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A comment on The risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan. Parent comment

Re:The risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan by api on Friday July 02, 2021 @05:31PM (#27717165)
That's because Facebook is full of bad actors sharing actual complete bullshit conspiracy theories, and the only thing a company like Facebook can possibly do is a make a "nothing that deviates too hard from the Official Line(tm) rule." Otherwise they have to get into the business of being some kind of scientific review board, which they are in no way equipped to do.

Bad faith propaganda at the scale we have seen recently is abuse of free speech, and widespread abuse of a freedom often leads to the curtailment of that freedom.

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Re:The risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan by cvwright on Friday July 02, 2021 @07:12PM (#27717988)
That crazy shit is only a problem because they built an algorithmic feed that automatically finds the most virulent bullshit, and then shows it to everyone it possibly can.

Drop the algorithmic feed, and you solve most of the problem. Unfortunately for Facebook, this would also cut their ad revenue, so they'll never do it.

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Re:The risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan by nradov on Friday July 02, 2021 @05:58PM (#27717450)
Official line in which country? And what happens when the WHO says one thing, the CDC says something else, and the President contradicts both?
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Re:The risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan by api on Friday July 02, 2021 @06:07PM (#27717541)
What happens? Facebook eats it from all sides.

I didn't say they were doing a good job, just that the alternative would have been to let the platform turn into a complete cesspool of bullshit and hate.

This scenario is a curse you get when you are operating a gigantic Internet forum at that kind of scale.

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Re:The risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan by heavyset_go on Friday July 02, 2021 @08:17PM (#27718329)
> I didn't say they were doing a good job, just that the alternative would have been to let the platform turn into a complete cesspool of bullshit and hate.

Here's an example of this happening[1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

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Re:The risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan by tweetle_beetle on Friday July 02, 2021 @06:09PM (#27717562)
> Otherwise they have to get into the business of being some kind of scientific review board, which they are in no way equipped to do.

They're not that far off that to be honest - https://oversightboard.com/

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