I don't think it's a coincidence that Facebook is building censorship tools at the same time they are talking about "fake news". It seems that the tooling to deal with both of these "problems" has a lot of overlap and could potentially be the same.

I lived in China for almost a decade during its economic rise, and many predicted an opening and democratization of China. But it always seemed to me that the US was becoming more like China rather than the other way around, and so far I haven't been disappointed.

Blame the business community that realized you could have a market economy within an authoritarian putatively communist government. Now they've been pushing hard to mold the whole world in that image under mantle of free trade.

I think it's a bit unfair to blame this squarely on the market economy. There's high levels of social fragmentation in the West leading towards the desire to censor the other side's speech.

Are you saying that a fragmented society in itself necessarily motivates censorship, that diversity causes repression? What is the engine of this desire?

I wonder how many of them have managed to actually sell into this market.

It really looked like china was going to open up in 2008 before backtracking in a serious way for he next 10 years. You are probably right about the US, though it has a long way to go, maybe look at the U.K. or Austrailia?

If it's 100% public as to what exactly is being censored: the when, the who, the what, etc - an uncensored list of this - then that'd be a very different situation than something done behind closed doors.

The question of whether we should or how could we trust Facebook or any government if they did publish a list - is it complete or not? How would we know an algorithm isn't reducing it's reach solely because it is on a specific list?

I don't understand - obviously they wouldn't publish such a list in China, and what good would it do outside of China? Admittedly, Chinese who break through the GFW would find it useful, but given that I have a hard time imagining the Chinese government accepting FB if they did publish such a list outside of China.

That's really not a fair comparison. What they are saying is actually:

1) "We can't automate the stopping of fake news without hiring an army of trained human censors"

2) "Although since China already has an army of trained censors, it'd be easy to fix stuff for them with an API"

Edit, forgot to save, sorry:

The implication on #1 there is that for Facebook the cost is not worth it. Whether or not you agree with that is fine, but it's incredibly unfair to call it the same problem as China's censorship. It would cost Facebook something like $2-4 billion per year in labor to deploy a similar solution for just the united States

Taking a stab at a naive calculation, $3B worth of $60K/yr positions is 50,000 employees.

Yup except China uses like 100k workers for ~200m online users, so scale up a bit.

At a rate of 0.5%, the job is going to have to be extremely unskilled in order to get enough hires.

It's a rate of 0.007% for China by virtue of their 1.5b population.

0.5% of online users.

Right but they don't have to hire from only that pool.

I think I'm not being clear. Using the China example, the number of censors required is 0.5% of the number of online users regardless of whether the censors are members of the "online users" group or not.

Maybe, it could be that it doesn't scale linearly though. All I know is where the numbers are at now (or actually, a year or two ago).

A $60k/yr employee costs more like $100k-$140k/yr, depending on the area. Taxes, Benefits, insurance, office space, equipment, support employment (HR, Legal, etc).

It is, of course, much easier to tell if a piece of news is inconvenient or objectionable to the powerful than it is to tell if it's true. That's what makes the recent push to ban fake news and its laser-like focus on items that are pro-Trump or anti-Clinton so scary.

Has there been anyone gathering statistics on this? i.e. were there also pro-Clinton fake news sites that we didn't hear about? And what are the percentages like?

I don't know if a objective analysis of this is possible, but has anyone even tried?

Well a lot of Media stayed silent on DNC scandal. CNN said general public shouldn't have possession of Wikileak's documents and should only rely on media for the information on Wikileaks.

What pisses me off with a lot people taking a moral stand against trump saying he is fascist, misogynist, racist (which is true btw) is that they ignore that Hilary voted yes for Iraq war, invaded Libya and look at Syria. Three failed countries where countless people have died and continue to die. Where is your morality now?

I don't think anyone has tried, and I'm not sure how you'd even tell - there's no solid definition of "fake news". For example, a story from a site called Bipartisan Report which claimed that Trump would eliminate overtime pay for 20 million Trump voters was doing the rounds a few days ago: http://bipartisanreport.com/2016/11/21/breaking-trump-announ... It's not true - the total number of Americans affected is about 4 million, their figure probably included every Trump voter earning under the new threshold, including unemployed, self-employed and retired people, and people who were already eligible for overtime anyway. They also have a handful of Snopes entries associated with them: http://www.snopes.com/search/?q=bipartisan+report Is this fake news or just sloppy reporting from a third-rate site?

To be fair, do you want a Facebook censorship board?

Facebook is already deciding what you see, that's a fundamental part of their business model. An editorial board deciding which stories get promoted is nothing different from what they already do.

The more fundamental problem is that Facebook makes it far easier and more profitable to run a cheap website stuffed with completely made-up stories than an actual newspaper, because it is much easier to catch people's attention with an outrageous fake headline than with boring real news.

Agreed. They already decided a long time ago to "manipulate" what you saw. That was the point where they decided to not simply show the latest items for all the pages you "liked", but to rather promote the "popular" ones based on what your "interests" are.

Now that they did that, then all of a sudden "oh fake news". If they had just kept it to latest first, from only the pages you liked, then there would be no way for them to "wiggle in" such a thing as "fake news". On the one, the person's choices dictate what they see later on, and on the other Facebook has to "tune" things to your liking.

That's why there is such an dark-pattern on Facebook when you try to "UnLike" a page. I urge everyone to go give it a try and tell me if it's intuitive or obvious.

That already exists. Just try posting a photo of a female nipple.

As mentioned, it already exists and it's not democratic and you can't complain about it or anything. Completely useless fascist censorship board.

You seem to believe "fascist" is the opposite of "democratic".

How would you call a Communist state? Democratic? Fascist?

The Facebook editorial board already existed, and got decried as a liberal conspiracy.

I really don't see how Facebook wins here.

Facebook doesn't win.

Which is good. Because it would be sad if collaborators in human oppression on the largest scale still happening in the modern era were the winners.

Why does it have to win? Maybe it's wrong on all counts?

What would it mean, what would it look like, for Facebook to "win here?"

To be fair, a lot of it is fake news. So much crap is "reported" about China that a lot of often exaggerated and spun in a certain way.

So I can definitely see why the Chinese government wants to protect itself.

I think Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" should be required watching to understand how real news can be spun to be positive or negative, e.g. 1 in 10 people die from this drug vs. 90% of people are saved with this medicine.

That's what China is trying to protect itself against.

> To be fair, a lot of it is fake news. So much crap is "reported" about China that a lot of often exaggerated and spun in a certain way.

This is just an excuse.

The rich and powerful in any country wanted to control media. They need fake news and make them prominent. They certainly can eliminate them easily; just like they would to censor real news. But they do need them to become prominent so people can buy in that censorship is necessary.

> This is just an excuse.

Possibly, but in case this happens to be true it may be hard to convince them to give up on censoring Western media, right?

AFAIK, the censorship is driven by the fear that the western media's intention is to subvert the CCP ruling. Fake news were never a problem. Unless the fake news has the same effect. But in that case, it's not difficult to disapprove the claim anyway.

China's Internet is full of junk and fake information. A while ago a poor young man's family spent their life's saving on hospital treatment that in reality does not help anything. Their belief comes from a seemingly legitimate source on Baidu Tieba. And just a few days ago, a patient believed that a doctor maliciously ignore his request to treat his daughter according to the fake "treatment" from some online search results. And stubbed the doctor 9 times, one of them pierced the doctor's heart.

Such stuff are routinely ignored, why? Because they do not pose a threat to the government's ruling. Instead, they actually reinforce the fact that government control over media is needed, which obviously is a vote to their continued ruling.

Another joke I learned recently perfectly explains this fact: In a community there is an abandoned car. The residents repeatedly ask the community manager to move it and no one did anything. Then one day someone painted "democracy, freedom" on the car, then the car disappeared next day...

That and trying to pretend events like Tiananmen Square never happened.