As the FB employee in this thread commented - this person vilified others and was fired for that, not his attempts to "bring down the man".

Large scale platforms like this are hard to manage. I can see many cases where people doing their best can be misconstrued as an evil conspiracy.

Eg.

- Users and companies with large fan bases are open to brigading. Previously companies have been taken off the platform suddenly because of militant FB groups.

- A new rule is instituted "anyone with more than X followers get Tier-1 support in reviewing and reinstating their account following a take down."

- Engineer on some team mildly close to the team who runs the takedown/reinstatement systems sees that a Right Wing commentator is getting Tier-1 support and fast turn around reinstatement.

- Said engineer tries to vilify the people who wrote the policy and those who are carrying it out, tries to go public with a conspiracy that "FB is prioritizing reinstating Right Wing users". Instead they've really just lost the trust of their peers, failed to understand the space properly, and now brought their employer into disrepute - they should be fired.

This stuff happens all the time, and is usually just chalked up to "its a hard problem to get right, and we're trying to get better every day". When people over react and make out like Zuck is pulling strings to rule the universe i have a hard time understanding when he sleeps.

The fact check program is itself executive abuse and should be ended. Given how many "fact checkers" are simply leftist pro-establishment types, and how many "fact checks" they produce are simple re-statements of whatever someone was claiming without bothering to address any raised criticisms, it doesn't surprise me at all that it's a flashpoint internally. These sort of people simply define anything that's not left wing as "misinformation", so the claim by the FB employee is on its surface meaningless.

Zuckerberg should never have given way on fact checking. I wonder if he understands it was a mistake. Facebook is meant to be a social network, it's inherently a graph oriented organisation in which graph nodes are all roughly equal. Fact checking is the exact opposite: a hierarchy with Facebook at the top and delegated "truth arbiters" a layer lower, that try to dominate the social graph.

The cited example of the Breitbart video is a good example. The video is a video of doctors. There are tons of scientists, government advisors and indeed whole governments saying they don't see any need for masks, children can go back to school or never even left (as in Sweden), etc. You don't need to go far to find them. That children aren't infectious is by now widely accepted in the scientific community. For Facebook to censor the President for making such a statement makes them look absurd, and totalitarian. Given the long term accusations of fraud surrounding mail voting that were never addressed, it's not a big surprise Trump is worrying about the integrity of the election process.

There are not "tons of scientists, government advisors" saying they don't see the need for masks. That is very much a minority opinion which is not supported by mainstream science.

I'm curious also by your claim that children aren't infectious. That is not widely accepted by the scientific community. It sounds like you're taking some minor positions and pretending like they're mainstream.

> It sounds like you're taking some minor positions and pretending like they're mainstream.

Indeed. And if the grandparent got all their "news" from paid feeds and shared content on Facebook (given the right seeding and demographics), they might genuinely believe these are mainstream positions.

Which is exactly the problem people are worried about in the linked article.

> Which is exactly the problem people are worried about in the linked article.

The problem with that is no amount of flagging and removing is going to fix the problem and that is why I don't even see the point, the left and right are so divided that those on the extremes will fall for anything being blinded by their emotional hatred for the other.

I mean we are at the point where the extreme left believes for a fact that via a thoroughly refuted dossier, that the sitting president paid Russian hookers to pee on him.

The extreme right is just as bad, believing that their is a global cabal of elite leftist that are raping children with a presidential candidate being one of them.

No amount of blocking content is going to repair the fact that people are no longer listening and that is the problem one side wants the other side filtered so that they can be the only voice shouting in the dark, thinking if the other side cannot talk then they are by default going to listen, but the reality is almost everybody has stopped listening, no amount of censorship is going to fix that.

This is a strawman and false equivalence. The "extreme left" believes the President definitely sexually assaulted at least one woman and additionally probably raped someone. The first part having been admitted to several times. Noone believes that 100% of the Steele dossier is true. The QAnon crowd is a minority of the "extreme right", although it is concerning how fast conspiracies spread, including "left conspiracies" like anti-vax or anti-GMO.

Fact checks might help slow crazy conspiracies a little bit. I think it is worth for this reason, although I believe in content warnings+disclaimers instead of takedowns because of Streisand effects.

Finally, again, the Steele dossier is not even a "left conspiracy". It is a side-product of rumor spreading games that the intelligence community plays, that got leaked. I think it is a bad example for the point your seem to be making.

> It is a side-product of rumor spreading games that the intelligence community plays

It was a hit piece, who funding is now well known, it was political from the start. What it was not, and would not qualify as is an intelligence report and was never formulated for the purpose of intel. It is no different than the hit pieces being produced by the right to paint Biden as a pedophile. So I don't see it as a Strawman as the point was people are so far gone on their version of the truth that no amount of censoring or labeling is going to pull them back from the edge. Both sides are doing it, and at this point there is no gradient of less-bad.

> at this point there is no gradient of less-bad.

OK, that's just silly. Read a newspaper? Watch a routine 1 hour news program from any of the major networks? No pee tape. No pizzagate (well, except when that nut started shooting up the restaurant over it). I'm sure you think there's "bias" but there are no lies.

There are many journalistic organizations who genuinely care about reporting the truth. And they "filter" and "censor" themselves to do it all the time, because in that world it's called "good journalism". They get stuff wrong, and when they do they tell us about it.

And the issue at hand here is that Facebook is trying to apply some of the same controls to the news it presents to its users, via most of the same processes (i.e. by trusting journalists). And stuff leaks through, and sometimes Facebook itself seems to be uneven in the application of its own rules.

So I don't get your point. Why is it OK for The Times to spike its reporting on the pee tape because it can't find good sourcing but when Facebook to do the same it's somehow an impossibility?

> I'm sure you think there's "bias" but there are no lies

Sure there is bias, Fox news is plenty biased so is CNN. and there are plenty of lies, a lie by omission is still a lie. Not to mention burying retractions in blurbs and page 10 even if they do a retraction. Make no mistake about it, I blame both sides equally so I am not advocating for one sides bias over another. My point is simply that people have stopped listening so all the meandering in the world will not "get them". Most everyone has chosen a side and the few of us left in the middle are stuck in a shit storm, that we don't want and we damn sure don't want to hear either sides dogma as it has become the stuff of religious fanatics, so we are not listening either.

The actual scientific evidence for masks is not as strong as you claim. Please read this analysis by the University of Oxford Centre for Evidence Based Medicine. We need to do more research.

https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/masking-lack-of-evidence-with-...

Just to be clear, I am not advising anyone to avoid wearing a mask.

Strictly speaking we're both in violent agreement that really high quality studies are required for the evidence to be solid.

Please note that I did not say there was scientific evidence for masks, but that wearing masks is good is the mainstream scientific position (which changed only very recently).

I read your article. It's pretty limited in its analysis. I'm going by this popular science article from my alma mater (I have a PhD in biophysics), https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/06/417906/still-confused-abou...

The article you cited doesn't include a number of the articles my article mentions (http://files.fast.ai/papers/masks_lit_review.pdf, https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2020.00818 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342198360_Associati..., https://www.cmaj.ca/content/192/15/E410, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/17/masks-sal...,

More importantly- this is a situation where we don't have unambiguous data, but the mainstream position is consistent with the current data and reasonable thinking about disease prevention.

The discussion upthread was about people arguing that masks aren't needed or don't work. This is review paper cautioning that the science behind mask effectiveness isn't as settled as we'd want. It shows good evidence for medical PPE being effective, but it found one study that showed cloth masks were actually harmful, and it points out that the applicability to covid isn't as strong as we'd like either.

There's nothing in there that should serve to argue against the general consensus that masks are a good idea. They are, within the bounds of the evidence at hand, effective in the opinions of most experts. And that includes the authors of the paper you wrote.

What general consensus?

You just wrote yourself that there is no consensus, even amongst scientists who have been extremely willing to recommend extreme measures from the start. The review paper showed the science isn't settled: that's literally the definition of no consensus.

The concept of scientific consensus is horribly abused. Look at the reply to my post. It's not about anything concrete, it just asserts everyone agrees with the poster. That's a lie, and obviously so. Yet simply by claiming it's true, some will believe it, as it's an unfalsifiable statement. Indeed you yourself believe it, even whilst reading a paper that says there's no consensus.