Thee larger problem is factual accuracy. With all the propaganda going around, it is hard to find the truth. Any attempt to classify such opinions will inevitably further a propaganda.

As someone said, we live in strange timeline where comedians are more trustworthy than politicians.

> With all the propaganda going around, it is hard to find the truth

If bot/organized posts are properly classified as spam then surely the factual accuracy of someone's postings don't really matter anymore, as anything "inaccurate" falls into the realm of "opinion" or just human error. Presumably it's ok to be wrong.

So I don't see any problem with a person believing that e.g. Epstein was killed, and posting online about this belief. I don't see a problem with grassroots communities arising around this belief. It only seems to me to be an issue when such postings are sponsored/encouraged because of e.g. some political aim, and proper spam detection would mitigate this.

FB does work with 3rd party fact checkers. We should be able to trust people from places like Reuters to remain fairly neutral.

Authority doesn't really work on the net. The information will be discarded anyway if people just want to.

When they use Breitbart as a 3rd party fact checker how can we trust them?

3rd party fact checkers themselves are highly biased. If you think reuters is neutral, then you really don't understand the "news" business. The "news" business isn't in the business of news. It's in the influence business. The founder of reuters started off peddling radical revolutionary propaganda.

Paul Julius Reuter worked at a book-publishing firm in Berlin and was involved in distributing radical pamphlets at the beginning of the Revolutions in 1848.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuters#History

Besides, the problematic part with "news" involve "non-factual" news but rather political "news". Whether globalism is good or bad. What, if anything, to do about climate change. Nonsense like veganism, etc. There, by nature, can't be fact-checked because it is a value/contextual judgment rather than a factual one. Capitalism vs communism, nationalism vs globalism, immigration vs nativism, alt-right vs alt-left, traditional media vs social media, etc.

Reuters having started off spreading radical pamphlets is about as relevant as Hitler being involved in the development of Volkswagen.

Nobody in charge needs to (or even can) decide if something like globalism or communism is good or bad, just that no obvious lies are spread while discussing it.

> I think you’re trivializing the difficulty in categorizing the low quality, and extremely brief, comments of social media. Go look at a political subreddit, or some controversial tweet. There’s little conversation or context. Most users could be bots.

Never mind Google, most people are unable to recognize when they are behaving in a bot-like manner themselves...and if you point it out to them, in my experience 90%+ of the time they will become hostile and double down on their clearly not correct statements.

EDIT: Which is often reflected in willingness to entertain or debate ideas, as well as voting patterns. But alas, it seems I am done on HN for the day, due to "posting too fast".

How could they not know?

This would be a great pet project to work on, to get a good understanding of why it's not easy. Plus, if you succeed, you'll be incredibly wealthy.

Ah. So it's my job to watch dog Facebook? Proving what we know must be true? Because reasons. And me performing this due diligence is going to make me fabulously wealthy? Because magic.