being so afraid of his corporation being censured by the incoming government that he's pledged to move his moderation team to a state which voted for them and refrain from publishing any "fact checking" notes in Facebook's name lest they conflict with the government and its supporters. That doesn't sound like a libertarian paradise either
> I don't recall expressing any of those sentiments you've attributed to me
Perhaps I misunderstood your intentions then.
If you believe that antivax debate was in the mainstream in the US and there wasn’t an active attempt to suppress just because some voices bled through the censorship, you are simply wrong. Zuckerberg even noted in this announcement that pressure from the Biden administration to censor speech was significant.
My consistent point here is that censorship drives extremism because it suppresses the debate where the debate wants to take place and pushes the conversation to those interested in the topic to siloed echo chambers. That definitely happened around vaccines in the US over the last 4-5 years. I know that happens for a fact and have personally tried to gently encourage people I know that felt the censorship frustrations and leapt to other platforms to still read all sides before making decsions.
Whatever Zuckerberg’s internal motivations are on this change of policy, I don’t care. Community notes seems to be a better way than suppression. Others may have a different opinion and thats ok. I encourage them to freely express it and would never support any one trying to shut that debate down.
How wrong of me to think that high-profile politicians and wall to wall cable news coverage are anything other than little-noticed voices bleeding through the all-pervading censorship of... two internet companies deleting a handful of accounts after people had pointed out how many million likes their dangerous medical advice was getting and some algorithmic "are you sure you want to link to this hoax?" interstitials. Really, the argument that Meta's moderation was futile and inept (even more so than its policing of scam ads and spambots) has far more credibility than attempts to portray it as some evil internet police forcing people to hide out on tiny islands of antivax.
It seems a little unlikely that people who decided to delete their Facebook account and seek out an echo chamber because they didn't like seeing FactCheck.org links slapped on vaccine function would have nevertheless listened very carefully to FactCheck.org or the public health officials their favourite politicos were slagging off if only they were able to d̶e̶b̶a̶t̶e̶ post misleading memes about public health on Facebook first. I mean, the anger at third party fact checkers is explicit rejection of the idea there's anything to debate.
Anyway, regardless of whether self-proclaimed fact checkers actually live up to their label, it's difficult to describe a corporation bending the knee to an incoming administration that's determined that corporations shouldn't link to them as a victory for free speech or enabling controversial viewpoints to be debated as opposed to merely promoted on internet platforms. Must be wonderful for Zuckerberg to be able to express himself freely without any threat of censure whatsoever on the day he announces that he'll be firing his his moderation team so he can relocate it to a state the incoming administration considers less susceptible to wrongthink
> a corporation bending the knee to an incoming administration
Funny how you aren’t critical of when Meta bent their knee to the existing administration by participating in the censorship requests. I guess that was ok…because you supported that action?
>Exposure to many viewpoints, including wrong ones, provides a counterbalancing effect. When you actively try and suppress information you create a “forbidden knowledge” effect where people seek out silos where extreme and wrongheaded information gets passed without the “sunlight is the best disinfectant”—-it grows faster…becomes more wrong, more extreme, and more dangerous.
Fact checkers don't suppress information, they add context and information to posts others make and provide the exposure to many viewpoints that echo chambers often do not have.
People haven't stopped posting wrong and biased information with fact checkers, they just have the counterpoint to their bullshit displayed alongside their posts on the platform.
>Seems to me in my experience after decades of watching and participating in online discussion extremism really only became more problematic when fact checking and active efforts to suppress took hold. Whatever the good intentions may have been, the results were worse.
My decades of watching is exactly the opposite. Extremism is and was rampant long before fact checking, and fact checking really only served to push some of the most extreme content to the margins and to smaller platforms that don't have it. It concentrates it in some ways as many of these opinions fall apart quickly when exposed to truth and facts.
I think some moderation is important, but misrepresenting fact checkers (damn ironic actually) doesn't serve us. Of course fact check suppresses information! That's the whole point. Sometimes it results in straight up deletion, but even when not it results in lowered reach aka suppression of what the algorithm would normally allow to trend, etc.
>Of course fact check suppresses information! That's the whole point
Its not. The fact checkers in this case, and almost all cases we're discussing ADD information that challenges the posted data, not censor or restrict it from being posted.
Outside of illegal content that is. Content deemed illegal was removed by moderation teams, this was before fact checking, and will continue with community notes with little to no change.
> Seems to me in my experience after decades of watching and participating in online discussion extremism really only became more problematic when fact checking and active efforts to suppress took hold. Whatever the good intentions may have been, the results were worse.
This is just overtly and flatly wrong. I reject your experience fully because over the past few decades the internet has become more open, not less. We openly debated people that believed vaccines caused autism and gave them microphones. Every single loud asshole and dipshit was given maximum volume on whatever radio show or podcast or social media platform they could want.
You can reject my experience all you want but the reality is that between 2020 and 2023ish the world’s top social media platforms became less open about specific kinds of information and actively tried to censor and suppress any contrary information to a government opinion/narrative about certain subjects. During this time certain forms of extremism exploded in popularity as people were driven to information silos to find and learn about the information that the social media platforms were trying to suppress. Those silos generally didn’t have censorship but they also didn’t have contrarian voices either. So when folks landed in those silos all they heard was the assholes at the loud volumes and without the contrarians, followed those assholes.
Specifically to vaccines, the antivax crowd was pretty minimal to a some nutjob soccer moms, holistic medicine fanatics, and RFKjr until you stopped having conversations with them, because you folks who want or believe that censorship is good silenced the debate and did not follow them to the forums where they went to spread their ideas to continue the debate.
I am absolutely convinced that the growth in the antivax movement is directly tied to the censorship effort (and the desire of the government to not be completely honest about the vaccines at the time).
No free lunch here. Social media is different from systems in the past cuz it give everyone Free Broadcast capability.
In the past people were told they had Free Speech, but they didn't have Free access to Broadcast Media (newspapers/radio/tv/movie studios/satellites). It was always up to someone else with Access to Broadcast(one to all messaging) to prop up voices they thought was important.
Shannon's Information theory tells us Social Media as a system can't work cause - once you tell people their voice matters, give everyone in the room a mic, plugged into the same sound system, and allow everyone to speak, firstly you get massive noise, secondly as a reaction people will scream louder and louder and repeat their message more and more. Noise only compounds. The math says it can't work. The way people are debating about this is under an assumption that it can.
> The math says it can't work. The way people are debating about this is under an assumption that it can.
Yet here we are…the math seemed to work overall just fine minimizing the anti-vax movement until someone started externally futzing with the numbers to try and force a specific result to that math. When you do that apparently more of your components run off to form other equations and no longer participate in your equation then before you tried to manipulate the messaging.
You are not going to get everyone to agree with you…ever. But suppressing and censoring debate in the real world example of vaccine acceptance to try and achieve that result backfired spectacularly by galvanizing and growing that movement far far beyond what it was…or should have ever been.
Minimal? Again you are just objectively wrong. The antivax movement had been growing since the 90s, RFK Jr didn't exist in a vacuum. The entire reason why there was push back against the COVID vaccine in the first place was because this movement was there already, much like the movement against abortion.
You are rewriting history to fit your viewpoint which is wrong. The reality is that you are wrong. And those silos that people moved to were equally sinful of censoring voices and banning people not aligned with their beliefs. Even now Musk has no problem censoring and banning people off Twitter for being too mean to him.
The mechanisms of online speech show us a few other issues.
For example certain ideas are far more “fit” for transmission and memory than others. Take a look at something as commonplace as “ghosts” or the idea of penguins. Ghosts are in all cultures, and they are essentially people with some additional properties. Penguins are birds that dont fly.
Brains absorb stories and ideas like flightless birds easily, because they build on pre existing concepts.
Talk about spacetime, or multiple dimensions and you aren’t going to have the same degree of uptake.
So when I put certain ideas into competition with each other, all else being equal - the more suited for human foibles, the more successful the idea.
People also dont make that much effort to seek out forbidden knowledge. Conservative main stream media has made many things forbidden - 1/3rd of America isnt aware that Obamacare and the ACA are the same thing.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant for certain breeds of germs. Many others get on just fine.
In my many decades of online existence, which includes being on multiple sides of moderation, extremism was on the rise from before, because we had created the arguments and structures that thrive on it.
Content moderation was a hap hazard effort created out of necessity to stall it.
Personally - I hope this works. Moderation sucks, and is straight up traumatic. If we can get better, more effective market places of ideas, then I am all for it.
I care about the effectiveness of the exchange of ideas. I see free speech as a principle that supports this. But the goal is always the functioning of the marketplace.
Citing the simple fact that every western government ignored their own pandemic plans and did adlib bingo instead was enough to get you banned of Twitter, Facebook and reddit for close to two years.
The problem with "Fact-Checkers" was that since they're human they're going to impose their own biases, and their own sense of morality. For well over a decade the majority of them were also left-leaning (per Silicon Valley), and so even true things that conservatives were trying to say got "censored" because these left-leaning folks believed their own sense of truth and morality were superior.
When you say this, what are you referring to? Was this about the general vibe of online conversations, or are you talking about specific incidences or traits?
Fact checkers are often wrong, and often corrupted by the activists that end up working at them. For example I’ve repeatedly noticed articles from Politifact that are blatantly wrong or very misleading. When I look up those authors and their other work, their bias is clear. Community notes on X/Twitter is far more effective and accurate.
The older I get, the more I realize that people just live in different realities and so many contradictory facts can be true. Obviously this is a source of conflict.
I don't think facts ever contradict each other, it's the stories people create to explain the facts that are at odds. These stories lead people to extrapolate other beliefs which they present as "facts", and it's an organic process of discussion and exposure that changes peoples minds over time.
I personally think aggressive fact checking authorities impedes this process, because people don't change their minds when faced with authoritarian power against which they are powerless, and because they are powerless here, they get angry and they disengage. This ends up which reinforcing their beliefs and now you've lost all chance of change.
Right. Imagine facts as data points on some Cartesian plane, and the narrative surrounding the facts as the curve fit to those points. The data points might all be sound, but by selectively omitting some, or by weighting their "uncertainty" higher or lower, you can fit just about any damn curve you want to them.
I also think that simple exposure to a narrative, whether it has any actual facts/data backing it up or not, is likely the primary driver of people believing it.
Now, consider that in most "free speech" societies, those with money can repeat things many orders of magnitude more than others. Over time, this results in influence. Thus, while many countries have "free speech," I'd say they don't have "fair speech." The two concepts complement each other, but one is not the opposite of the other.
The idea of some kind of universal fact is also misleading, some statements of fact are only statements of belief, others are so ill-defined that people end up debating two different things.
Yeah, journalism always has some inherent bias. But to say that the X community is going to be less biased than a fact-checking organization staffed by journalists whose job is to be neutral (within what's humanly possible), is frankly absurd.
Why is it absurd? Journalists don’t think their job is to be neutral. They are among the most biased. They abuse the trust given to them, which is why they don't deserve it. Community notes allows a diversity of opinions to compete, which is a better way to seek truth.
You are giving too much trust to a small authority group to determine what the "facts" are for the rest of the people.
If these "facts" are so obviously facts, we wouldn't need a team of researchers to establish the fact whether they are facts.
The fact that these "facts" need to be "fact-checked" means they are so open to interpretation and depend on context, that we came to the conclusion that this "fact-checking" concept in fact does not really work.
You can still "fact-check" for yourself; do your own research, make up your own mind yourself. Then you will become more of an independent thinker, be less influenced by authoritarian figures.
> Trump says the unemployment rate for African-American youths is 59 percent.
> In May, the bureau said the employment-population ratio for blacks ages 16 to 24 was 41.5 percent. Flipped over, that would mean that the unemployment ratio - although such a statistic is not published by the bureau - would be 58.5 percent. That’s pretty close to the 59 percent figure Trump cited, Sinclair noted.
> But there are differences between the ratio and the widely used unemployment rate, which Trump used in citing the percentage.
> The unemployment rate reflects the number of jobless people who are actively seeking work as a percentage of the available workforce - defined as those who have jobs or trying to find one.
> The May unemployment rate for blacks ages 16 to 24 was 18.7 percent. The rate for whites in the same age group was 9.1 percent.
> The employment-population ratio is a far broader measure that counts all civilians in its equation - even those who don’t work and aren’t looking for a job. In the 16- to 24-year-old category, it includes high school and college students who are not employed or seeking jobs.
In the examples you provided, they mostly deal with hotly-contested information around Covid-19, where there exists countless amounts of incorrect information, politicized reporting, and straight up propaganda. I'm not surprised that Facebook's fact-checkers got a couple articles mislabeled, especially if they blended in with the wave of genuine disinformation that accompanied the pandemic.
Given that there seems to only be two articles that are listed as falsely reported as misinformation (the Reason article and the BMJ article also mentioned in the Telegraph report from today), I have to assume that there actually aren't that many large errors on the part of the fact checkers. If there were more than two or the mistakes were much bigger, then the free speech advocates would never stop mentioning it.
There can definitely be bias when it comes to fact-checking, I wouldn't deny that. I also think that education and knowledge sharing can be greatly harmed by social media incentives to provide the most "engagement". Having an actual human in the process somewhere introduces some error but also cuts down on a lot of the dumb crap that would otherwise spread.
You asked if I saw examples and said that you haven't seen any examples; I showed you examples.
There certainly are more examples, and the free speech advocates I know do talk about the subject generally quite a bit.
One I just now remembered: Dr. John Campbell (https://www.youtube.com/@campbellteaching) has run into issues with this and has pointed out many other cases where established "knowledge" about Covid that we were previously not allowed to criticize, turned out to be objectively wrong. These disputes have resulted in many other people being censored despite later being shown to be correct, or at least reasonably justified by the best information available at the time.
This is someone who was proactively warning about the potential severity of Covid well before others, and advocating for proper hand-washing very early on (before more science emerged suggesting that skin contact is a relatively minor transmission vector). In the early days of the pandemic, he was complaining loudly about Fauci's initial mask rhetoric, arguing that the general population absolutely should wear masks and that production needed to step up. He's been doing serious medical content on Youtube for 17 years (sort by oldest to see) and first posted about Covid on Jan 26 2020 when awareness was still low and it was imagined that the virus had been contained to China and presented extensive detail on what little was known at the time (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPvpfC7NfR0).
But now he mostly makes videos against "the establishment", out of frustration with their unwillingness to consider new science over dogma.
I apologize for not scouring the internet for examples. If you had not sought those examples out and provided them, I probably would have never seen any cases of incorrect fact-checking in my actual life, but I would have seen many cases of misinformation being fact-checked. If you have to intentionally find such cases or hear them shouted from the rooftops by free speech advocates, then they probably aren't that many such cases.
I don't have time to search through an entire Youtube channel, but I will say this: there are many, many doctors out there with factually incorrect views about medical science. I personally have talked with doctors who think that the Covid vaccine killed hundreds of thousands of people (it didn't). I do not necessarily think this doctor is wrong, but from the perspective of a fact-checker who is given the current best knowledge of Covid it is hard to determine who is making genuine good-faith efforts to criticize vs who is simply repeating what they want to be true.
And for the record, you absolutely are allowed to criticize the establishment views. When it comes to important topics like medical science, however, you may just have additional context added saying that this is a contrarian view which (statistically) is more likely to be false than the consensus. Everybody likes to complain loudly about being censored, but the reality is that their views are just being disputed and information provided that they are going against the mainstream view.
>And for the record, you absolutely are allowed to criticize the establishment views. When it comes to important topics like medical science, however, you may just have additional context added saying that this is a contrarian view which (statistically) is more likely to be false than the consensus.
This does not match the experience of several people I have followed through all of this, including some I know personally.
>Everybody likes to complain loudly about being censored, but the reality is that their views are just being disputed and information provided that they are going against the mainstream view.
Systems which deliberately restrict access to your work on the basis of its content are ipso facto engaging in censorship. It is not about "getting community noted". Free speech advocates are in favour of Facebook's change; it reflects more speech from more directions. The problem is when state-like authority comes in and assumes the right to judge truth for hoi polloi.
Specifically, I was talking about in my daily usage, not a widely-distributed article on a single example. Have you personally seen any fact-checking whatsoever, much less fact-checking that is misleading? Or do you need to search it out in order to find it?
Joe Biden is sharp as a tack and any videos purporting to show the opposite are cheap fakes deceptively edited by the Republicans and their far right allies [1] [2] [3]
> From bad to worse. Meta is probably one of the single largest funders of fact checking. Now that appears to be coming to an end. Third parties will no longer be able to flag misinfo on FB, Instagram or Threads in the US.
Zuck has probably done exactly that cost-benefit calculation — FB has put enormous resources into fact checking, and to most people it hasn't moved the needle on public perception in the slightest. Facebook is still seen through the lens of Cambridge Analytica, and as a hive of disinformation. The resources devoted to these efforts haven’t delivered a meaningful return, either in public trust or regulatory goodwill.
Thank God. Fact checkers and political organisations pretending to fact check frequently spread false information. Aside from the 2020 election interference regarding the Hunter Biden laptop (which was falsely claimed to be a Russian disinformation effort), you can visit Snopes right now and read an article on how someone that blew up people (and now works for BLM) may not be a terrorist because ‘there are many different definitions of terrorist’.
I think the Snopes link indicates the grandparent's point well, if not in the way that was intended: words being subjective and imprecise, the fact checker has many degrees of freedom. If we allow fact checkers to censor content, they will use the linguistic degrees of freedom to censor selectively to the benefit of their political bias. (Your terrorist is my freedom fighter, your demonstrator is my rioter, your just cause is an imposition on my freedoms, etc.)
Snopes was careful to show degrees of freedom with this fact check, but most social media fact checkers will not be so careful. Social media fact checkers will have a tendency to censor in the direction of the currently-in-power political party, because that party is able to set regulatory policy on social media companies. So the only thing which will prevent censorship from blowing with the political winds is to not have centralized censorship.
Community notes (as implemented at Twitter) require agreement of multiple people who are not in agreement on issues to agree on Notes. I am cautiously optimistic that it may be possible to correct wrong speech with more speech in a nonpartisan manner.
Her specific crimes were possession of unregistered firearms, transport of firearms and explosives shipped in interstate commerce, unlawfully use of false identification documents, and robbing armoured cars.
Given all armoured car robbers would engage in such activities (unregistered firearms, explosives, fake papers, etc),
is it your position that all armoured car robbers are terrorists?
Exactly! They simply used lawfare in an attempt to bankrupt, sieze the assets of, and imprison their main political opponents rather than keep the scale balanced (for the sake of democracy) /s
Seems to me that if some authority is determining what are facts and what are not for me, that I am easily shapable and foolable.
Community Notes at least don't claim they have the facts. So that leaves you more with a responsibility to make up your own mind.
I know this isn't for everyone, there are still a lot of people that like to have leaders tell them how they should live. But nowadays there are more and more people that like to have more independence. You will have to live with that too.
None of this is to do with anything about what people want. It's to do with the government. Meta has always, by necessity to some degree, gone with what the current US administration wants re: content moderation. This is the same thing.
Do you really think the company which has openly admitted it wants to create AI profiles that post as if they're humans and not tell you they are AI care at all about facts or what you think or believe?
Well yeah true, the decision is probably mostly made because of the change of government. The fact checking was pleasing the left, and now that the right has the power, this left-wing-propaganda thing has to go.
But then is community notes right-wing?
They could also have kept the fact checking system, but just alter the facts to please their agenda.
But they didn't do that, they are replacing it with Community Notes, which isn't some small group supposedly figuring out the facts for everyone, but a community build information system.
To me that seems a lot more fair and less prone to corruption. So regardless of the real motivation behind the move, I think it will have positive effects for society. At least a step in the right direction. Still a long way to go.
> The fact checking was pleasing the left, and now that the right has the power, this left-wing-propaganda thing has to go.
Yes you understand. Meta, due to its problems with moderation over the years, both legal and political, has largely ceded direction of that to the government. Previous government wanted things like fact-checking, an oversight board for moderation decisions, and censorship of certain issues. Current government doesn't want any moderation at all, like X, the social media owned by Trump's biggest ally, which he personally loved so much that he created his own Twitter clone when he was booted off of Twitter. So in that environment, the easiest, simplest thing is to treat Meta platforms like X. That's all there is to it. It signals commitment to the new administration, it heaves political and legal pressure off Meta, etc. much more than your suggestion, that they keep fact-checking but bias it towards the right (which would need to be explained to the administration, etc.) Just saying "We're like X now" gets the point across most cleanly, and it's cheaper
What I think I just read is that content moderation is complicated, error-prone, and expensive. So Meta is going to do a lot less of it. They'll let you self-moderate via a new community notes system, similar to what X does. I think this is a big win for Meta, because it means people who care about the content being right will have to engage more with the Meta products to ensure their worldview is correctly represented.
They also said that their existing moderation efforts were due to societal and political pressures. They aren't explicit about it, but it's clear that pressure does not exist anymore. This is another big win for Meta, because minimizing their investment in content moderation and simplifying their product will reduce operating expenses.
How would fact checkers access the 90% of private content? And should they? I don't think so, even if the respective private content is questionable.
The EU goes its own way with trusted flaggers, which is more or less the least sensible option. It won't take long until bounds are overstepped and legal content gets flagged. Perhaps it already happened. This is not a solution to even an ill-defined problem.
Good. Private communication is private, even if it's a group. The nice thing about the crazy is that they're incapable of keeping quiet: they will inevitably out themselves.
In the meantime, maybe now I can discuss private matters of my diagnosis without catching random warnings, bans, or worse.
What kind of diagnosis spawns so many fact checks that it's a problem? I'd think any discussion about medical issues would benefit greatly from the calling out of misinformation.
Yes, this just reads like "oh, thank God for that, that department was an expensive hassle to run".
I don't know if I'd call it a certain win for Meta long term, but it might well be if they play it right. Presumably they're banking on things being fairly siloed anyway, so political tirades in one bubble won't push users in another bubble off the platform. If they have good ways for people to ignore others, maybe they can have the cake and eat it, unlike Twitter.
Like Twitter, the network effect will retain people,
and unlike Twitter, Facebook is a much deeper, more integrated service such that people can't just jump across to a work-alike.
A CEO who can keep his mouth shut is also a pretty big plus for them. They skated away from bring involved with a genocide without too many issues, so same ethical revulsion people have against Musk seems to be much less focused.
The pressure has just shifted from being applied by the left to the right. There is still censorship on Twitter, it is just the people Elon doesn't like who are getting censored. The same will happen on Facebook. Zuckerberg has been cozying up to Trump for a reason.
What is this based on? I see so many people shouting things like this, but there doesn't seem to be any basis for these arguments. They seem a bit useless and empty.
> it means people who care about the content being right will have to engage more with the Meta products to ensure their worldview is correctly represented.
Or maybe such people have far better things to do than fact check concern trolls and paid propagandists.
There do seem to be a lot of people who enjoy fact checking concern trolls and paid propagandists.
I'm not sure if they do more good than harm. Often the entire point seems to be to get those specific people spun up, realizing that the troll is not constrained to admit error no matter how airtight the refutation. It just makes them look as frothing as trolls claim they are.
And yet, it's also unclear if any other course of action would help. Despite decades of pleading, the trolls never starve no matter how little they're fed.
> And yet, it's also unclear if any other course of action would help. Despite decades of pleading, the trolls never starve no matter how little they're fed.
Downvotes that hide posts below a certain threshold have always seemed like the best approach to me. Of course it also allows groups to silence views.
> Often the entire point seems to be to get those specific people spun up, realizing that the troll is not constrained to admit error no matter how airtight the refutation.
Your point is exactly why I can’t take anyone serious who claims that randoms “debating” will cause the best ideas to rise to the top.
I cant count how many times i’ve seen influencer propagandists engage in an online “debate”, be handheld walked through how their entire point is wrong, only for them to spew the exact same thing hours later at the top of every feed. and remember these are often the people with some of the largest platforms claiming they’re being censored … to millions of people lol.
it’s too easy to manipulate what rises to the top. for debate to be anything close to effective all parties involved have to actually be interested in coming closer to a truth. and the algorithms have no interest in deranking sophists and propagandists.
> They aren't explicit about it, but it's clear that pressure does not exist anymore
It's clear that the pressure comes now from the other side of the spectrum. Zuck already put Trumpists at various key positions.
> I think this is a big win for Meta, because it means people who care about the content being right will have to engage more with the Meta products to ensure their worldview is correctly represented.
It's a good point. They're also going to push more political contents, which should increase engagement (eventually frustrating users and advertisers?)
Either way, it's pretty clear that the company works with the power in place, which is extremely concerning (whether you're left or right leaning, and even more if you're not American).
> content moderation is complicated, error-prone, and expensive
I think the fact-checking part is pretty straightforward. What's outrageous is that the content moderators judge content subjectively, labeling perfect discussions as misinformation, hate speech, and etc. That's where the censorship starts.
I thought there would be community notes. And how would third-party work? The Stanford doctor was banned from X because he posted peer-reviewed papers that challenge the effectiveness of masks (or vaccines)? I certainly don't want to see that level of hysteria.
> The Stanford doctor was banned from X because he posted peer-reviewed papers that challenging the effectiveness of masks (or vaccines)? I certainly don't want to see that level of hysteria.
Not familiar with that specific case, though generally I'm not a fan a bans. Fact checks are great though. There have been peer reviewed papers about midi-chlorians too (https://www.irishnews.com/magazine/science/2017/07/24/news/a...), but I'd sure hope that if someone brought it up in a discussion they'd be fact checked.
How do you avoid judging actual human discussions subjectively? I remember being a forum moderator and struggling with exactly the same issues. No matter what guidelines we'd set, there'd be essentially legitimate discussions that were way over the line superficially, and on the other you'd have neo-nazis acting in ways that weren't technically bad, but were clearly leading there.
Facebook moderators have an even harder job than that because the inherent scale of the platform prevents the kinds of personal insights and contextual understanding I had.
Okay, but you're saying this on a platform where the moderator (dang) follows intentionally vague and subjective guidelines, presumably because you like the environment more here than some unmoderated howling void elsewhere on the Internet.
Good point, and thanks. I have to admit I don't have a good answer to this. Maybe what dang needs to assess can be better defined or qualified? Like we can't define porn but we know it when we see it? On the other hand, assessing something is offensive or is hate speech is so subjective that people simply weaponize them, intentionally or unintentionally.
The quality of the platform lives or dies on the quality of these decisions. If dang's choices are too bad, this site will die.
The situation is somewhat different between a niche community and a borderline monopoly. But it's also true that facebook's success depends on navigating it well. At the end of the day we can choose to use it or not.
To the extent that people feel forced to use a platform that's a reason to further bias away from suppressing free expression, even if the result is a somewhat less good platform.
You're still making subjective judgements wherever you draw the line. I don't know how a platform could avoid making subjective judgements at all and still produce an environment people want to be in.
> I think this is a big win for Meta, because it means people who care about the content being right will have to engage more with the Meta products to ensure their worldview is correctly represented.
Strong disagree. This is a very naive understanding of the situation. "Fact-checking" by users is just more of the kind of shouting back and forth that these social networks are already full of. That's why a third-party fact checks are important.
True, but that doesn't discount that it's a win for Meta
1) Shouting matches create more ad impressions, as people interact more with the platform. The shouting matches also get more attention from other viewers than any calm factual statement.
2) Less legal responsibility / costs / overhead
3) Less potential flak from being officially involved in fact-checking in a way that displeases the current political group in power
Users lose, but are people who still use FB today going to use FB less because the official fact checkers are gone? Almost certainly not in any significant numbers
Its more naive to think a fact-checking unit susceptible to govt pressure is likely to be better.
There will always be govt pressure in one form or another to censor content they doesnt like. And we've obviously seen how this works with the Dems for the last 4 years.
You should look into the implementation, at least the one that X has published. It's not just users shouting back and forth at each other. It's actually a pretty impressive system
I have a complicated history with this viewpoint. I remember back when Wikipedia was launched in 2001, I thought- there is no way this will work... it will just end up as a cesspool. Boy was I wrong. I think I was wrong because Wikipedia has a very well defined and enforced moderation model, for example: a focus on no original research and neutral point of view.
How can this be replicated with topics that are by definition controversial, and happening in real time? I don't know. But I don't think Meta/X have any sort of vested interest in seeing sober, fact-based conversations. In fact, their incentives work entirely in the opposite direction: the more anger/divisive the content drives additional traffic and engagement [1]. Whereas, with Wikipedia, I would argue the opposite is true: Wikipedia would never have gained the dominance it has if it was full of emotionally-charged content with dubious/no sourcing.
So I guess my conclusion from this is that I doubt any community-sourced "fact checking" efforts in-sourced from the social media platforms themselves will be successful, because the incentives are misaligned for the platform. Why invest any effort into something that will drive down engagement on your platform?
> ... we found that posts about the political out-group were shared or retweeted about twice as often as posts about the in-group. Each individual term referring to the political out-group increased the odds of a social media post being shared by 67%. Out-group language consistently emerged as the strongest predictor of shares and retweets: the average effect size of out-group language was about 4.8 times as strong as that of negative affect language and about 6.7 times as strong as that of moral-emotional language—both established predictors of social media engagement. ...
But "fact-checking" by people in authority is OK? Isn't that like, authoritarian?
"Fact-checking" completely removed the ability for debate and is therefore antithetical to a functional democracy. Pushing back against authority, because they are often dead wrong, is foundational to a free society. It's hard to imagine anything more authoritarian than "No I don't have to debate because I'm a fact-checker and by that measure alone you're wrong and I'm right". Very Orwellian indeed!
Additionally, the number of times that I've observed "fact-checkers" lying thru their teeth for obvious political reasons is absurd.
Without some sort of controls in place, fact-checking becomes useless because it's subject to being gamed by those with the most time on their hands and/or malicious tools, e.g. bots and sock puppets.
They are given the title of fact checker, ending debate, this is the authoritarian part. It does not matter who employs them. If fact checkers were angels we wouldn’t have this problem. However fact checkers are subject to human nature just like the rest of us, to be biased, wrong, etc.. Do you think these fact checkers don’t have their own opinions? Do you think they don’t vote? Don’t lie?
You are assuming the people in social media are a representative cut of people in the society but what you will notice quickly is that this is not the case, just look at echo chambers.
If I am trying to debate the same fact on a far-right or far-left post, undoubtedly both will come up with the same discussion and conclusion - let's not lie to ourselves.
So for your claim to have any validity the requirement of a fair, unbiased group of people on all posts would need to be given (in the first instance, there are a lot more issues with this, just look at the loud people versus the ones not bothering anymore to comment as discussing seems impossible) and that is just de facto not the case and the reason fact-checking is indeed helpful.
Community Notes is the best thing about Musk's Dumpster fire.
The problem with CN right now, though, is that Musk appears to block it on most of his posts, and/or right-wing moderators downvote the notes so they don't appear or disappear.
Community notes launched at the start of 2021. It predates the buyout by almost two years.
If what they said about their design is to be believed, political downvoting shouldn't heavily impact them. I wish it was easier to see pending notes on a post though.
Right, I think that's the parent's point: CN is a great design, dragged down by the fact that Elon heavily puts his thumb on the scale to make sure posts he likes spread far and wide and posts he dislikes get buried, irrespective of their truth content.
You can see them, it's just that finding the button to do so on a post is difficult. I think you need to navigate to the post from the notes section of the website.
I am not so sure that Musk or right-wing moderators are directly to blame for the lack of published community notes.
My guess: in recent months, many people (e.g., me) who are motivated to counter fake news have left Twitter for other platforms. Thus, proposed CNs are seen and upvoted by fewer people, resulting in fewer of them being shown to the public.
Also, I ask myself: why should I spend time verifying or writing CNs when it does not matter - the emperor knows that he is not wearing any clothes, and he does not care.
> the emperor knows that he is not wearing any clothes, and he does not care.
Indeed the ending of the famous story is:
> "But the Emperor has nothing at all on!" said a little child.
> "Listen to the voice of innocence!" exclaimed his father; and what the child had said was whispered from one to another.
> "But he has nothing at all on!" at last cried out all the people. The Emperor was vexed, for he knew that the people were right; but he thought the procession must go on now! And the lords of the bedchamber took greater pains than ever, to appear holding up a train, although, in reality, there was no train to hold.
To be fair, a lot (not all) of notes on Musk's posts are spurious, including the NNN's. It's clearly being misused there, but in general they seem to work very well indeed.
Yeah, the problem is that if one side tells 100 lies, and the other tells 1 lie, you can't correct all 100 lies, but if you only correct the most egregious lies then statistically you'll only be correcting the one side, and if you correct 1 lie from each side, then you make it seem like both sides lie equally. The Gish Gallop wins again.
Especially for live fact checking the greater the number of lies and the more obvious/blatant those lies are the more likely someone is to get fact checked.
We would have to fact check if those numbers are correct.
Oh wait, fact checkers don't work, better just inform yourself and make up your own mind, and don't just believe some supposedly authoritarian figures.
This is the problem, you are clearly biased. She brought up the Charlottesville issue that has been widely debunked; it is blatantly false and well-known to be false. She was not fact-checked. That's the issue.
> “where there may be severe deformities. There may be a fetus that’s non viable” he said. “If a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen.”
Your dying grandma may go DNR, but that doesn’t mean murdering grandmas is broadly legal.
My wife does charity photography for https://www.nowilaymedowntosleep.org/. You see lots of this sort of withdrawal of care. Calling it an abortion is cruel and dumb.
As a Harris supporter, I actually agree, I think it was way too heavy handed and hurt Harris more than helped. I’m not sure anymore what the goal of fact checking is (I’ve always felt it was somewhat dubious if not done extremely well).
Agreed, I always felt like most of the fact checking that has become vogue in the past ten years is designed to comfort the people who already agree, not inform people who want genuine insight.
If you don’t have fact checkers, a debate loses all its value. Debates must be grounded in fact to have any value at all. Otherwise a “debate” is just a series of campaign stump speeches.
> it means people who care about the content being right will have to engage more with the Meta products to ensure their worldview is correctly represented.
To me it sounds better for large actors who pay shills to influence public opinion, like Qatar. I disagree that this is better for either Facebook users, or society as a whole.
It does however certainly fit the Golden rule - he with the gold makes the rules.
I was under the impression that Community Notes were designed to be resistant to sybil attacks, but I could be wrong. Community Notes have been used at Twitter for a long time. Are there examples of state-influenced notes getting through the process?
Twitter's Community Notes were designed to be resistant to sybil attacks. Meta is calling their new product Community Notes, but it would be a mistake to assume the algorithms are the same under the hood. Hopefully Meta will be as transparent as Twitter has been, with a regular data dump and so on.
Qatar is not well known for paying people to bot on social media. They play the RT game by using their news network Al Jazeera to do that instead and give their propaganda a professional air. The first country to do this was India[1]. Israel has special units in the army to do this[2]. At this point so many countries pay people to do what you say, but Qatar doesn't, from what I can tell. If you have proof of it, I'm all ears.
I was cautiously optimistic when this was announced that India and Saudi Arabia (among others, incl. Qatar) might see some pushback on how they clamp down on free speech and journalism on social media. But since Zuck mentioned Europe, I fear those countries will continue as they did before.
Sure, I'll trust the leadership of this huge commercial company, famous for lots of controversies reagarding privacy of people. I'll trust them to decide for me what is true and what is not.
> They also said that their existing moderation efforts were due to societal and political pressures. They aren't explicit about it, but it's clear that pressure does not exist anymore.
I didn't think it was any secret that Meta largely complies with US gov't instructions on what to suppress. It's called jawboning[1]
Corporate censorship should have never happened. It is a huge corruption of public discourse and the political process. These platforms have hundreds of millions of users, or more, and are as influential as governments. They should be regulated like public utilities so they cannot ban users or censor content, especially political speech. Personally I don’t trust Zuck and his sudden shift on this and other topics. It doesn’t come with a strong enough rejection of Meta/Facebook’s past, and how they acted in the previous election cycle, during COVID, during BLM, etc. But I guess some change is still good.
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there's any reasonable political discourse that is ever* censored by social media companies.
During COVID, there were people spreading lies about the vaccine, which many people believed, and many people died as a result of believing those lies. Even Louis Brandeis, one of the fiercest advocates of free speech, made an exception for emergency situations[0], which is arguably what a pandemic is.
But again, lies about a vaccine do not constitute reasonable public discourse, it is more akin to screaming fire in a crowded theater. If you have counter examples of regular public discourse that has been censored by a social media company, please share it.
* I realize "ever" is a stretch, I'm sure there are instances, but my understanding is that they are the exception rather than the rule.
[0] "If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence. Only an emergency can justify repression. Such must be the rule if authority is to be reconciled with freedom." - Louis Brandeis, Whitney vs. California
It's hard to talk about, because when a discussion is successfully censored you usually don't hear about it and presume any discourse on it would have been unreasonable.
I would point towards immigration as a topic where meaningful discourse is missing from social media. On most social media sites, the discussion will be dominated by people who think immigration should rarely if ever be restricted; Twitter has been colonized by some people who take the opposite extreme, often for overtly racist reasons, although this is tempered a bit by Elon Musk's personal support of high skill visas.
The "normie" immigration restrictionist position, that immigrants are great but only so long as they enter the country lawfully, is something I very often see expressed in news interviews or supported by older relatives and rarely if ever see expressed on a social media platform. I don't know how I'd go about proving this is downstream of fact checking, but there's a lot of orgs who argue that it's factually false to characterize, for example, someone who crosses the border without authorization and then applies for asylum as an illegal immigrant.
But being at the head of a social network is political.
Every choice is political. Allowing extreme speech to circulate is political, not authorizing it is political too.
It is not corporate censorship, it's regulation. without regulation, it will be the voice of the loudest / strongest. And I think we need some rationality, not polarisation.
Mark has looked at what has happened to Twitter since Musk took over, a notable decline in activity and value… and decided he wants a piece of that? Musk is begging people on Twitter to post more positive content, as it devolves into 4chan-lite.
If Musk’s ideological experiment with Twitter had proven the idea that you can have a pleasant to use website without any moderation then Mark’s philosophical 180 would at least make sense, but this doesn’t, at all. What’s to gain? Musk has done everyone a favor by demonstrating that moderation driven by a fear of government intervention was actually a good thing.
It starts to make more sense when you think about who is arm in arm with the president elect. I don't know that Musk believes his philosophy is wrong and now he has the power to pressure others.
I use meta products, it’s anecdotal but they’re dead. At least they seem very stagnant. This is appeasing the new establishment and hoping for more engagement ?
> Mark has looked at what has happened to Twitter since Musk took over, a notable decline in activity and value… and decided he wants a piece of that?
Hell yes he does, Twitter helped Musk get a seat at the table with Trump and the ability to influence US policy decisions at an unprecedented level. Zuck craves power and sees sucking up to the incoming administration as an easy path to get more of it.
Additionally, if you haven’t read the article you’re commenting on, community notes is an excellent replacement so-called fact checking services which are notoriously biased.
I have a feeling it is more part of an agreement with the new administration. It was an agreement with the old administration that led to the current platform where there is way too much overreach on things the govt didn't want discussed: COVID, Palestine, immigration, etc.
Zuck's video claims Europe has been imposing a lot of censorship lately, which is a nicer way for him to say "we have done a crappy job at stopping misinformation and abusive material, got fined A LOT by countries who actually care about it, and that's somehow not our fault".
Community notes is good news, and something I was expecting to disappear from Twitter since Elon bought it a couple years ago, especially since they have called out his lies more than once. Hearing Facebook/Instagram/Threads are getting them is great.
Then he claims "foreign governments are pushing against American companies" like we aren't all subject to the same laws. And actually, it wasn't the EU who prohibited a specific app alleging "security risks" because actually they can't control what's said there; it was the US, censoring TikTok.
Perhaps we the europeans should push for a ban of US platforms like Twitter, especially when its owner has actually pledged to weaponise the platform to favour far-right candidates like AfD (Germany) or Reform UK. And definitely push for bigger fines to monopolistic companies like Meta.
Why should social media operators be responsible for "stopping misinformation" in the first place? That sounds a lot like the logic that was used to justify smashing the printing presses in Gutenberg's day, not to mention by countless villains of dystopian sci-fi (e.g. Fahrenheit 451), in turn based on other real-world concerns.
I think I should have a right to let others lie to me, and decide for myself if I believe them. In the alternative where someone prevents me from hearing it, that other person is deciding for me. Why should I accept that other person as more qualified to do my own thinking?
It's really strange to me how calls for banning "misinformation" in the US seem to come from the same political direction as complaints about controversial books being taken out of educational curricula.
In all cases what they mean is that they want opinions or statements that go against to whatever ideology or political faction they belong to to be censored.
Humans tend to strongly identify with such things and motivate their moral reasoning to fit.
I would wager Mark and other sharks like him would find this entire thread very amusing. For they have no ideology other than self interest, nothing they do is for any other purpose other than their own.
> It's really strange to me how calls for banning "misinformation" in the US seem to come from the same political direction as complaints about controversial books being taken out of educational curricula.
I'm not in (or from) the US, I'm european and probably "more used to" regulation :). Thing is, banning misinformation isn't the solution, but the artificial algorithm should stop recommending accounts that keep feeding fake news to people, since community notes take a while to appear.
Or some indicator like "this account's posts has received a lot of community notes in the last 30 days, please take what this tweet says with a grain of salt". Young people keep getting feed far-right bullshit, which is the reason a party like Se Acabó La Fiesta (Alvise Perez) got to the European parliament in the first place, because he kept posting fake stuff, and until the justice ruled otherwise, people would just believe it. Because unfortunately, many people aren't able to "do their thinking" because of confirmation bias. "They say what I want to hear, so it must be true".
I think that most people with non-mainstream views understand that their views are not mainstream, and will be quite willing to ignore community notes. But your idea generally has merit; an automated system trying to predict how content will be rated by third parties seems much better than having it try to do the rating itself.
If you think this move exists in a vacuum or is actually about "getting back to their roots with free speech", you're wrong. Alongside Dana White joining the board[0], it's clear that this is solely about currying favor with the incoming administration.
It's not solely about currying favor. Many tech giants hate getting pushed around by politicians and courts around the world demanding censorship. Free speech rights in the US are much stronger than elsewhere in the world, and even businesses as large as Meta need political support to successfully push back on censorious overreach.
> When the White House called up Twitter in the early morning hours of September 9, 2019, officials had what they believed was a serious issue to report: Famous model Chrissy Teigen had just called President Donald Trump “a pussy ass bitch” on Twitter — and the White House wanted the tweet to come down.
100%. It is about aligning with Trump's political opinions. Thus I do expect to see no fact checking of anti-trans, anti-vaccine and anti-immigrant content. But I don't think that Meta's documented censorship of Palestinian content [1] will change, because the censorship is inline with Trump's political opinions.
They've also said there will be more harmful (but legal) content on there as they'll no longer automatically look for it, but require it to be reported before taking action.
As someone who worked on harmful content, specifically suicide and self injury, this is just nuts - they were raked over the coals in both the UK by an inquest into the suicide of a teenage user who rabbit holed on this harmful content, and also with the parents of teenagers who took their lives, who Zuck turned around and apologised to as his latest senate hearing.
There is research that shows exposure to suicide and self injury content increases suicidal ideation.
I'm hoping that there is some nuance that has been missed from the article, but if not, this would seem like a slam dunk for both the UK and EU regulators to take them to task on.
There’s lots of mainstream media content I think is psychologically harmful and should be suppressed, such as content normalizing adultery. But I’m quite content to live in a society where the social norm favors people saying what they want and the burden is on the opponents of that to produce strong evidence of harm.
But all we see are two proponents in a civil trial. Shouldn't the standard be the well known "preponderance of evidence"?
Though personally preponderance of evidence seems to be a shitty standard too because I might be listening to two awful theories and be forced to conclude one is the winner. Theories should rise above a minimum threshold to even consider sniffing at before we consider one as superior over the other.
I agree that there needs to be a better standard than just “more likely than not”. Freedom of expression is a fundamental good, and there should be clear evidence of harm outweighing that good, before curtailing it.
Regarding my previous comment, my intent was to point out the GP comment’s position (because the parent’s comment seemed to be beside the point), not necessarily to endorse it.
Right. The challenge for free speech absolutists is to demonstrate that free speech takes priority over moderating hate speech, adult content, highly addictive media etc... . That demonstration needs to evidence-based and framed in terms of short and long term social harms/impact. Simply saying "censorship hasn't gone well for some countries" or "having a free speech zone is extremely important to the future of civilization" is not enough.
Consider hate speech. There is a clear short-term benefit of moderation: reducing the harms to marginalised people from being exposed to threats to their person, identity, and way of life. In the face of this benefit, the absolute free speech advocate must provide a counter-argument for why free speech overrides that harm-reduction.
>reducing the harms to marginalised people from being exposed to threats to their person, identity, and way of life
This only makes sense if you use a recent definition of "harm" created by censorship advocates that's divorced from the traditional meaning. In criminal law, harm traditionally (and still does in America) mean actually physically harming someone's body or making threats to do so. Censorship advocates are the ones making the claim that mere words should also constitute harm, so the onus is on them to justify why they want to change the meaning of the word like that.
>In the face of this benefit, the absolute free speech advocate must provide a counter-argument for why free speech overrides that harm-reduction.
Why are you not the one who must provide an argument for why this "reduction of harm" overrides the benefit of freedom of speech?
Further, a very large fraction of what I have seen classified as "hate speech" simply cannot reasonably be argued to constitute any kind of threat.
Finally: what do you mean by "identity"? When I have seen this term used by opponents of "hate speech", it generally seems to refer to something like a person's self-image. I cannot understand how this can in principle be "threatened", nor how it could constitute harm to learn that someone else sees you differently from how you see yourself.
> why this "reduction of harm" overrides the benefit of freedom of speech
There are some strong arguments for harm reduction being a more fundamental human value than freedom of speech.
Firstly, the modern conception of freedom of speech is often seen to be grounded in libertarian thought, in particular the works of Bentham and Mill. Yet Mill himself explicitly stated that these freedoms should be limited in the case where they cause harm to others. Thus freedom of speech has historically been seen as lower priority to harm reduction.
Secondly, there are in fact two competing interpretations for "freedom of speech": on one hand the equality of access to a public forum, on the other hand the ability to say whatever you want. I say "competing" because in a public forum without moderation, the tendency is for loud and offensive voices to drown out the discourse, effectively leaving marginalised people without a voice. This is especially potent in modern social media. To me it is similar to antitrust regulations in the market: we put these in place for the benefit of competition, as this typically improve social impacts. However in doing so we are limiting the freedom of corporations with large market share to collude, fix prices etc... .
Thirdly, history suggests that it's problematic for ideological values to trump the basic tenet of harm reduction. We see this for example in the Catholic church's refusal to support abortion rights or the use of condoms to prevent AIDs. If we don't ultimately assess the long-term social impact of a "core moral value" in terms of human harm and flourishing, then we risk entrapping ourselves in an ideological morass.
> what do you mean by "identity"? ... I cannot understand how this can in principle be "threatened"
As an example, homophobic comments are an attack on the sexual identity of homosexual people. It sends a message that they are unacceptable to society due to their inherent preferences, and that they should not express themselves as they naturally wish to. This causes psychological suffering.
>The challenge for free speech absolutists is to demonstrate that free speech takes priority over
Why? And how, in principle? Why is the burden of evidence not on others - and equally, how, in principle, could they furnish evidence?
The entire point is that freedom of speech is a core moral value; they have weighed the potential harms and come out against censorship, because they consider censorship to be inherently harmful. There is no objective way to compare different kinds of harm to each other; each individual's moral values are what they are.
When a free speech absolutist argues that freedom of speech is more important than whatever goal the censor has in mind, that argument is of fundamentally the same kind as the censor's argument, just with opposite polarity. When the censor says that "hate speech" needs to be prohibited, that, too, is based on a relative weighing of values and purported rights (i.e. freedom from hearing it).
You’re presuming that the debate has to be carried out according to utilitarian rules (do benefits of free speech outweigh harms caused by certain speech). But why should it be?
Arguably they don't go both ways. The distinction is action vs inaction. If someone wants action from someone else, they need to argue the case for that action. Arguing for not doing something on the other hand is never necessary.
To see why, consider that the space of possible actions someone could not take is infinite. If there's an expectation that someone do a ton of research and work to argue for why they are not doing something, then the amount of work they would have to do is thus also infinite. This way lies madness, which is why in reality the default outcome that results from not acting is always taken as a given.
Sometimes this reality is obfuscated by activists. They find some group of people who are just doing their thing, and demand that those people do some extra things (usually some costly things). The arguments they make for this are weak, but when the targeted people say they'd rather not do those extra things the activists demand their targets argue for not doing what the activists want to whatever level of effort (or greater) they themselves made. This can be an effective bullying tactic but isn't legitimate: it's on those who want action to argue the case for it, not those who don't to argue against.
Digital platforms like social networks default to uncensored. If the operators do nothing, then by the way they are built content is allowed. It takes additional work to categorize posts and block certain kinds of content. So the default outcome is free speech. If someone wants someone else to do work to suppress that, then it's on them to prove that it's truly necessary and that the benefits outweigh the harms. But that doesn't cut both ways; it's not required for other people to take on the argument for free speech. That's the default outcome so it just wins by default if the other side can't prove their case to a sufficiently convincing level.
That's not really how language works. If not choosing to do something is a choice, then today we have all made an infinite number of choices. Nobody would ever express themselves that way.
But even if you want to play word games, choices and actions aren't the same thing. Choosing to act is quantitively different from choosing not to act because it involves a different level of effort. It's wrong to assume that they are morally equal.
>then today we have all made an infinite number of choices
The way I like to think about it is that once a choice has risen to the level of conscious awareness, it is an illusion that a person can just decline to choose.
This seems to be presuming that there is some clear delineation between acting and not acting, but going through some daily occurrences it's difficult for me to find an objective line, mostly because there are choices one could make that allow one to call something inaction while it requires active action.
Say for example I'm passing by a beggar on my way to work. Before deciding whether I give them money, I can first decide to ignore or not ignore them. From a basic human perspective I want to say hello and be friendly (and I choose to do this), but it does make me feel worse if I decline than if I had ignored them, exactly because it makes it feel like a choice. But if I ignore them, can I call passing by without giving them money less of a choice? I only moved my choice up one level in the tree of all possible decisions I can make.
Or, moving it to the example of the drowning man: imagine you're holding out your arm to see how long you can do it, and see the life ring flying towards you. If you choose not to act, it'll hang on your arm, and the person will drown. Is it nevertheless inaction on your part?
> Duty (criminal law), is an obligation to act under which failure to act (omission), results in criminal liability
You failed to act, which is why a law is sometimes required to compel action. However, saving a drowning person isn't something that triggers such a legal obligation in the USA unless you're the person who actually pushed someone into the water in the first place.
I don't get why this thread is getting so long or so abstract. The principles here are straightforward. Facebook don't actually have to care about what arguments activists make, but even if they did, it's on activists to win the argument for what they want. You don't get to automatically have your own way unless someone sits down and does a randomized controlled trial showing that you're wrong - and this is independent of what domain we're talking about.
> I don't get why this thread is getting so long or so abstract
Activists use abstraction to attempt to overcome settled understandings and norms. Of course there is a distinction between action and inaction—as you recognize it’s even a legally significant distinction. The very existence of that norm is the reason anyone would say “inaction is really a form of action.”
It’s like how the notion of “antiracism” is an effort to reframe race neutrality as a form of racism.
But we're not talking about only the legal obligations. Plenty would argue that a person with a life ring and a drowning person in front of them have a moral imperative to act; the court of public opinion would be certainly negative about a video of someone casually watching the person die while holding the means to save them, even if you can't criminally prosecute.
In this particular case, changing the rules (and making the blog post explaining those changes!) is pretty clearly an action.
Here, the law flows from the moral judgment that there’s a fundamental distinction between action and inaction. Otherwise, you’d be morally culpable for not basically enslaving ourself to helping whenever happens to be the poorest.
This exactly mirrors my thoughts, although I don't work in your field. One quote:
"For example, in December 2024, we removed millions of pieces of content every day. While these actions account for less than 1% of content produced every day, we think one to two out of every 10 of these actions may have been mistakes (i.e., the content may not have actually violated our policies)."
That is first order data and it's interesting. However, before making policy decisions, I would want the second order data: what is the human cost of those mistakes, and what percentage of policy-violating content will not be removed as a result of these changes? Finally, what's the cost of not removing that percentage?
For that matter, by talking about the percentage of active mistakes without saying how many policy violations are currently missed, you're framing the debate in a certain direction.
The human cost of a piece of content being taken down depends on the piece of content, and the reason behind posting it.
In the case of someone posting about recovery from self injury and including a photo of their healed self-harm scars, having that taken down by mistake would be more harmful than someone who posted a cartoon depiction of suicide for the lolz.
My personal belief, for whatever that's worth, is that communication and speech are one of the most powerful tools any of us have. Talking can change minds, move societies, arouse emotions, and in general makes a difference. This is true no matter the format (text, voice, etc.).
That means that restricting communication should not be a casual activity. Free speech is a good ideal for a reason.
It also means that, if you believe in the primacy of free speech, you are obligated to consider the implications of that belief. Speech has effects. In my adult life, since 1990, we have seen a major change in the ease of communication. IMHO, society hasn't been able to fully adjust to that change -- or rather, that huge suite of changes. I sincerely do not know what a healthy society using the Internet looks like; I don't think we're in one now. All of these arguments (on all sides, mine included) are hampered by our lack of perspective.
Which is why we should research this carefully - and the research thus far points to consumption or graphic or even borderline depictions of suicide, self injury and eating disorder content (eg thinspo) being bad for mental health in at least teens.
Meta seem to be making the case for those who would see social media banned for people under the age of 18. To enforce that properly would require needing ID, and that then opens a whole can of civil liberty issues.
The social "science" research in this area is junk with small effect sizes, unclear causality, and multiple uncontrolled variables. People who claim to be following the science in this area are generally being disingenuous and picking results that support their preferred ideology.
Given how easy it is to take things out of context, I'm not so sure that the original context really makes a difference.
There's more people online than any of us has heartbeats, and the n^2 number of user-user pairs generates detrimental effects that track any positive effects.
Much better, I think, for each of us to have a small and private personal social network, not to hand everything over to a foreign* company trying to project its social norms worldwide.
* Facebook claims about 3 billion active users, so for 89%-93.5%** of its users, the fact that Facebook is American makes them foreign.
> we think one to two out of every 10 of these actions may have been mistakes
May have been a mistake? Reminds me of RTO and the subjective feeling of being more productive in the office. They have the feeling they may have made mistakes and base their new policy on that feeling.
I think what they are saying there is the press release interpretation of experiments showing a false positive rate of 10-20%, with error bars wide enough that stating a percentage gives too many significant figures. But the definition of FP is necessarily fuzzy; if you can perfectly identify them as FP at scale then you have built a better classifier and you no longer have the FP problem. So any statement about FP rates necessarily needs to be couched in uncertainty.
I don't think it's malicious wordsmithing where they are mis-representing the internal data, though I don't have the data to confirm.
The human cost can't be quantified in any meaningfully precise way on either side. The calculations are necessarily based on so many assumptions as to become entirely subjective. Ultimately the decisions will be made based on politics and business priorities, not any objective calculation of human cost.
That ignores the regulations in the EU, and the UK (coming into force this year), and also the huge volume of lawsuits they are facing in the US. Does everyone remember Zuck turning around to apologise to the parents in that senate hearing? Those parents must feel this is a slap in the face.
This is a decision for the US market first and foremost. The lawsuits you mention are sadly irrelevant to the decision-making; again, if you are about to be forced to make this change by Trump, the results of some cost/benefit study will not sway his reasoning. His decision is already made.
FWIW I would not be surprised if the bluster about championing free speech abroad gets quietly forgotten; we’ll see. They explicitly state they will comply with laws, which in EU likely means continuing to moderate (more not less over time, given the regulatory trends).
I mean, we can tell it's not about free speech because it specifically allows you to target gay and trans people, calling them mentally ill, but not religious people.
> There is research that shows exposure to suicide and self injury content increases suicidal ideation.
Yes. However, I find this obsession with harm-based value judgment to the exclusion of all other considerations ethically problematic, to put it mildly. Ethics does not reduce solely to considerations of harm.
Absolutely they should, and when I worked there that was known as "protecting voice", that content has always been explicitly allowed because it is free expression, even if reading it can be difficult for some people. The same with someone posting images of healed scars because they've been overcoming their self harm.
The content I'm talking about is graphic photos of suicide and self injury, fresh, blood soaked cuts, bodies hanging, graphic depictions of eating disorder (that goes beyond "thinspo", which is more borderline, and so downranked and not recommended rather than removed).
It's the latter that we believed (based on the advice of experts who we relied on for guidance) is harmful when consumed in large quantities.
I reject the implicit assumption that Zuckerberg has an ethical duty to reduce indirect harm from hosting content, and I also reject the implicit assumption that ethical calculations ("balancing" harm) are a meaningful way to reason about ethics. I think both of these assumptions are ethically problematic. The only reason Zuckerberg apologized to parents is because other people would have punished him had he not, which does not imply sound ethics or that he agrees with what he said.
I also think normalizing an infrastructure whose sole purpose is to suppress speech is ethically problematic. Rights are rarely expanded once taken.
You're right that people post abhorrent stuff on such sites, but I prefer approaches like filters over suppression. I also think that if reducing indirect harm is important to certain people (like reducing suicide), then there are known effective ways that don't require coercive power, like the public campaigns against smoking and MADD which have both had significant impacts.
“Think of the children” isn’t really a good argument for censoring completely legal political discourse, which is what has been happening.
They are admitting that there has been a global push against free speech on these platforms.
>There is research that shows exposure to suicide and self injury content increases suicidal ideation.
I mean do you really need research to show this link? Of course it does.
We are okay with slapping an “R” rating on movies and allowing parents to be the ones who decide what content their kids can see. Why can’t we decide that parents also need to be the ones to stop their kids from consuming bad content on social media?
I've already seen disturbing stuff on X since Elon took over that I never would have seen when it was twitter. They don't even show the warning "this might be harmful content" on images and videos anymore. The X algo seems to go haywire every couple of days and dumps a bunch of this crap in my feed until I block 20+ bluecheck accounts showing this crap.
I believe it's only going to get worse going forward as they all adopt these policies.
My profile is largely unused, I follow no one, and like 1/3 times I open up the front page I get straight holocaust denial threads suggested. Completely insane.
> So, we’re going to continue to focus these systems on tackling illegal and high-severity violations, like terrorism, child sexual exploitation, drugs, fraud and scams.
I don't think this is exhaustive, and I think SSI (suicide/self-injury) + ED/etc. stuff is considered high-severity.
Counterpoint: censorship inherently harms everyone. People I follow on Youtube have repeatedly had their ability to discuss topics such as suicide seriously interfered with. It actually gets in the way of factual reporting when a suicide occurs in the community and of discussing the facts of the situation so that people can learn from it and possibly prevent future deaths.
Not to mention, people just straight up have a right to talk about these things. It is not moral to hold one person responsible for an unintended and not reasonably foreseeable reaction to the discussion. And joking about these topics is legitimately therapeutic for some.
I'm not talking about that here - and that always fell under protecting voice - if mistakes were made they should have been reversed on appeal. e.g. imagery of healed scars in the context of recovery, discussions of struggles with mental health, suicidal ideation etc.
I'm talking about graphic images of self harm, suicide, eating disorders. And at some point you have to weigh the maximalist interpretation of free speech "you have to host whatever I want, as long as it's not illegal" with "promoting this stuff causes active harm, no".
>And at some point you have to weigh the maximalist interpretation of free speech "you have to host whatever I want, as long as it's not illegal" with "promoting this stuff causes active harm, no".
The burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that it causes such harm.
I don't generally think people should be held responsible for the unintended reaction to their speech of a small minority of the audience.
Having a piece of content removed, or demoted and not recommended, is being held responsible?
Also as per the inquest into the death of Molly Russel found based on the preponderance of evidence, exposure to this kind of graphic content was largely the causative agent in her suicide.
What would the bar you require be, is there a bar?
>Ending Third Party Fact Checking Program, Moving to Community Notes
CNotes were extremely successful on X.
The problem with censorship, why digg and reddit died as platforms, you end up with second order consequences. The anti-free speech people will always deeply analyze their opponent's speech to find a violation of the rules.
They try to make rules that sound reasonable but are beyond section 230. No being anti-LGBT for ex. But then every joke, miscommunication, etc leads to bans. You also ban entire cultures with this rule. Ive had bans because I meant to add NOT to my 1 sentence, but failed to do so.
Then when it comes to politics. You've banned entire swaths of people/viewpoints. There's no actual meaningful conversation happening on reddit.
Reddit temporarily influenced politics in this way. In a recent election a politician built a platform that mirrored the subreddit. There was polls and if you were to go by reddit... the liberals were about to take at least a minority government, if not majority.
What actually happened? The platform was bizarre and very out of touch with the province. They got blasted in the election. The incumbent majority got stronger.
By all measures I can find, reddit continues to grow year over year, while X seems to have been flat or in decline, so I’m not sure this is a strong premise.
Reddit fell a great deal in rankings. They mostly use bots to make it appear like they are still relevant. Which ironically is creating a 'dead internet' conspiracy theory. In reality its just 'dead reddit'
Zuckerberg knows which way the winds are blowing in the US Capital and is ensuring he is aligned with them so to avoid political blowback on his company.
I suspect the changes to the fact checking / free speech will align with Trump's political whims. Thus fact checking will be gone on topics like vaccines, trans people, threats from immigrants, etc.
While the well documented political censorship at Meta affecting Palestine will remain because it does align with Trump's political whims...
"We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate."
As far as I can tell they gave up moderation a few years ago, at least every time I report someone spamming about "Elon Musk giving away a million dollars if you click this shady link" or the like I invariably get told it meets their "community standards" and won't be removed. I guess technically I haven't seen a female nipple there though so, job well done?
They also allow the scammiest ads for products that are 100% obvious frauds - pure distilled snake oil. It really brings meta’s image to the dirt. They’re like an online super market tabloid these days.
Will this totally end content moderation? That could be a small silver lining, as content moderation for FB appears to be extremely hazardous to one's mental health:
It is not obvious that many people (when was the last time a single post was seen by the entirety of the platform?) seeing occasional soul-destroying stuff is worse than seeing soul-destroying stuff as full-time employment, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for the length of one's work life.
Also: perhaps the occasional soul-destroying post would help people break their social media addictions.
Certainly poor molly russell does not appear to have seen this cintent occasionally, which is just my point. There is no mention of how she accessed this content either: was it a message board, or was it served algorithmically, which is important to the contention here.
I am not sure that the death of one person outweighs the lifelong ptsd of 100% of fb content moderators. Again, my original claim is that it is not obvious.
I am not trying to trivialize this persons death. If it were up to me, I'd completely get rid of social media in an instant.
That's pretty much the only legislation I'd support, i.e., a compulsory setting for chronological ordering of events, which effectively disables "the algorithm." Seems like it would be agreeable to media companies and pure libertarians alike.
As a leftist, while this is concerning, it's also important to remember that Meta censors left content as much as it does right content.
So, while this announcement certainly seems to be in bad faith (what could Mark mean by "gender" other than transphobic discussion?), this should be a boon both for far-right and left discussion.
Does that mean increased polarization and political violence? Surely, surely.
> this should be a boon both for far-right and left discussion.
If by left discussion you mean discussion of the genocide in Gaza, don't count on it, because this censorship is bipartisan in the United States.
Zuck cares about currying favor with the powerful. He doesn't give a crap about the powerless. Also, he's pretending that Texas, the proposed site for content moderation, is not politically biased, which is laughable. "We're moving from a blue state to a red state" is not a serious proposal for reducing or eliminating bias.
> people just do not wish to participate in other peoples gender performances.
The “bad faith” is in the pretending that we don’t all participate in gender performance with every single person we come into contact with, every single day, for our entire lives.
The post you are responding to does not claim otherwise.
Again: it is specifically pointing out that other people are not obliged to participate in other people’s performance.
People are free to act, have whatever cosmetic surgery or take whatever hormones they wish to.
Where their rights end is asking other people to refer to them based on their performance rather than their sex.
Again, it is not ‘bad faith’ for Meta to allow discourse from people to disagree with gender ideology. Meta are not hiding anything, they are directly saying that they want to allow people that disagree with gender ideology - which judging by the last election is most Americans - to use their services.
He explained it in the next sentence. If people are free to say it in Congress they should be free to say it on Meta platforms too, and that includes a range of non-binary opinions that aren’t intrinsically istphobic.
> while this announcement certainly seems to be in bad faith
Not really though. It means that feminist campaigners can advocate for single-sex spaces and services without the looming threat of being banned. This is great news and a win for free speech.
>it's also important to remember that Meta censors left content as much as it does right content.
This is a bold claim. I see a lot of people in this discussion that seem to have a very different experience. Your point would be much stronger with evidence, if only to calibrate everyone's understanding of what you mean by "left content".
>what could Mark mean by "gender" other than transphobic discussion?
From what I've been able to tell the last several years, the overwhelming majority of your ideological opponents here have no interest in visiting physical harm upon others simply because of how they view and present themselves. They just don't want to be, or feel, compelled to treat the other person's self-image as an objective fact. Some of them additionally have concerns about capacity of minors to give informed consent for the related medical procedures, or consider it suspicious that the prevalence of such self-identification has risen drastically in recent years (to the point that they imagine social pressures toward such identification).
>Does that mean increased polarization and political violence? Surely, surely.
I have seen statements like this from your opponents interpreted as veiled threats in the past.
> Your point would be much stronger with evidence, if only to calibrate everyone's understanding of what you mean by "left content".
I think it's extremely likely that people will see the "de-ranking" of content they agree with as bias, regardless of their place on the spectrum.
Similar: "Biden must have committed election fraud, because all of my friends voted for Trump and I don't know anyone who voted for Biden." (previous election, obviously) Well, is that because no-one voted for Biden, or that the friends/content you see is tuned to how you lean.
> Starting in the US, we are ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to a Community Notes model.
The Community Notes model works great on X at dealing with misinformation. More broadly, this is a vindication of the principle that putatively neutral "expert" institutions cannot be trusted unless they're subject to democratic checks and balances.
There is a long history but the short of it is, before Section 230, platforms that moderated user content faced potential liability. Oakmont v. Prodigy[1] is a case where Prodigy was held liable for defamatory posts due to its moderation efforts. However, in Cubby v. CompuServe[2], the court ruled that platforms without active moderation, CompuServe were not liable for user-generated content because they were just hosting with no active involvement. Section 230 protected platforms from liability for user content, allowing them to moderate in good faith without being held responsible for all harmful material if they weren't able to moderate everything.
I believe Elon and Trump, being the internet's biggest liars, have the goal to remove Section 230 making moderating online more or less a crime that will open you to litigation and allow them and all of their followers to spread lies not only unchecked but with the threat of punishment if a company, like Blue Sky, were to try to moderate them.
I wouldn't mourn the loss of BlueSky, because it's basically designed from the ground up to create filter bubbles and echo chambers, and social media needs way less of those.
Zuck claims "Europe has an ever increasing number of laws,institutionalizing censorship and making difficult to build something innovative"
Ouch. As a European, I feel very wary of such a sentence and the implications.
Time for Europe to wake up ?
(edit: fix typos)
I'm not sure that we are awake. As a dev for a long time, I realized only 6 months ago, that all the tools I use daily are directly from US.
My job and my life would be very very different without this technology.
We are loosing ground, or more, we are falling down more and more quickly.
It is individual of course. But for example Emanuel Macron and Mario Draghi have sounded the bell quite clearly. As individual citizens we should try to buy European any time there is a European alternative.
It's pretty much right. Dig into what it takes to run a social network in most European countries and you'll hit at minimum the following problems:
• Lack of a DMCA equivalent. DMCA lays out a lightweight process for platforms to process copyright disputes which if they follow it will avoid legal liability, which is needed on any platform that hosts user generated content. The EU Copyright acts require platforms themselves to enforce copyright and prevent users violating it. This is a gigantic technical implementation problem all by itself. Also, the US has the legal concept of fair use but that's not a concept in much of Europe, so people posting parodies etc thinking it's OK can still create liability problems.
• No equivalent of Section 230. Many new laws that specifically criminalize the hosting of illegal speech, and which don't give any credit for effort. As what's illegal is vague and political in nature you can't make automated systems or even human-driven systems that reliably handle it, so the legal risks are large even with a good faith effort to comply.
• GDPR, "right to be forgotten" and NetzDG style laws have large fixed costs associated with compliance which established companies can absorb but startups can't. For instance it's common for EU lawmakers to demand 24 hour turnaround times, which you can't reliably comply with if you're a one man startup.
• Algorithmic transparency laws, which mean you can't obtain any competitive advantage by better ranking (being good at this is how TikTok got so big), and which can threaten your ability to clear spam or use ML.
• Laws around targeted advertising mean you can't generate revenue comparable to what the US based firms can do, so you can't be competitive and your users will be annoyed by low quality barrel scraping ads for casinos after they click "No" on a consent screen without reading it.
There's probably more. For example, running a commercial search engine or training AI models on the internet is illegal in the UK, because UK copyright law only allows "data mining" for research purposes. There's no way to argue it's fair use like they do in the US. Just one of many such problems off the top of my head.
Yes I somewhat agree on FOSS and I agree for the people.
But I think that for the capital, it is massively US controlled (though is international too).
Think of the seven first companies of the S&P500. (GAFAM, Nvidia, ...)
If you look at the cac40 (france) or EUROSTOXX50 : I dont use directly any products of the tech company. But I'm sure that these companies use at least one the seven.
Tech company in Europe are not ridiculous, but they are not leading the change. They optimize, they improve, but the lead is us centric.
We have ASML, but for how long. ?
I know of exactly 0 European businesses they use free open source software for their office suites.
Z-E-R-O.
I don’t even think companies have their own mailservers anymore, its mostly gsuite and microsoft office 365; people aren’t even hosting business critical applications in Europe unless compliance forces them- let alone using European made tools to do it.
There's a lot more to life than a lot of things, I'm not really trying to discuss personal fulfilment, moreso mentioning that there's no reality where we can get by with European technology right now, and if the US decided to sanction a european country that country would suffer a pretty significant (trillion-euro most likely) shock to productivity, as not only would they need to find new tools and retrain, but they would also lose all their mail and documents.
Looking around my apartment and my life, I see a Japanese game console, Japanese camera, US speakers, US laptop, Czech/German car, French photo software, Czech IDE, Swedish furniture, Swiss/US computer accessories, Chinese IoT devices, and a lot of the stuff was manufactured in China. If anything, my life would be very different without China (whether I like it or not).
I don't know how to say this inoffensively, but a lot of US people seem to mistake the slightly higher chance (from 1/inf to 2/inf) of becoming a billionaire with a higher quality of life, and the ability of the select few to hoard capital for a rich society.
The problem is that these platforms have to be built, and people have to willingly use them... which is hard, given Meta have built brilliant addiction machines.
The whole threat here is you can't regulate Meta away, because they'll use the US Government to bully you into not doing so. I'd imagine if the EU tried to publicly prop up a platform not making any profit, they'd do the same.
But yes, the only way is for this to happen. But either way, this was the scariest statement of the announcement(s).
The faster we decouple from societies like american, the better we europeans will be. We europeans defend our European way of life, against the degenerate capitalism of the US.
I challenge you to find another economic system that has worked in history, because it sure isn’t communism if that’s what you’re referencing. This is also aside from the fact that Europe is also a subscriber to capitalism.
America is the most successful country on this earth and we bankroll most of the rest of the world but somehow we’re always the bad guys.
As an American I’d be very happy if my tax dollars stopped getting spent on Europe.
There is also the good old: "We can't discuss changes because there is nothing better already existing. There can't be anything better because we cannot change"
> America is the most successful country on this earth
According to what metrics? life expectancy? crime rate? wealth per inhabitant? education? work life balance? health care? happiness? incarceration rate? human rights? corruption? freedom of press?
American tax dollars aren't spent in Europe or elsewhere in the world for some altruistic reason. The US want to maintain their hegemony and prevent other powers from emerging. They certainly don't care about Europeans or Taiwanese or whoever.
> I challenge you to find another economic system that has worked in history, because it sure isn’t communism if that’s what you’re referencing.
Not that I'm a big fan of communism or China, but communist China has been doing pretty well, and is getting more innovative than the US
The part of China that is innovative is not communist. They have the most free-market labor market, the most free-market regulations in everything except media (which is heavily controlled by the state).
China is the most brutally capitalist society in the world, with a dictator sitting on top managing it at the margins and ensuring media will never be free and threaten the communist party.
Somehow US Americans managed in about a year and some to almost singlehandedly fund complete destruction of already impoverished and entrapped society of 2.3 million people, most of them younger than 18. Nevermind the pressure or direct military attacks on other nations to not intervene.
And you wonder why you're viewed as baddies.
I'd be happy if your tax dollars stopped going outside of US, too.
As an American who lived in Europe in the 90s when I was young, a lot that I really appreciated about the European way of life has deteriorated and is now almost unrecognizable to me in some ways.
When I visit every few years, it amazes me how quickly Europe is “Americanizing”. More fast food and less traditional food. Ripping up vineyards that have been there for centuries. Fewer protections for your farmers. More people walking around staring at their phones and less people talking to each other in cafes. Seems like almost everyone dresses like Americans and can speak English now. And it’s hard to tell the difference between the coffee shops in Spain and those in San Francisco. How long until you start building suburbs and driving everywhere?
Don’t get me wrong—I love the U.S., and I love living here. But its culture is not for Europe.
Comments like this are interesting because the changes you’re describing aren’t really “Americanizing”, they’re just a sign of modern times.
For example: People weren’t walking around staring at their cellphones in Europe in the 90s because they were distinctly European. It was because we didn’t have smartphones anywhere. The smartphone changes happened in lockstep across the globe.
Likewise, many of your other points are purely people’s personal preferences. I think your criticisms are largely nostalgia for the 90s and your time spent living abroad, not an indictment of “Americanizing” Europe.
Vineyards are ripped up because they have become unprofitable due to decreased alcohol consumption in general. I'm not sure that has much to do with Americanization.
As a European who does generaly feel that the continent is on its way to becomming a museum, describing the absolute bilge that the flagship products of Facebook, YouTube, X etc are as 'innovative' feels in the same ballpark as describing the work of tobacco companies to sell and advertise their products in the 50s-80s as innovative.
They were innovative.
I don’t know for other eu countries, but it seems that in France, there were only unsuccessful copycat of end user service. I’m probably a bit harsh, it’s because I m under impression that the gap between us (eu vs us) is widening. 10 years ago, there was open source, there was ovh, there was hope. With the cloud, we have surrender a lot of power to massive us company.
As a European I would say that Europe's governments are radically more focused on the well-being of their populations than say, the USA.
But... is it just luck or is it this Nanny-state issue that makes it very hard to think of a single major Internet destination or tech company that was born in Europe?
The through-line is US/China with the vast majority. Eu I can only think of Spotify for non-retail.
Being in Europe I find no shortage of local versions of companies for all kinds of providers but only the large social media or platforms are outside of EU mostly in US as a rule.
The issue seems to be that saturation is real and the moat gets larger with time when companies just gobble up all their competition. How could Here maps compete with the free google maps + apples large pockets, etc. TomTom used to be much larger and European, seems to still survive but nowhere near to the size it could've otherwise.
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[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 572 ms ] threadThis is not good imho.
To claim internet discussion worked better without fact checking is something I haven't seen any actual evidence for, just opinions like yours.
Community notes is just a watered down, more easily 'ignored' version that appeases people that were angry about fact checkers to begin with.
Hopefully there is a push-back, likely from EU legislation. Between the AI generators many of these companies are implementing and changes like this, platforms need to be held more accountable for what they allow to be posted on them.
EU legislation tries to introduce "trusted flaggers". A ridiculous approach, an information authority by a state-like entity doesn't work, even if they paint these flaggers as independent. They simply are not, a trusted and verifiable fact.
Community notes provide higher quality info, it is the better approach. That is an opinion of course.
We will probably see community notes on trusted flaggers.
I've only seen a handful of cases where they were wrong of heavily biased, but I've seen hundreds of cases where the poster refuses to accept they are wrong and the fact checkers are right.
>Community notes provide higher quality info, it is the better approach. That is an opinion of course.
Roughly the same info but from less trusted sources and with less controls being higher quality sounds like a big bag of wishes but not grounded in reality.
>We will probably see community notes on trusted flaggers.
I expect lots of partisan complaining and yelling, but not a lot of actual valid challenges.
A fact checker however has economic incentive towards their employers. You can paint them as independent, but the will always be in a precarious situation or are influenced by third party financiers. This does not at all evoke more trust than a random internet person. Trusted source is pretty subjective, but for me "official" fact checkers don't have too much of that.
The idea that there is some official governing body that has access to undisputable facts and they have the power to designate what you or I or anyone else can talk about is preposterous and, frankly, anyone on a site called Hacker News should be ashamed for supporting it.
Platforms were encouraged to create their own departments, and have. There is no "one" or "governing" body here, so this is more hyperbole in this already flagrantly absurd discussion.
>have the power to designate what you or I or anyone else can talk about is preposterous
No one is stopping you from posting bullshit, fact checkers simply post the corresponding challenge or facts that allow others to see the lack of truth in your statements.
The idea you can say whatever you want, lie all you want, and be unchallenged as some form of right is absurd. Claiming because you can be challenged is censoring you or preventing you from talking is also completely absurd.
>and, frankly, anyone on a site called Hacker News should be ashamed for supporting it.
Frankly anyone on this site should be able to separate hyberbolic strawmen from reality.
> Finally, in the midst of operating or considering up to three different avenues of “misinformation reporting” (switchboarding, EI-ISAC, and the “misinformation reporting portal”), by early 2020, CISA had dropped any pretense of focusing only on foreign disinformation, openly discussing how to best monitor and censor the speech of Americans.
That's a quote taken directly from the House Judiciary report on "disinformation", page number 31 - https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-j...
Here's another one
> The EIP repeatedly used its fourth category, in particular, to justify the censorship of conservative political speech: the “Delegitimization of Election Results,” defined as “[c]ontent that delegitimizes election results on the basis of false or misleading claims.”166 This arbitrary and inconsistent standard was determined by political actors masquerading as “experts” and academics. But even more troubling, the federal government was heavily intertwined with the universities in making these seemingly arbitrary determinations that skewed against one side of the political aisle.
So please, let's not pretend that the fact-checking organizations, the information streams they themselves depended upon and the pressure that was applied to all of the social networks was organic "encouragement" meant to challenge bullshit posted online - it was a censorship campaign by the United States government, plain and simple.
As for that laughably partisan report from many of the politicians aligned with the biggest sources of American disinformation claiming their lies as political speech, nice pile of garbage.
Seems to me in my experience after decades of watching and participating in online discussion extremism really only became more problematic when fact checking and active efforts to suppress took hold. Whatever the good intentions may have been, the results were worse.
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/6zg6w6/reddits_ban... / https://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf
"Sunlight is the best disinfectant" is a great pithy slogan, but modern society needs bleach and chlorhexidine sometimes.
That does not imply it reduced hateful speech overall, maybe the censorship just increased antipathy and drove that speech underground or to other platforms where it couldn't be seen.
"Off reddit" is just a win for reddit's PR, and that's why they did it, and no other reason and no other effects can be inferred.
And that claim is evidenced, It’s not conjecture. I dont have it handy on me, but we have mapped out the ways people are recruited, and things like fatpeoplehate, coontown, are the funnels for groups to find new recruits.
Here’s one - https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3447535.3462504
There’s several others on things from ISIS to hacktivists. The mechanism is the same, heck - “red pill” is the term for this, it’s actually quite known.
I don't know if that's what happened and there's probably a lot more research to do here but I'm not convinced that deplatforming is actually a good outcome societally without more data.
There’s a reason surgeons disinfect their hands with more than a skylight. Sunlight is a shitty disinfectant.
Edit: I did not want to imply that you meant it that way. But in a different context, or coming from the wrong person, it may sound like a dog whistle.
So removing a censored platform eliminated the problem? Amazing how that works!
Essentially what it showed was that if you pull people out of a particular echo chamber, then that had a sustained effect on how they behaved. Which is evidence contrary to the often made claim that they'd just leave and go somewhere else. It's in line with the theory that the internet fosters extremism because it enables insular pathological communities that in the analog era you'd have been slapped out of long ago by people who aren't nuts.
So…silos and echo chambers are bad. Seems to me that was part of my original point. I am suggesting that censorship of information leads people to the silos.
Because when they got banned, many other communities saw improvements as well, not just those?
You don’t need to ban people from echo chambers if they don’t land there in the first place.
Your solution is reactive to a problem you caused. My solution is don’t create the problem in the first place.
What people don’t seem to grasp is that all speech is not equal, and that our brains react very predictably to certain arguments and content.
For example, your argument is not supported by the paper, which I have read. Because the paper shows behavior of the bad actors changed across the site, and became less hateful.
However the argument is complex, and goes against commonly held beliefs, such as sunlight is the best disinfectant etc.
More exposure results in more reinforcement of popular ideas, until something happens externally.
If you get to the point where you feel you need to censor, suppress, or outright ban voices to be heard, you have already lost the communication high ground and no matter how true or good your opinion/idea/position. It will lose in the court of public opinion…and frankly should…because you did not put the appropriate effort in to be persuasive.
As mods, we removed it, since it’s traumatic to simply see it, and it’s out of scope for our community. It’s not an ‘acceptable’ argument and it was removed. That was censorship.
Should pro beastiality arguments be allowed? Am I admitting the anti beastiality argument is not as persuasive as the beastiality argument, when I choose not to give them space in my communities?
What about when children are engaging with an experienced cult recruiter?
Users are spamming your community with random content, to bury headlines about a heinous rape case that makes the ruling party look bad. That’s fundamentally more speech and it is acting as an antidote for ‘bad’ speech.
How do you address roving bands of users who go around Reddit, and downvote all negative news about China and India on r/worldnews? The demographics and time they are online, are sufficient to shift the news.
What would your conscience have you do? Have you been in a position to make similar decisions? I have, so I can give these examples.
This.. isn’t an attempt by me to prove you wrong. These aren’t hard questions, but pretty common place ones. Its just that all mod choices are essentially censorship.
I believe you are defending a principle. If you choose not to moderate/ censor in those examples I would respect you for holding to your principle.
If you decide to censor, I would be fine with it too. Because you would still be making a decision based on a principle.
I’ve struggled with the idea of censorship since I first volunteered as a mod nearly 15 years ago.
I valued free speech as a core principle to enable humanity succeed and thrive.
I have, stopped seeing free speech as an end to itself. I had to reconcile the limited options with the results I saw in communities.
I hated it. Eventually I had to ask why we value free speech in the first place.
And we value it because we value a fair marketplace of ideas. I see the goal as being able to have fair debates and exchanges of ideas between normal people.
And they suffer failings and weaknesses possible in any market place. So the goal is to ensure the marketplace is effective at being fair.
Perhaps you would have a different idea, and I am happy to hear it. If only to see a different solution.
And if you agree with me to some degree and also think that having effective market places is a good idea, thats fine too.
We Sure as heck need the average person to decide what principles need to be held up, and at what costs.
I am of the opinion that net positive benefit of free expression outweighs negatives when it’s allowed and the negatives of censorship outweigh the positives of it when it’s practiced.
Also, generally I think civil people will simply reject spaces where uncivil discourse or “not appropriate” content to them is present. If I was a moderator I can see where that would create a challenge of balance towards censorship, because you would want your forum to thrive and not dry up from the garbage.
Ultimately it’s not a decision I would need to make, I don’t moderate anything, nor would I. Even here on HN, I only upvote. I am not a fan of how HN handles the downvoting (content dimming), but at least I can still see it if I choose to. I also use a feed reader for HN post delivery so, flagged/dead posts still make it to me and I can choose whether those posts are worth my time.
I think its pretty critical that people who believe in Free speech get their blasted hands dirty.
I cant be amongst the few people trying to communicate the stupid complexity of this issue! If you believe in free speech, then you really really have to see how the sausage is made, so that you can articlate the issues to people who believe the same thing!
I'm serious! To an extent I know its uncomfortable to be put on the spot, but please at least consider it.
Back to our main point:
>I am of the opinion that net positive benefit of free expression outweighs negatives when it’s allowed and the negatives of censorship outweigh the positives of it when it’s practiced.
I would like to think we both agree, but there is much that hinges on what you mean by positives.
I ended up reading everything from court cases to research papers to reconcile the options mods have, with the principles of free speech. I eventually had to lean heavily on the analogy of the market place of ideas from the Abrams dissent, to reconcile the two.
That means the good engendered by free speech, is primarily to enable the exchange of ideas - which in turn is what serves the ultimate goals of humanity. Free speech is a subordinate principle to the free and fair exchange of ideas.
To illustrate -I can and do have users flood the front page with content, to suppress content that is hurtful to their ideas and image. This is speech meeting more speech.
Any action I would take to stop this, is censorship and the prevention of the free expression of users. This happened over and over again, for all content critical of positions by the ruling party.
The frameworks I had to figure out helped me navigate this choice, but how would you approach it?
would you stop the users who are coordinating the multiple submissions of topics to prevent visibility of a post?
Or would you let that behavior continue?
Or would you find a way to signal boost the content that is being suppressed?
I am way too old, opinionated, and my ability to “suffer fools gladly is long in my past”
But, I do appreciate your point that it’s good to see the sausage being made. Then again, I am a person who knows exactly what is in scrapple and how it’s made, but when I am in Philly if I go to a diner it’s what I order and scarf up every morsel.
It’s the reconciliation and articulation of principles reasoning.
Look you may not do it.
But there is a contradiction at the heart of modern American society between principles and how conversations actually function online.
And this needs to be articulated by normal people for normal people. Otherwise it’s always going to be an imposed reality,
Or think of it this way. Unless people who care about free speech don’t reassure mods that the consequences of not modding are acceptable - that they will also be the conscience keepers when inevitably society turns around and says “oh you should have modded more”
And that has to be an informed choice.
And consider that you are crotchety and old but get annoyed by free speech discussions.
You aren’t crotchety and old and annoyed by discussions on ancient Roman mining methods.
There’s things we can be sort of arsed to do which are within range of our interests.
This is within range of yours.
That doesn't "get in the way of people communicating where they want to communicate"? If 99.9% of a forum likes the "no child porn" rule, that's not enough?
I hope you understood why I would make this plea specifically to people arguing for their principles.
And single subreddits aren't really convincing about the reliability of fact checkers if their independence is in question. In the end they do rely on a truth-authority, which is problematic, especially for political content. And Meta reported that political demands increased.
Seems like the opposite. Traditionally we only had siloed forums which were often heavily moderated by volunteers who considered the forums their personal fiefdom, read every single thread and deleted stuff for being "off topic" never mind objectionable, plus the odd place like /b/ which revelled in being unmoderated. Then you ended up with more people on big platforms that were comparatively-speaking, pretty lightly and reactively moderated. Then you ended up with politicians weighing in against moderation with the suggestion even annotating content published on their platform was a free speech violation, let alone refraining from continuing to publish it.
The difference between antivax sentiment now and circa 2005 isn't that nobody ever determined that they weren't having that nonsense on their forums or closed threads with links to Snopes back then or that it's become difficult to find any references to it outside antivaxxer communities since then. Quite the opposite, the difference is that it's now coming from the mouth of a presumptive Health Secretary, amplified on allied news networks and now we have corporations running scared that labelling it a hoax might run the risk of offending the people in charge. Turns out sunlight is a catalyst for growth
The antivax movement literally grew exponentially when vaccine information started to be actively censored on the largest social media platforms and you think that is because there wasn’t enough censorship? People were literally driven into antivax information silos because a bunch of idiots decided that vaccine criticism should be forbidden in the public square
Wow.
People in the US didn't need to be "driven into antivax information silos", because those antivax information silos were their favourite talk show hosts and some of the country's most prominent politicians. Turns out that promotion of antivax sentiment as an important issue that must be discussed and constant attacks on public health officials doesn't "disinfect" people against the belief that there might be some truth to it...
Not sure where you live, but if those are the things that are important to your leaders and people, I wouldn’t want to live there or even visit. Sounds awful.
I note that the original topic was about Zuckerberg being so afraid of his corporation being censured by the incoming government that he's pledged to move his moderation team to a state which voted for them and refrain from publishing any "fact checking" notes in Facebook's name lest they conflict with the government and its supporters. That doesn't sound like a libertarian paradise either
Perhaps I misunderstood your intentions then.
If you believe that antivax debate was in the mainstream in the US and there wasn’t an active attempt to suppress just because some voices bled through the censorship, you are simply wrong. Zuckerberg even noted in this announcement that pressure from the Biden administration to censor speech was significant.
My consistent point here is that censorship drives extremism because it suppresses the debate where the debate wants to take place and pushes the conversation to those interested in the topic to siloed echo chambers. That definitely happened around vaccines in the US over the last 4-5 years. I know that happens for a fact and have personally tried to gently encourage people I know that felt the censorship frustrations and leapt to other platforms to still read all sides before making decsions.
Whatever Zuckerberg’s internal motivations are on this change of policy, I don’t care. Community notes seems to be a better way than suppression. Others may have a different opinion and thats ok. I encourage them to freely express it and would never support any one trying to shut that debate down.
It seems a little unlikely that people who decided to delete their Facebook account and seek out an echo chamber because they didn't like seeing FactCheck.org links slapped on vaccine function would have nevertheless listened very carefully to FactCheck.org or the public health officials their favourite politicos were slagging off if only they were able to d̶e̶b̶a̶t̶e̶ post misleading memes about public health on Facebook first. I mean, the anger at third party fact checkers is explicit rejection of the idea there's anything to debate.
Anyway, regardless of whether self-proclaimed fact checkers actually live up to their label, it's difficult to describe a corporation bending the knee to an incoming administration that's determined that corporations shouldn't link to them as a victory for free speech or enabling controversial viewpoints to be debated as opposed to merely promoted on internet platforms. Must be wonderful for Zuckerberg to be able to express himself freely without any threat of censure whatsoever on the day he announces that he'll be firing his his moderation team so he can relocate it to a state the incoming administration considers less susceptible to wrongthink
Funny how you aren’t critical of when Meta bent their knee to the existing administration by participating in the censorship requests. I guess that was ok…because you supported that action?
Fact checkers don't suppress information, they add context and information to posts others make and provide the exposure to many viewpoints that echo chambers often do not have.
People haven't stopped posting wrong and biased information with fact checkers, they just have the counterpoint to their bullshit displayed alongside their posts on the platform.
>Seems to me in my experience after decades of watching and participating in online discussion extremism really only became more problematic when fact checking and active efforts to suppress took hold. Whatever the good intentions may have been, the results were worse.
My decades of watching is exactly the opposite. Extremism is and was rampant long before fact checking, and fact checking really only served to push some of the most extreme content to the margins and to smaller platforms that don't have it. It concentrates it in some ways as many of these opinions fall apart quickly when exposed to truth and facts.
I think some moderation is important, but misrepresenting fact checkers (damn ironic actually) doesn't serve us. Of course fact check suppresses information! That's the whole point. Sometimes it results in straight up deletion, but even when not it results in lowered reach aka suppression of what the algorithm would normally allow to trend, etc.
Its not. The fact checkers in this case, and almost all cases we're discussing ADD information that challenges the posted data, not censor or restrict it from being posted.
Outside of illegal content that is. Content deemed illegal was removed by moderation teams, this was before fact checking, and will continue with community notes with little to no change.
What they really do is spin information.
This is just overtly and flatly wrong. I reject your experience fully because over the past few decades the internet has become more open, not less. We openly debated people that believed vaccines caused autism and gave them microphones. Every single loud asshole and dipshit was given maximum volume on whatever radio show or podcast or social media platform they could want.
Specifically to vaccines, the antivax crowd was pretty minimal to a some nutjob soccer moms, holistic medicine fanatics, and RFKjr until you stopped having conversations with them, because you folks who want or believe that censorship is good silenced the debate and did not follow them to the forums where they went to spread their ideas to continue the debate.
I am absolutely convinced that the growth in the antivax movement is directly tied to the censorship effort (and the desire of the government to not be completely honest about the vaccines at the time).
In the past people were told they had Free Speech, but they didn't have Free access to Broadcast Media (newspapers/radio/tv/movie studios/satellites). It was always up to someone else with Access to Broadcast(one to all messaging) to prop up voices they thought was important.
Shannon's Information theory tells us Social Media as a system can't work cause - once you tell people their voice matters, give everyone in the room a mic, plugged into the same sound system, and allow everyone to speak, firstly you get massive noise, secondly as a reaction people will scream louder and louder and repeat their message more and more. Noise only compounds. The math says it can't work. The way people are debating about this is under an assumption that it can.
Yet here we are…the math seemed to work overall just fine minimizing the anti-vax movement until someone started externally futzing with the numbers to try and force a specific result to that math. When you do that apparently more of your components run off to form other equations and no longer participate in your equation then before you tried to manipulate the messaging.
You are not going to get everyone to agree with you…ever. But suppressing and censoring debate in the real world example of vaccine acceptance to try and achieve that result backfired spectacularly by galvanizing and growing that movement far far beyond what it was…or should have ever been.
You are rewriting history to fit your viewpoint which is wrong. The reality is that you are wrong. And those silos that people moved to were equally sinful of censoring voices and banning people not aligned with their beliefs. Even now Musk has no problem censoring and banning people off Twitter for being too mean to him.
The mechanisms of online speech show us a few other issues.
For example certain ideas are far more “fit” for transmission and memory than others. Take a look at something as commonplace as “ghosts” or the idea of penguins. Ghosts are in all cultures, and they are essentially people with some additional properties. Penguins are birds that dont fly.
Brains absorb stories and ideas like flightless birds easily, because they build on pre existing concepts.
Talk about spacetime, or multiple dimensions and you aren’t going to have the same degree of uptake.
So when I put certain ideas into competition with each other, all else being equal - the more suited for human foibles, the more successful the idea.
People also dont make that much effort to seek out forbidden knowledge. Conservative main stream media has made many things forbidden - 1/3rd of America isnt aware that Obamacare and the ACA are the same thing.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant for certain breeds of germs. Many others get on just fine.
In my many decades of online existence, which includes being on multiple sides of moderation, extremism was on the rise from before, because we had created the arguments and structures that thrive on it.
Content moderation was a hap hazard effort created out of necessity to stall it.
Personally - I hope this works. Moderation sucks, and is straight up traumatic. If we can get better, more effective market places of ideas, then I am all for it.
I care about the effectiveness of the exchange of ideas. I see free speech as a principle that supports this. But the goal is always the functioning of the marketplace.
Citing the simple fact that every western government ignored their own pandemic plans and did adlib bingo instead was enough to get you banned of Twitter, Facebook and reddit for close to two years.
I personally think aggressive fact checking authorities impedes this process, because people don't change their minds when faced with authoritarian power against which they are powerless, and because they are powerless here, they get angry and they disengage. This ends up which reinforcing their beliefs and now you've lost all chance of change.
One such instantiation of this: https://chomsky.info/consent01/
Now, consider that in most "free speech" societies, those with money can repeat things many orders of magnitude more than others. Over time, this results in influence. Thus, while many countries have "free speech," I'd say they don't have "fair speech." The two concepts complement each other, but one is not the opposite of the other.
If these "facts" are so obviously facts, we wouldn't need a team of researchers to establish the fact whether they are facts.
The fact that these "facts" need to be "fact-checked" means they are so open to interpretation and depend on context, that we came to the conclusion that this "fact-checking" concept in fact does not really work.
You can still "fact-check" for yourself; do your own research, make up your own mind yourself. Then you will become more of an independent thinker, be less influenced by authoritarian figures.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/01/07/five-times-f...
https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o95
https://reason.com/2021/12/29/facebook-masks-false-informati...
Even when they aren't wrong, they can be biased. See for example:
https://www.allsides.com/blog/media-bias-alert-politifact-fa...
Also, compare and contrast how they handled Sanders and Trump's presentations of substantially the same claim:
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/jul/13/bernie-san...
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/jun/20/donald-tru...
There's an entire site dedicated to pointing out more examples, aptly named https://www.politifactbias.com/ . They show their work in great detail.
It's trivial to introduce bias by simply being selective about who you hold to greater scrutiny (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demand...).
> In May, the bureau said the employment-population ratio for blacks ages 16 to 24 was 41.5 percent. Flipped over, that would mean that the unemployment ratio - although such a statistic is not published by the bureau - would be 58.5 percent. That’s pretty close to the 59 percent figure Trump cited, Sinclair noted.
> Mostly False
Crazy
> The unemployment rate reflects the number of jobless people who are actively seeking work as a percentage of the available workforce - defined as those who have jobs or trying to find one.
> The May unemployment rate for blacks ages 16 to 24 was 18.7 percent. The rate for whites in the same age group was 9.1 percent.
> The employment-population ratio is a far broader measure that counts all civilians in its equation - even those who don’t work and aren’t looking for a job. In the 16- to 24-year-old category, it includes high school and college students who are not employed or seeking jobs.
Given that there seems to only be two articles that are listed as falsely reported as misinformation (the Reason article and the BMJ article also mentioned in the Telegraph report from today), I have to assume that there actually aren't that many large errors on the part of the fact checkers. If there were more than two or the mistakes were much bigger, then the free speech advocates would never stop mentioning it.
There can definitely be bias when it comes to fact-checking, I wouldn't deny that. I also think that education and knowledge sharing can be greatly harmed by social media incentives to provide the most "engagement". Having an actual human in the process somewhere introduces some error but also cuts down on a lot of the dumb crap that would otherwise spread.
There certainly are more examples, and the free speech advocates I know do talk about the subject generally quite a bit.
One I just now remembered: Dr. John Campbell (https://www.youtube.com/@campbellteaching) has run into issues with this and has pointed out many other cases where established "knowledge" about Covid that we were previously not allowed to criticize, turned out to be objectively wrong. These disputes have resulted in many other people being censored despite later being shown to be correct, or at least reasonably justified by the best information available at the time.
This is someone who was proactively warning about the potential severity of Covid well before others, and advocating for proper hand-washing very early on (before more science emerged suggesting that skin contact is a relatively minor transmission vector). In the early days of the pandemic, he was complaining loudly about Fauci's initial mask rhetoric, arguing that the general population absolutely should wear masks and that production needed to step up. He's been doing serious medical content on Youtube for 17 years (sort by oldest to see) and first posted about Covid on Jan 26 2020 when awareness was still low and it was imagined that the virus had been contained to China and presented extensive detail on what little was known at the time (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPvpfC7NfR0).
But now he mostly makes videos against "the establishment", out of frustration with their unwillingness to consider new science over dogma.
I don't have time to search through an entire Youtube channel, but I will say this: there are many, many doctors out there with factually incorrect views about medical science. I personally have talked with doctors who think that the Covid vaccine killed hundreds of thousands of people (it didn't). I do not necessarily think this doctor is wrong, but from the perspective of a fact-checker who is given the current best knowledge of Covid it is hard to determine who is making genuine good-faith efforts to criticize vs who is simply repeating what they want to be true.
And for the record, you absolutely are allowed to criticize the establishment views. When it comes to important topics like medical science, however, you may just have additional context added saying that this is a contrarian view which (statistically) is more likely to be false than the consensus. Everybody likes to complain loudly about being censored, but the reality is that their views are just being disputed and information provided that they are going against the mainstream view.
This does not match the experience of several people I have followed through all of this, including some I know personally.
>Everybody likes to complain loudly about being censored, but the reality is that their views are just being disputed and information provided that they are going against the mainstream view.
Systems which deliberately restrict access to your work on the basis of its content are ipso facto engaging in censorship. It is not about "getting community noted". Free speech advocates are in favour of Facebook's change; it reflects more speech from more directions. The problem is when state-like authority comes in and assumes the right to judge truth for hoi polloi.
So, you do now admit there are examples of official" fact-checkers being wrong?
[1] https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/jun/21/cheap-fake-vi...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/biden-trump-videos-age-cheap-fake...
[3] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/misinformation/biden-g7-video-j...
citation please
but it in no way can this case be translated into "wrong quite often"
Zuck has probably done exactly that cost-benefit calculation — FB has put enormous resources into fact checking, and to most people it hasn't moved the needle on public perception in the slightest. Facebook is still seen through the lens of Cambridge Analytica, and as a hive of disinformation. The resources devoted to these efforts haven’t delivered a meaningful return, either in public trust or regulatory goodwill.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-rosenberg/
Snopes was careful to show degrees of freedom with this fact check, but most social media fact checkers will not be so careful. Social media fact checkers will have a tendency to censor in the direction of the currently-in-power political party, because that party is able to set regulatory policy on social media companies. So the only thing which will prevent censorship from blowing with the political winds is to not have centralized censorship.
Community notes (as implemented at Twitter) require agreement of multiple people who are not in agreement on issues to agree on Notes. I am cautiously optimistic that it may be possible to correct wrong speech with more speech in a nonpartisan manner.
Edit for the reply below: yes that very obviously includes being a member of a group that attacks civilians for political purposes.
There being debate over whether other groups that do other things should be called terrorists is a separate matter.
Given all armoured car robbers would engage in such activities (unregistered firearms, explosives, fake papers, etc),
is it your position that all armoured car robbers are terrorists?
Seems to me that if some authority is determining what are facts and what are not for me, that I am easily shapable and foolable.
Community Notes at least don't claim they have the facts. So that leaves you more with a responsibility to make up your own mind.
I know this isn't for everyone, there are still a lot of people that like to have leaders tell them how they should live. But nowadays there are more and more people that like to have more independence. You will have to live with that too.
Do you really think the company which has openly admitted it wants to create AI profiles that post as if they're humans and not tell you they are AI care at all about facts or what you think or believe?
But then is community notes right-wing?
They could also have kept the fact checking system, but just alter the facts to please their agenda.
But they didn't do that, they are replacing it with Community Notes, which isn't some small group supposedly figuring out the facts for everyone, but a community build information system.
To me that seems a lot more fair and less prone to corruption. So regardless of the real motivation behind the move, I think it will have positive effects for society. At least a step in the right direction. Still a long way to go.
Yes you understand. Meta, due to its problems with moderation over the years, both legal and political, has largely ceded direction of that to the government. Previous government wanted things like fact-checking, an oversight board for moderation decisions, and censorship of certain issues. Current government doesn't want any moderation at all, like X, the social media owned by Trump's biggest ally, which he personally loved so much that he created his own Twitter clone when he was booted off of Twitter. So in that environment, the easiest, simplest thing is to treat Meta platforms like X. That's all there is to it. It signals commitment to the new administration, it heaves political and legal pressure off Meta, etc. much more than your suggestion, that they keep fact-checking but bias it towards the right (which would need to be explained to the administration, etc.) Just saying "We're like X now" gets the point across most cleanly, and it's cheaper
I guess we know the real reason now.
They also said that their existing moderation efforts were due to societal and political pressures. They aren't explicit about it, but it's clear that pressure does not exist anymore. This is another big win for Meta, because minimizing their investment in content moderation and simplifying their product will reduce operating expenses.
If you assume they are immune to politics (not true but let's go with it), this is the most obvious reason.
They've seen X hasn't taken that much heat for Community Notes and they're like "wow we can cut a line item".
The real problem is, Facebook is not X. 90% of the content on Facebook is not public.
You can't Fact Check or Community Note the private groups sharing blatantly false content, until it spills out via a re-share.
So Facebook will remain a breeding ground of conspiracy, pushed there by the echo chamber and Nazi-bar effects.
The EU goes its own way with trusted flaggers, which is more or less the least sensible option. It won't take long until bounds are overstepped and legal content gets flagged. Perhaps it already happened. This is not a solution to even an ill-defined problem.
You would be a good dictator.
In the meantime, maybe now I can discuss private matters of my diagnosis without catching random warnings, bans, or worse.
I don't know if I'd call it a certain win for Meta long term, but it might well be if they play it right. Presumably they're banking on things being fairly siloed anyway, so political tirades in one bubble won't push users in another bubble off the platform. If they have good ways for people to ignore others, maybe they can have the cake and eat it, unlike Twitter.
Like Twitter, the network effect will retain people, and unlike Twitter, Facebook is a much deeper, more integrated service such that people can't just jump across to a work-alike.
A CEO who can keep his mouth shut is also a pretty big plus for them. They skated away from bring involved with a genocide without too many issues, so same ethical revulsion people have against Musk seems to be much less focused.
If you care so much about it, now you can contribute with Community Notes. The power is in your hands! Go forth and be happy.
Or maybe such people have far better things to do than fact check concern trolls and paid propagandists.
Many of us might pay for journalism if we knew who was producing content not already beholden to some ridiculous bias sink.
I'm not sure if they do more good than harm. Often the entire point seems to be to get those specific people spun up, realizing that the troll is not constrained to admit error no matter how airtight the refutation. It just makes them look as frothing as trolls claim they are.
And yet, it's also unclear if any other course of action would help. Despite decades of pleading, the trolls never starve no matter how little they're fed.
Downvotes that hide posts below a certain threshold have always seemed like the best approach to me. Of course it also allows groups to silence views.
Your point is exactly why I can’t take anyone serious who claims that randoms “debating” will cause the best ideas to rise to the top.
I cant count how many times i’ve seen influencer propagandists engage in an online “debate”, be handheld walked through how their entire point is wrong, only for them to spew the exact same thing hours later at the top of every feed. and remember these are often the people with some of the largest platforms claiming they’re being censored … to millions of people lol.
it’s too easy to manipulate what rises to the top. for debate to be anything close to effective all parties involved have to actually be interested in coming closer to a truth. and the algorithms have no interest in deranking sophists and propagandists.
It's clear that the pressure comes now from the other side of the spectrum. Zuck already put Trumpists at various key positions.
> I think this is a big win for Meta, because it means people who care about the content being right will have to engage more with the Meta products to ensure their worldview is correctly represented.
It's a good point. They're also going to push more political contents, which should increase engagement (eventually frustrating users and advertisers?)
Either way, it's pretty clear that the company works with the power in place, which is extremely concerning (whether you're left or right leaning, and even more if you're not American).
I think the fact-checking part is pretty straightforward. What's outrageous is that the content moderators judge content subjectively, labeling perfect discussions as misinformation, hate speech, and etc. That's where the censorship starts.
It also starts when there is no third-party anymore. Where is the middle line?
Not familiar with that specific case, though generally I'm not a fan a bans. Fact checks are great though. There have been peer reviewed papers about midi-chlorians too (https://www.irishnews.com/magazine/science/2017/07/24/news/a...), but I'd sure hope that if someone brought it up in a discussion they'd be fact checked.
Facebook moderators have an even harder job than that because the inherent scale of the platform prevents the kinds of personal insights and contextual understanding I had.
But we don't, though. Or rather, there's broad consensus over most of it, but there's plenty of disagreement over where exactly the dividing line is.
The situation is somewhat different between a niche community and a borderline monopoly. But it's also true that facebook's success depends on navigating it well. At the end of the day we can choose to use it or not.
To the extent that people feel forced to use a platform that's a reason to further bias away from suppressing free expression, even if the result is a somewhat less good platform.
Strong disagree. This is a very naive understanding of the situation. "Fact-checking" by users is just more of the kind of shouting back and forth that these social networks are already full of. That's why a third-party fact checks are important.
1) Shouting matches create more ad impressions, as people interact more with the platform. The shouting matches also get more attention from other viewers than any calm factual statement. 2) Less legal responsibility / costs / overhead 3) Less potential flak from being officially involved in fact-checking in a way that displeases the current political group in power
Users lose, but are people who still use FB today going to use FB less because the official fact checkers are gone? Almost certainly not in any significant numbers
How can this be replicated with topics that are by definition controversial, and happening in real time? I don't know. But I don't think Meta/X have any sort of vested interest in seeing sober, fact-based conversations. In fact, their incentives work entirely in the opposite direction: the more anger/divisive the content drives additional traffic and engagement [1]. Whereas, with Wikipedia, I would argue the opposite is true: Wikipedia would never have gained the dominance it has if it was full of emotionally-charged content with dubious/no sourcing.
So I guess my conclusion from this is that I doubt any community-sourced "fact checking" efforts in-sourced from the social media platforms themselves will be successful, because the incentives are misaligned for the platform. Why invest any effort into something that will drive down engagement on your platform?
[1] Just one reference I found: https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2024292118. From the abstract:
> ... we found that posts about the political out-group were shared or retweeted about twice as often as posts about the in-group. Each individual term referring to the political out-group increased the odds of a social media post being shared by 67%. Out-group language consistently emerged as the strongest predictor of shares and retweets: the average effect size of out-group language was about 4.8 times as strong as that of negative affect language and about 6.7 times as strong as that of moral-emotional language—both established predictors of social media engagement. ...
"Fact-checking" completely removed the ability for debate and is therefore antithetical to a functional democracy. Pushing back against authority, because they are often dead wrong, is foundational to a free society. It's hard to imagine anything more authoritarian than "No I don't have to debate because I'm a fact-checker and by that measure alone you're wrong and I'm right". Very Orwellian indeed!
Additionally, the number of times that I've observed "fact-checkers" lying thru their teeth for obvious political reasons is absurd.
it's by third-party journalism organizations, not Meta employees, so not "people in authority"
If I am trying to debate the same fact on a far-right or far-left post, undoubtedly both will come up with the same discussion and conclusion - let's not lie to ourselves.
So for your claim to have any validity the requirement of a fair, unbiased group of people on all posts would need to be given (in the first instance, there are a lot more issues with this, just look at the loud people versus the ones not bothering anymore to comment as discussing seems impossible) and that is just de facto not the case and the reason fact-checking is indeed helpful.
The problem with CN right now, though, is that Musk appears to block it on most of his posts, and/or right-wing moderators downvote the notes so they don't appear or disappear.
If what they said about their design is to be believed, political downvoting shouldn't heavily impact them. I wish it was easier to see pending notes on a post though.
Indeed the ending of the famous story is:
> "But the Emperor has nothing at all on!" said a little child.
> "Listen to the voice of innocence!" exclaimed his father; and what the child had said was whispered from one to another.
> "But he has nothing at all on!" at last cried out all the people. The Emperor was vexed, for he knew that the people were right; but he thought the procession must go on now! And the lords of the bedchamber took greater pains than ever, to appear holding up a train, although, in reality, there was no train to hold.
Were they fact-checking too much? Not enough? Incorrectly?
Oh wait, fact checkers don't work, better just inform yourself and make up your own mind, and don't just believe some supposedly authoritarian figures.
Go back a sentence.
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/fact-check-virginia-go...
> “where there may be severe deformities. There may be a fetus that’s non viable” he said. “If a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen.”
Your dying grandma may go DNR, but that doesn’t mean murdering grandmas is broadly legal.
My wife does charity photography for https://www.nowilaymedowntosleep.org/. You see lots of this sort of withdrawal of care. Calling it an abortion is cruel and dumb.
That could lead to a debate between the fact checkers, which would derail the debate.
Better to not have fact checkers as part of the debate, and leave the fact checking to the post-debate analysis.
It does however certainly fit the Golden rule - he with the gold makes the rules.
I was cautiously optimistic when this was announced that India and Saudi Arabia (among others, incl. Qatar) might see some pushback on how they clamp down on free speech and journalism on social media. But since Zuck mentioned Europe, I fear those countries will continue as they did before.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BJP_IT_Cell
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-23695896
Only the name "Community Notes" is less misleading then "Fact checkers".
Sure, I'll trust the leadership of this huge commercial company, famous for lots of controversies reagarding privacy of people. I'll trust them to decide for me what is true and what is not.
Great idea!
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/10/mark-zuckerberg-says-biden-p...
I didn't think it was any secret that Meta largely complies with US gov't instructions on what to suppress. It's called jawboning[1]
[1] https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/what-jawboning-and-do...
During COVID, there were people spreading lies about the vaccine, which many people believed, and many people died as a result of believing those lies. Even Louis Brandeis, one of the fiercest advocates of free speech, made an exception for emergency situations[0], which is arguably what a pandemic is.
But again, lies about a vaccine do not constitute reasonable public discourse, it is more akin to screaming fire in a crowded theater. If you have counter examples of regular public discourse that has been censored by a social media company, please share it.
* I realize "ever" is a stretch, I'm sure there are instances, but my understanding is that they are the exception rather than the rule.
[0] "If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence. Only an emergency can justify repression. Such must be the rule if authority is to be reconciled with freedom." - Louis Brandeis, Whitney vs. California
I would point towards immigration as a topic where meaningful discourse is missing from social media. On most social media sites, the discussion will be dominated by people who think immigration should rarely if ever be restricted; Twitter has been colonized by some people who take the opposite extreme, often for overtly racist reasons, although this is tempered a bit by Elon Musk's personal support of high skill visas.
The "normie" immigration restrictionist position, that immigrants are great but only so long as they enter the country lawfully, is something I very often see expressed in news interviews or supported by older relatives and rarely if ever see expressed on a social media platform. I don't know how I'd go about proving this is downstream of fact checking, but there's a lot of orgs who argue that it's factually false to characterize, for example, someone who crosses the border without authorization and then applies for asylum as an illegal immigrant.
They’re doing everything they can to suck up to the incoming administration.
If Musk’s ideological experiment with Twitter had proven the idea that you can have a pleasant to use website without any moderation then Mark’s philosophical 180 would at least make sense, but this doesn’t, at all. What’s to gain? Musk has done everyone a favor by demonstrating that moderation driven by a fear of government intervention was actually a good thing.
Hell yes he does, Twitter helped Musk get a seat at the table with Trump and the ability to influence US policy decisions at an unprecedented level. Zuck craves power and sees sucking up to the incoming administration as an easy path to get more of it.
Additionally, if you haven’t read the article you’re commenting on, community notes is an excellent replacement so-called fact checking services which are notoriously biased.
Is this the same Elon Musk that recently called a British member of parliament a "rape genocide apologist"?
Elon Musk has been radicalised and now he is using his platform to radicalise others.
Community notes is good news, and something I was expecting to disappear from Twitter since Elon bought it a couple years ago, especially since they have called out his lies more than once. Hearing Facebook/Instagram/Threads are getting them is great.
Then he claims "foreign governments are pushing against American companies" like we aren't all subject to the same laws. And actually, it wasn't the EU who prohibited a specific app alleging "security risks" because actually they can't control what's said there; it was the US, censoring TikTok.
Perhaps we the europeans should push for a ban of US platforms like Twitter, especially when its owner has actually pledged to weaponise the platform to favour far-right candidates like AfD (Germany) or Reform UK. And definitely push for bigger fines to monopolistic companies like Meta.
I think I should have a right to let others lie to me, and decide for myself if I believe them. In the alternative where someone prevents me from hearing it, that other person is deciding for me. Why should I accept that other person as more qualified to do my own thinking?
It's really strange to me how calls for banning "misinformation" in the US seem to come from the same political direction as complaints about controversial books being taken out of educational curricula.
Humans tend to strongly identify with such things and motivate their moral reasoning to fit.
I would wager Mark and other sharks like him would find this entire thread very amusing. For they have no ideology other than self interest, nothing they do is for any other purpose other than their own.
I'm not in (or from) the US, I'm european and probably "more used to" regulation :). Thing is, banning misinformation isn't the solution, but the artificial algorithm should stop recommending accounts that keep feeding fake news to people, since community notes take a while to appear.
Or some indicator like "this account's posts has received a lot of community notes in the last 30 days, please take what this tweet says with a grain of salt". Young people keep getting feed far-right bullshit, which is the reason a party like Se Acabó La Fiesta (Alvise Perez) got to the European parliament in the first place, because he kept posting fake stuff, and until the justice ruled otherwise, people would just believe it. Because unfortunately, many people aren't able to "do their thinking" because of confirmation bias. "They say what I want to hear, so it must be true".
[0] https://www.npr.org/2025/01/06/nx-s1-5250310/meta-dana-white...
For context, in Germany you can face up to 3 years prison time for insulting a politician: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-greens-habeck-presses-charges-...
They may not like that but they also don't like to take responsibility either.
Taking steps to not be pushed around by an incoming president who has clearly suggested he'll push them around is, quite literally, currying favor.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/elon-tru...
> When the White House called up Twitter in the early morning hours of September 9, 2019, officials had what they believed was a serious issue to report: Famous model Chrissy Teigen had just called President Donald Trump “a pussy ass bitch” on Twitter — and the White House wanted the tweet to come down.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/08/us/politics/twitter-congr...
On video, if you like: https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1623357770933145607
[1] https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/12/20/meta-systemic-censorship...
Maybe the people elected Trump in a historic GOP win with demos that Reagan wouldn’t have won with… and Zuck sees the writing clearer than most?
The way you put it leaves out the cause and only gets the effect.
As someone who worked on harmful content, specifically suicide and self injury, this is just nuts - they were raked over the coals in both the UK by an inquest into the suicide of a teenage user who rabbit holed on this harmful content, and also with the parents of teenagers who took their lives, who Zuck turned around and apologised to as his latest senate hearing.
There is research that shows exposure to suicide and self injury content increases suicidal ideation.
I'm hoping that there is some nuance that has been missed from the article, but if not, this would seem like a slam dunk for both the UK and EU regulators to take them to task on.
Are there reproducible studies showing that? What is the effect size?
(These objections go both ways!)
Though personally preponderance of evidence seems to be a shitty standard too because I might be listening to two awful theories and be forced to conclude one is the winner. Theories should rise above a minimum threshold to even consider sniffing at before we consider one as superior over the other.
Regarding my previous comment, my intent was to point out the GP comment’s position (because the parent’s comment seemed to be beside the point), not necessarily to endorse it.
Consider hate speech. There is a clear short-term benefit of moderation: reducing the harms to marginalised people from being exposed to threats to their person, identity, and way of life. In the face of this benefit, the absolute free speech advocate must provide a counter-argument for why free speech overrides that harm-reduction.
This only makes sense if you use a recent definition of "harm" created by censorship advocates that's divorced from the traditional meaning. In criminal law, harm traditionally (and still does in America) mean actually physically harming someone's body or making threats to do so. Censorship advocates are the ones making the claim that mere words should also constitute harm, so the onus is on them to justify why they want to change the meaning of the word like that.
Fraud can be criminal, without bodily harm or threats.
Verbal child abuse can be criminal, without bodily harm or threats.
There are lots of criminal harms not covered by your claimed definition in the American legal system.
Why are you not the one who must provide an argument for why this "reduction of harm" overrides the benefit of freedom of speech?
Further, a very large fraction of what I have seen classified as "hate speech" simply cannot reasonably be argued to constitute any kind of threat.
Finally: what do you mean by "identity"? When I have seen this term used by opponents of "hate speech", it generally seems to refer to something like a person's self-image. I cannot understand how this can in principle be "threatened", nor how it could constitute harm to learn that someone else sees you differently from how you see yourself.
There are some strong arguments for harm reduction being a more fundamental human value than freedom of speech.
Firstly, the modern conception of freedom of speech is often seen to be grounded in libertarian thought, in particular the works of Bentham and Mill. Yet Mill himself explicitly stated that these freedoms should be limited in the case where they cause harm to others. Thus freedom of speech has historically been seen as lower priority to harm reduction.
Secondly, there are in fact two competing interpretations for "freedom of speech": on one hand the equality of access to a public forum, on the other hand the ability to say whatever you want. I say "competing" because in a public forum without moderation, the tendency is for loud and offensive voices to drown out the discourse, effectively leaving marginalised people without a voice. This is especially potent in modern social media. To me it is similar to antitrust regulations in the market: we put these in place for the benefit of competition, as this typically improve social impacts. However in doing so we are limiting the freedom of corporations with large market share to collude, fix prices etc... .
Thirdly, history suggests that it's problematic for ideological values to trump the basic tenet of harm reduction. We see this for example in the Catholic church's refusal to support abortion rights or the use of condoms to prevent AIDs. If we don't ultimately assess the long-term social impact of a "core moral value" in terms of human harm and flourishing, then we risk entrapping ourselves in an ideological morass.
> what do you mean by "identity"? ... I cannot understand how this can in principle be "threatened"
As an example, homophobic comments are an attack on the sexual identity of homosexual people. It sends a message that they are unacceptable to society due to their inherent preferences, and that they should not express themselves as they naturally wish to. This causes psychological suffering.
Why? And how, in principle? Why is the burden of evidence not on others - and equally, how, in principle, could they furnish evidence?
The entire point is that freedom of speech is a core moral value; they have weighed the potential harms and come out against censorship, because they consider censorship to be inherently harmful. There is no objective way to compare different kinds of harm to each other; each individual's moral values are what they are.
When a free speech absolutist argues that freedom of speech is more important than whatever goal the censor has in mind, that argument is of fundamentally the same kind as the censor's argument, just with opposite polarity. When the censor says that "hate speech" needs to be prohibited, that, too, is based on a relative weighing of values and purported rights (i.e. freedom from hearing it).
To see why, consider that the space of possible actions someone could not take is infinite. If there's an expectation that someone do a ton of research and work to argue for why they are not doing something, then the amount of work they would have to do is thus also infinite. This way lies madness, which is why in reality the default outcome that results from not acting is always taken as a given.
Sometimes this reality is obfuscated by activists. They find some group of people who are just doing their thing, and demand that those people do some extra things (usually some costly things). The arguments they make for this are weak, but when the targeted people say they'd rather not do those extra things the activists demand their targets argue for not doing what the activists want to whatever level of effort (or greater) they themselves made. This can be an effective bullying tactic but isn't legitimate: it's on those who want action to argue the case for it, not those who don't to argue against.
Digital platforms like social networks default to uncensored. If the operators do nothing, then by the way they are built content is allowed. It takes additional work to categorize posts and block certain kinds of content. So the default outcome is free speech. If someone wants someone else to do work to suppress that, then it's on them to prove that it's truly necessary and that the benefits outweigh the harms. But that doesn't cut both ways; it's not required for other people to take on the argument for free speech. That's the default outcome so it just wins by default if the other side can't prove their case to a sufficiently convincing level.
But even if you want to play word games, choices and actions aren't the same thing. Choosing to act is quantitively different from choosing not to act because it involves a different level of effort. It's wrong to assume that they are morally equal.
The way I like to think about it is that once a choice has risen to the level of conscious awareness, it is an illusion that a person can just decline to choose.
Say for example I'm passing by a beggar on my way to work. Before deciding whether I give them money, I can first decide to ignore or not ignore them. From a basic human perspective I want to say hello and be friendly (and I choose to do this), but it does make me feel worse if I decline than if I had ignored them, exactly because it makes it feel like a choice. But if I ignore them, can I call passing by without giving them money less of a choice? I only moved my choice up one level in the tree of all possible decisions I can make.
Or, moving it to the example of the drowning man: imagine you're holding out your arm to see how long you can do it, and see the life ring flying towards you. If you choose not to act, it'll hang on your arm, and the person will drown. Is it nevertheless inaction on your part?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty_(criminal_law)
> Duty (criminal law), is an obligation to act under which failure to act (omission), results in criminal liability
You failed to act, which is why a law is sometimes required to compel action. However, saving a drowning person isn't something that triggers such a legal obligation in the USA unless you're the person who actually pushed someone into the water in the first place.
I don't get why this thread is getting so long or so abstract. The principles here are straightforward. Facebook don't actually have to care about what arguments activists make, but even if they did, it's on activists to win the argument for what they want. You don't get to automatically have your own way unless someone sits down and does a randomized controlled trial showing that you're wrong - and this is independent of what domain we're talking about.
Activists use abstraction to attempt to overcome settled understandings and norms. Of course there is a distinction between action and inaction—as you recognize it’s even a legally significant distinction. The very existence of that norm is the reason anyone would say “inaction is really a form of action.”
It’s like how the notion of “antiracism” is an effort to reframe race neutrality as a form of racism.
In this particular case, changing the rules (and making the blog post explaining those changes!) is pretty clearly an action.
"For example, in December 2024, we removed millions of pieces of content every day. While these actions account for less than 1% of content produced every day, we think one to two out of every 10 of these actions may have been mistakes (i.e., the content may not have actually violated our policies)."
That is first order data and it's interesting. However, before making policy decisions, I would want the second order data: what is the human cost of those mistakes, and what percentage of policy-violating content will not be removed as a result of these changes? Finally, what's the cost of not removing that percentage?
For that matter, by talking about the percentage of active mistakes without saying how many policy violations are currently missed, you're framing the debate in a certain direction.
The human cost of a piece of content being taken down depends on the piece of content, and the reason behind posting it.
In the case of someone posting about recovery from self injury and including a photo of their healed self-harm scars, having that taken down by mistake would be more harmful than someone who posted a cartoon depiction of suicide for the lolz.
My personal belief, for whatever that's worth, is that communication and speech are one of the most powerful tools any of us have. Talking can change minds, move societies, arouse emotions, and in general makes a difference. This is true no matter the format (text, voice, etc.).
That means that restricting communication should not be a casual activity. Free speech is a good ideal for a reason.
It also means that, if you believe in the primacy of free speech, you are obligated to consider the implications of that belief. Speech has effects. In my adult life, since 1990, we have seen a major change in the ease of communication. IMHO, society hasn't been able to fully adjust to that change -- or rather, that huge suite of changes. I sincerely do not know what a healthy society using the Internet looks like; I don't think we're in one now. All of these arguments (on all sides, mine included) are hampered by our lack of perspective.
Meta seem to be making the case for those who would see social media banned for people under the age of 18. To enforce that properly would require needing ID, and that then opens a whole can of civil liberty issues.
Yeah, making that my ideology is a hill I'm willing to die on, sorry.
If you or I happen to agree with the people who wield that power, rest assured it's only a temporary coincidence.
There's more people online than any of us has heartbeats, and the n^2 number of user-user pairs generates detrimental effects that track any positive effects.
Much better, I think, for each of us to have a small and private personal social network, not to hand everything over to a foreign* company trying to project its social norms worldwide.
* Facebook claims about 3 billion active users, so for 89%-93.5%** of its users, the fact that Facebook is American makes them foreign.
** https://thesocialshepherd.com/blog/facebook-statistics#:~:te....
May have been a mistake? Reminds me of RTO and the subjective feeling of being more productive in the office. They have the feeling they may have made mistakes and base their new policy on that feeling.
I don't think it's malicious wordsmithing where they are mis-representing the internal data, though I don't have the data to confirm.
I think this the wrong lens. The correct lens is: if they don't voluntarily make this change, will they be forced to?
The incoming administration seems committed to banning "censorship", so I believe making a cost/benefit analysis is something of a false choice.
E.g. see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJfUXVOoFBo
FWIW I would not be surprised if the bluster about championing free speech abroad gets quietly forgotten; we’ll see. They explicitly state they will comply with laws, which in EU likely means continuing to moderate (more not less over time, given the regulatory trends).
Yes. However, I find this obsession with harm-based value judgment to the exclusion of all other considerations ethically problematic, to put it mildly. Ethics does not reduce solely to considerations of harm.
The content I'm talking about is graphic photos of suicide and self injury, fresh, blood soaked cuts, bodies hanging, graphic depictions of eating disorder (that goes beyond "thinspo", which is more borderline, and so downranked and not recommended rather than removed).
It's the latter that we believed (based on the advice of experts who we relied on for guidance) is harmful when consumed in large quantities.
I also think normalizing an infrastructure whose sole purpose is to suppress speech is ethically problematic. Rights are rarely expanded once taken.
You're right that people post abhorrent stuff on such sites, but I prefer approaches like filters over suppression. I also think that if reducing indirect harm is important to certain people (like reducing suicide), then there are known effective ways that don't require coercive power, like the public campaigns against smoking and MADD which have both had significant impacts.
I'm sorry, but maximalist free speech positions fail in the face of reality.
They are admitting that there has been a global push against free speech on these platforms.
>There is research that shows exposure to suicide and self injury content increases suicidal ideation.
I mean do you really need research to show this link? Of course it does.
We are okay with slapping an “R” rating on movies and allowing parents to be the ones who decide what content their kids can see. Why can’t we decide that parents also need to be the ones to stop their kids from consuming bad content on social media?
But at this point, I'm siding with the "no social media for adolescents" people more and more.
I believe it's only going to get worse going forward as they all adopt these policies.
I don't think this is exhaustive, and I think SSI (suicide/self-injury) + ED/etc. stuff is considered high-severity.
Not to mention, people just straight up have a right to talk about these things. It is not moral to hold one person responsible for an unintended and not reasonably foreseeable reaction to the discussion. And joking about these topics is legitimately therapeutic for some.
I'm talking about graphic images of self harm, suicide, eating disorders. And at some point you have to weigh the maximalist interpretation of free speech "you have to host whatever I want, as long as it's not illegal" with "promoting this stuff causes active harm, no".
The burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that it causes such harm.
I don't generally think people should be held responsible for the unintended reaction to their speech of a small minority of the audience.
Also as per the inquest into the death of Molly Russel found based on the preponderance of evidence, exposure to this kind of graphic content was largely the causative agent in her suicide.
What would the bar you require be, is there a bar?
CNotes were extremely successful on X.
The problem with censorship, why digg and reddit died as platforms, you end up with second order consequences. The anti-free speech people will always deeply analyze their opponent's speech to find a violation of the rules.
They try to make rules that sound reasonable but are beyond section 230. No being anti-LGBT for ex. But then every joke, miscommunication, etc leads to bans. You also ban entire cultures with this rule. Ive had bans because I meant to add NOT to my 1 sentence, but failed to do so.
Then when it comes to politics. You've banned entire swaths of people/viewpoints. There's no actual meaningful conversation happening on reddit.
Reddit temporarily influenced politics in this way. In a recent election a politician built a platform that mirrored the subreddit. There was polls and if you were to go by reddit... the liberals were about to take at least a minority government, if not majority.
What actually happened? The platform was bizarre and very out of touch with the province. They got blasted in the election. The incumbent majority got stronger.
> reddit died
By all measures I can find, reddit continues to grow year over year, while X seems to have been flat or in decline, so I’m not sure this is a strong premise.
Tiktok is 4th.
Linkedin is 8th.
X is 12th.
Reddit is 16th.
Reddit fell a great deal in rankings. They mostly use bots to make it appear like they are still relevant. Which ironically is creating a 'dead internet' conspiracy theory. In reality its just 'dead reddit'
What were their relative rankings on the same metrics, say, five years ago?
I suspect the changes to the fact checking / free speech will align with Trump's political whims. Thus fact checking will be gone on topics like vaccines, trans people, threats from immigrants, etc.
While the well documented political censorship at Meta affecting Palestine will remain because it does align with Trump's political whims...
- https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/12/20/meta-systemic-censorship...
- https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/29/m...
Here's the topics the announcement mentioned:
"We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate."
Palestine is completely absent.
The result will be even more poisonous to users.
Just like cigarette companies using chemicals in the papers so that they burn slower. Does it improve the product? Maybe, along one dimension.
It's a bit more than giving up. They are also going to push more political contents on feed.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/22/business/facebook-content-mod...
Also: perhaps the occasional soul-destroying post would help people break their social media addictions.
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Molly-Ru...
I am not trying to trivialize this persons death. If it were up to me, I'd completely get rid of social media in an instant.
So, while this announcement certainly seems to be in bad faith (what could Mark mean by "gender" other than transphobic discussion?), this should be a boon both for far-right and left discussion.
Does that mean increased polarization and political violence? Surely, surely.
That said, if they remove the political filter, they're opening the door for all discussion (even from the left).
Of course, they could surreptitiously filter out the left. Hell, why not?
Just moving the needle for allowed content to include transphobia and racism.
If by left discussion you mean discussion of the genocide in Gaza, don't count on it, because this censorship is bipartisan in the United States.
Zuck cares about currying favor with the powerful. He doesn't give a crap about the powerless. Also, he's pretending that Texas, the proposed site for content moderation, is not politically biased, which is laughable. "We're moving from a blue state to a red state" is not a serious proposal for reducing or eliminating bias.
It’s also a right wing complaint, and they’re also silenced for bringing it up.
But Trump, Fox News, and the Republicans are absolutely actively aiding the genocide and squashing dissent.
The “bad faith” is in the pretending that we don’t all participate in gender performance with every single person we come into contact with, every single day, for our entire lives.
Again: it is specifically pointing out that other people are not obliged to participate in other people’s performance.
People are free to act, have whatever cosmetic surgery or take whatever hormones they wish to.
Where their rights end is asking other people to refer to them based on their performance rather than their sex.
Again, it is not ‘bad faith’ for Meta to allow discourse from people to disagree with gender ideology. Meta are not hiding anything, they are directly saying that they want to allow people that disagree with gender ideology - which judging by the last election is most Americans - to use their services.
Not really though. It means that feminist campaigners can advocate for single-sex spaces and services without the looming threat of being banned. This is great news and a win for free speech.
https://transparency.meta.com/en-gb/policies/community-stand...
This is a bold claim. I see a lot of people in this discussion that seem to have a very different experience. Your point would be much stronger with evidence, if only to calibrate everyone's understanding of what you mean by "left content".
>what could Mark mean by "gender" other than transphobic discussion?
From what I've been able to tell the last several years, the overwhelming majority of your ideological opponents here have no interest in visiting physical harm upon others simply because of how they view and present themselves. They just don't want to be, or feel, compelled to treat the other person's self-image as an objective fact. Some of them additionally have concerns about capacity of minors to give informed consent for the related medical procedures, or consider it suspicious that the prevalence of such self-identification has risen drastically in recent years (to the point that they imagine social pressures toward such identification).
>Does that mean increased polarization and political violence? Surely, surely.
I have seen statements like this from your opponents interpreted as veiled threats in the past.
I think it's extremely likely that people will see the "de-ranking" of content they agree with as bias, regardless of their place on the spectrum.
Similar: "Biden must have committed election fraud, because all of my friends voted for Trump and I don't know anyone who voted for Biden." (previous election, obviously) Well, is that because no-one voted for Biden, or that the friends/content you see is tuned to how you lean.
They also appointed Dana White, a prominent Trump supporter, to their board this week.
Their content moderation team is moving from California to Texas.
If people think all this is Meta going "neutral", you are delusional.
The Community Notes model works great on X at dealing with misinformation. More broadly, this is a vindication of the principle that putatively neutral "expert" institutions cannot be trusted unless they're subject to democratic checks and balances.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42622082
I believe Elon and Trump, being the internet's biggest liars, have the goal to remove Section 230 making moderating online more or less a crime that will open you to litigation and allow them and all of their followers to spread lies not only unchecked but with the threat of punishment if a company, like Blue Sky, were to try to moderate them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Prod....
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubby,_Inc._v._CompuServe_Inc.
Good luck with that considering:
>"Europe has an ever increasing number of laws,institutionalizing censorship and making difficult to build something innovative."
• Lack of a DMCA equivalent. DMCA lays out a lightweight process for platforms to process copyright disputes which if they follow it will avoid legal liability, which is needed on any platform that hosts user generated content. The EU Copyright acts require platforms themselves to enforce copyright and prevent users violating it. This is a gigantic technical implementation problem all by itself. Also, the US has the legal concept of fair use but that's not a concept in much of Europe, so people posting parodies etc thinking it's OK can still create liability problems.
• No equivalent of Section 230. Many new laws that specifically criminalize the hosting of illegal speech, and which don't give any credit for effort. As what's illegal is vague and political in nature you can't make automated systems or even human-driven systems that reliably handle it, so the legal risks are large even with a good faith effort to comply.
• GDPR, "right to be forgotten" and NetzDG style laws have large fixed costs associated with compliance which established companies can absorb but startups can't. For instance it's common for EU lawmakers to demand 24 hour turnaround times, which you can't reliably comply with if you're a one man startup.
• Algorithmic transparency laws, which mean you can't obtain any competitive advantage by better ranking (being good at this is how TikTok got so big), and which can threaten your ability to clear spam or use ML.
• Laws around targeted advertising mean you can't generate revenue comparable to what the US based firms can do, so you can't be competitive and your users will be annoyed by low quality barrel scraping ads for casinos after they click "No" on a consent screen without reading it.
There's probably more. For example, running a commercial search engine or training AI models on the internet is illegal in the UK, because UK copyright law only allows "data mining" for research purposes. There's no way to argue it's fair use like they do in the US. Just one of many such problems off the top of my head.
Good. It's heavily misused here.
> No equivalent of Section 230.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Services_Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Commerce_Directive_...
> Laws around targeted advertising mean you can't generate revenue comparable to what the US based firms can do...
Good! Agriculture is cheaper with slavery, but that isn't a great argument for permitting it.
https://map.debian.net/
Z-E-R-O.
I don’t even think companies have their own mailservers anymore, its mostly gsuite and microsoft office 365; people aren’t even hosting business critical applications in Europe unless compliance forces them- let alone using European made tools to do it.
There's a lot more to life than a lot of things, I'm not really trying to discuss personal fulfilment, moreso mentioning that there's no reality where we can get by with European technology right now, and if the US decided to sanction a european country that country would suffer a pretty significant (trillion-euro most likely) shock to productivity, as not only would they need to find new tools and retrain, but they would also lose all their mail and documents.
If the USA sanctioned europe (lol) we'd be completely fine, don't worry.
I don't know how to say this inoffensively, but a lot of US people seem to mistake the slightly higher chance (from 1/inf to 2/inf) of becoming a billionaire with a higher quality of life, and the ability of the select few to hoard capital for a rich society.
The whole threat here is you can't regulate Meta away, because they'll use the US Government to bully you into not doing so. I'd imagine if the EU tried to publicly prop up a platform not making any profit, they'd do the same.
But yes, the only way is for this to happen. But either way, this was the scariest statement of the announcement(s).
America is the most successful country on this earth and we bankroll most of the rest of the world but somehow we’re always the bad guys.
As an American I’d be very happy if my tax dollars stopped getting spent on Europe.
According to what metrics? life expectancy? crime rate? wealth per inhabitant? education? work life balance? health care? happiness? incarceration rate? human rights? corruption? freedom of press?
American tax dollars aren't spent in Europe or elsewhere in the world for some altruistic reason. The US want to maintain their hegemony and prevent other powers from emerging. They certainly don't care about Europeans or Taiwanese or whoever.
> I challenge you to find another economic system that has worked in history, because it sure isn’t communism if that’s what you’re referencing.
Not that I'm a big fan of communism or China, but communist China has been doing pretty well, and is getting more innovative than the US
China is the most brutally capitalist society in the world, with a dictator sitting on top managing it at the margins and ensuring media will never be free and threaten the communist party.
I'm going to need a source (and some definitions) for that.
And you wonder why you're viewed as baddies.
I'd be happy if your tax dollars stopped going outside of US, too.
When I visit every few years, it amazes me how quickly Europe is “Americanizing”. More fast food and less traditional food. Ripping up vineyards that have been there for centuries. Fewer protections for your farmers. More people walking around staring at their phones and less people talking to each other in cafes. Seems like almost everyone dresses like Americans and can speak English now. And it’s hard to tell the difference between the coffee shops in Spain and those in San Francisco. How long until you start building suburbs and driving everywhere?
Don’t get me wrong—I love the U.S., and I love living here. But its culture is not for Europe.
For example: People weren’t walking around staring at their cellphones in Europe in the 90s because they were distinctly European. It was because we didn’t have smartphones anywhere. The smartphone changes happened in lockstep across the globe.
Likewise, many of your other points are purely people’s personal preferences. I think your criticisms are largely nostalgia for the 90s and your time spent living abroad, not an indictment of “Americanizing” Europe.
But... is it just luck or is it this Nanny-state issue that makes it very hard to think of a single major Internet destination or tech company that was born in Europe?
The through-line is US/China with the vast majority. Eu I can only think of Spotify for non-retail.
Being in Europe I find no shortage of local versions of companies for all kinds of providers but only the large social media or platforms are outside of EU mostly in US as a rule.
The issue seems to be that saturation is real and the moat gets larger with time when companies just gobble up all their competition. How could Here maps compete with the free google maps + apples large pockets, etc. TomTom used to be much larger and European, seems to still survive but nowhere near to the size it could've otherwise.