This is the part that stood out to me.
It's allows Facebook to tell lawmakers and the public "Hey, look! We're taking things seriously!"
Until something goes wrong. Then they can lay the blame on someone else and issue another non-apology apology saying, "We can do better."
Is it the third-party aspect that you take issue with, or the fact-checking? Or the combination of the two?
I'd say contrary - that would be so wrong for FB to verify facts in-house. This way they are more transparent
Not attempting to the arbiter of truth and falsehood would be one.
Or reporting on what users think of a story's truthfulness: "49% rate this story as true, 21% rate it as untrue".
Or, if they want to be honest, acknowledging that it is about policing taboo thoughts. "Smith, 4980203 Winston. This article is crimethink! Warning: If you read too many articles like it your Citizen Credit Score will be downgraded. You have been warned!". OK, maybe they won't go for that :-)
Think of something like Pizzagate - the fact that the restaurant in question didn't have a basement belied the assertions that bad things were happening in said basement. Any article or comment that passed on that provable lie should be flagged as a lie.
Sure, there are grey areas beyond that. Those are opinions, and should be separable from facts.
Truth and falsehood are absolute for pretty much all fact claims.
Whether they can easily by determined is another story.
> Think of something like Pizzagate - the fact that the restaurant in question didn't have a basement belied the assertions that bad things were happening in said basement.
Sure, but suppose (they weren't, by for sake of illustrating the problem) bad things were happening in, say, a attached a controlled by the owners of the restaurant, but somehiw as the story got out and before it was fixed in text, it was distorted so that it referred to a non-existent basement instead. Would actively suppressing the story because of the impossible location described really be in the public interest?
Sure, in strict terms any single factual error in the most involved story makes the story false. But, most accounts will accumulate some false elements in a complex story: there has to be consideration of importance and materiality.
Sure, but for most contentious political issues, this is not the case.
While this is literally true, it's not clear to me that it's a relevant metaphor for online communities.
There's absolutely nothing nefarious about remembering previous interactions you had with someone. In fact it's impossible not to do so.
The problem with China is how it tears down the natural separation between different spheres of your life, how all-encompassing their panopticum can become because it has access to any data source it desires, and that the issues it engages with all seem to be of the this-doesn't-concern-you-and-nobody-is-actually-harmed variety, such as peoples' porn consumption or eating habits.
Valve also does something similar with their anti-cheat system called overwatch. A machine learning system selects which replays are most likely to result in a conviction, then those replays are shown to human peer-reviewers who must come to a consensus on whether the replay shows cheating or not. The pre-selection stage greatly increases the efficiency of the system.
Seems like infinite regress and turtles all the way down to me. Who fact checks the fact checkers?
Third party fact checkers seems like the best possible thing that could be in that box. It's not perfect, but there has never been a perfect system to determine truth so waiting until there is one is counterproductive. You do the best with the tools you have available.
They seem to demand a sort of proof from first principle for journalism, where every reader can (and must!) verify an article without any heuristics such as a medium's track record ("Argument from Authority!", they will complain, "FALLACY!").
Yet such a system is simply impossible. In practice, because nobody would ever have the time & energy to verify any meaningful fraction of the information they consume. But even in theory, there just aren't any methods to distribute "proof": you could be an eyewitness, which doesn't scale. You could inspect original documents, which also doesn't scale, and where almost nobody has the expertise to actually verify them. Oh, and then there are distributed ledgers, which could help around the margins but nobody knows how (Bitcoin, incidentally, is the outgrow of exactly the same mechanism, only for the financial system: the breakdown of trust in institutions such as the law or the FED, and the attempt to replace it with technology).
One of many incarnations of this dynamic the widespread criticism of the use of anonymous sources. And while the practice does have its problems, it's almost universally misunderstood by those criticising it today.
When journalists use anonymous sources, they substitute their own reputation, and that of their publication, for the source's. Which is why, when you go back and read articles from a year or so ago, you'll find that each and every single anonymously reported fact has actually been proven correct, or remains unknown. The system works (worked), because everyone in it is playing the long game.
But that would require trust. And people today aren't just distrustful. They completely deny the utility of the concept. They try to evaluate all information with complete disregard for the source (and fail). They assume equivalence between anonymous internet commentators and institutions such as universities, newspapers, or established politicians, without even noticing how this conflicts with their criticism of anonymity as described above.
This mindset is related to a perversion of the scientific method, one that denies the usefulness of all emotion, of the social sciences, and of all human relationships. It's perverse because even its proponents entirely fail to live by it: if you're more willing to let your spouse borrow you car than just any stranger, you're using the very same mechanisms (familiarity, the game theory of long-term relationships, reputation) that you otherwise reject.
So that's a long-winded way to say: these fact-checkers are supposedly different than whoever posted the material in question. You, and everyone else, can observe them over time, and they will have a reputation to defend. They will presumably also be recruited from the set of people and institutions that are established as trustworthy, at least among the minority that still believes in such a thing might actually exist.
Why can't HN be a place were we nerd out over new frameworks but engage in partisan political discussion over the impact of what we build?
The goal isn't to eliminate political discussion from HN, but to prevent the community from destroying itself. One reason people want to have political discussion here is that HN hasn't already destroyed itself for thoughtful, substantive conversation. This attraction makes it particularly vulnerable, so we all have to be careful. It's ok to comment on politics, but not ok to do it in the usual browbeating way.
And it's not going out of your way, it's 5 minutes of someone's time.
One _cannot_ in _any way_ infer a lack of good intentions from a single alleged phone call.
Besides, if I were a titan of industry I would do my best to call whoever the hell got elected president the night of the election regardless of my particular party affiliation. Especially considering most corporations lobby both of the main political parties to hedge their bets.
I imagine hardly any corporation lets ideology trump pragmatism – partisan individuals (we do not need to name names) notwithstanding.
For the love of all that is holy, can we please please focus on tech and policy and put identity politics and tribal politics to one side on HN? Please?
The US has become bipolar, the Media has become hysterical, using war propaganda to infer the worst intentions and personal qualities to the adversaries, instead of using Truth using prejudices, condemning people without evidence or counsel for the defense.
It explains the electoral system problems: http://www.fairvote.org/problems and a couple of possible solutions: http://www.fairvote.org/solutions
It sounds like a low-tech solution but maybe "ranked choice voting" (a.k.a. proportional representation?) could shift the needle?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_electoral_systems_by_c...
I don't have a problem with a phone call though. Although I would not have done it personally.
Case in point: https://www.google.com/search?q=majority+of+Americans+single...
The majority of Americans support single payer healthcare! Coincidentally (except it's not a coincidence at all) out of OECD countries the U.S. has the most amount of completely uninsured citizens (about 1 in 10!): https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=HEALTH_PROT but also pays on average more than anywhere else: http://www.oecd.org/els/health-systems/graph-of-the-month.ht... including this nugget: “Of all the OECD member states, only in the United States does voluntary health insurance and private funding such as households’ out-of-pocket payments account for more than 50% of the total”
When you realize that what the average person desires in the U.S. makes statistically zero difference on what laws get passed† it's little wonder that many have stopped voting.
And yet, what do the rest of us have to listen to on HN? Partisan bickering and identity politics. Spare us please.
† https://www.businessinsider.com/major-study-finds-that-the-u...
Some additional data from the insurance side of things is that about 5% of patients account for about 50% of health care expenses and about 1% of patients account for about 25% of expenses. This is not something to primarily solve for, but it is something the insurance industry must account for.
Solving even for the some of the most basic cost insecurities of health care is hard, because some side of the industry always benefits from a particular angle of each inefficiency. You have to be willing to financially harm a large segment of that industry to make it better for everybody else. Realizing this each segment of that industry (all industries) will maximize identity politics and team identity as necessary to ensure the survival of their collective business interests.
"can we please please focus on tech and policy and put identity politics and tribal politics to one side on HN?"
It's amusing that you start off by establishing your own identity(European) and then ask others to stop engaging in identity politics.
What I am trying to do is to say that from a neutral perspective the politicking here is reaching a toxic level. It distracts from the real issues of giant monopolistic tech companies and other such real social ills. You think it's amusing, I think it's downright depressing that I should have to wave a white flag.
I agree with you but I also think given the prominent role FB had in the last US election and the uncertainty of its potential role in the upcoming election its ensures that peoples's emotions on the subject tend to run hot. Cheers.
As regards FB, is it a utility or a medium? If it is a medium then they exercise editorial control over the content on their platform and are liable for said content; if it is a utility then they should not censor any content (which they totally do – be it timeline manipulation or shadow-banning or deplatforming). Tech companies want it every which way – they want to behave like a utility but also censor (and monetize) content. Whatever they (FB, Twitter, YouTube, et. al.) are, they're leading an ad-fueled muddled existence. I really think we need anti-trust legislation to chop them into pieces and reboot with some much needed global competition. What we need is effectively an ITU‡ (which was founded in 1865 btw) for the 21st century.
‡ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Telecommunicatio...
I'm assuming this is the question of are they a publisher or a platform? They seem to want to be both depending on the context and who is asking:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/02/facebook-...
For racial and sexual minorities, in the current US climate especially, it's hard to avoid "identity politics" when you have literal mobs with torches yelling for your head. And likewise it's hard to not feel a bit betrayed (even if that's completely irrational) when corporations ignore this for the sake of maintaining good relations for profit.
Are you concerned changing cultural tides will put you on the wrong side of history? Or is it more of an existential angst about privilege? I think we're in agreement that current trends are very serious, although it appears for opposite reasons.
My initial comment called for less of this kind of thing on HN but it seems that some of use here will always be at pains to show the rest of the world how on the correct side of history we are. How tedious. What this has got to do with Facebook's trustworthiness score machinery I do not know.
This article posted is immensely relevant for the intersection of tech and political discourse, and in such cases, I would personally prefer to see more discussion on HN.
If the article is about new advances in Golang, sure, I'd hate to see talk of politics in threads.
This seems like a "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" kind of thing. On one hand, I understand not wanting to forward every single story when a troll is mass-reporting, on the other hand though, this seems like a very 1984 approach that like all algorithms is horrendously naive.
Any closed group is likely to have a skewed sense of reality. On one hand, third party fact checkers are hopefully true to their title, but on the other hand, they could just be adding their own bias to the decisions with no oversight in a way that affects users going forward.
Add in no ability to appeal and no visibility into the system, and you have a closed system ripe for abuse.
Good job Facebook, you have learned nothing.