Election's Over, Facebook Gets Back to Spreading Misinformation(vanityfair.com) |
Election's Over, Facebook Gets Back to Spreading Misinformation(vanityfair.com) |
These systems are just outright abused for political purposes. It’s just gaslighting to claim they serve some higher purpose.
I don’t think it’s illegal for platforms to censure information for obliquely political purposes, but I personally find it extremely distasteful.
The asymmetry between Facebook users and Facebook users is enormous. One has the power to spend vast sums on advertising to attract new users, maintain a clean brand image with PR, monitor non-users' actions across the internet and beyond and algorithmically manipulate the emotions and beliefs of its users, etc.
What power do you or I have to justify splitting the moral responsibility with them 50/50? More education is always a good thing, but it's too late to tell 1.62 billion daily active users (Q3 2019) "You should know better". Facebook has become too good at what it does.
I don't know what the answer is. But whatever it is, letting Facebook carry on doing what it does and expecting society to change around it isn't going to work.
FB opened GA I might guess (hope) they open it all after the inauguration
But they do want to promote content to us, because their entire business model depends on keeping us in a never-ending scrolling algorithmic stupor.
So there’s the catch-22. I don’t want them promoting falsehoods. And most falsehoods only survive be being more interesting, more salacious, more engaging than the truth - so unless the system has some bias against them, it will prefer them.
If there’s a magical solution to not promoting falsehoods without deciding what’s false - there’s probably a lot of money waiting for you.
Have you're political beliefs been 100% completely static your entire life? Have you ever realized you were wrong about something, and that your previous belief was a falsehood?
Now obviously social media is not the same as traditional media, but they have the same reach, and with orders of magnitude less latency and more virality. I'm not sure how you propose the government and legal system can stay on top of this—by the time the courts hear about something weeks, months and years later the damage has been done and the news cycle has moved on.
It's not ideal for Facebook to be the arbiter of truth (and neither do they want that responsibility), but operationally any solution has to be deeply embedded within their systems.
That was until 1987 the Reagan administration eliminated the Fairness Doctrine... thanks Reagan!
>I'm not sure how you propose the government and legal system can stay on top of this
In my country, (the United States) we have a principal in our cultural called "freedom of speech". It basically means that we do not propose or tolerate any mechanisms for general political speech to be "kept on top of" (or "fact checked" or declared "misinformation"). People are free to decide for themselves what to believe, and when you think something is wrong you publish an argument against it. It may be different in your country.
It's also less than ideal that they body-check facts from right leaning news sources far more than left leaning. FTR, I'm Libertarian not typical left/right.
I posted a humorous meme, and it was tagged with a couple different "get the facts" messages, which was just plain stupid and kind of funny, even drawing in comments to that effect.
In the end, it's hard to trust most of the media sources without getting news/pov from multiple left/right/foreign sources. I'm starting to think that anything that is opinion based over facts in news reporting should have a big red label of "OPINION, NOT NEWS!" on it in order to receive any protection from libel, including videos for a couple seconds. I also think that any social media org that has more than 25% of a country as its' users should probably have to comply with the same free speech norms as a government agency would.
I work in the elections space, and while some things seem really fishy, it's hard to take any of it without a grain of salt considering how many of the things I've seen being accused are purely BS from people who don't know/understand what's happening. I mean, I'm pretty sure there was some fishy stuff going on in at least some places, but I just don't know what to believe anymore... and that's almost worse than just picking a side.
I think having peer review opportunities would go a long way over some of the paid and algorithmic review options. Even if you had a hidden Karma like here and other sites and was randomly chosen to "review" judge/vote on content posts... maybe not private messages, but say public posts or group posts... just a general thumbs up/down.. and the quorum is comprised of say 3-5 randomly selected each of left/right/other for a decent mix. You get a 55% quorum for violation, the post then goes to FB for review/action.
Reviews are done by those in the same locality of the person posting. Private groups or message posts go directly to FB monitors... but there's no reason not to have a community judge for itself if something is over the line.
You mean statements like this?