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Can Facebook Keep Large-Scale Misinformation From the Free World? (sfgate.com)
You can have a disaster-free Election Day in the social media age, writes New York Times columnist Kevin Roose, "but it turns out that it takes constant vigilance from law enforcement agencies, academic researchers and digital security experts for months on end."
It takes an ad hoc "war room" at Facebook headquarters with dozens of staff members working round-the-clock shifts. It takes hordes of journalists and fact checkers willing to police the service for false news stories and hoaxes so that they can be contained before spreading to millions. And even if you avoid major problems from bad actors domestically, you might still need to disclose, as Facebook did late Tuesday night, that you kicked off yet another group of what appeared to be Kremlin-linked trolls...
Most days, digging up large-scale misinformation on Facebook was as easy as finding baby photos or birthday greetings... Facebook was generally responsive to these problems after they were publicly called out. But its scale means that even people who work there are often in the dark... Other days, combing through Facebook falsehoods has felt like watching a nation poison itself in slow motion. A recent study by the Oxford Internet Institute, a department at the University of Oxford, found that 25 percent of all election-related content shared on Facebook and Twitter during the midterm election season could be classified as "junk news"...
Facebook has framed its struggle as an "arms race" between itself and the bad actors trying to exploit its services. But that mischaracterizes the nature of the problem. This is not two sovereign countries locked in battle, or an intelligence agency trying to stop a nefarious foreign plot. This is a rich and successful corporation that built a giant machine to convert attention into advertising revenue, made billions of dollars by letting that machine run with limited oversight, and is now frantically trying to clean up the mess that has resulted... It's worth asking, over the long term, why a single American company is in the position of protecting free and fair elections all over the world.
Despite whatever progress has been made, the article complains that "It took sustained pressure from lawmakers, regulators, researchers, journalists, employees, investors and users to force the company to pay more attention to misinformation and threats of election interference. Facebook has shown, time and again, that it behaves responsibly only when placed under a well-lit microscope.
"So as our collective attention fades from the midterms, it seems certain that outsiders will need to continue to hold the company accountable, and push it to do more to safeguard its users -- in every country, during every election season -- from a flood of lies and manipulation."
Most days, digging up large-scale misinformation on Facebook was as easy as finding baby photos or birthday greetings... Facebook was generally responsive to these problems after they were publicly called out. But its scale means that even people who work there are often in the dark... Other days, combing through Facebook falsehoods has felt like watching a nation poison itself in slow motion. A recent study by the Oxford Internet Institute, a department at the University of Oxford, found that 25 percent of all election-related content shared on Facebook and Twitter during the midterm election season could be classified as "junk news"...
Facebook has framed its struggle as an "arms race" between itself and the bad actors trying to exploit its services. But that mischaracterizes the nature of the problem. This is not two sovereign countries locked in battle, or an intelligence agency trying to stop a nefarious foreign plot. This is a rich and successful corporation that built a giant machine to convert attention into advertising revenue, made billions of dollars by letting that machine run with limited oversight, and is now frantically trying to clean up the mess that has resulted... It's worth asking, over the long term, why a single American company is in the position of protecting free and fair elections all over the world.
Despite whatever progress has been made, the article complains that "It took sustained pressure from lawmakers, regulators, researchers, journalists, employees, investors and users to force the company to pay more attention to misinformation and threats of election interference. Facebook has shown, time and again, that it behaves responsibly only when placed under a well-lit microscope.
"So as our collective attention fades from the midterms, it seems certain that outsiders will need to continue to hold the company accountable, and push it to do more to safeguard its users -- in every country, during every election season -- from a flood of lies and manipulation."
1. Shut the company down.
2. Done.
Once we appoint Facebook as gatekeeper of truth, a "Ministry of Truth" as it were, who gets to ensure that that Facebook determines the truth correctly and in a non-partisan way, and doesn't inadvertently or otherwise misinform its users from a position of privilege.
So fucking pathetic. This shit is as old as communicat. Dis/info is nothing, people should exert effort to understand what is going on. Otherwise we trade one propaganda for another.
The modern world is toddler level. Not by our choice but by corps and the loudest screechers?
Misinformation is everywhere. It's easy to misremember something, and then a few hops away it turns into something quite different from the original idea. And that's the most innocuous instance. Charlatans preaching bullshit, or easily-disproven nonsense, get far more traction than I'd think possible. E.g. young-earth creationism.
Too many ideas and claims are thrown at people all day every day for someone to fact-check every single one. It's known that repetition leads to belief, so someone might forget if they researched something that they believe, or if they just heard it from a few sources a few times. The Internet is a great source of second-hand information but there are tons of people who only know how to click links and don't know how to e.g. search wikipedia for an article on a certain topic.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
As always, the answer is "HELL FSCKING NO!"
The US not only spends about ten times more on weapons than anyone else, leads a magnitude more of wars than anyone else, the US also has the biggest public relations aka propaganda budget with a similar leading number. No one spends as much money as the US on ads, both the private sector and the public.
The US government has the biggest spin machine by far world wide, that goes both for public and private, no distinction The US produces more lies, more propaganda, more spin than any other country in the world.
So why would one the US' biggest ad companies like facebook filter these lies^Wads they make their livelihood with?
Oh, you mean filter the doubleplusungood information that the mainstream narrative doesn't like? Yes those they can will filter with the best AI money can buy.
However, since AI is actually no AI but pretty much shit, there will still be many unwelcome single postings going through through the cracks, similar like spammers get through mailfilters. This ensures a constant low intensity craze that every politician can point to when they don't like a particular result. "We didn't lose cause our program was bad and the candidate behaved worse than Darth Vader, no, those evilmongers over there are to blame and no one else. Kill them!"
Which is why a half a million dollar media campaign from a troll company who wanted to produce account followers, supposedly has derailed an election where the candidates alone spend directly more than two billion dollars, and the wider public spent more like 20 billions. Including untold millions from foreign, mostly allied, countries.
Those are probably the half million dollars with the most impact in all of human history.
Here, on Brazil elections, the main "guilty" was WhatsApp... Twitter helped too, besides facebook
No more of that cheap Ruskie misinformation and FAKE NEWS. Only 100% pure cornfed American misinformation err I mean TruthTM allowed. As determined by a cartel of self appointed completely unbiased neutral Bay Area Silicon Valley megacorporations and East Coast far left media conglomerates. Not only will they control everything you see they will also control everything you can say and do by threatening to cut you off from their increasingly mandatory monopoly for any reason they feel like. But don't worry, the government is not involved. officially so you have no right to complain according to liberals....Ahhh America...land of the Free...
It is the only way their current business model will survive.
and stop carrying any other media.
Truth isn't "facts". Facebook isn't stopping misinformation it's adding to it by deciding in an arbitrary and highly political fashion as to what the people get to see and declared as "truth". That's completely anathema to the point of a free press.
You see this right now with the midterm elections where the media is calling the reports of election fraud nothing more than a conspiracy theory and besides, the Democrats just want to ensure "every vote is counted" while Democrat heavy precincts continue to find more and more votes DAYS after the election which are overturning results (and always in the Democrats favor) and in some cases outright ignoring court orders to make the process transparent and report exactly HOW MANY votes left they're trying to tally from these mail in and provisional ballots THEY KEEP FINDING.
Conspiracy theory or an attempt to overthrow an election. I wonder what facebook's "gatekeepers" have decided.
Pravda would be proud.
I'm not sure what you mean by that these days
What next, someone censoring which books get publshed? There is a fine line between "misinformation" and information which makes some people uncomfortable. Facebook should stay out of the censorship business. One person's "minsinformation" is another person's truth.
Fakebook's purpose is to censor all it can.
This means that what remains after censorship is propaganda.
I have as yet to see any of the mainstream media take any kind of action to remedy deliberate misinformation or lack of reporting on their part
Remember when Chris Cuomo Told The World It Was Illegal To Read Wikileaks
https://www.realclearpolitics....
Or just how much coverage have they given to the screw job the DNC gave the Sanders campaign.
Or the latest we find out James Comey who lead the FBI investigation into Hillary's email was using GMail to handle classified documents. Many of which still can't be published in anything close to a readable state due to the need to redact.
Does Facebook have the responsibility of ensuring we are only exposed to "real" news? No. You can blame them for providing tools that make it easier to spread fake news, but that's what printing presses were a few hundred years ago. No, it is YOUR responsibility to think critically about the things you read (and share). The big problem really is that the schools have not been able to teach enough of you to do so.
make sure only the correct propaganda reaches the voters?
People thinking wrong due to getting non approved propaganda is becoming a problem!
It is misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education and entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter.
Would were! Should is! Could be! And live a hundred times three.
If SSM cakes are a fundamental human right that must be provided by every cake shop in America than I think its reasonable to require a huge global monopoly to provide an increasingly mandatory communications platform when they were funded and helped in large part by billions in public money and infrastructure. I also assume you are for net neutrality which in this case its exactly the same thing except the communications platform monopoly is simply the second gatekeeper to the internet instead of the first.
Also there is a huge difference between a company simply denying a service and a monopoly effectively becoming the world gatekeeper of information and behavior, using AI to instantaneously censor information and silence people on a global scale.
They've been peddling lies and fake news for decades and hiding behind press freedom while they do it. This applies to ALL of them before anyone starts any partisan bollocks.
This is all about profit, plain and simple.
There are numerous steps that Facebook could take that would allow them to positively identify every single registered user. This would reduce the potential for fake content, because anyone found to be posting the same would be identifiable, would lose their accounts and would not be able to re-activate them.
The problem is that not only might this discourage people from creating an account, but it would also introduce an operational cost for Facebook themselves, since they would have to pay people to review such content and make decisions about revoking access.
But it is possible, all of it.
In fact, this is an excellent example of the reason that there needs to be a tighter form of regulation around companies like Facebook, because - as this example clearly shows - unless there is a legal obligation for Facebook to do something, they won't - because it will dent their profits. Going even further, strengthening the requirement for Facebook (and similar organisations) to establish the identity of users doesn't really have a material impact on the free speech of those users. Facebook wouldn't be telling those people what to write or not write. Instead, they would be making their users accountable for their actions.
Which, on reflection, seems entirely reasonable.
No, I don't have a Facebook account. Never have. Never will.
Hit a nerve there, haven't I?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Whenever an individual is visible to a surveillance for profit business they become a commodity. Facebook shadow profiles are the perfect example. You can't opt out, all you have to do is visit a web site with a Facebook link and they own you. It's so ubiquitous it's impossible to avoid.
Since it is all about selling your information there are negative economic incentive for privacy or avoidance of falsehoods. If lies increase volume there is more profit to be had. Whatever they say about user privacy or upholding standards is propaganda in support of the business model. It also gives cover to executives who want to pretend they are not complicit in illegal and damaging behavior.
A counter example exists: medical information. HIPPA strongly protects patient information and data breaches are severely punished. Medical organizations can be shut down for failure so the protections work.
As long as for profit commercial surveillance is routine nothing will change. It's disruptive to the economy, society, democracy and national security, but that will be ignored as long as big business can buy political policy on the cheap. They're making vast amounts of money now and nothing else matters.
Why is Snark Required?
Join the club, but don't blame a free press for it and don't blame sides selectively. Blame all who are guilty or none.
You say votes are being found days after, in South Carolina they found hundreds stuffed behind office furniture in Republican administrative buildings, plus a box found behind a fire escape, in 2000. Curiously, you only go for the side you don't like.
Sure, you'll get the sympathy of those on your side. You're a tribe and tribes don't give a shit about facts. The left have done the same in the past, maybe they're doing it now. Curiously, I have no sympathy for the one-sided being on the wrong side. I reject lawbreaking by any side, but I've no sympathy for thieves who get broken into. Be fair, be honest or be abused by someone. If karma's a birch, if you reap what you sow, that's your issue. Not mine.
And, yes, truth is facts. Indeed, the only truth is facts. Everything else is subjective opinion.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
My wife an dI deleted our Facebook accounts when the Cambridge Analytica thing was exposed. Prior to that we only used Facebook to stay informed of what was going on with distant family members. We rarely posted to Facebook and then it was just to respond to something a family member had posted. I also have avoided buying an Oculus and went with a Vive because of Facebook's ownership.
We're just a couple of people in a massive user base but every little bit helps.
Facebook's role in spreading lies and disinformation is criminal and they must be held accountable. Look at the horrors abroad where Facebook was instrumental in genocide.
They are a privately held company and as such, they can censor people, moderate posts and remove users. They are not the government and are not held to the 1st Amendment's freedom of speech. If they wanted, they could do an exceptional job of cleaning up the mess they created but they won't because it cuts into profits. It's incredibly disgusting that Facebook places money above their own country's well-being and above the lives of marginalized people in the world.
They have never censored, just as Fox News has never censored.
What you're objecting to is not censorship, but preference.
Facebook is entitled to an opinion other than yours.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
... I'd opine that facebook will not want to put forth the amount of effort that is needed to solve the 'false information ' problems it faces. They may try to solve it via PRs that say how wonderful of a job they are doing, but they will not want to solve the root problem.
Social media should probably be banned.
People should have personal peer-to-peer web servers that provide such functionality.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Who decides what is fake and what is their agenda?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Worrying that nonsense like this gets modded "+5 insightful".
A recent documentary on Channel 4 showed that Facebook is very reluctant to censor anything, often allowing really extreme material to remain up. That's because such material is profitable, and Facebook's main goal is to make money.
The fake news and propaganda is making Facebook lose money because people don't want to go there and don't trust them any more. Plus Zuck got hauled in front of Congress which has bad optics, so they are doing something about it. Granted, it's mostly marketing.
So the claim that their purpose is censorship is clearly, demonstrably bullshit. It's part of a conspiracy theory that maintains that all the real news is censored, and everything you see is fake and what the shadowy all powerful leftist censors want you to see.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
If profile pics are any indication... no.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
https://www.theguardian.com/bo...
Whether you agree with Dr Zuckerberg or not, it's interesting what she has discovered in the way of misinformation and the practices.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
And doubtless the Pope will claim 1+1=2.
And?
Dressing up doesn't mean a statement is right or wrong. The statement being right makes it right. Facts really are immutable, there is only one universe and we're all in it. We do not live in alternative realities.
The church made claims about reality that were falsified. As per William of Occam, we can reject them. That means those statements were wrong. It doesn't mean reality is whatever you want it to be. If it was, then they couldn't have been wrong.
This is so obvious.
You have no magic wishes and cannot mutate reality to conform to your desires. I know this because there is only the one reality. One set of facts. One world. One reality. You can have as many opinions on all of that as you like, but you cannot change a single fact. You can lie, cheat and steal, but you can't tell reality what to do.
The fact that the church got one thing right, over 2,000 years, is hardly a surprise. I Ching has a better score. Not is it a surprise that criticizing a speaker rather than critiquing the argument is the strategy of choice in those who prefer to make up their own facts.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Facts are immutable.
There is no dispassionate dispenser of "facts". Facts can be reported out of context. Some facts can be omitted, while others amplified. What are considered "facts" one day can be found to be falsehoods the next. And facts can be spun together to paint a misleading or partisan narrative.
If you think that facts favour the left, question why you're on the right.
If you think "facts" favor the left, then question your own bias.
Claiming that "misinformation" and "junk news" on social media has any widespread impact on how a majority of people vote is a red herring (and on HRC's very long list of "reasons" why she lost). Most of the people I know that vote in every election cycle don't even use social media. Old people vote much more frequently than young ones. This is an undeniable and time proven fact. Old people also use social media at almost unquantifiably small rates.
Why can't we go back to using jumpers to configure slot adapter cards? Why? I say!
This post is a perfect example of the garbage that the right-wing noise machine loves to produce and amplify. It's aggressive, dishonest, makes far reaching conclusions with no factual basis, feeds a persecution complex, and treats the left as some kind of boogeyman responsible for all that is bad.
Not only will they control everything you see they will also control everything you can say and do by threatening to cut you off from their increasingly mandatory monopoly for any reason they feel like.
Projecting is another strong suit of the right-wing machine.
FFS, the President of the United States just revoked the white house pass of a journalist, supported the action with a doctored video from an Infowars contributor, and threatened to revoke the pass of another journalist.
officially so you have no right to complain according to liberals....Ahhh America...land of the Free...
It's not liberals' fault that the right wing immerses itself in conspiracy theories and lies.
If the right wing would clean up its own house, a cartel of megacorporations wouldn't have to.
Your victimization is self inflicted.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Yes. I think that Facebook can keep the "Free World"'s large-scale misinformation to itself. ;)
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
Facebook should be clearly labeled as a game environment populated by people who volunteer to be game pieces.
FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY
By consenting to our Terms of Service, you agree to enter into a legal contract where you affirm that the content is provided by you (Member) and is subject to our guidelines and you further stipulate that all content that you post is your original material and that only then can the material be shared.
By voluntary participation in this platform, you do hereby indicate that you have a full and complete understanding that Facebook is intended for polls asking, by way of example, but not by way of limitation, if you are a sunflower or a marigold and you will post obligatory duckface photos with your friends eating nachos at Frank's Dill Pickle Tofu Bar.
Finally, you, the Member will attest and affirm that you are well aware that the content of your Facebook Timeline is just a mishmash of chaotic syrupy shit not to be taken seriously.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
But muh FACTS(tm)(c)(r)!!!!1!!!11!!!
Respek muh authoritay!!!
Anything that facilitates interpersonal communication also facilitates the spreading of false rumors. I'm not sure there's any way around that short of hard AI. Think of the Nigerian scams that appeared as soon as email became common.
Now the one way that is shown to work fairly well is to increase the cost of communicating. That didn't eliminate chain letters, or false advertising, but it sure reduced it. However that comes with other secondary costs.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Robert Francis O'Rourke tried to capitalize on the nickname "Beto" to appeal to Hispanic voters (even though he's 4th generation Irish American). And he is open to abolishing ICE which is responsible for finding and deporting illegal immigrants and criminals - gangsters and thugs.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
> Conservative snowflakes would howl with protest that their "alternative facts" are being censored.
If you don't howl with protest when ANYONE is censored then you have no business calling yourself a liberal.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> They have never censored, just as Fox News has never censored.
They have censored me numerous times. Some of those times didn't involve anything that could any way be considered rude, objectionable, illegal or misleading. I just said something someone disagreed with.
The FB police will censor and ban you over nothing more than that.
All it takes is a little mild deviation from their liberal narrative. You don't even have to be mean about it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It's amazing that this has to be pointed out in 2018... you might think "not free" is better than "free" but prohibiting speech is inherently "not free"
Facebook's standards are set by the Atlantic Council (http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/) think tank. I doubt they are going to treat peace makers of either the left or right favourably.
The problem is that people believe what they read without doing proper research.
Nobody claimed science was about truth, besides yourself.
You throw up more and more straw men, each one knocked down. Give it up.
Why should I define a fact, when you claim to have all the answers? You talk of the church but are the only one here with the divine revelations. Curious.
If you don't think you know how I define fact, then you can claim nothing about such a definition until you know it. In that case, you, not I, are the one with the religious doctrine.
If you claim you do know, then you are definitely nothing more than a preacher.
You want to know how I define facts? Then ask nicely. As long as you're the Taliban of wisdom, you are asking nothing.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)