This is an example of a statistic designed to show progress without offering insight into the underlying problem, which is the insidious effect social networks have had on civil discourse. Absolute numbers are of little help in judging whether Facebook is actually addressing that issue in a meaningful way. It seems plausible that the main motivation for numbers like these is to fend off legislation to force social networks to take more responsibility for content, which would undermine Facebook's business model.

It's not all that different from the US military using body count numbers as part of propaganda to support continued funding for the Vietnam war. Here's a better reference to the controversy associated with those efforts.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_body_count_controv...

Just like needing technical support, so you call sales instead.

Or when you say you’re going to cancel just so you “unlock” the retention deals.

Such is the MBA league game of modern life.

Not that I make a habit of it, but sometimes something really annoys me on Facebook, but there's rarely an option that explains the actual problem. For example the other day I got a friend request from some young woman which I didn't accept (but left the request there encase it turned out to somebody who didn't look like their profile). A few days later the request turns into a young Indian looking man. I think most people can agree that bate and switch is bad behaviour for a social media network, but I couldn't find an option to report it using their limited interface.

Next step - how to prevent Sybil accounts created by the bounty hunters from generating new mal-content on an industrial scale for bounty hunters to identify for reward.

I can't think of anything harder than that to scale.

Busses on the Moon was the preserve of the Sunday Sport.

The Daily Heil or Sun reliably gave anti-trans, anti-EU - always anti-something, and hard right sympathy of the "we hate the NF/BNP, but immigrants should stop..." variety, occasionally far more blatant.

Most knew what they were avoiding, as well as what they were choosing from their daily.

Now thanks to facebook illegal political advertising and fringe groups like Britain First - who Facebook took years to ban - have gained a voice that reaches a very wide audience, where everyone appears as credible as everyone else if they can play the social media game.

Until it was eventually generally known what they were, Britain First stuff was shared by all sorts of people whose main failing was believing a story or meme someone shared - because it came from someone they knew.

We either expect everyone to be deeply untrusting and cynical of their friends and family all the time - which they're not and cannot be. Or we require some standards of Facebook, finally.

So if the bot-detection algorithm works by lifetime customer value, it would cull real accounts and leave the bots alone.

chuckle

Do you propose that in earnest in order to save the democracy[1]? Or are you being ironic and it's simply lost on me...?

What other words would you put on the moderation graylist? "Death penalty", "whistleblower", "sexual assault", "guns", "public education", "welfare", "war", "weapons of mass destruction"? Let's top it up with "conspiracy theory" and "fake news", just to max out the irony meter.

[1] or the republic, where applicable

When your root-cause analysis turns up an intractable problem that can't be solved, then maybe turn the intractable problem against itself.

Instead of eliminating filter bubbles and confirmation bias, encourage them. Herd the haters, trolls and propagandists into their own subgroups and shadow-ban them so people outside the group can't see them.

It doesn't solve the problem of confirmation bias, but it might help contain it and prevent wider contamination.

Does not fix confirmation bias, because people who are in deep in their own little holes don't want to know

I find conspiracy theories to be almost like some sort of sci-fi / fantasy lore.

I love watching stuff like Ancient Aliens, I know it is complete nonsense but it is fun laughing at all the begging the question they do.

My other half believes in some super natural stuff such as horoscopes etc and she gets a bit annoyed at me and my brother taking the mickey out of it but that is about as far as the "harm" goes with most of this stuff.

Trying to stop people believing in crazy things just isn't possible and actively trying to suppress it online will just make it worse.

I'll go out on a limb and say this though: right-focused news organizations have conditioned the US conservative base to believe highly editorialized articles that aren't fact-based (wether or not the actual assertions of the articles are true or not). I believe that style has seeped into other news outlets as well, but those right-leaning news sources have a head start and at this point their audience is more susceptible.

Maybe in a few years the difference will be negligible, but right now it's not.

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586

"Conservatives were more likely to share articles from fake news domains, which in 2016 were largely pro-Trump in orientation, than liberals or moderates"

We can speculate as to why. In my opinion, anti-intellectualism is far more virulent on the right than left. Nearly every single left-leaning politician is pro-science and accepts the scientific consensus on a broad range of issues. Conversely, most conservative politicians are anti-science, reject scientific consensus on a broad array of subjects, and consistently parrot mythology in its place. In fact it has become extremely common for conservatives to dislike and distrust higher education, academia, and research all together. It is a common trope in conservative media to attack scientific research as "pointless" and "expensive" and to use religious leaders to discuss intellectual or scientific topics.

Any ideology which preaches anti-intellectualism and mythology over science, evidence, etc, is necessarily more vulnerable to being co-opted in other evidenceless subjects.

Dev tools > Responsive Design Mode in the top right, then back on the main page, selected a phone model. I had to reload the page for it to show the phone version of the site.

And 10k comments taking it for face value, getting riled up over a screenshot of some text. Often when you google the headline, you either can't find it or it's on some bullshit website. Or you read the article and the tweet text everyone is replying to is 100% bullshit like any other clickbait.

It's not just Facebook.

It's not "social media" which is doomed, but it's our systems of government. China does just fine with controlled social media that is heavily censored precisely as the government wishes. It's not social media which is doomed, it's democracy, because authoritarians can exert power and control.

It reminds me of the Paradox of Tolerance. [1]

So long as social networks (and we as a society) tolerance this anti-intellectualism and choose fake news over real news, real information can never flourish.

But what can you do? Pass laws (which explicitly violate our American 1st Amendment)? Wait on Facebook to fix one of their biggest engagement (read: profit) drivers? Or just let everything come crashing down and shrug?

Who knows. The answer is aggressive moderation and banning fake news. Recreating the culture of intellectualism and truth. Emphasizing critical thinking. But I am extremely pessimistic that anything will (or even can) be done.

We're in meme-fueled political quicksand. I don't want to sound defeatist, but maybe after a generation or two passes and the millenials are older, this type of information warfare won't be nearly as effective [2]. Until then... good luck.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

[2] https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586 ("We also find a strong age effect, which persists after controlling for partisanship and ideology: On average, users over 65 shared nearly seven times as many articles from fake news domains as the youngest age group.")

And in the US it maybe a case that they are targeting their base voters. But in other countries with compulsory voting they are targeting swing voters. And those people absolutely will hit the report button.

An anonymous fake news article has no risk or accountability for its author, that's the main difference.

Basically all scientific or logical analysis about power generation yields a pro-nuclear conclusion and thus anti-nuclear campaigners tend to make arguments about priorities rather than claim their opponents are anti-science; they argue the risks are underestimated, the costs of waste are too high etc.

As for GMO foods, again, the scientific consensus is there are no health problems with them, which is why the anti-GMO argument tends to be of the form "but what if they're just so super long term problems that we haven't seen them yet" (a.k.a. the EU's precautionary principle on blocking GMO foods from competing with EU farmers).

Look at it the other way around - lots of climate change skeptics make deeply scientific arguments, typically pointing out errors or mistakes in papers, cases of previous predictions that turned out to be false and so on. That doesn't make them anti-science, it arguably makes them campaigners for better science.

Renewable energy is not theoretical.

> nasty stuff conveniently packed into cylinders, ready for dropping into the continental shelf

Your plan for highly radioactive waste is to put it in canisters and drop them into the ocean.. sure, what could possibly go wrong?