The problem is there is often some time when there is no news. No news isn't interesting, so it doesn't get shared as much as "news". Take the moments immediately following a disaster. Two types of news articles will show up:
"There was a shooting. We don't know anything yet, but we will keep you posted". Boring.
"We know who the killer is. Bobby Bobertson done it". Woah!
Now imagine you are a heavy social media user. You don't want to stay silent on such a big news story, so you want to share something showing you are engaged. Which story do you share?
(edit: removed duplicate "the problem is")
This is at best a conflict of interest when it comes to content that ought to be viewed as news. But there is significant pressure these days to blend news with entertainment (which simply means engagement, which entails ad sales).
It's not just the Internet though, it's organisations like Infowars who are out there claiming that the Vegas shooting was some kind of "false flag", after his previous disinformation on the Sandy Hook incident.
Let's not straw man by pretending that the existing system is entirely 100% censorship free, either.
(I don't have a clear proposal and it's a complex problem, but in the worst case - Rwanda - some of the people involved in hate radio were eventually charged with crimes against humanity)
> People need to make up their own minds regarding what is true and what isn't, what's worth their time and what's bullshit, which links to click on and which to avoid.
This is exactly what everyone is doing, and exactly the problem.
> we need to spend more money on education
And this is what many agree we need.
> or just accept that some people disagree with us.
And this is exactly what many have settled for since Trump took office.
> aggressively filtering "untrustworthy" content will lead to a net benefit.
It will lead to the Nightly News. But I the people have spoken already. They prefer Facebook. They prefer making up their own minds regarding what is true and what isn't.
Of course, users aren't passive, they could get their news elsewhere or change the filtering. But we know that defaults matter a lot. For many people, the order in which platforms present news is going to be profoundly influential.
The inescapability of choosing defaults settings, and the empirical fact that default settings do influence people a lot, taken together, imply an ethical responsibility on the part of platforms.
Making people smarter would be great - but you've got to be realistic about how effective that would be, and how long it would take.
What other usability problem would you solve by changing the people rather than the technology?
By doing that we are empowering the people who fabricate lies to move an agenda. It's ridiculously cheap to make fake news and the value gained is immense because people are having a hard time filtering it themselves. It is the social media equivalent of the Mirai Botnet.
Do we want to live in a world where the best lier wins?
The preoccupation with objective truth is a relatively recent notion, and only of interest to what appears to be a minority of the population. The rest are happy to have their biases confirmed, it doesn't much matter whether it's true.
The difference between now and 30 years ago, is that now if someone actually cares about getting to the bottom of something, the tools for doing so are much more accessible, making the ongoing prevalence of bullshit that much more frustrating. We're not getting any stupider, but the gap between the informed and the disinformed or uninformed has widened substantially.
Even here on HN, when it comes to the handful of subjects I'm knowledgable in, it's pretty common to see some masterclass bullshitting holding top spot in a thread.
True, but we also seem to have collectively become a lot more skittish about excoriating bullshit because "everyone does it". That's definitely not the optimal solution.
For example, it will take a lot of time for investigators to get close to the truth of what happened but no one is going to wait for official reports before publishing their takes on the incident --and I'm not nor would expect that. But we also can't very well expect only objective truth to be present in news stories/articles.
Should Google FB do a better job a filtering obviously bogus information? Sure. Should they only source from a "pool" of sources in the era of citizen journalism? I don't think I want to cede that to news orgs who want to perpetuate their aura as the only legitimate purveyors of news.
However, you can sort of get this if you limit yourself to "agency" news, ie AP or Reuters. If you have a big chunk of money and news is important in your work, you'll have a Bloomberg terminal.
> However, you can sort of get this if you limit yourself to "agency" news, ie AP or Reuters.
I've heard something about "wire services" before, but I'm not sure if there are any accessible to individuals at prices a regular person like me could afford. Do you know of any?
Journalism is not about digging until you find some kind of underlying "fact", there simply isn't time and what you're asking for could potentially be an extraordinary amount of work; journalism is about reporting what the reporter sees and what people tell them. Obviously it's incumbent on them to evaluate their sources, but not usually to write next to the sources' words the journalist's own opinion of the situation.
So for example in the Vegas situation, there will be a large number of official statements put out by various official bodies; or the reporter might call the hospital or a contact there; or they might go there and interview some people standing around.
But remember that this stuff does not cross the bar into what science or history would consider a fact. It's a snapshot of who's available and summary of what they said. There are always more people or organizations you could call for a quote, more people you could interview. And of course not all of them can or should be reported directly - there may be whistleblowers or vulnerable people to protect with a layer of indirection.
The problem with this thinking is right there in the word "relevant". What's relevant? The name of the shooter? Maybe he had a history with someone in the band? What high schools did they go to? What were their job histories? Where have they lived? What weapons did the shooter use? Are they easy to obtain? Were they legal? Why or why not? Guns can be more or less effective depending on the conditions. What was the weather like? Was it normal weather for Las Vegas at this time of year? Is it ever bad enough to be a concern?
Somebody always chooses what is and isn't relevant. There is no such thing as a complete, ""unbiased"" catalog of all the facts.
(Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse are three of the bigger ones)
I guess I would ask Google and Facebook, etc. to keep 4chan and reddit off the top of news results in favor of more reputable news orgs. At the same time, I recognize that sites like those can absolutely provide unique info that mainstream media cannot. However, we have to recognize that the info is raw and unfiltered. It cannot become canon without further confirmation.
Think back to the US election you can't just "decide" that the story of thousands of Ohio ballots pre-marked for Hillary Clinton was true. http://www.snopes.com/clinton-votes-found-in-warehouse/
You can't just decide that the story of a protester with a rape Melania was true http://www.snopes.com/2016/11/14/melania-sign-at-anti-trump-...
You can't just decide for yourself that climate change isn't true.
The consequences of people deciding for themselves would be globally disastrous.
people will always draw conclusions based on their own observations, good thing Einstein didn't have snopes to say "Actually, the Theory of Relativity is a myth: Pants on Fire rating!
And that's why it matters that google curates content. 99% of what they curate we cannot research in depth ourselves within our lifetime. We have to be able to trust that they've done the job of curation properly.
We have free will, and the incidentals effects on that exercise of free will have no other effects on our life and larger society - ie the exercise of free will has no effect on the larger world itself, and so we need not look further.
We kind of tried that with religion and people still persist in believing all kinds of stuff
People need to make up their own minds regarding what is true and what isn't, what's worth their time and what's bullshit, which links to click on and which to avoid. If people can't handle this then we need to spend more money on education, or just accept that some people disagree with us.
I don't think aggressively filtering "untrustworthy" content will lead to a net benefit.