I've been hearing this from a lot of people lately, but every time I do, I can't help but think we've got it backwards. People aren't becoming worse because of clickbait and fake news. Clickbait and fake news are becoming worse because of people.

Long before there was Facebook, plenty of people bought and read magazines and newspapers like the National Enquirer and the Daily Mail. The only difference now is that those people, just like everyone else, have access to much more of that content thanks to the internet. Taking that content away from those people isn't going to make them smarter. It's just going to make them angrier and more determined to seek that stuff out.

In my opinion, the only real solution is improving education, but no one wants to talk about that because that's the hard way. It's much easier to demand that certain news sources be censored or that certain news aggregators impose a bias against them, but that's a very dangerous road to travel down. Today, people are talking about sources like banning Breitbart and The Daily Caller, which is well-meaning, but how long will it be before people start talking about banning sources like The Intercept or The Guardian? There are certainly plenty of people in both political parties that would gladly slap the labels of "clickbait" and "fake news" on them as well.

This "bad" content is coming from everywhere, too. Recently, most of the factually-inaccurate content has been coming from, or has been in support of, the alt-right. But in the past a lot came from the far-left as well, and there's always inflammatory agenda-driven propagandist content come from extremist groups of all types. Every group with an agenda to push can easily slide from fact-based content to exaggerated content to outright false content in an attempt to be heard, and that's much easier today than it ever used to be.

Education would help, but only if the sources of the content people are seeing can be identified and judged by them. I have an even more difficult solution: integrity, self-control, and professional restraint on the part of the content producers. I think we lost that when news became entertainment, and I have little hope that we'll ever get it back.

I'm not advocating government control, but that's definitely where Trump is heading with his "FAKE NEWS media... is the enemy of the American People!"[1] He's trying to go down the path of many tyrants, discrediting all sources of information except for those run by or blessed by the state. The way content is distributed today, with so much noise and so little clarity, directly feeds into Trump's agenda that it's all illegitimate except for the sources that he's personally vouching for.

I don't really know what the solution might be. Google's been able to develop very good algorithms for identifying spam, mostly in email but also in Google Voice and their web search results. They've also got pretty good classifiers that can automatically tag content. Maybe Facebook, Twitter, and other sharing sites need that kind of algorithm to tag everything that's posted. Fake news would have a much harder time getting distributed if it had a big "FAKE" label applied to it. The devil's in the details though; we already know how Facebook's Like buttons get gamed, and we wouldn't want that for tagging. Tagging should be showing you the information you don't want to know, but need to know.

[1] https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/83270829351663206...

We have a representative government, which means that the fundamental evaluation a voter must make is whether or not they trust a candidate. Humans are innately very very good at this, and it doesn't require much education to get right. Mostly what it would require is convincing people to vote for the representative that they trust the most, rather than any particular issues, which are likely to be far too dynamical to really evaluate.

Yes, but now there's a difference: a zero-cost, near-zero-friction platform for fake news distribution. Today's fake news peddlers don't have to pay for space at supermarket checkout counters and newsstands, or pay for paper and ink. They just have to throw their product onto the platform and from there it literally distributes itself.

In other words, Facebook disrupted fake news.

It is true there has always been an appetite for trash. It's also true that the forces of industrial psychology and sociology have never before been so mobilized to maximize consumer behavior and minimize critical thought.

It's not one or the other -- it's both.

I'm not sure if this is the core of the problem, if at all. Most of what you see on facebook are links shared by your network. If your "friends" are sharing and re-sharing clickbait fake news, you see clickbait fake news. This is evident in groups on whatsapp where there is no algorithmic intervention and it is still an endless stream of misinformation (in most diverse groups). This also mirrors real world echo chambers.

If you do have have some suggestions for solving this problem, it would be great to discuss here.

Except FB's said [0] that the four main factors for what you see are who posted, age of article, article type, and interactions. The last factor is key as FB wants articles to draw eyeballs in order to sell ads. Thus, it sounds like the algorithm doesn't produce newsfeeds that are representative of what a majority of friends are reading v. that of a select, active few. I think the parent is arguing that FB could turn this off and improve newsfeed information quality at the cost of lower revenues.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/06/ultimate-guide-to-the-news...

I'd be happy if a Facebook2 came around to only do what Facebook did, but I'm pretty sure no one would sign up since everyone is already on Facebook anyway.

These days I try only to connect to messenger, there I can keep in touch with friends without the "news feed" functionality.

2. Maintain a public bug list not on software issues but social issues being created by social networks. These cannot be solved by software developers and need expertise from many other domains.

3. Look at Wikipedia, Stackoverflow/Stackexchange, Apache , Linux etc where contributing members of the community all have agendas. Yet they are kept in check. There is huge institutional experience here baked into these platforms on how to deal with competing (unconstructive/damaging) agendas. Bring people on board from these kind of orgs and experts in sociology, ecology, behavioral psycology that oversee fixes to "society effecting" bugs.

4. There needs to be a long term plan for media so they arent just pandering to the lowest common denominator. Journalists must be certified and ranked on quality every year.

Then how would they make money?

Plus I'm not convinced ads are the thing killing media. People are. Anyone is a journalist these days.

I don't see how Facebook or their CEO is to blame. MySpace could've been in the same position had they continued to innovate. Networking with friends and strangers online is one thing the internet was built for.

I read the manifesto, and I don't understand the outcry in response to that.

I understand the outcry against the pervasiveness of Facebook. It can be annoying if you use it too much. That said, If there were a better media alternative, people would use that instead.

Another would be government funding. Many countries still do this for national broadcasters and to compensate music artists (a tax on owning TVs and a tax on recorded media). That option carries its own obvious problems, but it is an option. It's just not the option that would give IPO in the sky stock return opportunities.

I agree that it's not the ads themselves that are killing media. The problem is how ad revenue forces Facebook and newspapers to heavily optimize for time spent on site, and the end result is the "filter bubble" where you get more content you like, and less content you don't like.

You might as well take away net neutrality if you want the government to influence Facebook via funding and whatever else comes with it. That would be a giant thumb on the scale.

I think that assumes that the truly valuable content on facebook is the "trash content" people are sharing.

If I'm speaking for myself, I love status updates, baby photos, dinner photos, and the mundane content created by my actual friends.

If I could never see another "shared article" I think I'd be OK with that. I wouldn't like facebook less because of that, I think I'd probably like it more.

If they make money off selling adds around the stuff I'm paying attention to, then they could still make money without driving the news and quiz sharing.

People become "journalists" because there's money in it, through ads. Ads pay the same whether your article is worth reading or terrible blogspam. Said people realize that, and go with the least effort/profit maximizing strategy which is buzzfeed level articles, partly because ad providers will pay anyways, and partly because deontology isn't a matter to themAds keep paying the same, and other people see "journalists" make money this way. It's a vicious cycle. Journalists from reputable sources are salaried, and usually don't have to resort to this tactic.

Facebook is one hundred percent to blame. By reaching so many users and being so prominent in all those users' lives, they are directly responsible if they choose to stuff trash quality articles, which directly influence opinions, in there because it's the more profitable option.

People are dumb, and faillible. It's incredibly easy to sway their opinion one way or the other. You are, I am, we all are easily influencable. All that's different is the amount of fact checking that's done after.

Crap takes a few different forms. I have friends that post an excessive number of cooking videos and cute animal gifs, which has close to zero informational value, but on the other hand I enjoy the simple things in life too. More worrying crap come sin the form of poorly-written news or analysis articles that are shared and often written in good faith, but which are misleading and require either time and effort to debunk, or an acceptance that some of your friends are credulous fools. This is aggravating but it's also unavoidable in a free society with a free press - people are going to disagree in good faith and some of the time and arguments are inevitable.

The third kind of crap is the most worrying, where people deliberately troll and spread rumors for either quick profit or to injure others. This can often tip over into hate speech, and unlike most people I think the first amendment saw that the solution to unwanted speech is more speech fails in this domain, because many of the participants are not acting in good faith, and leverage the idea of unlimited speech as a means to curtail the liberties of others rather than in pursuit of any equitable outcome.

This interview might provide an interesting insight into the (pre-facebook) psychology of deliberately slanted news. I apologize for the source and the annotations; the original interview is from a media career site called Journalism Jobs (where I first came across it) but it's from 2003 and the original page has vanished off the website: http://zfacts.com/metaPage/lib/Weekly_Standard_Matt-Labash_c...

If you don't want to read it's basically a really cynical industry conversation where Labash, a conservative writer, opines that finding a cohort of angry people and pandering to them is a really easy way to make money. This could just as easily be applied to other political fringes.

So what? Most of the internet runs on ads.

> Facebook is one hundred percent to blame. By reaching so many users and being so prominent in all those users' lives, they are directly responsible if they choose to stuff trash quality articles, which directly influence opinions, in there because it's the more profitable option.

I think you underestimate how difficult it is to define "trash". Once you begin censoring "garbage", you introduce bias.

This is the reason our country has free speech. It's the only practical way to keep us from revolting.

Imagine if Facebook were owned by Trump or Bannon and they were removing "fake news". You would be even more upset, right?

> People are dumb, and faillible. It's incredibly easy to sway their opinion one way or the other. You are, I am, we all are easily influencable. All that's different is the amount of fact checking that's done after.

I agree. Do you learn better through your own experience or when someone tells you what to do all the time?

Which is an entirely other story, that in my opinion is even worse. But the point is in the entire paragraph. Most of these people do not become journalists to bring accurate and researched reporting. It's purely pecause there's money in it. Potentially lots. The guy working for the NYT and the guy working for Buzzfeed have two very, very different definitions of deontology.

>I think you underestimate how difficult it is to define "trash". Once you begin censoring "garbage", you introduce bias.

Removing obvious lies is a start. Which, for a start, would remove a good part of breitbart, infowars, and a few left leaning journals. And it's fine! Truth is not biased.

>This is the reason our country has free speech. It's the only practical way to keep us from revolting.

Your usage of free speech has been widely criticized in the entire world and no European country would trade their free speech for yours, for example. It could also be argued that a good old revolution might have made your country better. Dusting off that woefully outdated constitution, reworking your political system, etc. instead of worshipping it as some shining star.

>Imagine if Facebook were owned by Trump or Bannon and they were removing "fake news". You would be even more upset, right?

If they are _actual_ fake news (i.e. not what Trump considers fake news, but proper lies, or voluntary misdirection), I wouldn't give a damn as long as it is done on both sides.

>I agree. Do you learn better through your own experience or when someone tells you what to do all the time?

If it's something I actually want to learn? Myself. If it's something I don't really care about? Eh, I might let other people tell me about it. And that's the dangerous part. I have limited time and ability to do fact checking. It takes someone five minutes to type up a "Hillary Clinton doesn't enjoy poptarts and eats children" story, and an order of magnitude more for me to debunk it for everyone. Enough of those articles and it effectively overtakes truth in people's minds. That is the exact same thing in Facebook feeds. People are getting bombarded with articles, some accurate, many not. You simply cannot fitler them. Especially if you're not aware they are false. Critical thinking skills are one part of the solution. But until everyone is properly trained (and then the methods of propaganda will have evolved), for the good of society, people particularly vulnerable to it must be protected.

Also, let's not forget that a good majority of people are told what to do all the time, at leas tat work. It wouldn't be suprising that part of this behavior is translated to their personal time, which includes getting informed.

You definitely underestimate the difficulty of identifying bias. Words imperfectly define truth. Words can be ambiguous, even when you have a video recording. Reporting is always a bit biased, and if you filter topics at a macro level, that can introduce a huge bias.

> Your usage of free speech has been widely criticized in the entire world and no European country would trade their free speech for yours, for example.

Well guess what, Europe gets to be more liberal because it doesn't need to invest in as big a military as the US does. Our alliance held off opponents like fascism and Russia for awhile. It seems to be breaking down. Nobody appreciates the value of the alliance or why it was made.

/r/ShitAmericansSay

There's so much wrong here I don't know where to begin. First off, that's not the subject at hand, your point has _literally_ nothing to do with free speech in the US. But if you want to go into that, sure, let's go. America's oversized army and its need to wag its dick around is nothing to be proud of. The US military is as big as the combined 25 next countries, and they're all allies. Do not disguise american imperialism under the guise of protecting the world.

America threatened to pull out of NATO, and Europe reacted immediately, pushing for a european army. The biggest threat around is Russia, and it would be crushed by an european army. It's nobody's wish, but that's what would happen.

You held off fascism? Where? WW2? Yeah, so did Canada, the UK, Russia, etc. It's callied the Allied side, not the American side. Every european is grateful for the US presence, but let's not pretend the US is the sole reason for victory.

You held off Russia? On the threat of nuclear weapons? Good, we're all grateful. But that was the only threat, as the russian army was in shambles after WW2.

Alright dude. I said "our" alliance. It's been a joint effort that appears to be ending.

Have fun picking up the pieces as nationalism continues to rise in Europe.

> People are dumb, and faillible

There's the real problem.

I'm not a big fan of FB and don't have any ownership interest in it. However I think it's largely politically neutral and that Zuckerberg is just a bit out of his depth with the manifesto as opposed to being wickedly cynical - even though most people would peg me as a radical leftist.

the phenomenon that Facebook exemplifies is a real problem, and it's why I've been arguing in general terms for the destructiveness as capitalism as the only driving force in development and the superiority of protocols to platforms, so as to preserve a truly open and inclusive internet rather than one built around the extraction of economic rents. But I regard FB as a symptom rather than a cause, and try to save my anger for the people who are actively working to strip people of their rights and liberties as opposed to those who merely profit from applying technology to the existing but often unethical way of doing business.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/06/business/facebook-bends-t...

You probably don't gather enough information before jumping to conclusions. I am sick to the back teeth of people assuming disagreement must be a result of ignorance, doubly so for people whose idea of rebuttal is citing a single data point and extrapolating absurd conclusions from it.

> That’s the average amount of time, the company said, that users spend each day on its Facebook, Instagram and Messenger platforms (and that’s not counting the popular messaging app WhatsApp).

So that's not Americans it's users, and it's not FB, but I am hopeful that it's Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram, which I perceive for now are "task" based communications and sharing apps, not the "spam my friends and family with my political beliefs" stuff I don't want in nearly the amount that FB shovels at me.

You had me scared there for a moment, but I bet you are more right than wrong in your basic point It's probably the prime source of news in the western world. This is not to be underestimated.

Judging by the Facebook feeds of people I know, there seems to be plenty on Facebook.

I thie problem is less stamping out extremist views -- which as you point out is impossible -- but the maintstreaming of those views. And that mainstreaming is done at least partially via the Facebook sharing mechanism.

"In times like these, the most important thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us.

For the past decade, Facebook has focused on connecting friends and families. With that foundation, our next focus will be developing the social infrastructure for community — for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all."

"Our greatest opportunities are now global — like spreading prosperity and freedom, promoting peace and understanding, lifting people out of poverty, and accelerating science. Our greatest challenges also need global responses — like ending terrorism, fighting climate change, and preventing pandemics. Progress now requires humanity coming together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community."

Can anybody translate these to their real intentions?

You should read it then. Naturally facebook is the best bet at fixing the problems facebook are having. The manifesto seems like a quite well thought through vision for how to do that.

It exactly points out all the things people dislike about Facebook, filter bubbles, censorship etc., discusses the various approaches, pros and cons, and how they plan to proceed.

I don't really get how people are so upset about it. Maybe it's because it's so long that no one reads it, and thus have much stronger opinions.

Ignorance and the lack of critical thinking are probably more responsible here than Facebook.

In fact, FB is probably a detriment to my livelihood if anything.

Perhaps you have the mental context and farsightedness to just not log on. But, you still have to deal with the large scale socio-political consequences of the fact that billions of others can't resist logging on, can't resist the clickbait, or don't understand why they should.

Ditto "fake news", ditto Twitter disinfo hysteria, ditto any source of information, especially online. At some point the people have to take responsibility for, and validate themselves, what they read and believe.

Working through the haze of media manipulation is an extremely complex task. It requires a ton of interest, time, effort education, IQ and mental discipline. Most people don't have a chance to resist society-wide campaign of lies; they're absurdly outmatched.

This is the same reason we have enforced pension plans, etc. You could just say people should save their own money. That would work fine for me and you. But most people just don't have the mental context to delay gratification that long. Their brains are not adapted and not equipped for the modern world.

So it's wrong to feed them socially-destructive lies, for the same reason it's wrong to feed a dog well-labeled poisonous meat.

Who is it that determines which news is "real" and which is "fake"? The scientific establishment is a truly wondrous achievement of humanity, but it's not perfect and the idea that there are facts that are 100% verifiably completely obviously definitely true is just flat wrong (and a scientist or historian would be the first to tell you that!). There are plenty of "conspiracy theories" that turned out to be absolutely true (see: the intelligence community's activities throughout the Cold War, e.g. MKUltra). There are plenty of "well-known facts" from the past that we now consider nonsense (e.g., look at the 50s-70s and take your pick from all the things we "knew" about race, gender, and sexuality). I truly don't understand how people think that giving the status quo the power to enforce itself will somehow lead to a misinformation-free utopia. You can pick examples of these theories that (probably) don't have any likely value or credibility, but that's not very helpful without a plan for how exactly this would be separated from the stuff that has societal value.

(And all of that is ignoring the inevitability of the gatekeeper's selectively using this power to their advantage)

It should be borne in mind that quite a lot of misinformation - particularly historical controversy, or intelligence community activities - is not an "honest mistake", but the result of deliberate misdirection and outright fabrication. It's impossible to measure, and difficult to overstate, the toxic effect this has had on the public discourse, and it continues to this day[1].

I draw a distinction between open mindedness, in the scientific sense (where there is a correct answer that we just haven't found yet), and "truthy relativism" (where everyone's "opinions" and cockamamie stories are afforded equal weight). To be sure, it's tricky to come up with objective criteria to differentiate between the two that can be blindly applied without common sense - but I reject that the difference doesn't exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=George_John_Dasch...

Oh come on. If you don't like alcohol, don't drink it. Lots of people choose not to. As someone who drinks it a lot, it's not required or necessary to live or work, unlike other substances I consume (coffee, Archer Daniels Midland, Costco).

In fact, alcohol is probably a detriment to my livelihood if anything.

I signed into Spotify with my FB page years ago, and now my entire musical personae is tied to my FB account. This [1] is the closest I've come to finding directions on how to do it, and eventually I will, but right now...it's just so damn easy to stay logged in. Agreed that FB at this point in my life is a detriment, but they've locked themselves into other parts of my life that are not. They know this...that was their plan.

[1]https://community.spotify.com/t5/Accounts-and-Subscriptions/...

Sometimes I really should just ask instead of trying to do it all myself. Good to know. Facebook Free come this weekend.