Should we censor social media, because people are too stupid to deal with it? I don't think so and if you do, you're playing in the hands of corporations who want a cheap work force.
Your "solution" isn't a solution, but a hot fix that will cause more damage in the future. It's exactly the shortsighted crap politics are trying to do right now to get immediate results.
It was a conference that was organized by a organization that holds one of the major initiative against false news, and where one of the main tracks was about addressing the issue of false news. Last year they had a massive booth at the middle of the conference hall about false news. This year they brought in a key note speaker which brought several political slides while making misleading conclusions that was later proven to be false, but the whole thing echoed with the audience. It seemed to not matter a bit that it also just happened to be false.
When facts get in the way of a political message, even the most educated seems to let the facts go if its align with their own views. I wish education would work, but I don't see it as a proven method to solve echo chambers or political news.
It's a far cry from the NYT or Fox News reporting incorrect things, whether deliberately or not, to someone called Foxx News or Non York Times reporting that Islam causes prostate cancer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fake_news_websites#Lis...
Have we forgotten about the Spanish American war?
Fake news has a slightly different approach because it's much easier to reach an audience online and elude trademarks.
Community news/comments can be wrong, but that's a far far different than a site intentionally promoting fake propaganda, which is the true meaning of a fake news site.
And even then, propaganda can blur into a political view, then even farther into down right lies.
I believe the parent might be referring to 'education' as in logic, political history, philosophy so that the student can retrace the historical steps and recreate a societal scaffold that may or may not look like society today in the same way civil engineers are taught trig, calculus, static mechanics etc so the engineer can retrace historical steps and engineer the structures that may or may not reinforce or criticize our engineering approaches today.
No fewer than 6 of the coveted "swing states" switched from blue to red[0], and many counties across the country flipped as well. What persuaded hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of 2012 Obama voters to be 2016 Trump voters? Trump himself educated them, in his speeches. I'm one such person, spent the entire election season commenting and chatting with others on Reddit and YouTube with others, and there were countless Trump supporters who had been Obama supporters. Trump educated us more about the political system than any politician or journalist ever has. He taught people the phrase "lobbyists, donors, and special interests." That itself had a very powerful effect.
This is primary school stuff in my country at least, along with the explanation for why political ads on TV are banned here.
But how do educate yourself though ?
The same argument was already made about books or newspapers: depending of the subject a lot of them are trash. Same for TV news. Wikipedia is also not a defacto trustable source.
Except for first hand experience on a subject, you will never be able to find a source that is inherently trustable (and you might even interpret your experience the wrong way, so you should doubt yourself too...).
To educate yourself, there's a point where you have to try to trust some of the information you get. Having that info come from a trusted source or with a high level of peer review is a useful first level of filtering. From there you can (and surely should) invest in more time to double check or cross check if you want, but IMO quick filtering is necessary, and can't be brushed away saying "people should know better".
Even first hand experience isn't trustworthy. Our memory is so deeply flawed that I can't even tell with certainty which first-hand experiences I had. Simply presenting "evidence" that you should remember something can cause your brain to make that memory up. And if the experience is genuine and and I try to remember some detail I didn't pay close attention to, my brain will most likely just make it up. So the only reliable way to learn from personal experience is to learn during the experience, but confirmation bias will make me miss most opportunities to learn.
Honestly, it's amazing that we are capable of learning at all.
Being able to further educate yourself and judge the trustworthiness of sources are direct results of a good primary education.
Many western states have criminally decreased education expanses for decades and the current state of the civilization is in big parts a result of that.
This shit is infectious, too. Many stupid people think their kids don't need a good education, even if there's a chance for them to get one.
Mindless regurgitation of facts doesn't really help anyone - and that's the majority of what I've seen in highschools in America.
For instance some politicians make a bold move that has clear and immediate positive effect. Yet if it has huge indirect and long term consequences that only surface once they are out of office, from your perspective they will get all the credits and none of the blame.
Having different perspectives from “experts” is in my opinion important. The problem is of course to find the right experts, and to have an insight on their limits or their biases, which is usually the beginning of become a kind of expert yourself.
I believe this is a design issue (systems design, not UI design). Filter bubbles and confirmation bias can reinforce each other in a vicious circle. Financial incentives for "news outlets" to mislead people make it worse. That's the heart of facebooks issue.
With a herculan effort we might be able to overcome that with education, but improving Facebook's design to lessen the impact of echo chambers and social confirmation would be much easier and faster. Removing all interaction is one way to do that, though I agree that that's a bit heavy handed and goes against Facebook's incentives.
I agree, but it's impossible to educate everyone on any subject. I think in this case, people who are experts in the matter, should give a reputation rating on the article. That would be really great. For example, I am no expert in theoretical physics, but I may enjoy an article about it, but how do I know it's not a bunch of bullshit I am reading? If I see that Stephen Hawking gave it a 5 star reputable source rating, I "know" I can believe it.
Critical thinking is universal though. It's not a necessity to have a solid judgment of a piece. "Critical abstention" is a possibility, and primarily formal analysis is another (eg. search for common communication red flags).
I don't think that the parent idea of removing likes and counts is realistic (in any imaginary scenario I can think of).
I'm assuming you don't spend a lot of time on Facebook?
People everywhere are going away from this model as "experts" are consistently bribed through various means.
There is no good short-term fix. People need to become more educated and adapt. If the argument is that they can't, well, maybe our brains have been defeated entirely by advertising and messaging. It wouldn't be the first time a complex problem was mostly solved.
See, I can make things up too. Furthermore the amount of education necessary to judge the trustworthiness of all potential subjects is not obtainable by an individual, meaning they have to hope the experts they choose to listen to aren't making it up.
If all you do to measure trustworthiness is check if the person has an expert tag, I can see your problem.
Just as a sort of general, broad response to this sentiment: yes absolutely. I envy your optimism, but the belief amongst the Hacker News set that humans are universally capable of educating their way out from under deeply-rooted biological faults is misguided. You're not going to educate people out of conferring status on the most popular people/stories/posts/etc. You're competing against at least a few hundred thousand years of evolution (and many of these processes go back much, much further than that.) You won't win.
So, yes, absolutely we should be working on ways to acknowledge and route around human foibles, not pretending we can eliminate them.
But https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/08/25/546127444/epis... convinced me that this is a case where education is NOT enough and there's a time where the only solution is plain censorship, unfortunately.
The censorship doesn't have to be confidential. It can be auditable and publicly recorded. But in that case in Ukraine, they did all the education stuff and let the fake news through, and that wasn't enough to stop the country from being ripped apart.
You will never educate the masses and even if you did, some of what you taught them would be wrong.
However, it seems possible to get further along than we are now by creating betting pools/markets where the participants do agree on a set of sources for information.
Actually, I've thought along these lines before rather indirectly by theorizing that the WSJ was probably the most non-partisan source of "news" because most of it's clientele demanded such due to their participation in the markets. But I realize that's highly speculative.
You might like the extension Facebook Demetricator: http://bengrosser.com/projects/facebook-demetricator/
Personally I block the entire news feed with uBlock Origin which has made my experience of Facebook tolerable.
Social media is a game and the score is whatever metric is shown. You want to most points for yourself and you only want to participate in popular content in the hopes it will earn you more points.
I am seriously considering a year without adblock and going out of my way to click as many ads as possible. Blocking is ineffective, it's time to fuck over the metrics
What you are thinking of exists: AdNauseam. It clicks on every single ad you see to disrupt the metrics.
News itself is an echo chamber. Don't see how that is facebook's fault.
The reason news is toxic isn't facebook. It's foxnews, nytimes, wapo and the entire media industry.
Not sure why you think "like" buttons would change that.
The news echo chamber existed before facebook. It existed for zuckerburg was born. It'll exist long after facebook is gone.
The only solution is for facebook to ban news entirely from facebook. But then the news industry would get very upset.
My Facebook feed is mostly personal updates about hundreds of people I have met, and it feels like the most democratic media I’ve ever seen. It improved a lot when I unfollowed the handful of people who post junk like sportsball.
Are you assuming the faceless masses are exposed to some unimaginable horror that you aren’t seeing? Or tell us more about the horrors you do see.
The Democrats thought the same thing too, before Trump won the election. Perhaps you are falling victim to a filter bubble confirmation bias?
A democracy implies independent national sovereignty. When anyone (govt, corp, or rogue hackers) across the world can effectively manipulate your elections at scale, sovereign democracy is no longer a thing.
Then they decided to spend ~$100 on buying fake reddit upvotes for their initiative and it received millions of views and ended up being highly successful.
It's interesting how far a little money and technological finesse can have such far reaching effects.
I wonder if Reddit has as much fake news as Facebook?
I think that /r/politics, /r/shitredditsays & /r/The_Donald might count.
Remove the counts and people have no external validation for the legitimacy of a piece of content. They actually have to read it. What we have now is a system where someone sees a headline, “Proof Obama birth certificate fake!” With 100k like and 10k comments and they don’t even read it and just comment, “I knew it!”
When you pick up a newspaper you have to actually read it. You can’t just look at the headline and see how many people agree with it before you can form any kind of opinion.
If the only incentive to read/share/comment was a genuine understanding or willingness to share and participate the entire space would be different.
For almost all stories you can work out its popularity just by the number of comments. And you can determine the comment count (-/+ an order of magnitude) just by scrolling through the comments. The accurate number isn't important for most people.
None of this will prevent the dissemination of fake news. What will do is (a) not prioritising it and (b) detecting whether it's fake. Facebook just added solutions to do both.
People comment on stories with the most comments and usually reply to the first set of posts because they want their post to be seen, accelerating commenting in that thread.
If you want to count comments fine. Most people won’t. FB actually makes this hard to do.
Would be fascinating to even try it here on HN. If you hit all the integer counters it would dramatically change the way people use the site.
Go ahead remove the number of comments. It won't solve the problem Facebook is trying to solve.
You would, of course, have to combine this with not just showing it to people who already hold those opinions.
you can work out its popularity just by the number of comments
Or controversy.
Instead of showing people only content that they agree with, with counts that reinforce the legitimacy of that content, you would show people everything that is popular and let them determine for themselves what they think about it.
I’m not talking about removing the comments. I’m saying don’t show the count. If people want to read the comments they can.
We have a similar this situation in Germany right now. A private corporation designated by the government can delete Facebook posts as they see fit under the guise of hate speech. Facebook had to agree, because they'll be hit with fines if they don't.
What should be controlled by law is now in the hands of a corporation and they are quietly removing content that is clearly not illegal.
Removing transparency is a dream come true for corrupt institutions.
1. It's Facebook, not the government 2. They aren't banning anything
How is this a free speech issue?
The question is how Facebook should order news sources/articles. They're suggesting changing their strategy. This isn't anything like censorship.
Facebook would be a much better platform if they removed the like and comment count from every post. It’s those numbers that lead people to believe that garbage is legitimate in the first place. By hiding these numbers it would force people to think for themselves.
Same thing with YouTube. Fake News becomes real news when it had enough views, likes, upvotes, comments, etc.. These counts don’t really need to be shown to the end user.