Neutrality is a mirage. Journalism can and should be fair without trying to appear 'balanced' or neutral. For example, there aren't really two sides to climate change when 99% of scientists and experts agree. It's really only the news who tries to position issues as if they are competing arguments like sports teams. This seems like it's had a negative impact over all by giving a false equivalency, for politically motivated reasons, to issues that are by and large not contestable or debatable.

There is a debate, it's just not on the questions you're looking at.

Climate Change is by no means a 'settled' science, one of the most important questions scientists must answer is what the Climate Sensitivity is to CO2. There's a wide range of answers to this question by scientists, depending on which climate model you use, as well as many other factors.

http://imgur.com/a/vbOM0

The only debate is over the degree of how bad CO2 is, but we know it is 'bad enough' to be avoided. Whether it's really bad or just bad, we should move on to alternatives without that problem. As someone else said below, this is roughly like asking if there will be millions of climate refugees or billions?

Whether we are looking at 1.5C vs 8C is absolutely enormous in terms of what policies we should be looking to enact. Everything in this discussion is shrouded in a cloud of uncertainty due to the complexity of weather, and the thousands of negative and positive feedback loops which can take thousands of years to stabilize.

Popular science articles misrepresent the science and ignore the variance/complexity, in the end hurting the cause in the eyes of those who don't agree with the prescribed policies to address it.

There is really no way to control 3,000 people and have them all having the same understanding of and all applying the moderation criteria in the same way.

You'll be at the mercy of whichever out of 3,000 moderators ends up passing judgment on your post, whether they are liberal or conservative, whether they are having a good day or not, etc.

I don't see this going well for Facebook.

I think the networks way over-adopted the spirit of the FCC's Fairness doctrine (1) and the equal time rule (2). It's so easy to build controversy and call if "fair and balanced", which drives up ratings while suppressing the evolution of any meaningful progress in any of the affected areas.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_Doctrine (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule

I think a lot of it has to do with CNN and cable news presenting politics as sport. Jon Stewart's take down of Crossfire is still relevant and if anything, CNN doubled down on what Jon was criticizing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE

>"there aren't really two sides to climate change when 99% of scientists and experts agree"

So what exactly is this one side that 99% of experts agree upon?

That it's happening, that we're causing it, and that if we don't change something, we are fucked.

The only disagreements are on extent to which we will be fucked - will we see hundreds of millions of climate refugees, or billions.

> and that if we don't change something, we are fucked.

This simply isn't true, it's outlandish even, and is part of why moderation is tricky. Why do you believe this?

We are not 'fucked' even at the worst estimates.

In 1990 almost 2 billion people were on less than $2.00 per day.

Were we 'fucked' in 1990?

Are we currently 'fucked' with 700 million people on less than $2.00 per day.

When someone writes "we're fucked", the only completely wrong response is to assume "fucked" has a precise and technical definition. As a bit of language, it merely means "things will be shitty". What does "shitty" mean? C'mon… yeah, this is all relative.

Can you be more specific? For example, I really doubt anyone thinks climate change is not always "happening" or that human activity has exactly zero influence on it.

A certain commander in chief has in public espoused that:

"The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive."[0].

There are plenty of misinformed people that will gladly tell you there is no such thing and if there was human activity has no effect. Pretending that there aren't and even if the issue is complex there isn't a set of clearly wrong opinions is disingenuous to the extreme.

[0] https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/26589529219124838...

I asked about "climate change". You are talking about "global warming" as if I asked about that.

Are you saying these concepts are equivalent to the aforementioned 99% of scientists and experts?

I'm really not trying to act dense, just figure out what it is people even believe about this topic.

I think "global warming" was rebranded as "climate change" to avoid people saying "well it's getting colder here!" as a rebuttal to its existence

This is splitting hairs. The consequences of human-driven climate change are widely understood to include net warming of the globe.

For example, if there is a new ice age triggered due to human activity, would that would agree with both the global warming and climate change ideas?

If cows were spherical, we could agree that cows were both cow-shaped, and sphere-shaped.

They aren't, though.

Sorry, I have no idea how this is relevant. I thought I was asking a pretty simple question: "What is it that the average person concerned about climate change actually believes is going on?"

It appears this is the wrong place to get an answer to that question.

You're asking questions that could be answered with 10 seconds of Google use and you're being kind of impolite about it. That doesn't seem like a good strategy to engage with someone usefully.

I don't consider asking this question to be impolite: Can you give a quote from what you find after 10 seconds of googling that sums it up?

This is getting off topic, but do you consider asking that to be impolite?

Well, I mean, the alternative is that it's a complex issue often touted as black-and-white to allow for taking a moral high ground against rational people that reasonably disagree on some of the conclusions and proposed methods for dealing with the issue.

And if that's true, then it's possible there's no grand conspiracy and at the end of the day, either the evidence isn't strong enough or the case isn't being made well enough to get everyone on board. If the debate is being lost before they even start telling people how dramatically their lifestyles will have to change to have a meaningful impact on the issue, what possible hope could they have when those realities are laid out?

But that's probably not true, so don't worry about it. Now are you with us or a denier?

You might like Merchants of Doubt which goes deep into false equivalency in media coverage.

> I wonder if they will push some politic agenda or if they will manage to stay neutral.

I don't. They will, of course, push a particular agenda. In the worst possible way.

As we've seen with Twitter and other organizations, the ToS don't matter. Or at least, don't matter for the right people. The "bad people" get punished even if they don't violate the ToS. The "good people" don't get punished even if they do violate the ToS.

I'd be OK with even egregious ToS, if they were applied evenly. But as we've seen too often, they're not.

Whatever agenda FB and friends are peddling, it's hidden in the guise of "safety", and "fairness", and "community standards".

That's because the real incentive FB and Twitter have is not to avoid PR fallout - and one side of american political spectrum has an upper hand in that battle.

For the demographic FB cares about, yes they lean left (which is what I am assuming you are getting at, and I agree with you that most of the time it's safe to just do left leaning PR). But Target openly supported bathroom access rights (left leaning) and have been met with a huge backlash from many right leaning markets which has materially impacted their bottom line with defections to Walmart and ecommerce.

It's not automatic who you need to PR for.

Why the hell don't we just adopt individual bathroom stalls? This whole debate is so stupid I can't get behind any of the sides.

Cost, probably.

What is "neutral"? Neutral as in halfway between political extremes, even if that does a disservice to the truth? Or neutral as in only reporting fact-checked stories, even if they're incredibly biased to one side?

There is obviously false, and then there is everything else. I guess the best facebook can do is weed out the obviously false. If they do that, it is a guarantee that they will get attacked for being biased, because with the shifting of the political winds usually one party or the other spreads more misinformation.

> I think the whole "fake news" thingy seems to politicaly motivated.

Sure, branding real news as fake news is politically motivated, whereas labeling what is the clearly the equivalent of the most absurd supermarket tabloids as "fake news" is accurate and appropriate.

It is curious that many people are somehow oblivious to tabloid headlines when they appear on the internet, whereas nearly everyone discards the supermarket checkout stand "The Pope is a space alien!" stories.

And then there's everything in between. That's where the actual debate is. Was "WMDs in Iraq!" fake news in 2002, 2003, or 2004?

Watching this has helped me, at least somewhat, decipher what is said in the media. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmoXze-Higc

Of course, it doesn't help for outright lies like WMDs in Iraq.

Though your broader point holds, they did in fact find WMDs in Iraq, but it wasn't really big news (or especially serious weapons)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destr...

The WMDs that Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfield, and Colin Powell were referring to were nuclear weapons [1] though, not chemical weapons. We already knew he had chemical weapons:

>President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and George Tenet, to name a few leading figures, built support for the war by telling the world that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling chemical weapons, feverishly developing germ warfare devices and racing to build a nuclear bomb. Some of them, notably Mr. Cheney, the administration's doomsayer in chief, said Iraq had conspired with Al Qaeda that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11.

1: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/02/opinion/remember-that-mush...

Oh you're definitely correct, I was just surprised when I learned that fact, and there's a bit of a "No WMDs at all!" echo chamber.

By that tho they use WMDs as shorthand for "none of the WMDs they claimed were there, were". Almost exclusively.

Which is true.

That's the first time I hear about nuclear weapons in this context - I was always under impression that this was about chemical weapons, which they found a lot of evidence of after the invasion.

Read the article I linked above. It's from that time period and Cheney and others specifically tried to link Iraq to nuclear weapons and Al Qaeda. It was fear-mongering and lying to justify the war and the Bush administration knew it: http://www.newsweek.com/2015/05/29/dick-cheneys-biggest-lie-...

I specifically recall LOTS of talk about "mushroom clouds" from the Bush administration leading up to the war. We knew they had chemical weapons because we sold them to them.

Wow! This is interesting. I thought the "WMDs in Iraq" was fake news, turns out the "no WMDs in Iraq" is fake news! So much fake news, hard to sort everything out.

The interesting part to me is that it tends to be the lesser educated that sense that there's something wrong with the news they are fed on TV & newspapers. I think this is likely because college educated people tend to use more pure intellectual horsepower (which is easy to fool) whereas the lesser educated use more "intuition".

That said, simultaneously the lesser educated can be far more easily led astray by laughable obvious fake propaganda (usually right wing) that an educated person would never fall for. But the thing is, those whose job it is to manipulate public opinion are experts in where weaknesses are in each type - different tactics for different audiences.

Ultimately, I see the root cause of this dichotomy as a side-effect of The Death of The Expert.

Edumucated Folk live in one Universe, and Working Joe on Main St lives in another Universe.

By the time you finish 10 years of secondary education, you think you're smart, but mostly all you've done is chain together countless memorized assumptions about how various model parameters should work to over-fit your mental interpolator of the Map of the World.

You become so educated that you filter our more than you realize. You don't even notice, like a fish never notices the ocean in which it swims.

The Academically credentialed refer to others just like themselves, because Authority only works if you mutually vouch for each other, by adhering to the same rules. Outsiders are Othered, smugly laughed at and ignored like Morlocks.

Look at any big example where The Experts not only were off, but were Not Even Wrong, turning a Moonshot into a Neptune shot, then trying to cover up their mistakes to save face so they won't be de-credentialed and forced to go live in the sewers under Metropolis.

Pick any major World event, and you'll find The Smartest Guys in the Room, who earn more in 1 year than Joe on Main St will in his entire life, and who COMPLETELY BUNGLED what ever they claimed they knew with near absolute certainty, because they are Scientists who use Evidence and Math that nobody can proof read, but trust us buddy, you dudn't get a PhD from MIT like all of us did.

1. Iraq WMD: look how spectacularly wrong were the several thousand Experts from 100's of Professional Fields.

2. 2008 Depression. 20,000 Genius Quants and Nobel Prize Winners and top billionaires and the Gods Upon Mount Olympus all bet their reputations that a 1-in-60 trillion Outlier event could never, ever happen. This Time It's Different. The price of houses will never go down, so it's a AAA double certified bet to use it as collateral to take out huge loans by increasing the multiple by which you are leveraged in your hedged bets.

And it all blew up.

3. Syria. All the idiot Experts yet again assembled to recommend the real solution is covertly arm ISIS to topple Assad, then send in the Marines to whack ISIS and install some new puppet.

All the experts yet again were so blindly certain that their models were the Territory that they stopped looking at the newest changes on the Map.

Oh, now ISIS declared War on the West? Well that fact can't possibly fit into our Narrative that we Experts know is scientifically true, so let's just ignore it.

Oh, what's this, hundreds of thousands of social media accounts are joining ISIS and threating to overthrow us in our own Nations?

Well that's just preposterous, we know with absolute certainty that 99.9999999% of Muslims are Peaceful. Therefore, let's invite 10, then 20, then 100 million of them to cross our borders and live next door, all so we can retain our Cognitive Dissonance that we are The Experts, we can't be wrong because otherwise why should I have a PhD and earn 20x more than you, a mere Uber driver with no credentials?

4. As Programmers, we are the Enlightened Class, we build the future while Joe Blow on Main St just lives in the Minecrafted Utopia which we sculpt for him. We are Urban Liberal Atheist/Pagans with refined intellectual pursuits, we love Truth and Equality and by golly we really are going to CHANGE THE WORLD, hold hands, sing Kumbaya We Are The World around the SpaceX AI Rocket that will take us all to our new life awaiting us on Mars.

Meanwhile, out of 18,000,000 or so code monkeys on Earth, not even a handful have any idea that all of our computer security is fake, the NSA quite literally records and decrypts everything, using 10,000 new 0day per year which they purchase from Respectable Programmers like you who have a bright future and just want to do the right thing by cooperating with the NSA for a well earned comfortable upper-middle-class salary.

Then Snowden appears and pops your Truman Show bubbke like Copernicus deprecated Ptolomy.

All The Experts assemble like Avengers yet again. They all recommend, everything is fine Mr Joe Blow, we paid a vendor millions for a pretty dashboard of Analytics Big Data charts to tell us that everythibg's fine. We're in The Cloud, we're patched, we use 2FA on E2E with Axolotl Rachets stacked to the Moon and we're Lifetime Gold Donors to the EFF and several Houses of Fierce, Intrepid Journalism.

5. Guccifer the Shadowbroker hacked the shit out of everything. You name it, it's compromised. VPN, ssh, every web, email, file, chat, dns, ntp, database, all of it is now known to be hijacked.

Can we still trust the banks, the utilities, the telcoes, the defense contractors, the media conglomerates, the entertainment, the software, the OEMs, etc?

You say Trust Us, we're the Experts.

See how this works? Processions of Expert Pied Pipers lead us off a cliff into the ocean like lemmings.

Is Joe Blow on Main St a dumb racist redneck for taking one look at that ol' Bull you're selling, but instead flipping the Series of Tubes to check out what Alex Jones and /pol/ and UFO chasers and Chentrails kooks and Reptillian Agenda paranoids and monetized Youtubers have to say about The Real News?

From where I'm at, living in a card board box on Main St with no future, I'm going with what Joe says he saw Alex say about the Pizzagate-Soros-Globalists. I may not be an Expert beyond Main St, but I do know the only person who never lied to me was the hacker who leaked all the Expert's shit to Wikileaks. It's not a perfect Map of the World, but it's a helluva lot more accurate than the total disasters we got by listening to The Experts.

Complete tangent: assertion: if equation group had like, 10k 0day per year they would have already run out of "good" code names. We wouldn't see EPICBANANA or EXTRABACON at all because all the fun names for sploits would already have been taken. Like, the only way you get those names is by combining words on an approved list, maybe rolling the dice until you get something that doesn't suck.

I wonder if one can do a kind of "german tank problem" analysis on the likely size of the "cyber arsenal" (LOL) based on the frequency of code words and awesome codenames...

One thing in addition to everything you mentioned is that there is NO ACCOUNTABILITY. How many news people got fired for the poor reporting around WMDs and Iraq? I only know of one prominent news-person that got fired: Phil Donahue, for questioning the status quo. We caught Donna Brazille giving Hillary the debate questions (via seemingly the only reputable news source around: Wikileaks). Sure, she got fired from CNN, but now she still has a cushy job at the DNC. I will NEVER vote for a DNC party member while she's still on the payroll. FWIW I voted Obama his first term.

Oh, didn't you hear, things looked bad but they couldn't prove anything, just like the 2008 banking fraud, they couldn't find evidence to prove anyone did anything wrong! (wink wink, nudge nudge)

I feel honored to read such an epic rant as a reply to my comment!! It truly is amazing what they can get away with essentially in broad daylight, but then when you have the entire media machine manufacturing reality for the masses, it's much easier.

Have you read Manufacturing Consent? You might find it interesting.

>Complains about the failure of journalism. Posts in a forum citing 0 sources and touting conspiracies.

That's the problem. Not the news, which while imperfect, is far and above anything your preferred citationless blog is slinging.

Here's an interview with Assange discussing "cablegate" where the 2006 plans for Syria were revealed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3HWiydFlJc

It's hard to prove a negative, but I'm open to being proven wrong about the top 5 newspapers. Here they are, please provide an example of an opposition article to the recent Syrian attacks from the day after the attacks.

USA Today, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, New York Post,

We are all human and we bring with us all sorts of biases.

I was listening to a podcast on my commute today, and the person mentioned a book called Think Twice that was about decision making. How we make decisions with these different biases. I think I even remember a great post on HN about all the most popular biases.

I guess what I am getting at is its no at all clear cut how someone's post will be judged given all the baggage each one of us carries with us.

This might be interesting as well for a free way to access a list of biases we can fall in to: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

They're doing this because people were calling on tougher penalties and an independent watchdog for social media. They don't want oversight so they pay extra for moderation.

They will definitely push their own agenda, because that's the agenda of most of their market.

We democrats tend to stick to tech pretty hard, and we buy things. Billy joe bob will post his pro-trump rants on Facebook all day, but will still go to a walk in store to buy things.

Of course I'm generalizing and oversimplifying it, but the leadership at FB is strongly left leaning, and they know how to cater to their audience, keep them happy and make money from them.

The issue is of course branding everything that might help the right "fake news". Sure, there's a lot of it (from both sides really) but the idea that they have the power to shape people's opinions in a political direction, and are willing to do it is dangerous for all of us.

Are you saying that news of fake news is fake news?

All of their actions should be transparent and a forum exist for people to discuss those actions and specific moderators (they can and should likely have a pseudonym associated with their actions); a little more difficult for moderation that aren't published as public.

maybe related to the rumor?

https://qz.com/882475/facebook-fb-ceo-mark-zuckberg-hires-da...

https://www.wired.com/2017/01/zucks-sure-acting-like-someone...

All that speculation seems kind of weird to me. Zuck is already president of facebook (pop. 2bn), why would he want to be president of America (pop. 300m)? As the article you linked to says, the Chan-Zuckerberg initiative is the sort of thing retired presidents do - he's not angling to become a world leader, he already is one.

If you want the world to be a certain way, president of the USA does a lot for letting you make that happen.

If you want america to be a certain way, that holds even more strongly. How 'murica moves forward will depend heavily on the political parties stances. Being able to move (I'm guessing) the democrats will have a massive effect on politics.

Not being beholden to a share price also really helps.

Moderation is political, it is unavoidable. There is no such thing as neutral.

As long as they have clear and fair guidelines, I don't see an issue.

The guidelines don't matter if enforcement, non-enforcement, and target selection isn't audited for compliance. Give me a clear and fair guideline and an agenda to push / person to punish, and they'll get suppressed.

Have you seen the moderators on reddit or stack overflow?

Moderators on reddit have 1) full control of their subreddit and only have a few basic guidelines/rules to follow but basically they can do/ban what/who they want 2) are not paid.

This is correct. I started r/cubancigars for example. It's mine. I can kick every single moderator off the team, shut the sub down, or change the rules without care. I don't, but I can, and nobody would stop me.

MisterBastahrd : r/cubancigars :: Zuck : Facebook

This comment sounds exactly like something a stereotypical cigar smoker would say.

No, my comment illustrates the basic facts of being the top moderator on a subreddit.

If I'm not breaking reddit rules, then as long as I've been active any time within the past 6 months, I own the subreddit and can make changes to the direction of the sub and its moderation team as I see fit.

That subreddit was created, by the way, because I disagreed with rules regarding the discussion of Cuban cigar sources which ship to the US in the main cigar subreddit. They're free to administer their subreddit as they see fit, and I'm free to do the same.

The moderators on Reddit and stack overflow aren't paid, and broadly set their own guidelines.

Anyone with enough points on SO becomes a mod automatically, and gets to deal with "how dare you close my shitty off topic question, I have every right not to follow the rules and homogenise so into every other discussion forum". Anyone who starts a subreddit becomes the mod of it and can promote other mods at will.