Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/10/facebook-admits-it-must-do-more-to-stop-the-spread-of-misinformation-on-its-platform/ <comment><USER2> This article criticizes Facebook for firing the human editors that had been keeping things sane. However they were pushed to that by accusations of bias in the right-wing media. Accusations that looked likely to lead to a Congressional investigation.

See, for example, [http://thehill.com/policy/technology/279361-top- republican-d...](http://thehill.com/policy/technology/279361-top-republican- demands-answers-over-alleged-facebook-political-bias).

Now they are in a situation where they are damned if they do, damned if they don't. And people immersed in echo chambers will accuse them of bias no matter what.

But the entire system is fundamentally broken. Pay per ad incentives lead to rewarding viral content. And content that induces outrage is far more likely to go viral than pretty much anything else. Plus it goes viral before people do pesky things like fact checks. And the more of this that you have been exposed to, the more reasonable you find outrageous claims. Even if you know that the ones that you have seen were all wrong.

For an in depth treatment of the underlying issues, I highly recommend _Trust Me, I 'm Lying_.

<comment><USER3> Yes, trying to solve this problem by creating a definition of "misinformation" sufficiently precise to act on it for all possible articles, then trying to remove it somehow is probably an AI-complete problem. If it's not AI-complete it's probably just plain an ill-formed question. That's before we ask questions about the biases that get embedded into the misinformation detector.

This can't be fixed at Facebook scales by building a platform that so highly incentivizes low-quality content of all kinds, then trying to stop the content so late in the cycle. The entire incentive structure has to be rethought. Unfortunately, that's probably a problem that Facebook is literally incapable of solving without going out of business, because Facebook the corporate entity _is_ that incentive structure. To fix Facebook requires Facebook to become not-Facebook.

<comment><USER4> There is no need to create a Grand Unified Theory of misinformation, here.

This problem isn't that hard. You filter this stuff and rank it by its SOURCE, not by the content of individual articles.

It's not hard to figure out which online sources are pushing out most of the abjectly-bad propaganda, and de-rank them.

<comment><USER3> "This problem isn't that hard. You filter this stuff and rank it by its SOURCE, not by the content of individual articles."

I don't think reifying _ad hominem_ into code is the solution to the problem.

Of course, if you don't mind a rare few false positives here and there on articles, I've got your filter right here:

        def source_is_trustworthy(source):
            return False

Remember as you sit here thinking through your exceptions what we're talking about; if your "trustworthy" source was confidently telling you about how Clinton was going to win, _it 's not one of the exceptions_. I won't say I was _confident_ Trump would win, but I was certainly less suprised than most; the fact that I generated this somewhat more predictive model by tossing out pretty much every "mainstream" news source is not a good sign for them. And to be honest, Trump news isn't the only thing that I find this useful for. Beyond the bare facts, most media outlets really aren't good for much anymore, and do you ever have to de-spin their news just to get those bare facts in the first place. (I can't, however, pack up into a recipe how to do this yourself. I think we're in a period of transition in the news industry, much greater than just "the internet makes the old dinosaurs stumble" makes it sound, and I'm at the moment not really all that confident in anything.)

<comment><USER5> As someone who vehemently opposes Trump, I feel that allegations of anti-Trump bias in the mainstream media were entirely correct and somewhat to be expected. Although Trump is certainly a name that sells papers, Trump's repeated threats to open up news media to broader libel laws were not well received. The news organizations' endorsements were pretty one-sided[0]. I don't want to take you too literally, but it seems to me pretty obvious that a model ignoring the MSM entirely would not be preferable to one that took into account the MSM opinions and then applied a correctional factor. I'm sure we agree that truth is a function of our means for determining truth, but I suspect we disagree strongly on the reliability of Internet news sources.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_endorsements_in_the_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_endorsements_in_the_United_States_presidential_election,_2016)

<comment><USER6> You must have missed the leaked emails in which Clinton exerts massive influence on the media, planning every last details in exchange for all kinds of rewards [0]

[0] [http://observer.com/2016/08/wikileaks-reveals-mainstream- med...](http://observer.com/2016/08/wikileaks-reveals-mainstream-medias- coziness-with-clinton/)

<comment><USER5> I did miss that. Was that article intended to support that view? The incidents listed don't seem to have been terribly well planned or executed, or to have garnered any positive results. That seems difficult to reconcile with the idea of a powerful media conspiracy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _" OMG, Trump has won through lies and deception! We failed to stop him. How on Earth did that happen? We must out-manipulate our opponents next time."_

If you read between the lines, this is what the article condenses to.

The discussion here is mostly creepy groupthink shit.

Social networks fact-checking their content? What's next? Should AT&T stop the spread of misinformation over its phone lines? Should USPS fact-check your mail?

Facebook is not a real news source and never going to be one. At best it's a communication medium. At worst it's a giant propaganda machine. Any moves to get it further away from the former and closer to the latter are just machinations to change _who_ benefits from the propaganda and nothing else.

We don't need an "improved" Facebook. We need a working replacement for old- school newspapers, TV stations and radio channels. The "new media" eroded all of those, but failed (so far, at least) to provide anything of equal utility and value. Hence all the issues involved in the coverage of these elections.

<comment> B-Con Agreed.

The problem is the users, not the platform. If users propagate misinformation, the _users_ propagate misinformation.

The easy solution people often jump to is fighting negatives with negatives, assuming it yields a positive. But often a positive approach is more effective. Offering incentives for good acts, not just disincentives for bad acts, is a fairly popular recent trend backed by research.

In this case I can't help but think that the best solution is to focus on education and the propagation of correct information, not censorship (or at least, something that smells like censorship) of bad information. If "new media" is a problem we should be fighting it closer to the source.

I don't know what Facebook's role in that would be, but ideally, as a platform, it would be minimal.

But ultimately, it's worth remembering that it's hard to build a good system with bad raw materials. If people are interested in falsehoods and echo chambers, their social media will reflect that.

<comment><USER8> Hmm, I mostly agree, but it's important to remember that a bad mechanism can encourage bad behavior as well. Facebook must make choices about design of the feed algorithm that have important effects on incentives and behavior. So even if they take a minimal censorship role, we cannot ignore the effect of the feed algorithm - in fact, we should focus on how to design it!

For example, the extent to which one "bubbles" users into their own echo chamber is largely up to the algorithm designer. If you look at "content aggregator" sites like HN, reddit, Facebook, they all have pros and cons. HN and reddit give incentives in the form of karma. They all have different levels of "bubbling" and opting into or out of bubbles.

Good design of such sites is an open problem -- even formalizing good _goals_ for such sites is an open problem -- but it is a design problem we should be thinking about and addressing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's also on us to resist the temptation to build social media bubbles around ourselves, and to poke into each other's bubbles. Every time I've wanted to block a friend or relative on facebook, I've put my phone down and come back to it later. Looking away from people we disagree with isn't working.

My cousin shared a post this morning asking why people on the left aren't celebrating the fact that a female campaign manager helped put someone in the white house for the first time. I wasn't sure what to say as his friends piled on to say things like "Yeah, I thought they were for women's rights?!" Here's the response I finally came up with:

 _I 'm not celebrating her "success" because I imagine my facebook and twitter feeds look a lot different than yours. My feeds are filled with first-hand stories from women around the country who are being more openly harassed than they were last week. It's happening often enough that's it's really dismissive to say "Oh those are just a few assholes." People are openly harassing women in the name of Trump._

I think when we act as consumers of social media we need to stop building our own bubbles, and reach out into other's bubbles. And when we help build social networks, we need to intentionally structure them in a way that maintains connections, rather than isolating individuals and groups.

<comment><USER10> When I knew people who supported Romney, I felt no need based on that to exclude them from my life or my social media circles.

One's ability to support Trump tells me much more about a person. There are too many things that are good and should be fundamental about a functional, enlightened society that one must reject in order to support Trump. Prejudice, fraud, bullying, and sexual harassment must all be accepted.

People who would accept these things are not welcome in my life. It's not because they're on the other side. It wasn't like this in 2008 or 2012. This time it goes deeper than that.

<comment><USER11> And to support Hillary, one must accept lies, corruption, warmongering, corporatism, voter manipulation and unfettered globalization.

It's a choice between two evils, however you look at it.

<comment><USER12> Don't forget tolerance of rape and child prostitution. (See Jeffery Epstein and William Jefferson Clinton.)

<comment><USER13> I mean, Trump is arguably FAR more involved with Epstein though - he literally has a quote saying that he acknowledges Epstein surrounds himself with young women:

"I've known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy," Trump told New York Magazine for a 2002 profile of Epstein. "He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life."[1][2]

How can someone come to the conclusion that this means only Clintons support this? Clearly the common denominator is rich people abusing their power to rape children, not politicians raping children, and not Clintons only raping children. Rich people are abusing their power and America voted to fix it by electing a rich person who has abused that power.

[1]: [http://dailycaller.com/2016/10/09/the-friendship-between- tru...](http://dailycaller.com/2016/10/09/the-friendship-between-trump-and-a- billionaire-pedophile-that-nobody-wants-to-talk-about/) [2]: [http://www.snopes.com/2016/06/23/donald-trump-rape- lawsuit/](http://www.snopes.com/2016/06/23/donald-trump-rape-lawsuit/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think it would be relatively easy to have an "auto-snopes" feature which detects a URL being shared and immediately attaches a post that says "this has been debunked by X"

For example - I've seen dozens of links to Michael Moore's trumpland speech which strategically ends with the phrase "America will elect Trump and it will feel great"

Sample: [http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-25/michael-moore- trump...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-25/michael-moore-trumps- election-will-be-biggest-fuck-you-ever-recorded-human-history)

        He concludes:

        Yes, on November 8, you Joe Blow, Steve Blow,
        Bob Blow, Billy Blow, all the Blows get to go
        and blow up the whole goddamn system because
        it's your right. Trump's election is going to
        be the biggest fuck ever recorded in human
        history and it will feel good.

but the truth is that is not what he __CONCLUDED __

He continues:[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVLTQIUMq18&t=30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVLTQIUMq18&t=30) [sic]

        ... and now you're fucked.

EDIT - I feel like I should clarify I mean "auto-snopes" figuratively. Auto fair-balance might be a better descriptor. Something that links to an opposing opinion automatically, in cases of absolute falsehood the debunking, or even a CSS CLASS where there is a bright red "FALSE" wrapper.

Snopes doesn't have to be the automatic choice.

Breaking filter-bubbles & ensuring _truth_ would be my goal on an idea like this. Not strictly "promoting liberal media"

<comment><USER15> I have personally asked an individual why they don't trust snopes.

Their claim is that it's a Democrat rag towel and shill.

I then ask, then what fact-checker would you trust?

Their response: None of them.

Congratulations. We've reached a point, for this individual, where "facts" as decided in the common forum are suspect and the only thing they trust is themselves (and whatever non-Mainstream Media they listen to). We have reached a point where the only truth is what they decide is the truth.

That is a non-trivial problem to resolve. If we can't even agree what basic facts are, there is no way to even have a discussion.

<comment><USER16> Have you done any research at all on snopes? I just spent 5 minutes on google and found that one of snope's main "fact-checkers" is Kim Lacapria. She used to write for a blog called "The Inquisitor", a site known for posting bad news stories, similar to the right-wing Alex Jones programme. They have published fake quotes and stories without doing research: [http://www.inquisitr.com/670091/retraction-and-apology-to- ro...](http://www.inquisitr.com/670091/retraction-and-apology-to-roger-moore/) [http://www.rawstory.com/2015/07/story-about-costco- pulling-d...](http://www.rawstory.com/2015/07/story-about-costco-pulling- dinosaur-cake-was-hoax-by-insquisitr-contributor/)

As for Kim, she describes herself as "...an openly left-leaning individual myself", if you ctrl+f for those words here: [http://www.inquisitr.com/402558/scandal-envy-behind- petraeus...](http://www.inquisitr.com/402558/scandal-envy-behind-petraeus- drama-allegations-obama-ignored-benghazi/)

As you can see, journalistic integrity is lacking from both sides of the political spectrum. Please do not get all high-and-mighty and think you're better than everyone else, because you would be falling into the same trap you mock others for. I hope in the future you will examine sources with a more objective view and keep an open mind, and not just believe whatever someone wants you to believe so they can make a quick buck off of your ignorance.

<comment><USER17> Come on. You've highlighted one staff member as having once mentioned having a personal political leaning (like most people do) and that she once worked at a blog with a tarnished reputation and spun that into implying Snopes is untrustworthy. I'm sure you could meet this extremely low bar of "proof" for practically any news organization.

If you really want to present a case of bias, find some real evidence. Specific articles with specific instances of false or misleading information. Otherwise, you're just sowing doubt by casting aspersions based on vague associations.

<comment><USER16> This post wasn't meant to be a thorough debunking of Kim and snopes. I actually think snopes does a mostly good job of producing accurate information. However, it does show in some cases, such as the Hillary Libya "We didn't lose one person" question from the debate. [http://www.snopes.com/hillary-clinton-benghazi- msnbc/](http://www.snopes.com/hillary-clinton-benghazi-msnbc/)

Snopes and Kim claim "Hillary Clinton overlooked Benghazi victims when she said that "we didn't lose a single person in Libya" during a campaign event on MSNBC." is false. However, reading the article for her evidence, you can observe that Kim accepts Clinton lying by omission by saying the conversation was not about Benghazi.

Looking at this from a high level, Clinton is implying the the Benghazi attack is a completely unrelated event from the USA's war in Libya. However, these two events are both part of the Libyan intervention and it's disingenuous from Clinton to make such a claim because as a result of the Libyan intervention, Americans did die. Clinton is obviously playing a political game to play down the negative consequences of the Libyan intervention. I don't blame her for doing this, by the way. I would too if I wanted to be president.

Just because they didn't die in the initial confrontation doesn't mean "No Americans died." Snopes fails to point out the fact that Clinton does not include Benghazi in the overall Libyan confrontation. Let's say I am in a car accident with someone, and they are injured. If 6 months later, they have complications and die from the injuries I caused with the initial car accident, I am still responsible for the death of the individual.

Left wing bias: No Americans died in the initial confrontation with the Libyan government.

Right wing bias: Clinton killed Americans in Libya.

Neutral bias: Clinton made a decision to support the invasion of Libya. As a result of the invasion, Americans died in Benghazi.

<comment><USER18> > Neutral bias: Clinton made a decision to support the invasion of Libya. As a > result of the invasion, Americans died in Benghazi.

Even that statement could be twisted if you draw the conclusion that Clinton supported the invasion, people died, therefore she is partly responsible. And it's missing information about the "600 requests for additional security".

I do understand and agree with your point.

Perhaps the more important issue is that some voters have an overly simplistic world view. "Casualties from an attack on a diplomatic enclave in a volatile country" should be separate from "US Foreign policy had implications for the conflict in Libya".

<comment><USER16> Agreed, the unbiased statement could definitely use some more words to show it's an opinion that Clinton COULD be responsible for the result, but it's not black and white. It's just frustrating that people don't recognize that yes, snopes, in general, is a trustworthy source. However, snopes is a group of people, each with their own individual biases.

These biases can occasionally influence the content. To treat these sources as some kind of perfect "machine" that can just be unleashed onto facebook to automatically say "You're wrong, this is how it really happened." is a scary thought. Especially when the process and machine are blackbox and we don't have any way to verify which "facts" are being pushed, by whom, and for what reasons. And when you bring up the fact that there might be bias, you become one of _those_ people, like you're some kind of conspiracy nut for asking questions.

I think that happened this election. The polls all said "Clinton crushes Trump." Anyone that asked about the validity of those polls was mocked and laughed at and seen as some kind of rightwing conspiracy nut.

Well, turns out they were dead wrong and maybe if people recognized their unconscious bias, we wouldn't have a president Trump right now and people would have said "Holy $@&* these polls are wrong we need to change our strategy so we can win." I kept repeating to people, don't underestimate Trump, he's smarter than you give him credit for and he's a huge threat to Clinton. Nothing but jokes and mockery from the majority of democrats I talked to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If Facebook wants to be a "source of truth" they're going to need to hire moderators outside of Silicon Valley that represent a wide array of values, traditions, and backgrounds, in a ratio that represents the actual population, and have them peer review each other without fear of repercussion from their employer. I think it's hard for the Silicon Valley types to surrender this type of control... For instance, would this article even be on HN if Hillary had won the election? If we're talking about neutrality, that's an important point to consider.

Actually, the lack of multiculturism is true for quite a few Silicon Valley companies. Try to find a station that has 'Today's Metal' on Google Music, good luck ...there are a couple hundred different indie channels to listen to that are very meticulously organized into genre, sub-genre, and sub-sub- genres. I'm not complaining, I simply use different products, but I think it points back to the source of where the lack of multiculturism stems from.

</comment><comment><USER20> You think the users are too stupid to fact check. But what makes you think the users care about the truth anyway?

More often than not they double down with "well it's emblematic of the greater problem" or something to that effect. They then look for new evidence to support their views. Like it or not, some sites are designed to build echo chambers and are not for general discourse.

<comment><USER21> A lot of people don't care. They believe an image on facebook that reaffirms their belief.

You try to counter with statistics from the FBI, DOJ, BLS, DOL, or any other organization and the numbers are 'made up'. And studies have been done that when presented with counter arguments it strengthens the original misperceptions.

Corrections also don't get much traction. I've seen many conspiracy theories pop up for a week, then die down. While the correct gets no traction at all.

>As a result, the corrections fail to reduce misperceptions for the most committed participants. Even worse, they actually strengthen misperceptions among ideological subgroups in several cases.

[http://www.dartmouth.edu/~nyhan/nyhan- reifler.pdf](http://www.dartmouth.edu/~nyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf)

People don't want news, they want to hear what they already 'know'.

<comment><USER22> The problem is that there are no organizations that can give out unbiased facts. This includes the FBI, DOJ, etc. If you have grown up in a household that were in opposition to either of these organizations (and that could be either democract or republican, I can't imagine a poor black person in the Ghetto likes the FBI more than a Montana rancher), why should you trust their statistics? Heck even if you do trust them, don't forget the old saying: lies, damned lies and statistics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> If you do a root cause analysis of this election's result, much of it points back to Silicon Valley in one way or another.

Workforce automation created millions of unemployed people in places far away from economic hubs, with no hope of employment in their hometowns or re- skilling for the new roles, leaving them desperate. Proliferation of mobile apps lead to an explosion in use of social media. The wild popularity of this democratic social media encouraged a culture that allowed misinformation to flourish without a lot of consequences.

Bad actors took advantage of this, and reinforced distorted false narratives. Desperate people latched onto the messages presented to them, that gave them solutions repeatedly reinforced by social media, and many took an enormous risk - they voted against their best interests in order to solve their problems with the information they had available. And that is how we got here today.

<comment><USER24> Yes, Federal jobs should have been moved from cities to fill those lost. Norway did something similar.

<comment><USER25> That sounds like an interesting story, how can I find more about it?

<comment><USER24> Here is one article on the subject. I am sure there are more out there. [http://www.lifeinnorway.net/2013/03/have-the-norwegians- got-...](http://www.lifeinnorway.net/2013/03/have-the-norwegians-got-it- right/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is seriously hilarious. Now that's he's won, against seemingly all odds, we have to find some other reason for why EVERYONE ELSE, was completely WRONG. Every media outlet, everyone in politics, all the polls, completely shit on Trump. Now look who is the most powerful person in the entire world.

The Democrats, and the rest, did it to themselves. Overconfidence, smear campaigns, and all of the morons doing the polls.

We are all sick of politicians, and the people have spoken, let's just see what happens. Get over it already.

<comment><USER27> >we have to find some other reason for why EVERYONE ELSE, was completely WRONG

>and the people have spoken

Trump lost the popular vote, so this isn't true. He got about 25% of the total voting population overall.

<comment><USER28> I agree that just because Trump won the election doesn't mean the people gave him a mandate, or have spoken, but looking at popular vote in a system that doesn't even focus on popular vote is incorrect IMO.

If the rules were to get popular vote then campaigning would be done totally differently. The candidates are doing everything they can to win states, not win popular vote.

<comment><USER29> Regarding popular election, "mandate" and "only 25% voted for him", it seems that all people who are now dissatisfied have voted for Clinton. Which suggests that the 50% who didn't vote maybe don't oppose Trump that much.

I observed that leftists have a tendency to systematically overestimate their numbers, influence and the amount of agreement or even familiarity with their ideas among the public.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Another place where Facebook's failure to detect fakeness has proved costly is in their social graph.

A lot of sites moved away from comments platforms like Disqus to Facebook in the hope that the quality of discourse would improve and trolling would decrease. Instead, clicking on some of the most vehement commentators' names would invariably lead to suspiciously bare accounts (and often suspiciously fake names) with a handful of friends themselves, all with similar characteristics. Unfortunately the people who are influenced by this sort of thing are not tech savvy enough to do even this basic level of checking.

There is a a sort of "uncanny valley" that a technically savvy and experienced person can detect when looking at a fake profile, that I daresay Facebook's algorithms just can't.

Then there is also the problem that Facebook really doesn't care about blatantly fake accounts until they are reported. The sorts of people who are trapped in some filter bubbles are unlikely to be savvy enough to know how to report these profiles (I've reported many-dozens at least-ranging from community noticeboards to cupcake businesses, all pretending to be people and missed by FB's much vaunted ML)

Of course, there is a certain irony in using a throwaway account to discuss fake accounts, but without a patina of "realness", it triggers a greater level of skepticism, which is a good thing.

When the history of 2016 is written, a large part will be filter bubbles and trolls expertly manipulating huge swathes of electorates enabled by the hubris and greed of Social Media networks.

</comment><comment><USER31> Except it isn't just the spread of misinformation. Even more important (IMHO) is the insulating effect of showing people only like-minded opinions, effectively trapping everyone in a bubble. I can't think of any way Facebook can solve this problem without drastically decreasing their reliance on ad revenue. What are they going to do, force people to view opinions they disagree with?

<comment><USER10> Everyone should be responsible for the curation of their own timeline. I barely use Facebook but hate the idea that I didn't get a straight chronological feed.

I was a huge fan of Twitter but was driven away when they followed suit. My reasons had more to do with my own preference of how I enjoy using the service, but having algorithms manipulate the information I see so as to maximize engagement metrics is even more troubling.

<comment><USER32> There is a "chronological" option on facebook.

<comment><USER10> It's illusory. They may or may not, based on their algorithms, bump something old to the top of your feed after it gets a like or a new comment. They call it "most recent" and they can define "recent" the way they want to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > Last week Buzzfeed reported on an entire cottage industry of web users in > Macedonia generating fake news stories related to Trump vs Clinton in order > to inject them into Facebook's Newsfeed as a way to drive viral views and > generate ad revenue from lucrative US eyeballs.

Does anyone else find this incredibly ironic? Buzzfeed ratting out others doing clickbait?

<comment><USER34> Buzzfeed lately has been trying to 'outgrow' their reputation as clickbait, and actually do traditional investigative reporting. With moderate success.

I agree with you though, it's hard to take them seriously.

<comment><USER35> "Actual journalism" Buzzfeed articles are of surprisingly great quality. They fund that quality through clickbait, which is their primary monetization strategy if I recall correctly.

It does make the right hand difficult to believe when the left hand is off being silly - but I'm actually impressed by the level of works produced by their journalism department.

<comment><USER36> Their monetezation strategy is advertorial content posts.

People are so used to clickbait as a way to get impressions and clicks from display ads that many don't realize there isn't a single 'traditional' display ad on BuzzFeed's entire site.

They make their money by charging for references to 'advertisers' products and services throughout BuzzFeed content - something they do really well.

Doesn't come cheap either - big cash outlays iirc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Not long ago I saw a post about the oil pipeline protests. It was a photo of a huge crowd, and stated that the media was not covering the protests properly and that people are taking a stand. The photo was of tens of thousands of people, and had over 230,000 shares. 230k....

A quick image lookup showed that it was in fact a photo from Woodstock 1969, but since the comments on the photo were restricted, nobody had been able to point it out.

I went to report it, but facebook seems to have removed the "misinformation" option when reporting content (thought there was one before?)

</comment><comment><USER38> Trump's strategy worked brilliantly on social media. Here's the strategy in a nutshell:

1) Say something outrageous that news orgs will grab for a quick, clickbait story that will generate tons of ad revenue.

2) Let outraged people share via social media.

3) Benefit as some of the people seeing the content will not disagree and will take the candidacy seriously.

4) Win.

It doesn't matter what Facebook does with its trending section, the real value of Trump's strategy came with the way it exploits the basic sharing / newsfeed mechanism's intended behavior. Even today, many Trump opposers think that they were helping by posting their outrage at every rude comment Trump said.

<comment><USER39> Except he closed the gap in the last few weeks of the race when he stopped saying outrageous shit.

<comment><USER40> People still want to believe that Trump couldn't have won except by exploiting stupid people.

<comment><USER38> His message resonated with a lot of people. His tactics exploited social media patterns and mass media patterns effectively. He also ran against a candidate plagued by scandal and widely disliked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Let's be frank here: Free speech and facebook never go together. They want to present as a respectable forum where prominent people like politicians can have their platform (same with Twitter). That needs some kind of filtering. And, as we saw with pretty much the entire American press, as soon as you start filtering and selecting, you start to induce gross biases and distortions of the truth. The truth only comes out in a clutter of contradicting opinions, engaging discussions, pieces of evidence and leaked materials. Of course, that is an ugly mess not many people want to put up with.

<comment><USER42> > The truth only comes out in a clutter of contradicting opinions, engaging > discussions, pieces of evidence and leaked materials

It feels like we're way beyond that. It's degenerated to the point of two tribes who no longer have any "shared truth" from which to argue. If I see a post of Facebook saying that Obama has instituted martial law in New York, how can I convince the 4364 people liking it that it's a lie? If I point out that the New York Times would probably write about it, I'll just get laughed at.

The truth seriously fared a lot better in times where newspapers and a few TV stations acted as completely undemocratic arbitrators.

<comment><USER43> I think it may be worse than two tribes. Its a million tribes with limited overlap in what they consider the truth, but all having a large megaphone that cuts across tribal lines while still building bubbles.

My analogy is breaking down. I don't think we understand how the complete removal of barriers to publishing are changing society. Nor do we understand how to cope with it. A bunch of folks just elected an authoritarian to "guide" the way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I am not a Trump supporter, as far as his anti-Muslim stance is concerned. But I do support some of his economic stances which are labeled as "protectionist" by mainstream media. I may be wrong as I am not an economic expert also his take on immigration is certainly a thing of significance.

A related note regarding Facebook here: AFAIK, Facebook's curators were very biased and were always removing anything to do support what "mainstream vocal leftists" find objectionable. e.g. Be it to do with the shameless suppression of news related to people like Geert Wilders or Pamella Geller who are not by any means right wing fanatics. Geert Wilders is a staunch supporter of homosexuals. Just because he criticizes the barbaric ideology of Islam he is labeled as a "right-wing nut" by leftists with covert/overt Islam-apologetic stances.

It is well known that Saudi kingdom has large investments in mainstream US media, that's what Trump drew people's attention to. Who knows how much of Facebook is controlled by Saudi and the likes. [1]

It's no surprise that mainstream media got the prediction about Trump wrong. I guess, there predictions and poll-results were in fact propaganda against Trump. I felt it that way, many people I know felt it and I am sure many more people must also have felt it.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ex9ldUHSgjs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ex9ldUHSgjs)

</comment><comment><USER45> This is a tough position for FB. No matter what they do, half of the the world will think the actions they take are wrong. Most humans are intelligent enough to know that stories like Hillary Clinton running a child sex ring (or whatever) are false. People choose to share these because they want to believe it or think it's funny. As they say in their mission statement "Facebook's mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected." it is a commendable mission but it's also a messy one. I think inevitably they will have to do something. Maybe some kind of "truth barometer" on stories that attain a certain volume of engagement. At least then they can say "look! we're trying" without taking away the people's right to troll. In this particular election though I doubt anything would have helped. The winner has been openly trolling for years, his direct actions set the standard for truthfulness much lower than ever before.

</comment><comment><USER46> It seems abundantly clear that the problem isn't low-quality content in the feed. That's unavoidable. It's the very small trickle of high-quality content in the feed – content from actual people who want to contribute to Facebook. There isn't much of it. And Facebook wants to show a fresh feed every refresh.

<comment><USER47> Having uninstalled Facebook from my phone and being too lazy to login on it from my primary computer (2fa) I only look at the feed maybe once every other day. Amazing how much better it is. Relevant and interesting stuff from real friend I care about, no junk. I can recommend that to everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> The timing of this announcement does not seem to help assuage fears that facebook was using its platform to push an agenda. It was this accusation that initially forced them to switch from human editors to an algorithm for trending news. I suspect that we as a country are going to have a conversation regarding the nature of privately held nearly public spaces on the internet and what their obligation to us is, if any.

</comment><comment><USER49> In corporate speak "misinformation" is defined as "any information that doesn't support our narrative". Certainly it is the goal of Facebook, the government, and every other large media corporation to control the flow of information. You need look no farther then Obama's recent statement that news needs to be "curated" by government appointed gatekeepers, to filter out all that pesky information that doesn't jive with government propaganda.

<comment><USER50> Do you mind linking to where Obama said that? The closest I can find is this: [https://www.yahoo.com/news/obama-decries-wild-west-media- lan...](https://www.yahoo.com/news/obama-decries-wild-west-media- landscape-214642552.html)

>"We are going to have to rebuild within this wild-wild-west-of-information flow some sort of curating function that people agree to," Obama said at an innovation conference in Pittsburgh.

Why do you think that the curation is going to be done by the government or by government appointed gatekeepers?

<comment><USER51> It's implied by the use of the word "we" and the fact that he is a government employee.

<comment><USER52> > It's implied by the use of the word "we" and the fact that he is a > government employee.

I think it's clear that's he's asking for a rebuilt mainstream media so that people can at agree on facts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> "As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."

<comment><USER54> AI curated feeds are, of course, not the free flow of information, rather they are blind algorithms looking at what one's "friends" like and what you've previously liked and then feeding you more of the same, creating filter bubbles and fracturing society, while allowing nefarious actors opportunities to game their inherent naïveté.

Closer to the free-flow of information was USENET, and even though it was eventually overrun by trolls and spammers, filtering was largely human driven and unsophisticated, via their news clients, and one had little choice but to look at contrary opinions, and even to debunk some of the totally false junk, which is now hidden from view or buried at the bottom of long threads, left for the "true-believers".

I've been reading parts of the "alt-right" (deliberately breaking my own filter bubble) for many years, and although I despise what they stand for, I do agree with them on one thing..human ability is not evenly distributed. Of course they use this point to advance a racist agenda, but the fact remains that many people of all backgrounds are just not smart enough to deal with the "free" flow of information. They lack the intelligence to deeply introspect on their own biases and to understand that what they are being fed is garbage aimed at manipulating them. The sooner geeks (and those with a "small l libertarian" streak) accept that reality, the safer[1] the world will be.

[1] in a literal sense, now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> the elite mainstream media and the supposed-to-be-independent reporters are the biggest losers in this election, as they took sides so strongly that the other 50% will never bother to have anything to do with them. facebook needs improvement? sure, but more important, those biased media outlets will be irrelevant for most of the people due to not only technology advancement, but also what the news industry has been doing over the last few decades, i.e. they're all so biased, that you always know what they're going to say, why bother reading there.

anyone can tell me one true independent news source in US today? there is _none_.

<comment><USER56> What about the non-elite supposedly non-mainstream media ? Like Fox News ? Who perpetrated a false story days before the election and came back to apologize for it ? They are real winners right ?

<comment><USER55> for the record I don't read fox-news and don't know what you're talking about. I read Reuters but its US news is limited, I did some study and was educated it is probably the closest to be called as a neutral source.

<comment><USER57> oddly enough the two financial news wires, Reuters and Bloomberg were the least bias. Cause they give sterile news about markets, their customers want to know how markets will go, not hear what they want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I read somewhere that Facebook isn't liable for information posted there, that the user's posting the information is the liable party. Here in Sweden, that's not how news organizations work. Here, whatever they publish they are liable for, regardless of who originally wrote it.

I know Facebook isn't a news organization, but it's treading a fine line isn't it? At some point one might argue that by being an aggregator and driving a large portion of its engagement in the sharing of stories is akin to being a publisher, and thus should be held liable for the things it publishes – regardless of who pulled the trigger. Of course, this would be a huge liability for Facebook, and a growth inhibitor because all of a sudden, a story going viral isn't exactly a good thing if it means they can easily be sued for libel.

I'm not a lawyer (probably obvious given the above) but I think it's a bit strange that given Facebook's position they can so easily get away with a "wasn't me!" kind of attitude to misinformation and straight up lies being spread around presented as though the stories were in fact news.

<comment><USER59> I'm not a lawyer either, but I don't think what worked in Sweden will work for the US. Not only is it hard to sue people for libel, but content sites like YouTube fought pretty to hard to make sure they couldn't be responsible for things other people post on their sites (as long as they promptly respond to DCMA notices).

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> The moderation of Facebook is outsourced to a select group of organizations, not unlike Twitter with their Trust and Safety Council.

[https://about.twitter.com/safety/council](https://about.twitter.com/safety/council)

[https://blog.twitter.com/2016/announcing-the-twitter- trust-s...](https://blog.twitter.com/2016/announcing-the-twitter-trust-safety- council)

Unsurprisingly, Twitter's Safety Council members are predominantly left- leaning with ties to the (now defunct) Clinton campaign. I would presume there are plenty of seats to be filled now.

<comment><USER61> Isn't twitter moderation openly mocked for being, well, hardly functional at all? It's been a bastion of bigotry for the past year. It's Trump's main platform. If they're trying to suppress the right, they're doing a TERRIBLE job.

<comment><USER62> Twitter moderation is slow and ineffective, but still partisan - they're jut not very good at it.

<comment><USER63> If it's ineffective then what is the evidence is it that it's partisan?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Determining what is, and what is not, misinformation seems:

1\. Intractable. How exactly do you propose to accurately vet every bit of information posted to facebook?

2\. Dangerous. Who does the vetting? If it's an algorithm, who writes the algorithm? No matter which way you slice it, "doing more to stop the spread of misinformation" imposes someone's 'one true view' of reality and stifles the engine of western civilization: the open, competitive marketplace of ideas.

This is clearly an emotionally driven sentiment caused by the moral outcry of a person considered 'bigoted' being elected to office. Stifling political expression will only make Trump/next trump/next next trump's populist appeal stronger.

</comment><comment><USER65> Or Facebook can take their thumbs off the scale on what is supposed to be friends sharing information. Do you realize how Orwellian it is for a big company to say friends Bobby and Sally have to be monitored in what they share? How does this not bother people?

I don't care if Bobby and Sally believe that we never made it to the moon and wear tin foil hats. It is _none of FB's damn business_. They are a _platform_ not the editors of all things true. They should not issue us all with truth detectors.

</comment><comment><USER66> So what do they propose? To hire more human editors/moderators to evaluate/censor links and stories?

FB already has too much power and its moderators affects 'politically undesirable' content too much.

One week ago, FB blocked an event page of Independence March, which traditionally takes place on November 11th (Polish Independence Day) in Warsaw. This is the biggest mass event of Independence Day, having more than 100k participants each year.

FB also blocked or removed pages of NGOs and political parties, which are organizing or support the march (some of them had 80k or 170k followers) and personal accounts of people involved in these organizations.

Then FB went full rage and started to block personal accounts of everyone who invited or even positively mentioned the Independence March, including for example the personal account of editor-in-chief of the second largest daily newspaper in Poland ([https://twitter.com/sjastrzebowski/status/793001362070052864](https://twitter.com/sjastrzebowski/status/793001362070052864)).

The most extreme case was the personal account of a MP, who wrote on his timeline: "I will be [on the Independence March] along with my family, whether FB likes that or not." ([https://twitter.com/jakubiak_marek/status/793497135954202625...](https://twitter.com/jakubiak_marek/status/793497135954202625...)) His profile was blocked for 24 hours after that.

Another case was a personal profile of a retired Intelligence Agency officer, who revealed in a FB post, that a local coordinator of an anti-government liberal-left protest movement during the communist period was a colonel of Soviet-dependent military intelligence agency.

All of this happened just within the last month. FB actions generated a huge pushback and hit the headlines. Deputy Minister of Justice qualified FB actions as "censorship". Minister of Digitization tweeted that she "asked FB management for a talk". Many people started deleting their FB accounts in protest.

FB got frightened and reactivated the event page of Independence March, but many nationalist/conservative organizations profiles still remain blocked.

</comment><comment><USER67> Here's what to do about Facebook.

(1) permanently close your account. [https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account](https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account)

(2) if you're like me and you can't do that, "unfriend" everybody except the people you work with. Delete all your affiliations and locations.

If enough people did this FB would have to do a little struggling to retain membership. That's the kind of incentive they need. Altruism demonstrably doesn't work, especially Sand Hill Road altruism.

(I help a couple of little nonprofits so it happens that I need a fb account.)

<comment><USER68> Alternative, lightweight solution,

* Do not visit facebook often, do so only in incognito mode, delete other existing facebook cookies on all your browsers.

* Do not use facebook app, inform people that it is a battery hog and steals everything it can on your phone.

* Do not accept new friend requests, or send new ones.

* Do not post status updates or any other kind of content

* Do not "Like" things, do not comment. Do not produce anything for facebook actively.

* Keep it only as a place to check if other people upload pictures of you by scrolling the feed a little, to tell them to stop if they post information about you, use the web interface for messaging any friends who dont know any other means of digital communication.

* Sometimes Like things you dont, spread some misinformation, devalue what content/profile they already have about you.

* Ofcourse set all your posts to private, and all other "settings" to maximum privacy, allow noone to write on your "wall" and so on.

<comment><USER69> Also a good tip: unfollow all your friends by default, except for a select few.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Wouldn't Facebook have the perverse incentive to define 'misinformation' to be any information which offends the most people, regardless of truth, in order to keep users from leaving

<comment><USER65> Of course. Worse, they actually have two different strategic factors that play poorly together: 1.) Retain users 2.) Have a personal bias about what will offend users

These two items can magnify each other in a false direction as they attempt to retain users that they perceive they have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> I don't understand how this is different than any other communication medium.

Telegraph operators shouldn't feel any onus to ensure that they stop the spread of misinformation, right?

In fact, I think it is VERY detrimental for them to step in and started editing posts, bringing back the human editors. Humans have biases, ML less so.

If an algorithm decides that something is trending, even if it is "incorrect" to some interpretation of the word, then it should be treated the same. It's just a matter of principles.

</comment><comment><USER72> How are we to ever prevent misinformation when news papers are happy to publish that "political candidate did crime X! anonymous john/jane doe said".

If news papers were held to ethical requirements that prevented mere accusations from being news, I could see how Facebook should also be held liable for not following the same rules. As it is now, someone could just append "john doe said" at the end of any conspiracy theory and by news standard, its fact checked and ethical.

</comment><comment><USER73> It is a temporary aberration. In due course, people will come to realize that they can't believe everything they read on the internet (duh), especially where provenance is not clear, and Facebook will improve their algorithms.

Some kind of reasonable balance will be found.

People blaming Facebook for Trump is far more a reflection of themselves than of FB news algorithms.

<comment><USER74> I certainly do not blame Facebook for Trump, but I don't see any balance happening anytime soon. It's not just an issue of the Internet, but also with traditional forms of media like cable TV, talk radio and print. Distrust and misinformation are shoveled out daily. Even the local pastor is in on the action these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> You can't prevent false ideas spreading by censorship; quite the contrary.

The idea that one can create an AI or censor or committee to separate truth from falsehood and then put it in charge is plainly authoritarian.

<comment><USER76> What about just keeping out stories that are patently false? If I did an image search for cars, I wouldn't want a boat in there. If I did a search for news, I wouldn't want a fabricated story.

<comment><USER75> Such stories would not go viral.

<comment><USER77> That's not true: false, viral stories were the very lifeblood of this election.

<comment><USER75> I'm sure that it so. However, for a story to spread it has to seem like it _might_ be true to a significant fraction of the readers. So it can't be 'patently false'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> Throwaway for obvious reasons. It's dangerous to support reform against the reactionary left.

I'm a Trump voter. I consider myself pretty well educated (M.Sc. CS/EE, honors), and I work in a research lab. I'm not your typical Trump voter. Full disclosure: I'm also an immigrant (legal one, nearly 20 years), naturalized US citizen, I make several hundred thousand dollars a year, and pay a ton in taxes. I'm liberal on social issues. I support LGBT and gay marriage. I'm an atheist. I have a wife and a kid. I'm also pro-gun, pro marijuana, and pro letting people do whatever they want with their lives. I'm also extremely fiscally conservative, and against illegal immigration.

My FB feed was so skewed against Trump I had to close my account. Bombshell stories on Clinton wouldn't trend, while the most inane BS about Trump would immediately reach the top and stay there.

It is strange for me to hear FB being accused of being "too conservative". I certainly saw nothing like that "red" feed on WSJ.

BTW, I could elaborate why I voted for Trump if anyone is interested. I don't agree with him on everything, but on the balance he seemed like the lesser of two evils to me.

<comment><USER79> I would like to hear you elaborate on your reasons for voting Trump, particularly what kinds of changes you are expecting/looking forward to.

<comment><USER78> Happy to oblige. Let's get the big one out of the way: I disagree with Trump on climate change. That said, the current president did jack sh#t about it, and so would Clinton (who is owned by her wealthy donors). Combined with the fact that the President can't enact policy unilaterally, and there's broad consensus around climate change in the legislative branch, I don't think too much damage will be done if any at all.

I voted for Trump for several primary reasons:

1\. I'm very much against war, and Clinton has shown herself as a war hawk again, and again, and again, and basically wrecked much of the Middle East as a secretary of state. Enough is enough. This alone would have been a sufficient reason for me to vote for Trump. 2\. I do not believe in government handouts. I believe that for prosperity, and especially to improve the lives of the working poor, it is necessary to create jobs. To do this, you need to reduce supply of unskilled, below-minimum-wage labor flowing across the border, and make keeping jobs in the country the low energy state into which corporations will naturally arrive, if they want to have US markets at their disposal. Trump promised both of those things. 3\. I do not believe that free flow of military age males from the countries with which we're de-facto at war is a wise thing to have. Refugee needs would be much better served by their neighbors, not by people whose military blew up their relatives. 4\. It is becoming blindingly obvious that Obamacare is a trillion-dollar handout to the Big Pharma and medical insurance companies. The healthcare is SIGNIFICANTLY more expensive now than it was before, and coverage is worse as well. And the cost is growing double digit percentages every year. Donald Trump promised to improve competition by allowing import of drugs and letting people shop for medical insurance across state lines. Not sufficient, IMO, but we just can't afford to pay 10x for the same drugs anymore. 5\. The vast majority of Donald Trump's contributions comes from his small scale supporters, not from Wall St and megacorps. As such, he's not beholden to their interests, unlike certain other candidate. Thiel being the only notable exception I can name off the top of my head. 6\. I've found what the press did in this cycle completely disgusting.

So TL;DR: anti-war, pro-jobs, anti-sjw/pc, pro-LGBT, not owned by Wall St or the establishment. That sounds pretty good to me, loose tongue and personal antics notwithstanding. I don't agree with him on some things, but by and large there's more overlap than with Clinton.

<comment><USER79> Thank you for responding, this gave me food for thought. (Also, you can add extra line breaks in your comment to get breaks between your numbered points.)

Also wondering how much you were convinced about Trump's sincerity. Whether he truly cares about the promises he made or the people he made them to.

<comment><USER78> I'm more convinced of his sincerity than of Clinton's. Let's face it: he doesn't _need_ presidency. 400K a year is pocket change for him, he's not a politician and he did not spend 30 years of his life converging on this goal. Moreover, he partially financed his own campaign with tens of millions of dollars. Truth is, all politicians lie to get elected, he's no exception.

But I believe he did not lie about the core tenets of his campaign: wars, immigration, globalism. He will do something about those at the very least. That's good enough for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> Neil Postman argued in "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business" (1985) that _entertainment_ had become the "supra- ideology of all discourse on television". _Good television_ is entertaining while _bad television_ is not, so we learn to judge all content on television based on its entertainment value.

"Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images."

I think Postman's comments are extremely relevant today (30 years after 1985) except that now they would apply to the Facebook news feed. (The quote about 'exchanging images' is now literally true.) The role of "news as entertainment" does a lot to explain the Trump's emergence as a candidate in the first place (he got a lot of coverage early on because of his outlandishness).

</comment><comment><USER81> I don't think this is only Facebook's fault. I watched several extremely biased Youtube videos on both sides.

I guess it's just how decentralized media works; it only tells people what they want to hear.

Not so long ago, the media used to be relatively trustworthy, now everything has become propaganda. It started online mostly but now even major TV channels and newspapers which used to pride themselves on journalistic integrity have become propaganda machines.

There is no truth in the media anymore; the only way to approximate the truth is by watching opposing media channels and then 'averaging them out' in your mind.

All the news I was reading online was so obviously biased in Hillary's favor that I was compelled to watch Fox news (which I used to think was complete garbage) just to try to get the other side of the argument.

<comment><USER82> This assumes Fox is as biased in one direction as, say, NPR is in the other. But you can tell the quality of reporting from the content itself and the way it is presented. For example, while cable news channels will go to the same non-expert pundits for every story, NPR will actually call a different specific expert who is knowledgable to comment on each story.

<comment><USER81> Sure, that's something you have to account for as well (they're not equally biased).

That said, you'd be surprised how well media organizations can bend hard facts (and so-called 'experts') to match their opinions. People who've worked in quantitative market research will tell you that you can find pretty much any pattern you want in any data if you present it (and label it) carefully.

Just because they've put in extra work to get an 'expert' and did some research doesn't mean that they're unbiased; it just gives you extra confidence - But you still have to fact-check yourself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> Can't wait for the Facebook Department of Truth™ to inform me!

</comment><comment><USER84> Just stop using aggregators. Pay for real news sources that hire actual investigative journalists.

<comment><USER85> Real news sources are dead and actual investigative journalists do not exist anymore.

<comment><USER86> Well that's patently not a true statement. The Guardian, the NY Times, and Der Spiegel are the first three publications that do important investigations that come to mind but they are not alone.

There are a lot of PR plants even in the more reputable newspapers, which is unfortunate, but there are still regular thorough investigations, which I assume are getting harder to do as money and resources continue to shrink.

<comment><USER87> The blind NYTimes bias has been readily apparent in this election cycle. WaPo as well. The entire media system missed this election.

A staffer in the Obama White House remarked on the quality of reporting now, as of a few months ago:

"All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus. Now they don't. They call us to explain to them what's happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That's a sea change. They literally know nothing."

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik- wemple/wp/2016/05/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik- wemple/wp/2016/05/05/white-house-official-on-some-reporters-overseas- expertise-they-literally-know-nothing/)

<comment><USER88> That said, NYT performed some significant investigative reporting. Though Gawker broke the Clinton private email server story, the New York Times vastly expanded the investigation and brought the story into the mainstream.

The statement that the entire media system missed the election is an exaggeration. One function of the NYT, the election prediction section, failed. It shouldn't reflect on the various investigative reporters doing actual digging.

<comment><USER87> I would recommend reading this commentary, from the political director of CBS News, today:

"The mood in the Washington press corps is bleak, and deservedly so.

It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that, with a few exceptions, we were all tacitly or explicitly #WithHer, which has led to a certain anguish in the face of Donald Trump's victory. More than that and more importantly, we also missed the story, after having spent months mocking the people who had a better sense of what was going on.

This is all symptomatic of modern journalism's great moral and intellectual failing: its unbearable smugness. Had Hillary Clinton won, there's be a winking "we did it" feeling in the press, a sense that we were brave and called Trump a liar and saved the republic."

[http://www.cbsnews.com/news/commentary-the-unbearable- smugne...](http://www.cbsnews.com/news/commentary-the-unbearable-smugness-of- the-press-presidential-election-2016/)

<comment><USER89> I'm frankly amazed that was published at CBS and not some pseudonymous post on medium.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> Misinformation is any information that does not follow the official guidelines laid out by the ministry of truth.

</comment><comment><USER91> The problem is that the Facebook feed shouldn't be about news in the first place, or anything that isn't original content from the people I follow. I miss the days when the news feed was photos of my friends, notices about new their new job, what they ate, etc. instead of a stream of tabloid junk and recycled news articles.

Unfortunately Facebook gives no tools to limit the posts to only original content and profile updates. Curating your followed list is pointless since reposted crap and original content are mixed together.

<comment><USER77> I agree. I think there could be a limit on the amount of links and of images containing text that you can post in a day, as well as warning messages next to content that comes from questionable sources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> Admiting to fight misinformation amounts to the same as admiting that they will pursue a left-wing bias.

</comment><comment><USER93> We are developing systems to identify and check the impact of misinformation at scale (triage + human in the loop).

If you're interested in potentially joining or funding us, let us know [https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSclhq7zrUKI3nxJFiYw...](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSclhq7zrUKI3nxJFiYwJ- NvyW4xAeLbSF7cWxst6GKBON9Y7Q/viewform)

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-----

Also relevant — my comment 43 days ago to the new "Request for Startups": [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12594955](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12594955)

"I'm really happy to see YC putting attention toward the (increasing) market failure around media quality. It's a serious problem, with IMHO imperils governance and stability worldwide.

I'm exploring a way to improve this dramatically, and fairly rapidly; essentially creating a stronger market for trust & quality, with resulting ranking rewards from FB, Google et al. If you are interested in learning more and perhaps being involved, let me know (firstname.lastname@example.com). Experience with news organizations, partnerships, platform companies, pr, moderation systems, or machine learning are all especially helpful."

</comment><comment><USER81> The biggest source of bias in the media is not related to feeding people false information, it's about misdirection.

If you have two articles A and B, where A is more important than B, sometimes the media outlet will deliberately choose to publish B instead of A if it matches their philosophy better (even though it's less important). If the news outlet shows each reader 5 articles of type B for every 1 article of type A - Then they are manipulating the reader's opinion to become biased towards type B thinking (by focusing their attention on less important stuff). It doesn't matter if all articles are 100% accurate, your perception is being affected through the exposure imbalance; through priming.

I think that's what happened with the Clinton/Trump fiasco; "Hillary media" was publishing more articles about Trump's "sexual deviance and unstable character" while "Trump media" was publishing more articles about Hillary's "deception and murky financial schemes".

</comment><comment><USER94> How do they define misinformation as many grey area's, for example religion.

So in such grey area's one persons information is another's misinformation and that gets messy for anybody, let alone AI.

</comment><comment><USER95> So Facebook will be openly committed to censoring certain information for the public good. What could go wrong?

<comment><USER54> Their algorithms are already doing this. It's not like it's a pure chronological feed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER96> Facebook isn't the problem. It's a function of its users. It is as much responsible for misinformation as a city park is responsible for the crazy guy shouting about the lizard people. The problem is all the users who actually believe anything they read via facebook.

<comment><USER97> Suppose you were the person to relay the message though.

Imagine one friend tells you "Can you please tell Adam X", but you know X is a flat out lie and is actually horrible and offensive. So do you agree to spread the lie? Oh and you're doing this free, and it's not your friend it's 2 strangers.

<comment><USER96> "Can you please tell Adam X" is a hair away from spreading rumor, hearsay. I would ask, at least in the context of facebook, why the speaker cannot talk to Adam himself. If he cannot, if he doesn't have the connections required to speak to Adam, then his message probably isn't worth forwarding.

<comment><USER97> I was trying to paint the picture that Facebook is the one passing along messages from one person to another. So yes, people could turn their computer off and go directly to someone elses house and tell them the message, but I think we've grown accustom to sending messages to each other over social media.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER98> I would like to see less headlines frame every statement made by a company as "admits." Facebook is not admitting to wrongdoing or confessing to a secret crime they tried to cover up, they are _acknowledging_ there is an issue that they have to improve on.

</comment><comment><USER99> [http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/11/the-forces-that-drove- this-...](http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/11/the-forces-that-drove-this- elections-media-failure-are-likely-to-get-worse/)

</comment><comment><USER100> If it's such a problem why not just disable the Newsfeed?

No one needs to get their news from Facebook

</comment><comment><USER101> Very relevant to understanding today's media and politics is Adam Curtis' new documentary film Hypernormalisation. It's long but very worth it

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04b183c](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04b183c)

If anyone has links to the BBC iplayer for the US, if there is one, or another legit source for outside the UK, please do reply with it.

I strongly encourage you to watch it, and if you can only find it from a dodgy source, buy someone a classic BBC DVD of something for Festivus so support their making more. (lots of things, Dr Who, Jeeves and Wooster, the Century of the Self...)

<comment><USER102> Seconding this recommendation. American viewers can watch the film here:

[https://thoughtmaybe.com/hypernormalisation/](https://thoughtmaybe.com/hypernormalisation/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER103> "It's totally forgotten now, but for the 100 years after the American Revolution, the U.S. government made it free or almost free to send newspapers anywhere by mail. It was available to papers of all political perspectives, with no government censorship. The rationale was straightforward: This was necessary for people to participate in governing themselves."

[https://theintercept.com/2016/11/09/donald-trump-will-be- pre...](https://theintercept.com/2016/11/09/donald-trump-will-be-president- this-is-what-we-do-next/)

</comment><comment><USER104> If the goal is not to bias, total transparency is the answer.

</comment><comment><USER105> Here's a tool someone could write. Write a browser add-on which modifies Facebook pages so that the news links are changed to Google, Bing, and Wikipedia searches for the news headline. Connect to Google/Bing in a mode with no signin or cookie info, so you don't get "search personalization". This will get you out of Facebook's filter bubble quickly. Google and Bing have problems, too, but they are somewhat better at blocking spam, having been at it longer and being in the business of forcing spammers to buy their ads instead.

<comment><USER106> Better and easier to do a Google News search for the link itself. If the link doesn't show up in news search, it can be considered a less credible source. If the link shows up, it'll be accompanied by follow up sources

<comment><USER107> Google as the arbitrator of what's good or bad? Please!

<comment><USER106> well are you going to suggest a better solution?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER108> this is what I would propose. Attach a very visible rating on each story shared from all news sources, the rating says how much the news source holds to it's journalistic integrity. There should be a very clear criteria that facebook holds it's news content providers to. If you click on the rating of a low rated news source, you should be shown exactly what extremely misleading articles they have published in the past, these reviews should also be tagged so you can view it directly if someone is spreading misinformation on the news feed.

<comment><USER77> I agree with you. I would keep it simple and as transparent as possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER109> Look folks, I get that this is a libertarian crowd but hear me out:

If someone says the earth is flat, it's not dystopian for editors to minimize those claims, or even point out how incorrect they are. Instead, in today's media world, the response would be, "two sides disagree on contour of the planet", and would present two talking heads to chatter about their opinions.

Facts are facts, and we're losing the battle online to disinformation.

Beware of slippery slope arguments about how editorializing leads to propaganda.

</comment><comment><USER110> There are two big problems shown by this. First, that any one service like Facebook could become so large and unopposed that we _need_ to care how it handles something like this. And second, that people seem fine with the idea of living only inside Facebook, unfriending or muting anyone who disagrees with them, until nothing else matters.

This is an utterly unhealthy way for people to be. If you want to combat misinformation, you must also encourage (teach?) people to stop being spoon- fed and start being more curious and more critical.

<comment><USER77> Facebook could deliberately inject a certain amount of contrarian content into people's feeds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER111> "Stop the spread of misinformation" is a subset of "stop the spread of information", which is yet one more way of saying that some people can't stand the freedom of speech.

<comment><USER14> That is fair - however it does not have to be implemented by stopping the information from spreading. An alternative could be to refuse to distribute the false information without a disclaimer reading "DEBUNKED / FALSE / see here for fair balance"

Or include a DIV to one side with a bulleted list of false claims.

Consider the TRUMP quote image: [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CRxEt7pU8AAzekC.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CRxEt7pU8AAzekC.jpg)

People Magazine 1998 - I'd run as a republican because they are the dumbest. I'd lie my face off and they'd love me [paraphrase]

A Facebook-fact-checker wouldn't have to suppress the sharing of the image. Id could create an overlay or add a subtitle or tag which reads "FALSE QUOTE - this isn't real"

Rather than relying on the hundred million individual conversations being _maybe_ fact checked - an algorithm / ai / editorial squad could apply fact checking automatically.

The IMAGE thumbprint / URL flagged in the facebook database as proven false, it gets the extra-content on its own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER112> It would be nice if this were approached more as a user experience enhancement as opposed to a content editorial function. I would love to see the former as my feed is so overwhelmed with garbage. The latter, however, would almost inevitably turn sinister - the leftist, PC, Silicon Valley influence would have no ability to check itself - even if it's not on purpose, the isolated bubble think could not be overcome. I can't imagine that it would hard to automate away teenagers purposely creating fake content.

</comment><comment> white-flame I really enjoy the dynamic of large forums, where varying ideas can pitch in, and I appreciate that much more in comparison to family members who are steeped in facebook.

Global forums can end up with a fairly civil discourse, because everybody knows and acknowledges that there are differences in opinion. If you want your thoughts to be respected, you need to make them level headed, even if it is an emotional argument. The broader the forum, the better it tends to be. Of course, it also depends on good moderation, but even the self-moderation of HN and /. tend to end up being level headed and fairly moderate.

But there are no alternative opinions or moderators in facebook. People subscribe to small echo chamber radicals, which laser focus on some hyper exaggerated version of their outlook and there's no counterpoints in sight. Disagreements with what other people post ends up in unfriending, because it's too personally dissonant.

This whole blurting out of one's impassioned political, religious, and social ideologies is simply not appropriate public discussion!

You don't go out to social gatherings and start yelling stuff like this. Yet, on facebook, people share such content on their walls for all their acquaintances to see, which ends up being incendiary. These are subjects reserved for those you have enough rapport with to warrant deep controversial dives, not your personally public web presence. The very nature of the mechanics of social media tends to stoke and reward this behavior.

</comment><comment><USER113> Zuck seems to be crafting and curating his persona & reputation for a future life of public office. Changing up facebook's bad content reputation will be important for this path.

</comment><comment><USER114> Something I haven't seen mentioned yet is the voting system. I think the voting system ruins online discourse.

Let me explain. Within my own social media and online forum bubbles, there are a certain set of norms and beliefs that are easy to express.

But should I express the 'wrong' beliefs in the 'wrong' forum, I simply get downvoted to oblivion. And then people don't see what I have to say. Look what happens here on Hacker News, my comments will literally start faaaaading awaaaaaay!

<comment><USER115> Truth isn't a majority opinion.

It's correspondence to an external Universe.

Voting systems _may_ help get you there, but not if the voting-group tendency rewards values other than truth.

Related: Celine's 2nd law.

The problem is complex: [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER116> Ministry of Truth

</comment><comment><USER117> The linked article from NiemanLab [1] is a really odd read. It ends like this:

"It's been said that we get the media we deserve: that the journalism we see is a reflection of business structures and audience decisions, not the result of an elite's decisions to shape public opinion. There's a lot of truth to that. But the information we produce and consume is generated by human beings, not systems, and those human beings have just gotten the shock of their professional lives."

So he starts by saying that the journalism we see is _not_ the result of an elite's decisions to shape public opinion as if it is a good thing (which you would probably agree with).

Then the next line says that the result of the opposite - the unwashed masses? - is (some bad thing will occur).

At this point, you are probably expecting something neutral to follow. I mean, after all, the author talks about the journalism profession, which is supposed to provide both sides of the picture.

What actually follows is this:

"If we're going to build a better environment for news, we need to think about these issues in a much bigger context than one election night. And it'll take everyone — journalists, readers, tech companies, and more — to make it happen."

Great, so the author has just defined himself, Facebook, the general media and the people who agree with his views as the "elite" who wants to "fix" the problem by shaping public opinion in a way which is more palatable to him.

Maybe this attitude is what caused this "systemic shock"?

[1] [http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/11/the-forces-that-drove- this-...](http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/11/the-forces-that-drove-this- elections-media-failure-are-likely-to-get-worse/)

</comment><comment><USER118> I'm still waiting for the day that there's a responsible entity that only ever publishes things when they're 100% certain and is willing to bet their freedom (going to prison) on it. But given how information and influencing of opinions is a market and means control of the population, I'm afraid this won't happen with official support, and only be seen as the crazy lunatics news agency that publishes stuff a week or month later after having vetted things.

I'd like to say leave speed reporting to the Twittersphere and mandate a clear label on unvetted news reports on any network, but I doubt politics can have such influence on the media. I would love it if the news reports had a watermark that says fresh-and-unvetted just like "preliminary results" or "consult your doctor before taking".

First we have to encourage and support critical thinking, but too much of it may lead to some influencers misusing it to support causes which deny past and current crimes of humanity on itself and the planet.

<comment><USER119> That's scary. 100% certain? Nothing is 100% certain.

So they can't even say "it's likely to rain tomorrow"? This doesn't seem thought through.

<comment><USER118> Not all topics warrant certainty, but given the power of news outlets forming opinion and thereby influencing the population's behavior, I do think certain topics demand responsible reporting which doesn't report anything at all if uncertain. It's the same as a good police detective not disclosing speculations to the media because they pursue many leads but only conclude one, and you don't want a mob go lynch people. The same logic applies to news outlets forming people's opinions. That's why I think there's a need for, admittedly few, certain-report-only news agencies. That way, if you read posts on TheSun or E!Online, you get accustomed to not taking it seriously, forming doubt that this is most likely speculation. Once something gets confirmed unquestionably, it can migrate to one of the few vetted-only news outlets, if that's something they cover.

That said, our weather models are pretty good but not good enough to make certain predictions that far away into the future, but they can for the next few hours.

It's like a software company's model of code branches. The Apple/Google/whatever filesystem team works on something, it gets pushed into their level of production branch, then it percolates up to the shared production kernel branch, and after a couple more layers it hits the common branch, which is what public production binaries are made from and consists of kernel, userland, foobar modules all merged together. Not all software shops operate this way, but it's what size of a project can demand after it hits certain amount. The linux kernel works this way too, to name a successful non- commercial project. You can argue this doesn't prevent regressions, and that's true, but it's hard to deny there would be more regressions (aka false reporting) with unfiltered (aka unvetted) reporting.

<comment><USER119> I can understand having _some_ news outlets with a much higher threshold.

I still don't believe the term "100% certain" is meaningful. Maybe if they were to put a label on certain facts: "This fact is considered by our editorial board to be 93% certain." And maybe have a chart, so that figure can change over time.

I think there are better ways, and that there should be accountability. I just am not in favor of black and white terms for concepts that, to me, are purely shades of gray.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER120> So who's going to be Head of Truth at Facebook?

<comment><USER115> Someone very good at it, I hope.

</comment></comment><comment><USER121> I think it would be better to provide something like the opposite of "friends you'd get along with"

If we could switch the facebook algorithm to different modes - "people you agree with" "people who'd challenge you"

That would be better than straight up blocking false things. Let the conversations happen.

</comment><comment><USER122> Censorship

</comment><comment><USER123> This is sort of starting to remind me of the Reticulum in Neal Stephenson's book _Anathem_. He talks about how they are constantly checking the reputation of data and only valuing high reputation sources. It's certainly hand wavy but interesting. Life imitating art imitating life.

</comment><comment><USER124> Good luck with that. Reddit's failed at it. Twitter's failed at it. It's almost always bundled with some sort of hate speech or political rhetoric that triggers swaths of people when they feel like they're being silenced.

There probably is no right way to do it.

<comment><USER61> I tend to agree—I think that the more we get upset by these sorts of behaviors, the more it encourages them. "Don't feed the trolls" is really the only thing that works, and it's a pretty miserable experience to have nothing you can do about harassment.

Which isn't to say I disapprove of reddit, twitter et al removing hate speech; just that it's a very late and reactive solution to a problem that seems inherent in social media.

Really, all we can do is improve filtering, and facebook seems almost ideologically opposed to increasing user control over the content they see. So I don't see facebook being a pleasant place to visit in the near future.

<comment><USER66> > hate speech

On many subreddits, being in opposition to illegal massive immigration is being considered as a 'hate speech' and is a reason for ban.

<comment><USER61> Err, citation needed. Preferably by someone employed by Reddit. If it's just the subreddit.... I don't know what to tell you beyond "find better ones".

<comment><USER66> I was talking about /r/europe for example.

> find better ones

It's not that simple, having in mind that:

1\. Current moderators clique holds the most adequate name for pan-Europe subreddit.

2\. Everyone registering account from Europe-located IP address is being automatically subscribed to this subreddit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER125> My elders always taught me believe half of what you read, and believe is not such a good word here.

People need to use their wetware and common sense. Tabloids were printing alien invasions with photos, or that certain celebrities were aliens, during the 70s and 80s, and _most_ rational people did not believe them. The papers were allowed to continue printing.

How about multiple sources, and not just being tuned into FB for your entire world view? I'm glad I taught my children how to live without their smart phones, and now they use them wisely. They can even coordinate meeting up when out in the city if their phone's battery or phone fails.

Common sense is a waning resource.

</comment><comment><USER126> We obviously need a commission that determines what things are facts and which things are fiction. It will be comprised of experts who know more than the populace, so it will be much better. It will be called the Ministry of Truth.

<comment><USER77> The radio, print, and television media have laws concerning what they can publish. I don't think it's so incredibly impossible to imagine that the new technology which is replacing those old forms, might also have something in the spirit of those older laws. Also consider: Facebook is already censoring what you see, it's just censoring to show you things you will like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER127> Call me old fashioned but I blame people for being stupid rather than technology.

</comment><comment><USER128> LOL, whats it going to do run as a NPO and take donations from its users and no ads? Cmon Zuck, I dare ya because you know that is the only way to "fix" this...fix your bottom line.

</comment><comment><USER129> "Rhetorical Fever" is entirely too contagious. Recovery from it can provide immunity, but is fairly rare. (See _Shikasta_ by Nobel-Prize winner Doris Lessing for more).

</comment><comment><USER130> I deleted my Facebook account and suggest others do the same.

<comment><USER115> Are you going to suggest this solution to _every_ mass media channel which turns out to have perverse or pathological dynamics?

Do you realise your personal actions in this case don't have any impact (at the margin) on the whole?

Are you willing to entertain that perhaps there's something in the function of Facebook (and other online sites) that leads to information flows with strongly negative social welfare outcomes?

(I don't have, and have never had, a personal Facebook account.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER131> Facebook needs a censorship department! Get a list of prohibited topis from white house and block those posts on facebook.

Better yet, ask Trump what topics to block :)

</comment><comment><USER132> A humble question --

Had Hillary won, would this post even be on HN?

<comment><USER133> No. And facebook does not pretend it 's not pro-Hillary (its CEO endorsed her). That doesn't mean the discussion is not warranted. In fact it's long overdue. Facebook is now a medium like the rest, it needs to be regulated like the press imho.

<comment><USER134> "Regulated like the press?" What the hell does that mean?

<comment><USER133> Freedom from censorship, enforcement of defamation laws.

<comment><USER134> Those things already apply to Facebook users. Facebook is actually proposing active censorship here.

<comment><USER133> Yes that s what i m saying facebook has no business to censor people.

<comment><USER134> Oh. Well then I agree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER135> Facebook isn't the right venue for this.

Of course it's filled with garbage!

While it's noble to seek better, the reality is people are using poor tools because the good ones are failing them.

Ask where did journalism go and that's the start on real solutions.

If we had that as we used to, the garbage on FB would be much less of a worry. The laughable would fit laughed at as it should.

</comment><comment><USER136> I love it when engineers try to fix social problems. When the constructs of the solutions are human-made then they are gameable and therefore not a solution. And also why is this suddenly a problem? I would wager that if Hillary won there would be much less talk of "bias" and "misinformation".

</comment><comment><USER38> This headline could be retitled: "Silicon Valley calls upon Facebook to use more aggressive censorship"

</comment><comment><USER137> Also to all the people here who are ok with selling their privacy to facebook, google - how do you now feel that a Trump-led government will have 100% access to all your data! It is time that we fix the internet from the menace of the advertising business model - that has not only destroyed the internet but society itself...

</comment><comment><USER54> Zuckerberg seems to be denying that its a problem: [http://money.cnn.com/2016/11/10/technology/facebook-mark- zuc...](http://money.cnn.com/2016/11/10/technology/facebook-mark-zuckerberg- fake-news/)

</comment><comment><USER138> What is the difference between 'fake' news and true news thats inconsistent with prevailing narratives?

By letting 'the people' choose what trends, at least you are being honest.

Most real news is fake anyways.

</comment><comment><USER139> The same way parents are responsible for the education of their kids, not schools, individuals are responsible for feeding their brain and developing opinions.

Facebook isn't promising more than cat gifs, Buzzfeed click bait and rants. It is not more an echo chamber than your group of friends.

</comment><comment><USER69> Can't proper moderation be crowdsourced somehow?

E.g.: a group of fact-checkers, with reputation based on previous performance and a page-rank like system, and perhaps a meta-level above that (people checking the fact-checkers), so that gaming the system becomes difficult.

</comment><comment><USER140> Define misinformation, because certain groups will call certain facts misinformation.

</comment><comment><USER141> An interesting contextual point is that Amazon (or perhaps more precisely Jeff Bezos) has an outstanding and tremendously well respected journalism feature whereby the publish original, factual, well-researched articles every day at the Washington Post.

</comment><comment><USER142> They could start by including "misinformation" as a reason when you report a post.

</comment><comment><USER143> Unlike traditional media, social media spreads free opinion [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_West](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_West)

</comment><comment><USER143> FB is supposed to promote [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd)

<comment><USER115> Mackay had some thoughts on that topic.

[https://archive.org/details/memoirsextraord05mackgoog](https://archive.org/details/memoirsextraord05mackgoog)

[https://archive.org/details/memoirsextraord01mackgoog](https://archive.org/details/memoirsextraord01mackgoog)

</comment></comment><comment><USER144> I don't mean to be all doom-and-gloom but it seems too little, too late. Someone else in this thread put it well:

> people immersed in echo chambers will accuse them of bias no matter what.

</comment><comment><USER81> I think that news and advertising is too powerful to be in private hands. All major news and advertising sources should be nationalized or turned into non- profits.

</comment><comment><USER145> They have it backwards. Its not about blocking misinformation. That just puts you in the role of the Inquisition. It's about seeking the truth.

<comment><USER115> Both matter. Blocking fuckwits (or misinformation) is a very useful heuristic to promoting truths.

(Google "Block fuckwits" for my earlier discussion(s))

</comment></comment><comment><USER146> What if they added a flag button labelled "This post contains misinformation"? Then, if sufficient people click it, it is reviewed by a human editor.

<comment><USER88> Great, I can expect every New York Times and Fox News article to be flagged by people who didn't like it.

<comment><USER146> You'll notice I said that such articles would be reviewed by a human editor, which would prevent this type of abuse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER134> I mean it seems a little dystopian if Facebook is going to become the arbiter of what information is accurate and start culling stuff.

</comment><comment><USER147> Facebook relatively recently reaction buttons. Would a "This is untrue" reaction button help?

<comment><USER115> That's an option. You've got the fundamental problem that many people treat truth as a popularity contest or majority opinion. It's not.

You'd need at some level a source of trusted truths against which to compare or rate statements. Though user-based flagging could work.

There's both a wisdom and a madness of crowds to contend with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER148> All they need to do is have a skeptical reaction along with their other emotive reactions.

</comment><comment><USER149> What if Facebook found a way to turn it's billion into tiny wikipedia fact checker.

</comment><comment><USER150> Itt: people who think the world is dominated by unequivocal ideas and information.

</comment><comment><USER151> I was thinking something similar about gmail. Once a year or so someone send me powerpoint with "the Mars would be as big as moon" and other obvious nonsense. Gmail should notify them before sending that it is indeed bullshit, if they really want to send it.

</comment><comment><USER152> why not just add a "spam flag" on all posts and let the users clean it up? Or something like a downvote.

</comment><comment><USER153> So they admit they want to censorship FB.

<comment><USER154> Censorship of libel and intentional mischief is no vice.

<comment><USER155> It's up to courts to decide whether something is libel or slander, not an algorithm or an engineer at Facebook.

Private communication / media organizations like Facebook deciding what's acceptable and what's not would only be censorship.

<comment><USER154> No, it's not. Courts are a last resort, when private mediation has failed, not the first line of action. If I publish news articles claiming "the sky is the color red, and only evil people disagree", courts do not need to be involved for Facebook to bury my articles. Most mischief is obviously classifiable without outside mediation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER156> Let people develop critical thinking skills and determine their trusted sources. Keep censorship out of this!

<comment><USER115> That's been tried. It scaled poorly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER157> what is misinformation? what is false today can be true tomorrow.

</comment><comment><USER158> [Citation needed]?

</comment><comment><USER159> It must stop its operations. That is too much.

</comment><comment><USER77> I have had a lot of similar thoughts recently. If you think of this historically -- soon after mass-communication technologies were first invented, they were eventually abused, the radio propaganda of WWII being one of the best examples.

Laws were introduced, and corporations grew up around these technologies, the producers of the content became professionalized, and by doing it full time, some of them even developed ethics and standards of behavior.

Now, that old media has been destroyed by new technology. The new technology is fundamentally superior in terms of the volume of information that can be transmitted, and it is both push and pull. However, the old media's "checks and balances" were also destroyed, and that is having incredibly negative consequences.

I think there are some concrete, simple, technical steps that Facebook & browser vendors can do:

* Before allowing you to share an article from a source that is of questionable trustworthiness, it should show you a warning message: "This site is known to contain untrue content." They might also consider adding an alert next to links from these sites when they are being displayed in the news feed. I think technically, this problem is not that different from the way that email systems deal with spam.

* Similarly, the way that browser vendors show you an alert before allowing you to navigate to sites that contain viruses, etc, the browser can show you an alert message before taking you to a site that is known to have untrue content. And just like you see a red error message when visiting a site that doesn't have a proper SSL setup, this could appear for sites that are untrustworthy.

Don't underestimate the psychological power of strategically placed small red warning messages over time.

Obviously making the decisions of what goes on the list will be a highly political affair, but what is nice to realize is that, unlike the government, all these technologies are developed by private companies and given to their users for free. If you keep the bar for what is considered "lying" pretty high, most educated professional people (who are the employees of these companies) would be able to agree on which things to warn about.

Additionally, the "social media" space has greatly matured and consolidated. There is no longer really a direct competitor to Facebook. Facebook & browser vendors now have the opportunity and, the responsibility to innovate in this area. I think they can do a lot without really impacting their bottom line.

Don't allow yourself to get sucked into the problem of how computers might be able to determine "truth" \-- that, is absolutely unsolvable. We will not be able to censor the CNN, the NYTimes or even Fox News (in general). However, there are many dark corners of the internet that are actually pretty influential, that could be toned down with this approach.

<comment><USER115> Not just mass media.

Writing coincided, and probably facilitated, building of cities, and rule of law (which previously couldn't be written down).

Printing (1436) in Europe saw the split of the Catholic church into multiple denominations.

The continuing fall in printing and paper costs, and rising literacy, eventually lead to revolution and populist reform first in the American colonies, then Europe. Particularly the Chartist movement in England and the Revolutions of 1848 throughout the Continent.

Mass comms as you said, with Fascism in Italy and Germany.

[https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/gqzszjwf4unuqfupzqff8g](https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/gqzszjwf4unuqfupzqff8g)

<comment><USER77> Absolutely: technological changes in "information technology" bring about social changes as well.

<comment><USER115> Corollary: it's not a question of "how do we preserve the current system given some change in media technology?" It's "how will our current system change _given_ some change in media technology?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER160> ministry of truth'd

</comment><comment><USER161> *some misinformation

</comment><comment><USER162> Oh really? You think?

</comment><comment><USER163> Deleted.

<comment><USER164> What should we do to you for posting it? Let's start there.

<comment><USER163> Good point. I've deleted it.

<comment><USER164> The question remains.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER165> How hard is it to write a bot that googles the facts and checks if they contradict the story?

<comment><USER115> See Google's Knowledge Engine.

The problem is challenging. Perfection is impossible (for deeply philosophical reasons), but a reasonably tractable system strikes me as possible.

[https://www.google.com/intl/es419/insidesearch/features/sear...](https://www.google.com/intl/es419/insidesearch/features/search/knowledge.html)</comment></comment>