All of the articles I'm seeing about this online are ideological, but this feels like the kind of decision that should have been in the works for multiple quarters now, given how effective Notes have been, and how comically ineffective and off-putting fact-checkers have been. The user experience of fact-checkers (forget about people pushing bogus facts, I just mean for ordinary people who primarily consume content rather than producing it) is roughly that of a PSA ad spot series saying "this platform is full of junk, be on your guard".
* Dana White added to the board.
* "Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content." - like people being in Texas makes them more objective?!
The actual mechanisms of running a social media network at scale are tricky and I think most of us would be fine with some experimentation. But it looks pretty political in the broader context, so maybe it's just a way of saying that certain kinds of 'content' like attacking trans people is going to be ok now.
I can't quite FB entirely, but Threads looks like a much less interesting option with Blue Sky being available and gaining in popularity.
I've never seen a wrong Facebook fact-check; I am warmly supportive of intrusive moderation; that's not where I'm coming from.
> “We look forward to working with Meta in the coming weeks to understand the changes in greater detail, ensuring its new approach can be as effective and speech-friendly as possible.” [1]
So is it possible this was only announced recently. It might have been "in the works" in the C-suite for a bit longer, but there doesn't seem to be any evidence it was widely known before very recently.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/07/meta-face...
Announced together with everything else and given the timing, I just can't help but think there's a political component to all of it.
"We're moving to Texas to eliminate perceptions of bias" is the biggest giveaway of this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...
i mean they can just pretend and get paid
The change here is to move the people designing the policies to Texas (basically a stealth layoff, tbh).
That being said, the moderation has been insanely bad for a while now, so all the model tuning seems like a worthwhile change to me.
The Texas thing sounds like PR but isn't really given their huge offices in Austin.
That distinctly smells like pork barrel politicking: we're moving jobs from Commiefornia to your great state, and if your criminal [1] state AG sues us again over this function, he'll be putting Texans out a job.
1. Allegedly. Meta wouldn't dare call him thar, but he agreed to 100 hours of community service and paying restitution to those he allegedly defrauded to avoid a trial.
Lately I've been talking with a lot of people trying to help find answers and something I am learning is to delete all the duckspeak from my vocabulary (there was an otherwise good article about "placement poverty" in medical education that I didn't post last weekend because but "X poverty" is duckspeak)
If I say anything at all to anyone about this or that and get a negative response about the words I use I take it very seriously and most of the time resolve to use different words in future.
https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt
called "The Principles of Newspeak" that coins the word.
The slogan "My Body My Choice" has some of this character. It rolls off the tongue and stops thought. There is no nuance: the rights of the mother are inalienable. Opponents will talk about the inalienable rights of the fetus. There is no room for compromise but setting some temporal point in the pregnancy is a compromise like Solomon's that makes sense to the disengaged but gives no satisfaction to people who see it as moral issue. [1]
Note that this phrase turned out to be content-free and perfectly portable when it got picked up by anti-vaccine activists.
"Illegal Alien" is a masterpiece of language engineering that stands on its own for effectiveness. I mean, we all follow laws that we don't agree with or live with the threat of arrest and imprisonment if we don't. It's easy to see somebody breaking the law and not getting caught as a threat to the legitimacy of the system. "Undocumented Migrant" has been introduced as an alternative but it just doesn't roll off the tongue in the same way and since it is not so entrenched it comes across more as language engineering.
(Practically as opposed to morally: Americans would rather work at Burger King rather than get a few more $ per hour to get up early for difficult and dirty work which might have you toiling in the hot or the cold. An American would see a farmhand job at a dairy farm as a dead end job. A Mexican is an experienced ag worker who might want to save up money to buy his own farm. Which one does the dairy farmer want to have handling his cows?)
My son bristles at "healthcare" as a word consistently used for abortion and transgender medicine to the point where he shows microexpressions when reading discussions about access to healthcare in general.
This poster burns me up
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/741405157385448245/
in that teaching small children the alleged difference between two words will make a difference in the very difficult problems that (say) black [2] people have in America trivializes those problems. It trains them to become the kind of people who will trade memes online as opposed to facing those problems. In the meantime I've heard so many right wingers repetitively talk about "Equality of opportunity" vs "Equality of outcomes" which is a real point but reduces a complex and fraught problem to a single axis.
[1] There's a great discussion of this https://www.amazon.com/Rights-Talk-Impoverishment-Political-... although that book has a discussion of the Americans with Disabilities Act that hasn't aged well
[2] Bloomberg Businessweek has a policy to always say capital B when they talk about "Black" people. Do black people care? Does it really help them? What side of the barricades are they on when they write gushing articles about Bernard Arnault and review $250 bottles of booze and $3000/night hotel rooms.
It definitely comes across as language engineering. It's a legitimate category ("I'm an asylum seeker directly on my way to claim asylum from the nearest office") but expanded to include people who are just in the country illegally. It's too obvious to convince many people for very long.
In terms of cost, the items you cite are vanishingly small, and to conflate the two, one must have no experience of the medical system beyond twitter.
Is your son on his own? Did he have to pay the cost for a broken limb or a child's disease, or has he seen a family member go through a cancer? Maybe he would have a better sense of what "healthcare" means if he had actually been facing these situations.
I don't like the word "debate" because it makes me think of a high school debate where you are assigned which side of the issue and it is about to winning or losing.
https://depts.washington.edu/fammed/wp-content/uploads/2018/...
in the current situation people feel they have exactly one candidate to vote for every time and thus we have no ability to vote out corrupt politicians. The political class wins and the rest of us lose.
(I am so concerned about people's inability or reluctant to change that I've experienced a call to the ministry and I'm working to use practices that I developed for selfish ends in the past to help others. Ideally when I offend you I want to strike you at the core and leave you haunted for months and not be able to think about the issue the same way ever again. If you're reacting to bits of trash somebody else stuck on me that I'm not aware of, I'm not going to get that strike in.)
To wit there are a lot of totalitarians out there, and just because some group claims to be on your side or looking out for your interests versus some other group it doesn't mean they don't want your mind, body, and soul for their own purposes. We must take it upon ourselves to think for ourselves and to hold our own interests rather than to adopt the interests of the group we're in. Humans can engage in enterprise as a group for their own reasons, and we ought to embrace that instead of seeking to identify so wholly with the group that we lose ourselves.
Modern progressives shut themselves off from any ideas they don’t already agree with, making it impossible for them to discern whether what they believe is true or not.
Of course this is also true of many religious conservatives. It’s just now equally true of those on the far left.
On any topic you want to pick it's typically the radical right wing who have their fingers in their ears.
This isn’t hard to grasp.
I don’t care about immigration either way, I don’t have an axe to grind.
I’m not reflecting this idea, of course, because I’m a progressive. It does seem a bit imaginary, though.
I consider myself to be a progressive and am more than happy to critique "lefty stuff" all day long. I know I'm not alone in that regard.
Try me.
That is quite different from making up wild stories about immigrants eating cats, fabricating nonsense about widespread election fraud / stolen elections, suggesting injecting bleach is a sufficient remedy for coronavirus, sharpie-ing atop hurricane maps to prove previous incorrect statements were totally real because... look: sharpie! And this man has never had more widespread support.
These. Parties. Are. Not. The. Same.
By the way, it wasn't just one man making this "immigrants are eating our pets" thing. In addition to Trump, other prominent Republicans such as J.D. Vance, Marc Molinaro, and Laura Loomer also repeated this lie.
He does however have a knack for attracting people disenfranchised from politics.
And ever since the 70s there's been a tension between the blocks of the Republican party: fiscal business conservatives, foreign policy hawks, and rural/religious conservatives.
After couple decades getting the final group fired up, they decided they wanted to drive. And the primary system rewarded them.
I've been an outside observer of US politics for many decades, I'd characterize what happened not so much as the primary system rewarding them but more as a consummate grifter and snakeoil carpetbagger fooling them into thinking they've won.
They got fired up, they got the candidate they voted for, I'm not sure the expected rewards will follow as hoped and expected.
So he says "We'll build a wall!", then throws up a few miles of fencing, then takes some photos and says "We built the wall!", and people believe him?
That's job done.
Sure, there are a lot of interests around him, but I honestly don't think he's playing a master plan. He just lives inside messaging.
Is climate change driven by human activity? Do males have a natural advantage in sports? Do vaccines cause autism? Does rent control make housing more available?
The major political tribes are full of BS, because politics mostly isn't driven by disagreements about facts but by conflicting material interests. Partisans believe whats convenient.
I won't argue about the other two, BUT.
We have facts for contact sports and for speed and strength sports, we've had these facts for millenia.
For the vaccine one, we also have facts. You're more likely to win the lottery than to get autism from them. I think they're probably the same odds as dying from a potted plant falling on your head while walking but anti vaxxers don't seem to be wearing helmets everywhere, that's so weird...
That something like this might happen is not surprising. If you have two political groups and you assign both beliefs from a bag in a purely random process, odds are that one of the groups will end up with more true beliefs than the other, through no virtue of their own but through pure chance.
To your questions, the best explanations for climate change are human causes (and with very considerable evidence).
Women have higher pain tolerances and greater natural buoyancy, they are greatly advantaged at long distance cold water swimming. Many other sports require physical size and/or strength - so it does depend. Vaccines have no evidence of _causing_ autism, and the big paper that made that claim was retracted. I don't know about rent control and do not know what data exists.
Yeah, the answer of, yes, and here is all the evidence just doesn't seem to fly. I feel that trolling and trolls, and science illiteracy just have simply won the day.
FWIW, it's called the Firehose of Falsehood and the Soviets invented it.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/transgender-pronouns-fine-...
And Canada has similar (and far more widespread and severe) laws punishing people for expressing wrongthink about trans issues.
As far as I can tell the culture war is over since end of the pandemic - now the class war has begun, it’s going to be interesting
Hillary Clinton has made similar comments, saying "But I also think there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda, and whether they should be civilly, or even in some cases criminally, charged is something that would be a better deterrence, because the Russians are unlikely, except in a very few cases, to ever stand trial in the United States." But again, there is no First Amendment carveout for propaganda, Russian or otherwise.
There are some limits to protected speech, but they're rare and mostly limited to direct incitement of a crime or other threat.
One common error people make is that they think they can pick and choose beliefs and positions a la carte and expect them to remain stable as fixed parameters of the environment. But that's not how ideas work. They aren't static in this way. Rather, they function much like presuppositions that, over time, are worked out, dialectically, if you will. Society is like a machine that works out the consequences of ideas over time.
So, I always find it amusing when anyone appeals to some fondly remembered status quo that held in a prior decade, believing that all one needs to do is return to that status quo "verbatim" and all will be well, as if these things were just a matter of arranging the furniture a certain way. You can't roll back the clock, and if you could, you would only recreate a similar development that led to the undesirable state of affairs in the first place.
This isn't an argument for some kind of Big P progessivism, or against tradition, only an account of how cultures develop over time. In our case, by understanding the tensions and contradictions within the liberalism tradition, we can come to explain why Western societies have moved in a certain direction over the last 200 years. Heck, we can go back further to the influence of Luther, or even further to Ockham, without whose ideas liberalism would arguably not exist.
(I define here "liberal" and "liberalism" not in the lazy, colloquial partisan sense, as in "own the libs!" or "left wing", but the philosophical definition in the tradition of Hobbes, Locke, and others. In this sense, "we" are all liberals in the liberal West.)
It clearly is not. A fact is a fact by definition, regardless of what anyone happens to feel about it. There are facts that are known to be true beyond all possible doubt.
If it is uncertain or in doubt, then it's not a fact and shouldn't be corrected by fact checkers.
The problem is that some people believe a fact is one way beyond doubt, and other way believe it is the other way.
Epidemiology: Respirator masks help prevent infectious diseases
Economics: Rent control is always a bad idea
It basically helps reduce the hyperbole/echo chamber effect of such comments/topics. Vice/versa if those topics were "Respirator masks are useless." and "Rent control is always good." then the community notes would tend to go in the opposite direction. It's just a really good idea. For that matter I think a similar algorithm would also work well on general upvote systems at large.
I'd also add that one of the biggest issues with "fact checkers" was not only sometimes questionable checking, but also a selection bias - where the ideological bias becomes rather overt in both directions. Whether that be in deciding to "fact check" the Babylon Bee (in an overt effort to get it deranked), or in choosing not to not fact check statements from the lying politicians that one happens to like.
If the goal were to prevent rents from rising, the mechanism would do so directly, ie. regulate all rent, rather than limiting to continued rentals on certain types of property. Which would by definition prevent rents from rising, presumably along with other undesirable effects.
Anyways, the whole issue with conflating "bad" with objective consequences is the "presumed goal," which is of course totally subjective.
A good candidate for fact checking is something that is well documented objectively verifiable. Politician X said Y on TV the other day.
Well this is definitely false. If you're a politician who can afford a nice place then rent control is a great idea: it gets you elected (look, I made things cheap for you) and keeps you elected (look, I will solve all the problems underpriced rent brings).
I have never seen an accepted fact checking site answer this, which is very strange since it is such an enormous and grave conspiracy theory if it were true. The Mueller report is extensive and quite conclusive in stating that no such evidence of collusion (conspiracy) was not found. Yet fact checkers are happy to check peripheral and far less consequential claims around the case for some reason (e.g., https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mueller-report-no-obstruct...), but are strangely hesitant to address the elephant in the room.
Or for another example, there were many false or poorly substantiated claims made about covid and vaccines during the pandemic. I saw "reputable" fact checkers address a certain set of those claims about the virus and drugs, but were strangely silent when it came to a different set of claims.
So fact checkers don't even need to provide false content at all, they can be very political and biased simply by carefully choosing exactly what "facts" or claims that they address.
But even straightforward stuff goes unchallenged. Jada Pinkett Smith released a movie trailer claiming Cleopatra was black. When NBC covered the issue, they couldn’t even bring themselves to fact check her. They did a “he said, she said” article asserting that Egypt contested whether Cleopatra was black: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/queen-cleopatra-black-egy....
Trump Putin election hacking collusion was always a wild baseless conspiracy theory. Sure there is no absolute proof he did not, and there is various incidental connections and circumstantial evidence you could arrange to fit some crazy narrative. But what it not in dispute is that many people lied and mislead claiming to have "ample evidence" of collusion, when no such thing was ever produced.
But how do we distinguish facts from non facts?
That is a dilemma humanity has struggled with for millennia. Humans are very bad at recognizing their own biases and admitting to themselves they were wrong about something.
What do you mean how? Science. The process of science.
There might be people who want to believe gravity on Earth accelerates objects at 1m/s^2, but we can trivially establish through countless experiments repeatable by anyone who wants to try that this is not true.
If you can't measure it or repeatably demonstrate it then it's probably not a fact. If it can, then it is a fact and no amount of emotionally wanting to believe something else can make it not a fact.
Science, the process of science, does not prove something as fact. It can only eliminate non-facts, and even then, the experiments may be flawed in their recognition.
> If you can't measure it or repeatably demonstrate it then it's probably not a fact. If it can, then it is a fact and no amount of emotionally wanting to believe something else can make it not a fact.
This is demonstrably false. If you witness an event once, you cannot necessarily repeat it, but you know for a fact that it happened. Unless you redefine the term "fact" narrowly, what you suggested is an ideology.
See how even the definition of "fact" is up for debate.
I intentionally picked a wrong value for Earth gravity instead of the correct one to avoid nitpickery on precision, location, yada yada.
If someone has a feeling that Earth's gravity accelerates at 1m/s^2, they're just flat out wrong full stop. This is the problem with the anti-intellectual crowd who believes everyone's opinion has equal weight. No, it doesn't. If someone wants to believe Earth's gravity accelerates at 1m/s^2, then their opinion (on that topic) is worthless because it is known to be false and they don't deserve any recognition for the nonsense. Facts are facts, beliefs don't make them go away.
> This is demonstrably false. If you witness an event once, you cannot necessarily repeat it, but you know for a fact that it happened.
Not at all. Human memory is fallible so if you are the only one who saw that event and swear it is true that does not make it a fact no matter how hard you believe it.
That's why scientific process requires repeatable results that anyone can (re)validate over and over, not one-off recollections.
Indeed, "sea level" is defined as the level that the sea would be at, if the area of question didn't have the land mass, but still had the same gravity. Of the various possibilities, this particular definition is useful, in that it you can expect the air pressure at a particular altitude to be the same, regardless of where you are, after factoring in things like temperature and humidity -- which is kindof important if you're a pilot of some sort!
You do realize it depends on the distance of the object to Earth? So perhaps you are wrong not them depending on the context.
Now someone comes up and says I am nitpicking blah blah... well, the author should have been clear and not stating falsehood as fact! This is just your belief which does not change the incompleteness/incorrectness of the statement (as per the original post).
And this is the whole goddamn point. What's "fact" to someone can be incorrect, half-correct, wrong with completely good faith, or wrong with intent to mislead, etc. Who gets to decide all this is not as simple as "I am ScienceTM" Dr Fauci style.
As to the "correct formula for gravity" - that's just bad faith nitpicking. "Newtonian gravitation is a fact" is both a strawman and completely irrelevant when it comes to social media fact checkers.
No. Recording an experiment does not constitute scientific repeatability of an experiment. (Not to mention Quantum Mechanics explicitly rejects your claim as a universal principle at the micro level.)
> As to the "correct formula for gravity" - that's just bad faith nitpicking. "Newtonian gravitation is a fact" is both a strawman and completely irrelevant when it comes to social media fact checkers.
No, it is not a strawman at all. It clearly illustrates via an example of something we have known to be false for about a century, yet not only we do not censor it on social media, we teach it to kids, and almost no one would object to it.
So, where do you draw the line?
I posit there exists facts that are unknowable by the scientific method. The GP claimed science as the end-all-be-all method to fact-check. My statement is that it's not sound, nor complete, in its ability to fact-check.
People want to sell you lies and get you to believe them, and they'll give all the half truths they can to support their version of the truth. they'll use misleading graphs with real numbers, so you can fact check the numbers on the graph and come away thinking the graph represents the truth of the matter. But X axis that don't start at zero, logarithmic Y axis that don't say they're logarithmic, Or pie graphs viewed from a funny angle, with slices that don't represent the percentage they're labeled by, or with percentages that add up to greater than 100%.
If all we wanted to run were trivial physics experiments, we'd be golden. The real world of social media facts include things we can't run science experiments for, or go back in time to redo, like economic stats that use a different formula today and there's not enough information to see what it was in the distant past. So we get these narratives from people who are trying to convince us to believe theirs by leaving off important context. Which is totally dishonest of them, but they have a vested interest in us believing a particular narrative.
The aim of fact-checking isn't to be a perfect system that covers every single possibility and edge case. The aim is to reduce the effectiveness of lies and propaganda, so that people are less misinformed when they go about their daily actions and democratic duty.
As I've gotten older, I've become increasingly skeptical of the idea of a "fact".
There's no way to separate information from human context. Even seemingly obvious things like "that shirt is blue". To who? My wife sees it as green, frequently.
Or things are reduced to tautological nonsense like "gravity keeps us on the ground". Hard fact, right? But define gravity. A physicist will give you an answer, that may or may not mean much. A layman's definition might be something like "it's the thing that keeps us stuck to the ground", and now we're back to tautological nonsense. The entire "water is wet" class of "facts".
Anything less trite instantly becomes less fact-like the more humans are involved.
"Trump is a criminal" many people would argue passionately that this is a hard, incontrovertible fact.
Nearly as many, (or maybe more?) would argue the opposite.
I like the approach of the Fair Witness in Stranger In A Strange Land: "What color is that house?" "It's yellow on this side."
I'm increasingly convinced that the belief in "facts" is more about the desire to be right and know things than anything to do with objective reality.
May I suggest that your confusion comes from a conflation between facts and generalizations. Hard facts exist in strictly defined contexts. Relax the context, and you need to eventually reach for generalizations that less precise and potentially ambiguous.
If somebidy asked me whether the cup in you hand would fall and and shatter when they release it from their grip, my answer would of course depend on a few things I pick up from the context: what gravitational attraction would the cup experience in your current location? What material is the cup made of (porcelain, metal...)? So if we're standing on earth and the cup was made of porcelain, I'd answer that it would fall and likely shatter. Doesn't mean that any cup would shatter. Metal cups doesn't. But that's a different fact. So there is no generalized fact that all cups shatter when they fall. Some do, some don't. We can play the same game with gravity. The cup wouldn't fall if we were floating on the ISS. So the same cup doesn't fall in all locations it might conceivably be.
Many people don't want to deal with the level of precision that hard facts require. They get sloppy and then start these endless discussions of "this isn't true because..." etc. and everyone gets gradually more confused because nothing seems to be entirely true or false. The fundamental counter here is to dig in and tease the generalizations apart until they become sets of constrained hard facts.
It's, I think, quite relevant here to note that "word" is a famously hard to define concept in linguistics. That is, there is no generalized definition of the concept "word" that works across languages, writing systems (e.g. Chinese and Japanese writing don't traditionally use spaces to separate words), and ways of analyzing language (phonological words are different from grammatical words).
So to make your sentence more accurate, you'd have to say "there are 11 groups of letters separated by whitespace characters or punctuation before your first period".
True, but for a language like English, the various definitions for "word" agree in many (though definitely not all) cases, and in the particular example, I think you'd have to argue somewhat harder to convince me that that sentence doesn't have exactly 11 words (maybe if you argue that "would have" often turns into "would've", which is a single phonetic unit, but then I would also write it that way). There are however other cases where it's less clear (e.g. is possessive 's a separate word or an affix?).
Everything we see, do and understand exists in a context window of an individual. We have a shared language, with which we can inexpertly communicate shared concepts. That language is terrible at communicating certain concepts, so we've invented things like math and counting to try to become more precise. It doesn't make those things "true" universally. It makes them consistent within a certain context.
How far it it from Dallas to Houston? On a paper map, it might be a few inches. True, within that context. Or you might get an answer for road miles. Or as the crow flies. In miles? Kilometers? It's only fairly recently (in human history) that we've even had somewhat consistent units of measure. And that whole conversation presupposes an enormous amount of culture knowledge and context - would that question mean anything to a native tribesman in Africa without an enormous amount of inculturation? Are their facts the same?
I'm not trying to make a "nothing is true, we can't know anything" kind of argument, that's lazy thinking.
I'm making an argument for maintaining skepticism in everything, even (especially?) things that you know for sure.
So long as facts are represented in language, they are subject to language’s imprecision and subjectivity. And I don’t think that platonic ideals of facts, independent of representstion, have much utility.
It's the distinction that you're drawing between those things that I'm skeptical of.
If someone claims "it's 500 miles from Houston to Dallas" they're wrong.
I could imagine ways we could interpret “500 miles” the same way as The Proclaimers i.e. as a noteworthy or arduous distance, under which that claim “it’s 500 miles from Dallas to Houston” isn’t contextually false.
More interesting is what knowing that things are not the case tells us about what we can know is the case. I don’t think it reveals much, but I’m not sure
My apologies for this and with the omission I don’t disagree one bit with your reply.
On the other hand I can see how we might imagine ways we could scientifically sarisfy ourselves beliefs are not absolute, but I’m not sure how we could satisfy ourselves they are
No one’s opinion is going to make them closer together or farther apart, though. The distance (in whatever context) can be known. Can be objectively measured. That makes it a fact.
> I'm making an argument for maintaining skepticism in everything, even (especially?) things that you know for sure.
Are you skeptical about which way to put your feet when you get out of bed? Do you check to make sure every single time?
My understanding is that it's supposed to be a reduction of a logical argument into the form A = A, or true = true.
When the words are different, but essentially mean the same thing, and used as a flawed proposition.
Am I wrong about that? I certainly don't want to bandy the word about incorrectly.
With "gravity keeps us on the ground" I was trying to point out that the word "gravity" to most folks is the same thing as "the thing that keeps us on the ground", it's just a language symbol/shorthand for that concept, so the statement would reduce to A=A, and isn't a meaningful "fact".
Facts are political. Because facts actively change how you live your life.
The playwright who created the “kill all climate denialists” talks about how it took years for the play to get onto stage.
And then how he began to see the truth of climate denialists positions. That climate denialists believed the facts, and realized it meant their whole way of life was over. So they had to do something about it. They responded with denial. In a very real way, they lived their beliefs.
The fact of climate change IS political.
EVERYTHING is political, there is no fact that I cannot convert into a weapon, through some means or the other. Blaming fact checkers, is simply trying not to blame humans.
Whether evolution occurs became a political thing.
It may odd, but political reality is a ‘motivated’ reality - there is a goal to be achieved.
Anything that can be used to create a political win, will be used to create a political win.
I agree that subjectivity exists though.
It does not work for anything with nuance or context, or for unprovable propositions. It is a fact that there is no elephant in my house. But if you want to doubt that fact for the lulz or for profit, I will be hard pressed to prove it.
That’s where our modern populist / fascists have weaponized disingenuousness to prove that “up is down” is just as valid a statement as “up is up”.
I think the problem actually lies in your personal interpretation of what a "fact" should be, and how it contrasts with what facts actually are.
The definition of "fact" is "things that are known or proven to be true". Consequently, if you can prove that an assertion is not true then you prove it is not a fact. If your wife claims your shirt is green and not blue, does that refute the fact that your shirt is actually blue? No. Can you prove your shirt is blue? Can she prove your shirt is green? That is the critical aspect.
Just because someone disagrees with you, that does not mean either if you is right or wrong. You can both be stating facts if it just so happens you're presuming definitions that don't match exactly in specific critical aspects.
If your shirt is cyan, you can argue it's a fact the shirt is blue and argue it's a fact the shirt is green, because in RGB space both the blue channel and green channel is saturated. You can also state that it's a fact that your shirt is neither blue or green because there's a specific definition for that color and this one is in fact cyan, not blue or green.
If you can prove your assertion, it's a fact. If you're making claims you cannot prove or even support, they are not facts.
And more importantly, the problem tackled by fact checking is people making claims that are patently and ostentatiously false and fabricated in order to manipulate public perception and opinions. Does anyone care if your shirt is blue or green? No. Does anyone care if, say, Haitians are eating your pets? Yes.
1) While “facts” undisputed exist, there are vanishingly few people sufficiently versed in both epistemology and myriad substantive areas for “fact checking” to make sense. In particular, domain experts are rarely sufficiently versed in epistemology to distinguish between facts they know by virtue of their expertise, and other things they also believe that aren’t really facts.
Moreover, the folks employed checking facts for companies like Facebook typically don’t have any expertise in either epistemology or the range of substantive areas in which they perform fact checking.
2) In practice, the issue in society isn’t “facts” but “trust.” You can build trust by being consistently correct about facts in a visible way. But you can’t beat people over the head with putative facts if they don’t trust you.
My intent isn't to devolve into some sort of bastardized nihilism, it's to inject skepticism into anything that I can be bothered to think about.
I find it useful as a tool for critical analysis. To question a premise, to poke at the facts, especially the inarguable, indisputable ones.
There seems to be an inverse relationship between the accuracy of a fact and the amount of trouble you get in for questioning it.
Trump being a criminal is based on a shared legal and societal context. As a society, we accept that if you are convicted before a jury of your peers, you are guilty and have been convicted of a crime. Jury's get it wrong and the justice system is flawed and has made mistakes. A black man in the 1920s (or even the 1960s for that matter) being tried for murder with absolutely no evidence and sentenced to death is a clear miscarriage and corruption of justice. The testimony of Trump's employees during the trial, who all said they loved working there (most of them still worked there), but weren't willing to lie on the stand about checks and phone calls they participated in, was pretty clear cut. This wasn't random people off the street of [insert preferred liberal enclave here] testifying against him: it was his own people who still work for him.
Some people prioritize political allegiance over legal judgments when it suits them.
If we dismissed facts entirely, science, medicine, and countless other fields reliant on objective reality would collapse.
This exchange is a great example of the subjective nature of our experiences: as I've gotten older -- 38 now -- I've come to accept more and more that some things are objective reality, whereas in my teens and 20s, I questioned reality and society on the structural level, torn down to the studs. From Plato's cave, to brain in the vat, Kant, the Hindu Brahman and Maya, Buddhism, etc.
Heck, even lawyers don’t treat legal judgments as god-given “facts” except in specific legal circumstances. The questions at the back of every chapter in a law school textbook will ask the student whether a particular case was rightly decided or wrongly decided and why.
The better way to think about legal judgments is not in terms of “facts” but rather “process.” Even a final decision by the U.S. Supreme Court does not establish god given facts. It merely is the end of the line in a set of procedures that lead to a particular result in a particular case. But even judgments of the Supreme Court are second-guessed every day by 20-somethings in law schools around the country!
I'm ok with not knowing things.
We can measure all sorts of things, and put them in a human context, which is very reassuring. What's a wave? What's a wavelength? What's a unit of measure? These are not universal truths, these are human inventions. Things we've created in order to communicate a shared understanding with each other of things we've observed. It makes us feel knowledgeable, lets us build cool things, and that's a good thing!
It also interferes with learning, and that's a bad thing. For example, (and I'm not taking a position on this either way, because I don't know) I think it's very unlikely, based on your comment, that it would be easy to convince you that Trump is not a criminal. Or, to pick a less controversial topic, to convince the early Catholic church of the heliocentric model of the solar system. Because they already had the "facts."
It's a comfortable position to know things.
It's uncomfortable to not know. As I've gotten older, I've become more comfortable with being uncomfortable.
If you read a story about a drug kingpin being convicted at trial, do you assume that he might be innocent?
That's a very fair question.
To answer: I try as hard as I can to not draw any conclusion from something like that.
I'll be 50 this year. I've seen so many examples of media manipulation, "spin", crooked prosecutors, etc... that I try very hard not to jump to a conclusion. Especially with outrage stories like "child pornography was found on his laptop". There are countless examples of police and three letter agents getting caught red-handed planting this stuff, so I'm always skeptical of news stories like that.
Then there's the whole argument of "what's a criminal?". It's frequently the ethical choice to violate an unjust law. Was Ghandi a criminal? If someone broke a law, but then the law was changed or removed, are they still a criminal?
What kind of drug kingpin? (I'm purposefully being pedantic here for rhetorical purposes) Were they "dealing" ibogaine? Maybe for injured vets, but the news is just calling him a drug kingpin? It's strange to me that ibogaine is schedule 1, and I probably wouldn't consider them to be a criminal for doing that. Or maybe they were doing some combination of things, some good some bad. Or maybe there's a good reason why it's schedule 1, and I just don't understand and they really are a bad guy.
My point is that there's usually nuance. I don't trust stories like that, I don't "believe" news articles. I read them, take them in, and reserve judgement. Really. My initial, unconscious reaction and inner voice immediately says "are they framing him? What's the other side of the story? If he is a bad guy, does he see himself that way?"
I've just been burned too many times in my life by getting sucked into media stories that I believed were true, and made an idiot out of myself because I didn't think critically about it and jumped on a bandwagon that later turned out to be BS.
To think that someone is a criminal, you have to believe they committed a crime. A trial is one way of establishing whether they did with certain standards of evidence and process. But it is very far from the be-all-end-all of the matter.
For example, virtually everyone believes OJ Simpson is a criminal, even though he was found not guilty at trial, and even though plenty of biases worked against him in that trial, theoretically.
For myself, I do believe that Trump was rightfully convicted and is a criminal. But that doesn't mean that "he was convicted" should force anyone else to believe this. It only means that a particular group of jurors believed it given the evidence that a judge found correctly collected and presented to them.
Sentencing != conviction. Conviction is the legal finding of guilt, sentencing is the appropriation of punishment.
Given your excessive use of scarequotes around "facts", getting this simple fact wrong is ironic.
"in United States practice, conviction means a finding of guilt (i.e., a jury verdict or finding of fact by the judge) and imposition of sentence. If the defendant fled after the verdict but before sentencing, he or she has not been convicted,"
https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/106159/if-someone-ha...
S 380.30 Time for pronouncing sentence.
In general. Sentence must be pronounced without unreasonable delay.
Court to fix time. Upon entering a conviction the court must:
(a) Fix a date for pronouncing sentence; or
(b) Fix a date for one of the pre-sentence proceedings specified in article four hundred; or
(c) Pronounce sentence on the date the conviction is entered in accordance with the provisions of subdivision three.
The people who say that Trump has been ”convicted but not sentenced” actually mean that he’s been ”found guilty but not sentenced”, they just aren’t intimately familiar with legal terms of art.
If they simply say ”Donald Trump was found guilty but not sentenced” instead, they’ve silenced the nitpickers while still conveying the exact same message they intended to in the first place.
I'm hard pressed to think of an example of a fact that your statement wouldn't apply to.
Here, no one is actually confused. Everyone knows and agrees that Trump was found guilty, but that he hasn’t been sentenced. The only sticking point is whether you can use the word ”convicted” to describe someone who is in that situation, and whether or not that’s the case doesn’t have any material effect on people’s understanding of reality. It’s just a matter of arguing over which words should be used, i.e. it’s just semantics.
> 2 : any of the circumstances of a case that exist or are alleged to exist in reality : a thing whose actual occurrence or existence is to be determined by the evidence presented at trial see also finding of fact at finding, judicial notice question of fact at question, trier of fact compare law, opinion
This is the line in the sand that makes sense in the pre internet era.
Online, EVERYTHING is political speech, because moderation is the only effective action we can take, and moderation is currently conflated with censorship. Even though it’s on a private platform.
I was working towards researching this and building the case out fully - but online speech efficacy is not served by the blunt measures of physical spaces, where the ability to speak is not as mediated.
Online, diversity of voices, capability of users to interact safely, resolution of conflicts, these are better measures of how healthy the market of ideas is.
The point of free speech is to have an effective exchange of ideas, even difficult ones. The idea of free speech is not in service of itself, its in service of a greater good.
Therefore, we rely on experts that decipher information to transcend political opinions. It saddens me when scientists become political, only to add confusion to the consensus, in an attempt to weaken it.
Long live Wikipedia.
Part of the reason why they moderate content is the same reason that a bar owner turfs out people who are rowdy and threatening the other patrons: because the normies will leave and you're left with a bunch of nasty, loud people.
That is, after all, why this site we're on right now is so heavily moderated: it makes for a better user experience.
Perhaps both: might have started as a pragmatic offer to bury the hatchet, then quickly turned into the never ending firehose of demands of an extortionist who just realized that he still all the cards after the extortee has given in.
This is all just loud, performative subjugation to the incoming administration, that does take things like attacking trans people and immigrants as good stuff.
And therefore all Americans are censored.
This fight has been fought before, at the dawn of moderation. It’s been fought here on HN. Back when people used to hold libertarian beliefs openly. “The best ideas rise to the top”. No, they frikking dont. The most viral ideas, the most adaptive ideas - those are the ones that survive.
Everyone learned that moderation is needed, that hard moderation is the only way to prevent spaces from attracting emotional arguments, harassment, stalking, and hate speech.
Maybe this time its different.
Moderation is both thankless, soul crushing, and traumatic. Mods r/neworleans effectively became first responders on Jan 1st. I know mods see everything from dead baby pictures, burning bodies, accidental deaths, to worse.
IF this works, and reduces the need for mods, great! My suspicion is that it’s going to radicalize more people, faster. Its going to support the creation of more demagogues, and further reduce our ability to communicate with each other.
That's a pretty thin advantage, and still barely not an outright majority.
Not to mention the federal money spigot.
Big companies aren't stupid and are largely amoral.
It’s well-documented in SV’s military history, as well as recently, where Apple wasn’t involved in FAA702 illegal spying on americans (PRISM) until after the famously anti-establishment Jobs died.
The SV culture seems to have shifted a bit rightward (as has the whole country, tbh) but the tension is still there, and the social conflict remains (although I think there are other factors, not the least of which is the skill and grace of @dang, that keep people on the better side of their behaviors here).
HN doesn't need much moderation, because the discourse is so civil here [narrator voice: because of the good moderation].
The HN userbase, feedback tools, karma-level-locked tools, and new users' personalities seem to create decent outcomes.
Which is to say, if someone acts like an asshat, folks let them know (either through downvotes, flags, or replies), and they modify their behavior to be closer to the community norm.
That said, I'm aware I don't see a lot of the most egregious stuff the Good Ship Dang torpedoes. Or what I expect are non-zero repeat trolls.
And honestly, the fact is that outside of very nerdy street cred, there's little incentive to actively manage discourse for commercial purposes on HN.*
* Outside of, you know, cloudflare tailscale rust (any other crawler alarms I can trip)
I think all of this working in conjunction is why it has remained a pretty great community for almost two decades. And I think that's a really impressive feat. I don't think it was accomplished via "a combination of education and niche interests that attract a different user base".
Indeed, I think HN has gotten better over time, even somewhat so in absolute terms, but very starkly relative to the deterioration of everything else. For example, back in the day, when twitter was first getting big in tech, a lot of people felt that it was a healthier place to discuss those topics than HN. I was never completely convinced of that, and have always been more active here than on twitter, but it was at least a very reasonable thing to think for awhile, IMO. But now I think it would be pretty crazy to think that twitter is healthier than HN. Similarly with similar communities on reddit.
I dunno, maybe there are some healthier spaces on mastodon or blue sky or threads or something now, but at least to me, HN has maintained a fairly stable fairly decent level of discourse for a very long time, and I don't think it is a result of luck or magic, but rather of hard and tireless work moderating the community.
1: https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/ (kind of blog spam, but this is the only place I found that has the full transcript, the audio, and other useful links)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633521 (March 2018)
I should check again.
For stories on the front page, I made https://orangesite.sneak.cloud.
some of my downvotes are from bad tone, overreaction, hyperbole... some are because of the silly valley culture not realising they are a bunch of deluded maniacs, or just producing absolute garbage products.
its mostly the former.
as for demographics... well, i'm a single data point, but HN has a wide reach. its why a lot of us are here imo.
There are outliers of course, but that's the general vibe.
Agreed. That's why I used the term "low quality". The comments that get downvoted or flagged are usually either blatant spam/trolling or rude. If someone makes a quality argument, regardless of the opinion, it generally sticks around. I'll even up-vote comments I disagree with, if the author is making a good-faith effort. Not everyone does that, but enough people do and do so often enough that it helps to keep a complete hive-mind at bay (about most topics...).
But, I think that it's that simple level of moderation (which, I consider to still be moderation) that helps to keep discourse around here civil and interesting...
Yes, there are some threads that start where you just know nothing good will come from it, and in those cases we do see some admin moderation (hi @dang!). But, even then, I think the idea is that when discussing some topics, the thread will invariably end up going sideways. Those are the topics that end to get immediately flagged. And that's okay with me, because who has time for that, when we have so many other, more interesting things to argue (civilly) about?
https://www.npr.org/2024/06/26/nx-s1-5003970/supreme-court-s...
I short: because it wasn't Facebook that brought the case.
Those next two sentences from your article seem to contradict your assertion that it was because it wasn't Facebook that brought the case.
But facts are facts right?
Zuckerberg did say Facebook was pressured by the Biden administration to censor covid misinformation, and the Hunter Biden laptop story [0], [1], [2] (multiple left-wing references for good measure). If Zuckerberg is telling the truth, that is a clear cut first amendment violation.
A private company can censor whatever it wants (mostly) but not at the behest of the government, there's law against that.
[0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/zuckerberg-says-the-wh...
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czxlpjlgdzjo
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/aug/27/m...
To the broader concern, this feels like Facebook making their original sin again.
Namely defunding and destroying revenue for a task that takes money (fact checking) and then expecting a free, community-driven approach to replace it.
Turns out, hot takes for clicks are a lot cheaper than journalism.
In this case, where is the funding to support nuanced, accurate fact checking at scale from?
Because it sure seems like Facebook isn't going to pay.
> I've never seen a wrong Facebook fact-check
Did you mean to say Note here?
> I've never seen a wrong Facebook fact-check
Confused between these two statements, then.
Facebook and Twitter are also unalike in their social dynamics. It makes sense to think of individual major trending stories on Twitter, which can be "Noted", in a way it doesn't make sense on Meta, which is atomized; people spreading bullshit on Meta are carpet bombing the site with individual hits each hoping to get just a couple eyeballs, rather than a single monster thread everyone sees.
(This may be different on Threads, I don't use Threads or know anybody who does).
You're making a whole host of assumptions and opinions about this, with little in the way of data (I get it, you don't work at FB, how much data could you have?), just making blanket statements: "People hate Fact Checks", "People actually like Community Notes" and accepting them as accurate.
Meanwhile: Community Notes have become part of the discourse on Twitter; getting Noted is the new Ratio'd.
Accuracy has nothing to do with any of this. I don't think either Notes or Warnings actually solves "misinformation". I'm saying one is a good product design, and the other is not.
The issue with Community Notes is that if enough people believe a lie, it will not be noted. This lends further credence to a certain set of "official" lies.
How does that follow at all?
PR/political success is certainly not correlated with accuracy, given the very act of telling a group they're wrong tends to piss them off.
In terms of encouraging discourse that maximizes user enjoyment of the platform? That's a difficult one. Accuracy probably doesn't do a whole lot there either: HN knows the people love someone being confidently wrong.
Success in terms of society? Probably more yes, albeit with the caveat that only a correction that someone feels good about actually wins hearts and minds. Otherwise they spiral off into conspiracies about "the man" keeping them down. (Read: conservative reality)
It's also important to remember that Zuckerberg only tacked into moderation in the first place due to prevailing political winds -- he openly espoused absolutist views about free speech originally, before some PR black eyes made that untenable.
To me, both approaches to moderation at scale (admins moderating or users moderating) are band-aids.
The underlying problem is algorithmic promotion.
The platforms need to be more curious about the type of content their algorithms are selecting for promotion, the characteristics incentivized, and the net experience result.
Rage-driven virality shouldn't be an organizational end unto itself to juice engagement KPIs and revenue. User enjoyment of the platform should be.
Note that openly espousing absolutist views about free speech means less than nothing. Elon Musk and Donald Trump openly profess such views, while constantly shouting down, blocking, or even suing anyone who dares speak against them with any amount of popularity.
the thing is both community notes and top down moderation, if they have any purpose at all, are product malpractice. If they work, they are always going to be intrusive because that's what they're supposed to do, correct factually wrong information. Community notes is the neighborhood police, top down moderation is the feds but if they do their job either one is going to be annoying by definition.
If they're not intrusive they don't perform a corrective function and that's what largely happened to community notes. As time goes on they're more and more snarky and sarcastic meta comments rather than corrections.
It's the false negatives that are the differentiator, but false negatives are by definition invisible to the user.
When you evaluate moderation as a "product" you place more weight on factors that are mostly losers for third-party fact checkers and winners for Community Notes: speed and annoying tone.
But since false negatives are never seen, there's no visible "product" to be annoyed by. Sure, the platform fills up with even more disinfo, but users blame that on other user, not the moderation "product".
And this is where Community Notes fails. Because Notes require consensus from multiple groups with histories of diverse ideological perspectives, when one perspective has an interest in propagating disinfo, no Community Note appears.
Some studies show something like 75% of clear disinfo doesn't get a Community Note on X when it involves a hot partisan shibboleth.
False negatives are mostly invisible failures that make the entire platform worse, but the user can't blame it on a "product" because it's really the absence of a product that's the problem.
But I think that can still be addressed separately from the fact that all the tech leaders in Silicon Valley are bending the knee to Trump (e.g. the Mar-a-Lago visits, the "donations" to his inauguration, etc.)
I'll give you an example I find analogous. When Bezos forbid the Washington Post from giving a presidential endorsement, he wrote an op-ed, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/28/jeff-bezo.... I pretty much agreed with the vast majority of what he wrote there. What I think is total BS, though, is his purported rationale and the timing of the decision. I think it's absolutely clear he did it because he didn't want to piss off Trump should he win (the "obeying in advance" part), which he did. The reason I believe this is because he made this decision so close to the election, and he apparently didn't feel the need to do this in previous years, or even the fact that WaPo made other political endorsements (e.g. Senate races in Maryland and VA) just before the presidential endorsement was banned. Bezos subsequent Mar-a-Lago visits and Amazon's inauguration "donation" pretty much confirm my view in my opinion.
In Zuckerberg's announcement, I thought the part he put in about fact checkers being "politically biased" was unnecessary (not to mention dubious IMO), and cleared seemed done to curry favor with the current powers that be.
But it I'm pretty surprised at the outright transparent speed with which all these business leaders were willing to pay these naked fealty bribes, especially since for so long so many of them talked about these lofty goals besides just making money.
Italians in the 1930s didn't care either when Mussolini made corporations an arm of the state. But that doesn't mean what is happening now is any different.
I agree with the parent that Americans in general seem not to mind corruption, but we can't become so jaded as to think that it's not even worth mentioning that this is a problem.
It annoys me a lot that I have to point things like this out, because I think Trump is a grave problem for the country, but you have to beat him at the ballot box, and the schtick obviously isn't working there.
In my country we have a different word for people giving large sums of money as gifts to incoming politicians, yet we seldom impose that definition on others. US politics is different and affects the climate here too, even though that population is around 20% or less of all Facebook users.
More centralized government control, "Karen" style moralizing, DEI, gun banning, global warming, more bureaucratic (and ineffective) regulation, abortions everywhere and the entire "woke" platform apparently isn't it.
I'd suggest defocusing on those and instead return to being the party of the "working man" and a stable economy.
"Wealthy corporations want to force you to work 80 hours a week to enjoy unfair profits or they will replace you with immigrant labor" should be the vibe while never once speaking about things like systemic racism or climate change. Also "the rent is too damn high!". Definitely don't have the party fronted by people who appear airheaded or unintelligent.
You have to speak to the concerns of the voter which I think are individual freedom and economic prosperity.
Once in power you can do whatever you like of course, as is traditional in politics and Trump won't be any exception.
Even if you could account for all the dark money, that still leaves you with leveraging soft power - e.g. Musk using X as a de facto propaganda arm of the Republican party, which doesn't show up on any books.
Musk and X propaganda helped. Also Rogan and other podcasters, but look at how much propaganda the democrat side has/had. All the major media outlets. Reddit, etc etc. Plus the power of the federal government in censorship, courts and the like.
Look, I don't really care and don't trust anyone running for office much. I'm just pointing out what a winning platform would look like. MAGA won because they were speaking to things that more people found important. When the Democrats figure this out, they will be in the winning seat again. If they don't, then they will not win.
Republicans have always been and continue to be pro-elite, pro-oligarchy, and against the economic interests anyone outside the upper class. They still have a better message than the democrats at the moment.
I totally agree with that.
> The way to win is with a more appealing set of policy proposals.
I completely disagree with that. At this point I think it's a bit laughable to think that the majority of Americans care about policy proposals. Trump's appeal, I believe, is that he gave a voice and an outlet for anger to large swaths of people who felt they had been ignored (which they largely had) and talked down to for years. The "elites" (often of both parties) had basically told people in hollowed-out communities and those with failing economic prospects that it was their fault - you just should have gotten a college education, or retrained for the new economy. The Democratic messaging made things worse by also saying "Hey, you know those social standards that were the norm up until the mid 90s? Well, if you believe those, you're a knuckle dragging bigot."
When people have simmering anger and rage, a "nice guy" approach isn't going to cut it. That's why so many people vote for Trump even when they find so many aspects of his personality distasteful.
I'm baffled why a politician hasn't taken more of the lead with the rage that has exploded since the CEO murder. Some elites on the right are trying to frame this as "The crazy Left condones murder!", while I see some elites on the left doing their usual useless finger wagging against insurance companies (see Elizabeth Warren). I just don't understand why a politician hasn't taken this torch and gone into "We're going to tear it all down" mode. I mean, of course there's Bernie, but at this point it needs a younger and more "firebrand" type of person.
You're just stating that, in your personal opinion, a scenario would be bad. That says nothing about it actually taking place.
You're expressing your personal opinion in response to a message listing facts supporting the belief the scenario is actually taking place.
Meaning, it's still plausible this is what is actually happening.
Today, Trump in press conference (video at [0]:
Q: "Do you think Zuckerberg is responding to the threats you've made to him in the past?"
TRUMP: "Probably. Yeah. Probably."
This tells us all we need to know. It has nothing to do with facts and everything to do with yielding to political pressure to bend the media to his whims.
This is just the most standard and basic elements of autocracy, the autocrat must make all the institutions serve him, not the people. This includes not only the branches of government, but also of society, starting with the press, but also the corporate world, the academy, social groups, and everything else.
This is bog-standard autocracy, not democracy.
Bending the knee to the autocrat, in this case explicitly changing your rules and operations to enable the autocrat and his followers to more easily spread their lies and intimidation is not political flexibility, it is obeying in advance to be complicit in implementing the autocracy.
It would be better if you didn't have to learn that the hard way, but our educational system and information distribution system has failed. This is just a more advanced and accelerated example of that failure.
[Edit: yes, my mistake to phrase it as political pressure — it was nothing of the sort — it was authoritarian extortion. Note Zuck has a case before the FTC.]
Most, if not all, autocrats are democratically elected (with some wildly varying definition of democracy of course).
Autocracy is not typically imposed by conquest, it is mostly created by corruption of institutions. It is not binary, it is on a scale.
In full democracies, all the institutions of government, legislative, executive, and judicial, are independent and serve as checks & balances against each other. And the institutions of society, industry, trade, press, academic, sport, social, etc. are also fully independent.
Under autocracy, all of these governmental and societal institutions are corrupted to bend to the will of the autocrat, often by his using force of government to his corrupt ends.
This is exactly what Trump just admitted to and Zuckerberg just did — he threatened Zuckerberg with unfair government actions, and Zuckerberg is now converting Facebook to work to further Trump's goals instead of remaining an independent institution.
Here's just a few resources on elected autocrats [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/meet-the-new-auto...
[1] https://nps.edu/-/nps-professor-takes-a-deep-dive-into-elect...
[2] https://academy.wcfia.harvard.edu/publications/democrats-and...
[3] https://press.umich.edu/Blog/2022/07/Elections-in-Modern-Dic...
Not to turn them into a public debate which might as well continue in the posts themselves.
Meta's political history has consistently been shady. Meta patented behavioural targeting technology in 2012 and was fined $5bn for its "accidental" links to anti-democratic election-fixers Cambridge Analytica/SCL, who have ties to far-right oligarchs in the US and the UK.
If you're looking for an ideological position, look there. The historical record is absolutely clear.
And then there are comments from Meta insiders, who - perhaps - have a clearer picture of what's going on than outsiders do.
As for malpractice, consider the recent AI rollout and rollback. It was an absolute fiasco for all kinds of reasons, PR and technical, not least of which was the way the bots themselves turned on the company.
Threads has already had a mini-exodus because of slanted moderation.
Meta is simply not a trustworthy company. So "Oh, let's scrap our moderation and do community notes" is hardly an isolated slip-up on an otherwise unblemished record of noble public service.
https://fortune.com/2025/01/04/meta-ai-accounts-bots-false-r...
https://www.platformer.news/meta-fact-checking-free-speech-s...
That assumes that the correct amount of disinformation is zero, personally I wish to maintain my right to be wrong, and my right to tell others of my wrong ideas, and I hope they maintain the right to tell me I'm full of it.
Your position on censorship, moderation, as you call it, is your opinion, and your opinion only, and it is at odds with the position of X, and now Meta, who are taking the position that the point of moderation is to respect everyone's right to speech, while making it very obvious to those that care, that the speech may be less than truthful. Essentially everyone gets to speak, and everyone gets to make up their own mind. What a concept!
I also maintain a position of truth dies in the dark, and lies die in the light.
Most people aren't stupid, community notes breaks the echo chamber and provides a counterpoint.
That debate of free ideas has been working pretty well so far. So much so that we can usually tell who the bad guys are by how much the create darkness; how much they take on the role of arbiters of truth, how much they silence critics, think Soviet Russia, or North Korea for some good examples.
Probably because fact checkers are able to make content become unshareable so you not seeing them is the point? But "fact checking" NGOs have a long history of embarrassingly stupid, biased and self-serving decisions.
To pick just one example, in 2020 an op-ed in the New York Post arguing that COVID might have come from the coronavirus research lab in Wuhan was banned from Facebook and Twitter because of being labelled by an anonymous fact checker. Who was this fact checker? Turns out one of them was Danielle E. Anderson, an assistant professor at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, who had literally conducted experiments at the Wuhan lab and collaborated with its scientists.
You can't possibly get more biased than that, but because she was an academic the sort of people who chose the fact checkers assumed she would be automatically correct. And worse, that anyone who disagreed with her - even mildly - should therefore be banned from the internet.
That is the common pattern in every incident that make people mad at "fact checkers" and the reason they have no credibility is that these events happen all the time, are always in favour of left wing beliefs, and they never attempt to learn from these events strongly implying they're deliberate. Indeed the assumption that government funded people are always correct is basically hard-wired into the fact checker ecosystem. They don't attempt to actually work out what's true themselves, so they can't be fixed.
This is the kind of thing that Zuck is referring to when he says they're discredited. Wrong fact checks are commonplace, you just won't notice them if you rely on news feeds they control.
This is the least charitable interpretation. Obviously, it is not talking about a single person moving to Texas suddenly changing colors like a chameleon (although I suspect there is quite a bit of merit to that due to groupthink and community speech policing in BayArea/LA).
And yes, I think it won't be a stretch to think Texas would be more objective representation of general US PoV and less of a monoculture than FB sites in California. This is not a value judgement, just a natural function of the distribution of people.
Both states are internally diverse. And it’s just silly to suggest that “groupthink and community speech policing” is something that exists in California but not Texas.
If we just go by presidential election, Travis County's result is more balanced than SF and San Mateo, almost on par with Alameda county, so the answer is "slightly." However, the moment you get exposed outside the core Austin area, you deal with predominantly red areas. To get the same effect you have to go as far as Placer County or Sonoma, so I don't think the FB workers in Bay Area (SF/Menlo Park) have quite the same level of exposure.
That being said I think a more nuanced but still political take on the move is, having moderators is important, and its less likely those moderation will be pressured to shut down if the moderators are actual jobs in a red state. Further the jobs are low skill jobs so they can be moved back (or elsewhere) as needed. Easy move even if the political capital is minor.
But... how?
The new policy explicitly says that allegations of mental illness are not allowed except if the target is gay or trans, so, yeah…
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-immigration-gender-policies...
I think you misread that: it allows allegations of mental illness even on the basis of gender and religion, which before weren't allowed. It still allows allegations of mental illness based on other factors, because they were never disallowed in the first place.
Here’s another source:
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/meta-new-hate-spee...
And the original document:
https://transparency.meta.com/en-gb/policies/community-stand...
Tier 2 forbids insults based on:
Mental characteristics, including but not limited to allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity, and mental illness, and unsupported comparisons between PC groups on the basis of inherent intellectual capacity. We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like “weird.”
There’s no ambiguity. Allegations of mental illness or abnormality are explicitly allowed based on gender or sexual orientation, but no other reason.
It takes quite some effort to discern the intended meaning, which I agree matches your interpretation.
Even the tier system is declare but it's meaning never explained.
Calling out "weird" and no other word is hilarious, suggesting that Team MAGA is still sore over how much people enjoyed using that term to describe the bizarre behavior of of Trump and company.
Should we expect Meta doing 180 degrees u-turns every 4 years when another party wins US Presidential elections?
Or I guess you can just capitulate and leave it all to users to handle on their own, and wash your hands of the whole thing.
Prediction: it'll be cali-expats in Austin and nothing changes.
Also currently in the App Store (iPhone) bluesky sits at 167 .. Musk's X at 46 and Facebook at 19.
It's just coded language for who they're going to favor, otherwise it makes no sense at all, as it's possible to find people of all political stripes in both states, as well as employees who would take their duty to stick to the facts very seriously.
Nonetheless, it's trivially true that somewhere in the US must be to the left of the political center of the U.S.
Show me the party in the U.S. that wants to abolish private property, wants to provide food, healthcare, and housing to all, that wants to nationalize key industries, that wants to govern from a standpoint of "wellbeing for all". If you can point me to a place where that's the prevailing ideology, I'll gladly recant the idea that no place like that exists here.
BTW as an actual “classical liberal” I find it hilarious you describe the two parties that way.
There's plenty of room between the center and Marxist Leninism.
I would say many labor politicians are centrist. Some democrats are center, some are center-left. Some are center-right.
Some members of Liberal parties are centrist.
The center has tons of parties in it.
Many many nations are nationalizing things historically and through today.
Nationalization isn't a litmus test for if you are a leftist though, it's an example of one leftist policy.
In general, the left seeks social justice through redistributive social and economic policies, while the right defends private property and capitalism.
That’s an extremely left-skewed framing that leaves out a lot of important cultural issues. For instance, the leftists during the Spanish Civil War massacred Catholic priests and nuns and burned down churches while many on the right sought to protect the church and restore the Spanish monarchy.
It’s more correct to say that the right defends traditional institutions, which might include capitalism, but even these vary widely from country to country. For instance the United States never had a monarchy or an established religion; most of the American Founding Fathers would have sat somewhere left of center in the Estates General during the French Revolution, which is where we get the terms “left” and “right” from in the first place. But in an American context, the republic and the constitution are the traditional institutions that the American right has traditionally defended, even though they were established by the 18th century left.
Even when it comes to capitalism it’s not as clear cut. Prior to the American Civil War, the north was capitalist but the south had a precapitalist agrarian economy based on slave labor. The northern liberals, abolitionists, and capitalists formed a coalition to the left of the southern planters. Outside of areas that had widespread slavery, there’s also a long tradition of right wing critiques of capitalism as a destructive change to the traditional patterns of society, and there are many on the far right who seek to return to much older ways that are now lost.
Maybe it's you that doesn't have nuanced 'understanding'?
Classical liberal policies, looks those of the Democrats and Republicans, are right of center.
An example, when was the last time the Democratic Party pushed for nationalization of a whole industry? Eg aerospace, rail, or energy? What about offering food and housing for everyone? Abolishing private property? Those are leftist policies.
But maybe the OP was not talking about "what they thought they were doing" only describing "what they do / did"?
It's not the only way to be leftist. You can be leftist and anti central government, for instance. You cannot, however, be leftist and staunchly capitalist.
This is why ATProto is a great foundation for to the next generation of social media applications. It makes experimentation easier and open for all. It removes the cost of switching to the better alternatives. ATProto enables real competition on a single, common social media fabric.
More reports about the awful actions of bluesky/ATProto: https://www.newsweek.com/conservatives-join-bluesky-face-abu...
ATProto is an open protocol, anyone can add content to the network. Bluesky is a company that operates the most used application, a micro logging platform like Twitter.
Musk Social has far more awful actions and far more awful personal posts by the oligarch himself. The "awful" thing of blocking trolls on Bluesky is what makes it a place with more and better engagement. We don't all need to read all the awful shit people write online in the name of "free speech". I have every right to ignore or remove content I don't like from my information diet. The benefit of ATProto is that if you don't agree with the content moderation policies of Bluesky, you can write just a different client (many already exist) and subscribe to different moderation providers (many already exist), all without having to rebuild your social followings
Your platform is just a safe space, but it ain't defacto decentralized nor valuing an impartial worldview the slightest. Enjoy it.
There are very serious issues involving trans people with no easy answers. Like allowing minors access to irreversible treatments. Like women’s sports. Like the safety of women only spaces.
I bring this up because on so many questions like these, the progressive reaction is to shut down any discussion and isolate themselves from exposure to any ideas different from their own.
It doesn’t work. And it doesn’t help anyone.
And maybe this has something to do with why Facebook is migrating to a “Community Notes” model.
Others may misidentify respectable, good, or correct arguments as ‘attacks’ in narrower senses, but that no more makes the underlying categories meaningless than the misapplication of such descriptions as ‘true’, ‘valid’, ‘scientifically established’, or ‘by definition’. I have no general pithy answer to what one should do about the sorts of attack I have described, but I venture that it is reasonable to talk or attempt to do something about them. What term would you prefer?
In practice people complaining about attacks on trans people almost always want to shut down discussion about related topics all together.
You've also made a bold claim about the relevant statistics without any kind of citation.
My understanding is that a higher standard of discourse is expected on HN.
But aside from that meta point: your argument seems to rest on the idea that your ideological opponents would prefer for cisgender teenage boys to be able to get mastectomies when they exhibit unwanted breast growth. But the source your interlocutor found suggests that the "breast reductions in teenage boys" you're talking about are in fact dominantly performed on transgender teenage boys (i.e., people your ideological opponents would consider "teenage girls"). So the intended gotcha doesn't even work; you haven't identified any kind of inconsistency in the position or potential for a "self-own".
https://www.plasticsurgery.org/news/press-releases/male-brea...
While the page is obviously not unbiased about the benefits of this surgery, you can infer from the number of patients included in just one study that it’s very common. Yet this particular irreversible surgery performed on children does not seem to be causing a moral panic.
The broader point, which I think you’ve not picked up on, is that most people are fine with gender affirming care for children as long as the children are cis - which is arguably a double standard.
No, I don't think I can infer any such thing. The original claim was that "everything else is completely and totally marginal by comparison in the US." The Reuters article cites hundreds of mastectomies on trans-male-identifying patients per year. The existence of a study on 145 mastectomies on cis-male-identifying patients does not establish the claim.
>The broader point, which I think you’ve not picked up on, is that most people are fine with gender affirming care for children as long as the children are cis - which is arguably a double standard.
I understand exactly what the point was. I just didn't think it was established. Absent a baseline statistic, the Reuters article suggested a different conclusion. Claims phrased with language like "completely and totally marginal by comparison" should be evidenced.
The way to do that would have been with a citation, such as from Wikipedia:
> According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, breast reduction surgeries to correct gynecomastia are fairly common but has been a recent decline. In 2020, there were over 18,000 procedures of this type performed in the United States which is down 11% compared to in 2019.
But for those who object to such surgeries on trans-identifying minors, I doubt that they would characterize such a surgery in a cis individual as "gender affirming care" anyway.
>I doubt that they would characterize such a surgery in a cis individual as "gender affirming care" anyway.
Right, but they don't characterize it that way purely because the individual is cis. The typical reason for these surgeries is that many boys and men feel uncomfortable having large breasts (even though this is not particularly abnormal in biological terms or a dangerous medical condition). So it is 'gender affirming care' in a pretty literal sense. The person feels that their body conflicts with their gender identity, and the surgery removes or lessens the discrepancy.
Making it harder for teenage boys having surgery to fit a stereotype sounds like a win?
I don't think you thought that point through.
As to whether teenage boys should be getting that surgery? That's .. more complicated. Should one that lost 100+ pounds to be healthier be able to get that surgery? Probably. How big should the growth be before it becomes "medical"? Don't know.
This is why stuff like this should be left to doctors who actually understand the circumstances of the patient.
You didn't invalidate the concern at all and just if anything bolstered it. One reason why people voted for Trump (I wouldn't vote for him myself) is that any discussion on these topics gets called a phobia or an ism.
> Should one that lost 100+ pounds to be healthier be able to get that surgery?
If they're an adult, they can do what they like.
> This is why stuff like this should be left to doctors who actually understand the circumstances of the patient.
Just because someone is a doctor does not mean they have an unquestionable moral or ethical compass, there are good doctors and bad doctors. When homosexuality was illegal in the UK, doctors would chemically castrate gay men.
Breast reduction for children IS in fact irreversible. It causes huge scars and trying to get breast augmentation later is not actually restoring their body to its natural state. It is definitely something that is controversial. Also putting children on hormones is within scope of this conversation and DOES happen.
There are lots of people who detransition and regret their decision. Children who have been sterilized for life and have permanent scars. It's completely valid to have discussions about whether kids should be able to make these decisions (they shouldn't).
The number of those kinds of surgeries people claim to be "oh so concerned" about is in the low double digits--generally low single digits--normally zero in a year.
When you get to some medical procedure that incredibly rare, the medical indications are generally really, really unique and should be left to doctors. (breast implants in girls are simply not done until 18+ unless cancer is involved, for example).
Despite what people seem to think, doctors don't just do this stuff randomly (at least in the US). They can and will lose their license for doing this kind of thing unless they follow established guidelines. And all those guidelines dictate that this kind of stuff is simply not done until after 18 unless there are incredibly extenuating medical circumstances.
> Breast reduction for children IS in fact irreversible. It causes huge scars and trying to get breast augmentation later is not actually restoring their body to its natural state.
I have yet to meet a girl or woman who had breast reduction and regretted it. See: Soleil Moon Frye, for example. She had genuine health issues. And, even still, she had to fight with her doctors to get it done at 16 rather than wait until 18.
> Children who have been sterilized for life and have permanent scars.
Cite examples. I suspect vastly more children have been sterilized for life from circumcision complications than from any other gender surgery.
You have not provided any numbers of your own. Your interlocutor found the same source (https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-tran...) I did by putting "transgender youth surgery usa" into DDG.
Quoting:
> ...These drugs, known as GnRH agonists, suppress the release of the sex hormones testosterone and estrogen. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved the drugs to treat prostate cancer, endometriosis and central precocious puberty, but not gender dysphoria. Their off-label use in gender-affirming care, while legal, lacks the support of clinical trials to establish their safety for such treatment. ... Over the last five years, there were at least 4,780 adolescents who started on puberty blockers and had a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis...
And more than that for hormone treatment:
> At least 14,726 minors started hormone treatment with a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis from 2017 through 2021, according to the Komodo analysis.
And far more than "low double digits--generally low single digits--normally zero" for surgeries:
> In the three years ending in 2021, at least 776 mastectomies were performed in the United States on patients ages 13 to 17 with a gender dysphoria diagnosis, according to Komodo’s data analysis of insurance claims. This tally does not include procedures that were paid for out of pocket.
(And also does not include cisgender patients without gender dysphoria but with unwanted breast growth.)
Too many progressives want to terminate such discussions by censoring any dissenting opinions and attacking any kind of disagreement as bigotry.
In the US it's hundreds of such surgeries each year, and rising, per https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-tran...
This is a lower bound as not all of these young girls get their breasts removed through health insurance, some will be paid for privately.
From 2013-2020 in Northern California we have:
> Among the 209 adolescents who underwent gender-affirming mastectomy, only two expressed regret.
> In our cohort, two patients (0.95%) expressed regret; one inquired about reversal surgery, but neither had undergone reversal surgery within follow-up periods of 3.7 years and 6.5 years.
Note the followups are into post-teenage years and most are very satisfied.
> Gender-affirming mastectomy, also known as “top surgery,” is the most prevalent surgery requested when considering all transgender adolescents, whereas “bottom surgery,” which affects genitalia and fertility, is relatively more complex and mostly performed after age 18.
As far as I can see, this is a medical system that is being very conservative (especially involving irreversible effects on fertility), involving parents/guardians at all stages, and prefers therapy first, hormones second, and surgery only as a very final choice. And note this level of conservatism in a system in Northern California--which is likely to be the most accepting of such medical actions.
So, if you are advocating that this should not be the case, understand that you are directly attempting to legislate the complex relationship between parent and teenager as well as both of them communicating with a medical professional for something which evidentially is a neutral to positive outcome for 98+% of the patients involved.
What right do YOU think you have to enter into that conversation at all?
> Our study has several limitations. First, its retrospective design meant we were unable to measure patient satisfaction and quality-of-life outcomes. Complications and any mention of regret were obtained from provider notes, which may be variable, and thus both may be under-reported. In addition, although an integrated health care system allows for continuity of care, some members may have transferred care or changed their insurance status and thus, subsequent complications, or reversal operations, would not have been captured. Next, our study was conducted at KPNC in an insured cohort of individuals with access to gender-affirming medical and surgical care. Therefore, our outcomes may not be representative of the general population, many of whom lack similar access to care. Finally, the time to develop postoperative regret and/or dissatisfaction remains unknown and may be difficult to discern.
You state that "the followups are into post-teenage years and most are very satisfied", but the authors were very explicit about not being able to determine this due to the study design.
The authors also report that:
> The median age at the time of referral was 16 years (IQR=2) and ranged from 12-17 years. Patients had a median post-operative follow-up length of 2.1 years (IQR 1.69).
Which implies that for many patients, the follow-up would have been within their teenage years.
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/gender-dysphoria/treatment/
>Long-term gender-affirming hormone treatment may cause temporary or even permanent infertility.
And the worst part of all:
>56 genital surgeries among patients ages 13 to 17
That's 56 kids who were permanently sterilized before their brain was even finished developing.
I have nothing against trans people, but many people draw the line when it comes to kids.
And this one says the same: https://academic.oup.com/jsm/article/20/3/398/7005631
And then there's article from Yale that actually disproves the cass report where the NHS guidelines are based on: https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/documents/integrity...
> I have nothing against trans people, but many people draw the line when it comes to kids.
Except when those children happen to be trans, that case they're not allowed to exist or be mutilated for life, even though it's easily preventable
Next to this there's also risk of those kids committing suicide because they can't get proper treatment, which is only getting worse with all the anti-trans laws. See https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01979-5.epdf
I see nothing in your links that supports those conclusions. The second one at least asserts that recipients overwhelmingly don't want to reverse the effects, but this too is a complex topic (see e.g. https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/08/acc-entry-should-trans... ).
Also, the link you're responding to isn't a "study", but rather a position document from the NHS (UK national healthcare).
I'd start with chapter 5.2.1.7 go from there.
> but this too is a complex topic (see e.g. https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/08/acc-entry-should-trans... ).
You can either force a trans kid to develop the wrong kind of secondary sex characteristics. With all trauma and painful corrective procedures that will follow later in life, or you can let them take a pill a day which will halt it until they're old enough to make that decision. That really doesn't seem difficult to me.
> Also, the link you're responding to isn't a "study", but rather a position document from the NHS
I know but it's still based on the cass report, which claims to be a study.
As far as I can tell, you linked to abstracts for a paywalled academic papers.
>You can either
The point is about the objective fact of what the kids want. Your moral judgement of what should be done as a result, is irrelevant to that.
Just scroll down, no paywall.
> The point is about the objective fact of what the kids want. Your moral judgement of what should be done as a result, is irrelevant to that.
This has nothing to do with my moral judgment. If a kid gets diagnosed with gender-dysphoria, they should get proper treatment. Social transition in combination with puberty blockers are the known effective treatment.
Not sure about the US, but here gender-dysphoria in children has to be diagnosed by a team of professionals that aren't allowed to steer them in any way.
A demand to censor any opinions dissenting from what you already believe.
Whether and under what circumstances trans women have no advantage over cos women is a highly complex question.
We already have men who freely admitted to claiming to be trans solely for the purpose of accessing women’s locker rooms.
> Again, not really, except for all the misinformation online. If trans woman have such an high advantage, why haven't they dominated the Olympics for the last 20 years?
Not really sure why you specify 20 years, but I'm too lazy to go through the history of IOC positions to figure out the one 20 years ago.
Because looking at the current one already provides the answer. The IOC doesn't take the position that it is a simple topic.
The wording in https://olympics.com/ioc/human-rights/fairness-inclusion-non... (and click through) is quite clear that they see a tension between inclusion along the axis of sexual identity and a continuation (or successor) or male/female category split.
What's dubious about that peer reviewed study ?
Who's talking about males? Trans woman on HRT are not male, all biological processes in their bodies change because off the hormones
No matter how inconvenient a truth, humans cannot change sex.
You can't just delay puberty until you're 20
Height is based on genetics, not puberty (again, see the paper I linked)
Vocal changes aren't affected at all, they will change as soon as an Testosterone based puberty is started. This is why trans man have low voices too.
Puberty is when humans grow the most.
Women do not have low voices: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoQ0ASTTI2g
Your second point about why people in Texas might be less biased is the distance to primary locations of tech companies perhaps? I don't think that it is convincing, but a lack of trust is the most severe problem of fact checkers.
I believe the concept cannot work though, especially if I look at the broader context.
No, user feedback is the better control mechanism. Also these fact checkers would never be independent and they would develop their own interest for even more moderation. They would never report that there isn't any more controversial content to be checked, because that is their raison d'être from day one.
We can debate the merits of notes vs factcheck. But it's hard to see the bullshit about freedom of speech as anything other than that: you are now allowed to express opinions that the new regime shares. Long live the king.
Travis County was blue 69-29.
Hardly a politically conservative place.
Texas is of course also an easier place to run a business.
The FB office in Austin, Texas is a moderately left-leaning area. Their office in Silicon Valley is about the most extreme left-wing place in the country. At the very least, teams at their Texas offices will have more overlap with the median voter than the ones in California. If their Texas offices were in rural rancher country, then I'd agree with your concern that it would just be swapping one bias for another.
A lot of them can't, actually, but that's really a different problem.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/report-austin-top...
https://www.kut.org/austin/2024-06-13/austin-texas-rent-pric...
https://austin.urbanize.city/post/austin-rent-drops-december...
https://therealdeal.com/texas/austin/2024/05/01/apartment-re...
Not to say it doesn't have problems - like housing - that are self-inflicted. Just that a big part of the 'brand' problem is people targeting the state.
This is an us problem not a them problem.
It used to be clear: you can make a better life in California. It was a land of growth, prosperity, and wealth. Growing families moving into golden cul-de-sacs.
We should actually make those things true again. Houses don’t need to be affordable in Palo Alto but not being affordable anywhere is a problem. We don’t need to develop Big Sur but not being able to develop any costal property is a problem. We don’t need to deport law abiding citizens because they fail an ICE sweep but not being able to deport career criminals is a problem.
But by and large, the 'branding' is places like Fox News crapping on California.
The problem is that we have lost any ability to make a positive case for California outside of niche political interests and very specific career paths.
That said, most of them have since (loudly) decamped the state.
See how that works?
The specific places in California where Facebook had "trust and safety and content moderation teams" were places that very much don't reflect the average politics of the US. That is naturally going to reflect itself in the ideological composition of employees, and therefore in political bias in the fact-checking process.
We've already seen harm from this. For example, Facebook suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story (https://www.yahoo.com/news/zuckerberg-admits-facebook-suppre...), even though:
* there has never been any evidence provided to link the story to supposed Russian disinformation;
* The FBI (i.e., the agency supposedly telling Facebook and other social media companies to be on the lookout for such disinformation) acknowledged that they did in fact seize the laptop from the computer shop owner in 2019 (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/22/us/politics/hunter-biden-...) and verified that it was Hunter Biden's - which later came up in a criminal case against him in mid 2024 (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/live-blog/hun...
* there is no good reason a priori, outside of political bias, to suspect the New York Post (founded 1801 by Alexander Hamilton) of spreading such disinformation.
Despite having grown up in a light blue state, the difference in politics was very noticeable when I got to SF/SV. This isn’t a value judgement, just my observation.
In reality, every country has their own set of issues. Every democracy has their set of parties that exist somewhere in the policy space of issues relevant to them. In the US, we generally think of socially progressive policies as "left" along with non-market views of the economy. As such, the SFBA is generally much closer to the American "left" edge than the right.
I agree that South Bay and the Peninsula are less "left" than SF or Oakland, but I think this sort of argument is sophistry. That said, I don't really think moving hiring to Texas will change anything ideologically among employees and instead is just a way to signal to the new administration that they're Friends (TM) and on the backside a way to cost cut so they can pay less in Austin.
I aim to discuss this topic factually while noting that views vary significantly among San Francisco residents. Some common political positions that would generally be considered far-left in the U.S. context include support for:
- Housing as a human right and strict rent control policies
- Universal basic income and significantly higher taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations
- Complete defunding or abolition of police departments
- Immediate and dramatic action on climate change, including bans on private vehicles
But that is not “by definition”. The definition of a “billion-dollar company” is that it is valued by investors at a billion dollars. That definition has absolutely nothing to do with its political leanings.
“Vanishingly unlikely” sure. But not by definition.
That has nothing to do with how 'objective' fact checking or content review or whatever is from people in both places.
This is just very thinly coded language signalling who they're going to favor.
Fact-checker warning labels are effective even for those who distrust fact-checkers
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01973-x
They also cited this paper for the proposition that Community Notes doesn’t work well because it takes too long for the notes to appear (though I don’t know whether centralized fact checks are any better on this front, and they might easily be worse):
Future Challenges for Online, Crowdsourced Content Moderation: Evidence from Twitter’s Community Notes
[1] Birdwatch: Crowd Wisdom and Bridging Algorithms can Inform Understanding and Reduce the Spread of Misinformation, https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.15723
The end-user experience of Facebook's moderation is that amidst a sea of advertisements, AI slop, the rare update from a distant acquaintance, and other engagement-bait, you get sporadic warnings that Facebook is about to show you something that it thinks you shouldn't see. It's like they're going out of their way to make the user experience worse.
A lot of us here probably have the experience of reporting posts to Facebook for violating this or that clearly-stated rule. By contrast, I think very few of us have the experience of Facebook actually taking any of them down. But they'll still flash weird fact-checker posts. It's all very silly.
1. What % misleading/false posts are flagged
2. What % of those flagged are given meaningful context/corrections that are accurate.
It seems there's circular logic of first determining truth with 1, and then maybe something to do with a "trust"/quality poll with 2. I suspect a good measurement would be very similar to the actual community notes implementation, since both of those are the goal of the system [1].
Yes, but are they true?
Lol sometimes people just have no logic
I think everyone can agree that polarizing content being pushed into people's feed for engagement is a very very bad mix with politics. There is no benefit for anyone in doing this, except for meta's metrics and propaganda outlets.
Yeah, I know what the press release said lol. Do you typically take press releases as fact?
Journalist: "Can you assure the world that as you try to get control of [Greenland and Panama], you are not going to use military or economic coercion?"
Extremist: "No. You're talking about Panama and Greenland: No, I can't assure you on either of those two..."
Journalist: "Will you commit that you are not going to use the military?"
Extremist: "No, I'm not going to commit to that."
Compared to compelling people to believe in gender ideology, industrial scale suppression of dissent on private platforms, and teaching race based original sin in schools, being the third president to want to get control of Greenland doesn’t seem particularly extreme.
Also, as was pointed out but you omitted from the question you’re quoting, asking a military commander their strategy is a very poor question.
To steelman this a bit, early versions of Birdwatch had problems with unsourced notes and speed of note display. There’s a bunch of research that shows that 1st impressions of info tend to dominate, so speed matters a lot.
In practice FB’s program was poorly resourced and overly complex so I’m not sure it ever achieved its theoretically lower latency.
It'll really take a special mind to think Community Notes wasn't a positive feature added to the social network sphere. Musk despite his schtick did very bold things that other platforms wouldn't think of doing, such as open-sourcing the recommendation system or recently suggesting the idea of optimising content with unregretted time spent that will reward healthy content and punish toxic content even if the two had the same number of impressions.
The overtone window is shifting towards a more open speech and less of self-gratifying echo chambers that promoted the toxic cancel culture.
Attributing it to Musk, though, would require a time machine.
> recently suggesting the idea of optimising content with unregretted time spent that will reward healthy content and punish toxic content even if the two had the same number of impressions
The precise sort of censorship and "cancel culture" he decried upon purchase.
It would have been a drag on profits to hire professionals to fact check and provide them enough time to do their job, at scale.
They quote numbers about how much they're spending as proof they're doing something, but that spend isn't normalized against the scale of their platform.
I don't know if anyone cared much about fact checker reports (or if anyone even bothered to track how often they ended up being wrong when looking back in review).
"Another wrinkle: many Community Notes current cite as evidence fact-checks created by the fact-checking organizations that Meta just canceled all funding for." (https://www.platformer.news/meta-fact-checking-free-speech-s...)
Does Facebook’s patronage constitute a significant % of the industry?
From a product perspective, once it’s accepted that Community Notes go through an algorithmic filtering process (which they must), you have to accept that you’ve lost most potential for third party viewpoints. There is nothing stopping ideological companies from putting their thumbs on the scale.
Back to product perspective: that means there’s no barrier preventing Notes from losing trust in the same way fact checkers have. The playing field is not static.
I think the speed of the rollout will tell us a lot about how long this has been in the works. It’s not a one week feature, although I will remember that Meta produced Threads very quickly.
By implementing community notes, Facebook is shifting responsibility. Previously, the perception was that Facebook was doing fact checking (and no one really cared about the third parties). Now, the responsibility moves to the community. Not only does this shift responsibility, but it also makes Facebook appear politically neutral to Republicans, because they can say, "Hey, we did exactly what Musk did, and you liked it. We are politically neutral".
It was the correct chess move given the current board.
There was a lot wrong with Facebook's moderation system. Spend any time in any politically active groups -- or groups that like to discuss politics -- and you'll quickly find people complaining about deranking. Based on both the extreme frequency with which it's reported and my own experiences with Meta, I believe that they're not making it up.
But Meta's moderation tools don't primarily exist -- as I understand it -- to keep discourse informative. They exist so that Meta doesn't accidentally become somewhat responsible for another genocide.
I think that community notes may be a better move for public discourse, but most conversations on Facebook itself happen in groups, and in groups nobody is going to be posting Community Notes that go against the trend of the group -- even if they might be useful for totally public discourse.
Tens of thousands of have been raped, entire towns have been destroyed, around 50k killed and 700k forced to flee.
If Western countries actually cared about the human cost of this genocide, it would be almost a trivial matter to stop it overnight with a few well placed missiles against Myanmar's military, which continues to perpetrate the genocide even today.
Instead, no real action is taken and it's just a talking point for "Facebook bad." Blaming Facebook for a genocide is like blaming videogames for an active mass shooter w/o actually doing anything to stop them.
The actions taken by the US in response to the genocide in Myanmar were largely economic because, I would think, their proximity to China. Can't imagine direct intervention would have gone smoothly.
For the record, I don't think our response in Myanmar or Rwanda were good, not trying to dispute or downplay that.
It is not simply a matter of it happening elsewhere on the internet -- Myanmar is one of the countries that Facebook provided its Free Basics package to.
Of course, I think the bulk of the blame lays on those actively perpetrating the genocide. But I'm concerned mostly with outcomes, and it seems that with different behavior from Facebook, there would have been a different outcome in Myanmar.
I think blaming the medium for communication is a bit silly. That is just the substrate. The responsibility solely lies with the murderers.
Since then Marketplace has more or less destroyed Craigslist. So two months ago I tried to create an account strictly for Marketplace. My email, phone, and location have all changed since 2018. Despite verifying phone and doing the most extreme KYC step of taking a picture of myself with my ID I still could not make a new account. So maybe they should focus on that?
Forget about the sucky product. Who has Facebook been hiring in the past decade that built that technical crapshoot.
so I wind up making a new Facebook account once a year for a few months
although could see this moving to Discord across those same age ranges, I’m in some local groups there which overlap with festivals/events/things like the burn.
I've seen Gen X-ers be notoriously inflexible about considering Discord or anything besides Facebook Groups, but as they say: nobody can prevent you from becoming like your parents
I tell that cohort "you can't Google this, you have to join the platform and search that channel", and they balk as if their Facebook Group that's segregating them is any different
back to burning man specifically, at this point it seems like I can get invited to different camps, so I'm excited about that. mixed age groups, stays fresh
Yeah I'm a millenial with older and younger friends. I found that around 35 +- 4 years you generally have people get more annoyed and flippant at change. I get it, at this age you're probably at the peak of both career and life responsibilities, and you want to focus your energy on your family/career/other loved ones, and the last thing you want to do is learn something new for doing what you've been doing for the last 18 years (chatting about something online.)
But it's been pretty fascinating watching the change as my older millenial/young GenX friends are getting into Back In My Day conversations while my GenZ friends talk about new fashions and music.
My take is that while it must have been a potential plan for some time and switching to this plan can't have just been an “overnight” decision since the election, the timing suggests that either they were waiting for the outcome of the election and using that result in the decision-making process, or that the election result pulled the decision¹ forward.
----
[1] Or the implementation, if the decision had already been made. They may have already moving towards this happening, purely as a business decision based on internal effectiveness studies, no matter who was in power, but given the election result there are some political benefits to rolling the plan out now instead of in Q2 or Q3.
Zuckerberg's framing of this as being about "fact checking" is intentional misdirection. Very little checking of facts was actually happening.
This is about moderation. Specifically, reducing the obstacles to posting racist/misogynist/political abuse amd threats. The objective is to make Facebook acceptable as a platform for the incoming US administration and its supporters, while simultaneously increasing engagement with more inflammatory user-generated content.
So its primarily a demonstration of fealty to Trump and co, with upsides.
Trump and Zuck recently met privately. I do wonder if these changes are, in part, also a quid pro quo for Trump undertaking to continue with the ban on TikTok in the US.
I also appreciate that if I liked a post that community notes called out and I'm getting a notification that was misinformation.
You can’t have community notes if you don’t already have a community established. Community notes won’t help if the community’s behavior is the problem.
Many people will die as a result of this decision.
But other than that, how about I get to use my critical thinking to evaluate the content I access without my “betters” trying to color it first?
Any day now, I’m sure Gmail will introduce a feature where Gemini will warn you that the article your grumpy uncle sent you is not nuanced enough. Or your cell provider will monitor your texts and inject warnings that the meme you shared doesn’t tell the whole story.
Because no-one, including you, is an expert on everything.
So there will be many topics for which you will not be able to make an informed judgement about the accuracy of the content. And on a social network centred around sharing it can be very easy for inaccuracies to spread.
As I said, god forbid I forget my place and use my mind in the domain of my betters.
Pretend that the Community Notes are a conspiracy to rob you of your free will and ignore them.
Yep, reading, researching, considering what things matter given your own life experience and situation, these are all meaningless in the face of THE EXPERTS!
/s
When J.S. Mill wrote about infallibility[1], I can't remember if he wrote about outsourcing that infallibility belief to others, but if he did, he predicted the last 5 years of pro-censorship arguments perfectly.
[1] https://www.bartleby.com/lit-hub/on-liberty/chapter-ii-of-th...
1. certain groups are arguing for assigning trust to a group to perform case-by-case censorship as a countermeasure to propaganda and disinformation,
2. other groups (sometimes purposefully) misinterpreting this as blanket censorship and conjure up several slippery-slope warnings.
When talking about general things, it sounds very noble to talk about protecting every budding idea... therefore group #2 gets to trot around the higher moral ground when arguing in this way.
When talking about the specific ideas being "censored" (e.g. "immigrants eating dogs"), group #1 gets to claim group #2 is some flavor of crazy.
What both miss is that they have been pitted against each other by so many interest groups: nation-state and corporate.
This is happening all around the globe.
It's much more complicated than that. Here's the white paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.15723
Philip Cross is very pleased to hear that!
But, for the record, they regularly get sued. I think they are being seriously sued in India for defamation at the moment, for example.
Why do you think facebook is ending fact-checkers now? Editors are hired by facebook, facebook is the publisher. If facebook publishes "fact" and people get harmed as result, Facebook gets sued to bankruptcy. There is no protection from government anymore!
What a nice reality would it be where Facbook could be actually sued to bankruptcy for whatever reason, let alone such minor one. Sadly it's not our reality.
Suing Wikipedia would be like suing email and SMTP protocol!
The structural reason that you can't sue email is that email is not an "anyone", it's an abstract concept. How would you even e.g. notify "email" that it is under litigation?
Wikipedia (or more precisely, the Wikimedia Foundation that owns it) is.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_News_International_vs._W...
edit: My bad, I get the joke now.
There is no such thing. If your understanding of truth is so flat, you're incredibly ignorant and dangerously foolish. Biases, perception, and propaganda influence the "truth" you see in the world. And no one is immune to it. Even large groups of very smart people are not immune to it. In fact they're even more often prone to groupthink.
The whole point of science is to eliminate human authority as a source of truth. Every claim must be peer reviewed, should be replicated by independent parties, and open to falsification by new evidence.
“Appeal to authority” is always the wrong approach if you are seeking truth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZlbQqXBsn0
« I think one of the troubles of the world has been the habit of dogmatically believing something or other and I think all these matters are full of doubt and the rational man will not be too sure that he's right; I think we ought always to entertain our opinions to some measure of doubt » (Russel)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/may/27/facebook-...
IDK if you intended to compare this to the world's #1 comprehensive and trustworthy repository of information.
But if you did, mission accomplished.
No. Community Notes is an open-source peer review-like system but designed in a way to limit bias: When sets of note contributors (the peers in this case) who normally strongly oppose each other’s views on Topic A strongly agree on a point made re Topic A, we’re likely getting closer to the truth.
The code for its implementation is literally available on GitHub [0] under the Apache License 2.0.
The case in question did NOT go to trial, so your claim isn’t entirely correct, but yes, all mainstream “news” outlets (including Fox) abuse our trust by constantly lying to us—I don’t watch or trust any of them.
I remember when Rachel Maddow told us, “Now we know that the vaccines work well enough that the virus stops with every vaccinated person. A vaccinated person gets exposed to the virus? The virus does not infect them; the virus cannot then use that person to go anywhere else.” [0]
https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Civil-Opinio...
The claim that the president was a Russian spy was never made afaik. But if you have evidence of a fact checker saying this, I’d appreciate it.
I think you aren’t going to find it because overlapping fact checkers with news media is a slippery thing.
News media is going to be combining opinion and news, to push an angle.
Fact checkers are wont. I suspect you are shifting your ire from media, to fact checkers, which wouldn’t be fair.
However if there was a fact check that said Trump was a Russian plant? That would negate my contention.
I didn’t save the links, so no, I don’t have evidence ready to show you, and it’s not like I can just go to their websites and see an accurate history of their conclusions on specific claims, given that many of them have a history of simply burying their original conclusions once it becomes obvious they were wrong (e.g., [0]).
[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/12/27/in-200...
If we could have legitimate fact checking that really works, then I guess we wouldn't need any politics at all.
Like any other work, it can be reviewed by supervisors within the company and/or the client (Meta). If a sample of an employee's work shows that they often hide content that isn't factually false, they are performing their job poorly. If Meta doesn't like the job the company is doing, the contract can be cancelled.
> If we could have legitimate fact checking that really works, then I guess we wouldn't need any politics at all.
You absolutely need both. Politics is about which decisions to make within the context of shared facts. The amount of the US national debt, the number of people caught crossing the border illegally in 2024, or the number of people sleeping on the streets in San Francisco are all matters of fact. What to do about them is politics.
And the ones in power and with money can decide who the fact checkers will be. And the ones in power and with money can help and support each other. Because we want to keep the money inside the family, to protect the facts you know.
When you grow up you start to understand that you can't trust all authority all the time.
> When you grow up you start to understand that you can't trust all authority all the time.
I think you know I'm not arguing for this. Don't misrepresent my position, please.
The concept of fact checking is a very recent movement, with the idea that we could filter out the "fake news" on the internet, which is also a recent concept.
But it turned out that the so called "fake news" wans't always so fake, and that the fact checkers weren't always so factual.
So it turns out that you can't trust any group to determine what the facts are for the rest of the people.
You can fact-check for yourself, but don't put your "facts" on other people like they're real facts. Leave other people in their respect, and let them think for themselves. You can of course share your knowledge, but you should let the other person ultimately decide what they believe for themselves.
> The concept of fact checking is a very recent movement, with the idea that we could filter out the "fake news" on the internet, which is also a recent concept.
Again, this is not accurate. Look at the job sub-editors have been doing for a century or more. Their main role is to save the newspaper from getting sued or looking silly by striking out or questioning any claim that can't be proven to be true, or corroborated by multiple sources. Fact checking is not a new discipline.
Of course some facts are less flexible than others. Like most people wouldn't argue whether a football is round. Although it matters if you're talking about an American football or a soccer football. So context also matters, and that can be confusing sometimes.
So the facts that the fact checkers were called in to tackle, were so flexible that it turns out it's not doable in a secure way.
And newspapers also don't always have the correct facts. Often things in the newspapers are wrong. And no they are not always being sued for that.
Again, you can fact-check for yourself, that is totally fine, and I would even encourage it. Then you make up your own mind and you are more independent and less shapable by others.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/10/mark-zuckerberg-says-biden-p...
It's also not necessary for third party fact checking to "always work" to have value, there will be some level of false positive rate that's still acceptable. Even with something like Covid, there is unambiguously false information with probably harmful consequences ("you can cure Covid by drinking a bottle of bleach", for example) that would be worth taking down by fact checkers.
And, don't you see the connection? If the government can tell Facebook to censor content, they can also tell them what facts to publish.
Community Notes is from the community, not from Facebook, so not directly influencable by the government. The government could of course tell Facebook to censor certain Community Notes, but the community would notice. With the fact checkers, which are in the hands of Facebook, the community doesn't know.
You can still call it fact checking, just as you can still call air travel by that name even though a very small percentage of planes crash. Suppose the fact checkers had a 0.1% false positive rate and a 0% false negative rate. For every 1,000 pieces of reported content they review which should be left up, they take one down, and they never leave anything up that should be taken down. Wouldn't we say that the system, broadly speaking, works and has value? Even though it doesn't always work?
Do you think Community Notes will "always work"?
> Community Notes is from the community, not from Facebook, so not directly influencable by the government.
It wouldn't work like this. Meta still own the platform, profit from it, and are responsible for it.
Governments will always want to talk to Meta about the material they host, because Facebook reaches millions of people. Sometimes the governments will have a valid case, like when material on Facebook can be linked to inciting genocide[1]. And sometimes they won't, and will be trying to pressurise Facebook for political or self-serving reasons. The point is, those governments will not simply be satisfied and go away if Meta throw their hands in the air and say "Sorry, but we fired the fact checkers and have no control over the material on our platform. It's up to the community, talk to them."
If Meta are trying to solve the government interference problem, the solution is to strengthen their fact checking and moderation systems. Then they'd be able to push back and say that actually no, they are confident that the content on Facebook is appropriate and can credibly stand by it. Abdicating responsibility is just going to get them into more trouble.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide#Facebook_con...
That's already a great reason why Community Notes are better, just because of the name.
Aside from that, if the community is making notes, and the government censors or modifies it, the community would be able to find it out. With an internal fact checking department, the community wouldn't know.
Of course the government will still try to take as much control as they can. So this news should also make us aware of the fact that such huge global networks are not a safe place anyway for independent thinking.
Most people in your country are actually not that different from you.
However the basis for fact is precisely predictive power, so it's actually more like the battle between science and superstition. Information that can directly empower a person is not necessarily information that will help them to feel more comfortable or confirm their biases.
There's a reason why you have Creationists at the highest levels of government.
No, you never had any moral backbone and you are just looking at the first excuse to behave like the psycho you have always been.
The only other possible explanation is that you are stuck at the psychological maturity of a small child, throwing a destructive tantrum any time anyone opposes you.
It's all so tedious, but this is what we humans are like.
I’m in the field and I am thinking of how to work without focusing on truth, because that’s how most humans work!
IMO the concerning part is hidden at the bottom. They want to go back to shoveling politics in front of users. They say it is based on viewing habits, but just because I stop my car to watch a train wreck doesn't mean I want to see more train wrecks. I just can't look away. FB makes theirnacrions sound noble or correct, but this is self serving engagement optimization.
Social media sites should give users an explicit lever to see political content or not. Maybe I'll turn it on for election season and off the rest of the year. Some political junkies will always have it set to "maximum". IMO that is better FB always making that decision for me.
Facebook does sorta have this, under Settings & Privacy > Content Preferences > Manage defaults. Note that the only options for "Political content" are "Show more" and "Default". The other categories listed also include "Show less". There is no "off" option for any of the categories.
https://www.threads.net/@mosseri/post/DEk65TJTXcQ?xmt=AQGzmI...
Our lives ARE political.
Hell, right now researchers on misinformation are being harassed by senators to bankrupt them, and create living lessons to stop others from reducing the reach of manipulative content.
WE already had the entire free speech fight at the dawn of content moderation. We collectively ran millions of experiments, and realized that if you dont moderate community spaces, the best ideas DONT rise to the top, the most viral and emotional ones do.
If you want to see what no moderation looks like, you can see 4 Chan.
By nature, taking a stand on being factual, is automatically political because there are people who are disadvantaged by facts. Enron and oil producers spread FUD over global warming because it was problematic for their profits.
Stopping their FUD, is censorship via moderation. How is a regular joe going to combat a campaign designed to prevent people from reaching consensus?
Anyway, this is going to be fun.
Sure, initially the platform's view time would decrease, but then maybe people would actually like that platform.
Bluesky’s not my favorite website but Xblock is proof that the app can go “this is a twitter screenshot and she doesn’t want to see those” at scale.
AI could identify, label, and hide all of these things.
On bluesky it already does: “this is rude” or “this content promotes self harm” , I wish both websites could suppress , snooze, or completely nuke “viral” or political content be it left or right. In bluesky’s case it’s not that I disagree with them. It’s just that I’ve had this shit that I more or less agree with shoved down my throat from every angle for a decade and I’m exhausted and don’t want to see or engage with it anymore. People who have nothing else to say 24/7 every single day of their life and mine just need to go away and I wish the AI on bluesky would just let me filter people whose content is primarily political temper tantrums because I don’t have the time or will to mute or block them all so I just don’t use the product.
In fact for moderation purposes, Facebook already is doing that on their back end. (a few years ago you could see automatically generated alt text like “a woman holding a baby” though I don’t use meta at the present time and don’t know if it’s still doing this.)
AI is already analyzing the memes and purging ones with themes they don’t like on FB though . Unlike bluesky moderation, it’s not presented as something I can leverage or access to make my experience more enjoyable on Facebook.
But that’s not how they’re leveraging AI right now. They won’t let it prevent me from seeing memes posts and content with themes **i** don’t like.
If the platform’s view time increases only when it shows you “snowboarding, WW2 history and pinball machines", then you and the platform are aligned.
Great, so more filter bubbles? They don't learn, or more likely, don't care.
Facebook is explicitly pro filter bubble. The community notes will come from your ingroup.
One irony is that diversity in online spaces leads to division. People no matter their politics and interests prefer people similar to them.
One way to look at this is by geography. Think of how a group of non English speaking Africans would talk together.
The other irony is that groups of people view the other groups as not similar to them and want to change them. It's always the outgroup that needs it's filter bubble bursting. It's always the other that is brainwashed.
So the downside of filter bubbles remain: more division, more separation between different people.
I liked the way early twitter worked, I have my bubble being the people I follow and I can see glimpses of the outside from the trending topics and what comes in as retweets, news, etc. Being able to see a thread without being logged in. Seeing analysis of people from the firehose showing different ways to see conversations and the bubbles.
I miss the fact that old tweets died, things had to be relevant to humans to be rekindled, meaning someone had to retweet to keep it alive instead of an algorithm deciding whats important for me based on how outrageous it is.
Bubbles are unavoidable, bubbles decided by algorithms are the worse of all alternatives.
If I go to a woodworking class, I won't be surprised to see people who like woodworking. If I go to the supermarket and everyone is talking about and liking woodworking, I start thinking that everyone likes woodworking.
A user explicitly signing up to specific topics are opting into a discussion. Filter bubbles are implicit.
Of course not. Enraged, uninformed people "engage", and that sells ads like hotcakes.
I don't know where people get this idea that Zuckerberg had any principles or gave a shit about anyone but himself. He's spineless, and his primary goal in life is has always been acquire as much wealth as possible by whatever means necessary.
I guess FB will be the judge. They might even stop showing train wrecks to a person if they notice metrics dropping. Some of these metrics might even track the user’s well being, although most will focus on the well being of shareholders.
We lost the levers long time ago, replaced by opaque algorithms; are there any signs for this to change?
People say they don’t want political content, but they’re also more likely to engage with it if they see it.
Maybe they need to be optimising for unregretted user seconds /s
They also said that their existing moderation efforts were due to societal and political pressures. They aren't explicit about it, but it's clear that pressure does not exist anymore. This is another big win for Meta, because minimizing their investment in content moderation and simplifying their product will reduce operating expenses.
> it means people who care about the content being right will have to engage more with the Meta products to ensure their worldview is correctly represented.
It does however certainly fit the Golden rule - he with the gold makes the rules.
I was cautiously optimistic when this was announced that India and Saudi Arabia (among others, incl. Qatar) might see some pushback on how they clamp down on free speech and journalism on social media. But since Zuck mentioned Europe, I fear those countries will continue as they did before.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BJP_IT_Cell
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-23695896
Only the name "Community Notes" is less misleading then "Fact checkers".
Sure, I'll trust the leadership of this huge commercial company, famous for lots of controversies reagarding privacy of people. I'll trust them to decide for me what is true and what is not.
Great idea!
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/10/mark-zuckerberg-says-biden-p...
Or maybe such people have far better things to do than fact check concern trolls and paid propagandists.
Many of us might pay for journalism if we knew who was producing content not already beholden to some ridiculous bias sink.
I'm not sure if they do more good than harm. Often the entire point seems to be to get those specific people spun up, realizing that the troll is not constrained to admit error no matter how airtight the refutation. It just makes them look as frothing as trolls claim they are.
And yet, it's also unclear if any other course of action would help. Despite decades of pleading, the trolls never starve no matter how little they're fed.
Your point is exactly why I can’t take anyone serious who claims that randoms “debating” will cause the best ideas to rise to the top.
I cant count how many times i’ve seen influencer propagandists engage in an online “debate”, be handheld walked through how their entire point is wrong, only for them to spew the exact same thing hours later at the top of every feed. and remember these are often the people with some of the largest platforms claiming they’re being censored … to millions of people lol.
it’s too easy to manipulate what rises to the top. for debate to be anything close to effective all parties involved have to actually be interested in coming closer to a truth. and the algorithms have no interest in deranking sophists and propagandists.
Downvotes that hide posts below a certain threshold have always seemed like the best approach to me. Of course it also allows groups to silence views.
Strong disagree. This is a very naive understanding of the situation. "Fact-checking" by users is just more of the kind of shouting back and forth that these social networks are already full of. That's why a third-party fact checks are important.
How can this be replicated with topics that are by definition controversial, and happening in real time? I don't know. But I don't think Meta/X have any sort of vested interest in seeing sober, fact-based conversations. In fact, their incentives work entirely in the opposite direction: the more anger/divisive the content drives additional traffic and engagement [1]. Whereas, with Wikipedia, I would argue the opposite is true: Wikipedia would never have gained the dominance it has if it was full of emotionally-charged content with dubious/no sourcing.
So I guess my conclusion from this is that I doubt any community-sourced "fact checking" efforts in-sourced from the social media platforms themselves will be successful, because the incentives are misaligned for the platform. Why invest any effort into something that will drive down engagement on your platform?
[1] Just one reference I found: https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2024292118. From the abstract:
> ... we found that posts about the political out-group were shared or retweeted about twice as often as posts about the in-group. Each individual term referring to the political out-group increased the odds of a social media post being shared by 67%. Out-group language consistently emerged as the strongest predictor of shares and retweets: the average effect size of out-group language was about 4.8 times as strong as that of negative affect language and about 6.7 times as strong as that of moral-emotional language—both established predictors of social media engagement. ...
1) Shouting matches create more ad impressions, as people interact more with the platform. The shouting matches also get more attention from other viewers than any calm factual statement. 2) Less legal responsibility / costs / overhead 3) Less potential flak from being officially involved in fact-checking in a way that displeases the current political group in power
Users lose, but are people who still use FB today going to use FB less because the official fact checkers are gone? Almost certainly not in any significant numbers
"Fact-checking" completely removed the ability for debate and is therefore antithetical to a functional democracy. Pushing back against authority, because they are often dead wrong, is foundational to a free society. It's hard to imagine anything more authoritarian than "No I don't have to debate because I'm a fact-checker and by that measure alone you're wrong and I'm right". Very Orwellian indeed!
Additionally, the number of times that I've observed "fact-checkers" lying thru their teeth for obvious political reasons is absurd.
it's by third-party journalism organizations, not Meta employees, so not "people in authority"
If I am trying to debate the same fact on a far-right or far-left post, undoubtedly both will come up with the same discussion and conclusion - let's not lie to ourselves.
So for your claim to have any validity the requirement of a fair, unbiased group of people on all posts would need to be given (in the first instance, there are a lot more issues with this, just look at the loud people versus the ones not bothering anymore to comment as discussing seems impossible) and that is just de facto not the case and the reason fact-checking is indeed helpful.
It's clear that the pressure comes now from the other side of the spectrum. Zuck already put Trumpists at various key positions.
> I think this is a big win for Meta, because it means people who care about the content being right will have to engage more with the Meta products to ensure their worldview is correctly represented.
It's a good point. They're also going to push more political contents, which should increase engagement (eventually frustrating users and advertisers?)
Either way, it's pretty clear that the company works with the power in place, which is extremely concerning (whether you're left or right leaning, and even more if you're not American).
I didn't think it was any secret that Meta largely complies with US gov't instructions on what to suppress. It's called jawboning[1]
[1] https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/what-jawboning-and-do...
If you care so much about it, now you can contribute with Community Notes. The power is in your hands! Go forth and be happy.
If you assume they are immune to politics (not true but let's go with it), this is the most obvious reason.
They've seen X hasn't taken that much heat for Community Notes and they're like "wow we can cut a line item".
The real problem is, Facebook is not X. 90% of the content on Facebook is not public.
You can't Fact Check or Community Note the private groups sharing blatantly false content, until it spills out via a re-share.
So Facebook will remain a breeding ground of conspiracy, pushed there by the echo chamber and Nazi-bar effects.
The EU goes its own way with trusted flaggers, which is more or less the least sensible option. It won't take long until bounds are overstepped and legal content gets flagged. Perhaps it already happened. This is not a solution to even an ill-defined problem.
In the meantime, maybe now I can discuss private matters of my diagnosis without catching random warnings, bans, or worse.
That could lead to a debate between the fact checkers, which would derail the debate.
Better to not have fact checkers as part of the debate, and leave the fact checking to the post-debate analysis.
Were they fact-checking too much? Not enough? Incorrectly?
Oh wait, fact checkers don't work, better just inform yourself and make up your own mind, and don't just believe some supposedly authoritarian figures.
Go back a sentence.
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/fact-check-virginia-go...
> “where there may be severe deformities. There may be a fetus that’s non viable” he said. “If a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen.”
Your dying grandma may go DNR, but that doesn’t mean murdering grandmas is broadly legal.
My wife does charity photography for https://www.nowilaymedowntosleep.org/. You see lots of this sort of withdrawal of care. Calling it an abortion is cruel and dumb.
I don't know if I'd call it a certain win for Meta long term, but it might well be if they play it right. Presumably they're banking on things being fairly siloed anyway, so political tirades in one bubble won't push users in another bubble off the platform. If they have good ways for people to ignore others, maybe they can have the cake and eat it, unlike Twitter.
Like Twitter, the network effect will retain people, and unlike Twitter, Facebook is a much deeper, more integrated service such that people can't just jump across to a work-alike.
A CEO who can keep his mouth shut is also a pretty big plus for them. They skated away from bring involved with a genocide without too many issues, so same ethical revulsion people have against Musk seems to be much less focused.
The problem with CN right now, though, is that Musk appears to block it on most of his posts, and/or right-wing moderators downvote the notes so they don't appear or disappear.
Indeed the ending of the famous story is:
> "But the Emperor has nothing at all on!" said a little child.
> "Listen to the voice of innocence!" exclaimed his father; and what the child had said was whispered from one to another.
> "But he has nothing at all on!" at last cried out all the people. The Emperor was vexed, for he knew that the people were right; but he thought the procession must go on now! And the lords of the bedchamber took greater pains than ever, to appear holding up a train, although, in reality, there was no train to hold.
If what they said about their design is to be believed, political downvoting shouldn't heavily impact them. I wish it was easier to see pending notes on a post though.
I think the fact-checking part is pretty straightforward. What's outrageous is that the content moderators judge content subjectively, labeling perfect discussions as misinformation, hate speech, and etc. That's where the censorship starts.
Facebook moderators have an even harder job than that because the inherent scale of the platform prevents the kinds of personal insights and contextual understanding I had.
The situation is somewhat different between a niche community and a borderline monopoly. But it's also true that facebook's success depends on navigating it well. At the end of the day we can choose to use it or not.
To the extent that people feel forced to use a platform that's a reason to further bias away from suppressing free expression, even if the result is a somewhat less good platform.
But we don't, though. Or rather, there's broad consensus over most of it, but there's plenty of disagreement over where exactly the dividing line is.
It also starts when there is no third-party anymore. Where is the middle line?
Not familiar with that specific case, though generally I'm not a fan a bans. Fact checks are great though. There have been peer reviewed papers about midi-chlorians too (https://www.irishnews.com/magazine/science/2017/07/24/news/a...), but I'd sure hope that if someone brought it up in a discussion they'd be fact checked.
And I don't see why publisher of news even if they just re-publish should not be held to some responsibilities, like eg. abstaining from nefarious manipulation of content people see on their platform.
X/FB is far more trustworthy than the legacy news media, which happily censors salient stories at the request of the government and pushes very specific agendas that are totally out of touch with the average voter.
I can't even count how many times I've seen literal video evidence for a story on X that the news media twists or refuses to cover.
This frustration with fact-checkers seems genuine. Mark alluded to it in https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-says-hes-d... which squares with how the Government used fact-checkers to coerce Facebook into censoring non-egregious speech (switchboarding) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41370516
Alex Stamos pushed this initiative pretty hard outside of Facebook in 2019+, seemingly because he wasn't able to do inside of Facebook back in 2016/2018. But I haven't dug into his motivations.
There's no fighting a government, and all governments are corrupt if they see an opportunity to rent-seek from you.
Europe has way weaker free speech protections so I have no interest in defending them.
I don't use Twitter so I hadn't seen it in action, but the interview convinced me that this is a good approach. I think this approach makes sense for Facebook as well.
It's a terrible solution.
The obvious context is that either Meta gets out of the content moderation game voluntarily, or the incoming admin goes to war with them.
> focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations.
I imagine this will in practice determine how far they can go in the EU. Community notes, sure. No moderation? Maybe not.
But... Community Notes is subject to "tampering." Elon's either removes the CNs himself from his posts, or his brigade downvote them to infinity so they don't appear on all the misinfo he posts.
The data I can find says it was last updated 9:02 PM Jan. 5, 2025 (presumably America/Chicago from my browser). That’s a >2 day window as of writing this comment.
Not throwing any accusation, just trying to understand the technicals.
If there was any manipulation of community notes in the last 2 days, how would we know?
If there’s manipulation of this data before it is published, such as ratings or notes never hitting these data files, how would we know?
Maybe, an individual could check to see their own contributions are included in updates to the published data. Is that sufficiently common such that it would get caught?
Community note data I can find (log in required): https://x.com/i/communitynotes/download-data
You can't know until the data is published. 2 days isn't that long though. Just wait a couple more days for the next data dump, then run the algorithm and compare the results to what the X UI was showing at that time.
> If there’s manipulation of this data before it is published, such as ratings or notes never hitting these data files, how would we know?
That would be a bit more sneaky than just outright removing notes. As you noted, you'd need a user whose ratings or notes were omitted from the dump to notice and come forward. Or perhaps with careful analysis you could prove that the manipulated data could not have resulted in the allegedly removed note being shown and then later not shown, indicating something fishy happened.
Theoretically if X wanted to improve on this system, they could go even further and implement something like certificate transparency (append-only log verified by a publicly distributed merkle tree), or create an independent third party organization that users interact with to submit and rate notes, rather than that happening through X's UI. Given the threat model though, I feel like the UX and complexity trade-offs of that wouldn't be worth it. Open sourcing the data and algorithm as X has is already far more transparency than we get from any competing social media company.
But of course he can turn it off. He owns the entire platform and algorithms on it.
If you do not think Elon could be controlling the moderation of his own account then you are either hopelessly naive or responding in bad faith. Either way, I will not be responding again.
I am not so sure that Musk or right-wing moderators are directly to blame for the lack of published community notes. My guess: in recent months, many people (e.g., me) who are motivated to counter fake news have left Twitter for other platforms. Thus, proposed CNs are seen and upvoted by fewer people, resulting in fewer of them being shown to the public. Also, I ask myself: why should I spend time verifying or writing CNs when it does not matter - the emperor knows that he is not wearing any clothes, and he does not care.
I don't know if this is the case, but X is Elon's property, so he can shape it as he pleases. Assuming that X (or Facebook) is unbiased and working for your benefit is simply foolish, unless you are Musk (or Zuckerberg).
The exact tweet being - “ looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services in his PhD thesis.”
Or this one where he accused his disabled employee ?
(using community notes to make the point no less) https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1633011448459964417?ref_src=tw...
> Over the weekend, Musk shared some of Roth’s past tweets and what appears to be an excerpt from his PhD thesis about Grindr, the LGBTQ social media app. Roth is quoted as saying that the app is possibly too “lewd or hook-up-oriented” for people under age 18 who are already using it, but that providers should “focus on creating safe strategies … for queer young adults” that aren’t just about hook-ups. Musk commented, “Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to use adult services in his PhD thesis.” On Monday, the tweet had more than 60,000 likes and received 15,000 retweets.
The thesis demonstrably exists (https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/60981d118b006454de9222b2/61d...), and it does have a roughly matching quote at the bottom of PDF page 257 (labelled page 248). The idea of businesses "crafting safe strategies" to "safely connect queer young adults" (the context is very clear that Roth refers to people under the age of 18) is very reasonably interpreted as Musk did. There are very obvious reasons why existing services advertise themselves as 18+ and attempt to enforce that, and it should be clear to everyone that any such service intended specifically for minors could not plausibly be rendered safe.
The idea that this observation constitutes an accusation of pedophilia is 100% media spin, and does not reflect Musk's words.
Ideas like Roth's are not rare on the American (or Canadian) left, especially where they intersect with LGBT etc. rights - which is how things like https://www.cbc.ca/cbcdocspov/episodes/drag-kids can come to exist and be vigorously defended. This empowers quite a bit of culture warring from the American right.
I’m sorry you took the effort to prove that point, however can you hold me responsible for that point? I was just asking a question.
Isn’t the way you interpret those sentences your issue? Not mine?
> The idea that this observation constitutes an accusation of pedophilia is 100% media spin, and does not reflect Musk's words.
It surely doesn’t reflect Musk’s exact words.
I dont know what you mean about media spin.
I do know that people took those words to imply he was a pedophile. Which is why they went out to teach him a lesson, threatening him, harassing him and hounding him. I mean, who would let a censoring pedophile be?
And it’s not Musk’s fault people did that, anyone who reads his sentence will see he clearly doesn’t mean that Roth is a pedophile.
That’s the fault of the people who can’t read correctly! Like how can I be held responsible if you didn’t understand me.
Media stories asserted that he made such an implication. I believe that people came to that conclusion because they saw the assertion in the media, and didn't look into it further. I don't think they could have come to that conclusion on their own from what Musk actually said - if they were thinking clearly. As you say, it was not his fault. But people very often don't think clearly when it comes to topics like this. They infer things that were not implied.
Also, I can say for sure - people came to that conclusion because they saw his words directly.
Others were also funneled in via the media channel.
People read Elon’s words in the context that gay people are perverse liberals.
Diver rescuers being pedophiles?
That's completely irrelevant to the discussion, however. GP asserts that Musk takes actions to protect "...the misinfo he posts". The burden of proof is on GP to establish that Musk posts "misinfo[rmation]", a word which I understand in context to mean "content which is provably untrue". If you think it should mean something different, please explain why.
Often I live through events and read about it in the daily paper and then read about it in The Economist and read a few more accounts of it. 5-25 years later a good well researched history of the event comes out and it is entirely different from what I remember reading at the time. Some of that is my memory but a lot of it is that the first draft of history is wrong.
When someone signed their name "Dan Cooper" and hijacked a plane a newspaper garbled that to "D B Cooper", the FBI thought it sounded cool so they picked it up, but it happens more often than not that journalists garble things like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Armies_of_the_Night
shows (but doesn't tell) that that a novelized accounts of events could be more true than a conventional newspaper account and similar criticisms come throughout the work of Joan Didion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Didion
If anything really makes me angry about news and how people consume it is this. In the age of clickbait everyone who works for The New York Times has one if not two eyes on their stats at all times. Those stats show that readers have a lot more interest in people like David Brooks and Ezra Klein blowing it out their ass and could care less about difficult journalism that takes integrity, elbow grease and occasionally can put you in danger done by younger people who are paid a lot less if they are paid at all. The conservative press was slow on the draw when it came to 'Cancel Culture', it was a big issue with the NYT editorial page because those sorts of people get paid $20k to give a college commencement address and they'd hate to have the gravy train stop.
Seen that way the problem with 'fake news' is not that it is 'fake' but that it is 'news'.
salient point. as a writer, the essential condition for any story is a conflict because it's the source of tension or dissonance that people engage with for resolution. the issue with the "fake news" wasn't the facts, it's that the conflict that brought them together as a story was manufactured cheaply from ideology. this had a compounding effect where the absurdity of the resulting conflict with reality drove further outrage from the other "side."
it's a pan-partisan problem. fine observation anyway, I'm provoked. to get better news, the conflict it expresses needs to be more organic. imo using community notes is way more organic than the governance model FB and formerly twiiter used.
One of the only visible actions Meta has taken on my account was once when a cousin commented on a musical opinion I had posted to facebook, I jokingly replied "I'll fight you" and I caught an instant 2 week posting ban and a flag on my account for "violence." Couldn't even really appeal it, or the hoops were so ridiculous that I didn't try. The hilarious thing is these bans will still let you consume the sites' content (gotta get those clicks), you just are unable to interact with it. This kind of moderation is pointless as users will always get around it anyway - leading to stuff like "unalive" to replace killing/suicide references, or "acoustic" to refer to an autistic person, etc. Just silliness, as you'll always be able to find a way to creatively convey your point such that auto-moderators don't catch it.
It's also the word for delay in English.
Just because some childish people are misusing the word for some time, we shouldn't just ditch it like that. Words go back a long time.
We should just remove the negative use of it. And we do that by growing up, not by banning words.
Which, of course, also referred to clinical mental disability at some point in history. As did "moronic", "imbecilic" and others. But nowadays they're really all just strong forms of "stupid".
Even in contexts where generic insults directed at people are not tolerated, it should be acceptable to recognize stupid ideas as such.
>Right. I made a reference to educational development being retarded due to COVID restrictions and the very people you'd expect to be offended were of course offended.
I misread that, and interpreted "retarded" as being a subjective judgment applied to the restrictions.
That said, the reading "[the process of] educational development has a mental disability" is utterly incoherent, so I still see no reasonable justification for taking offense.
One of the kindest women I know, but she doesn't bead around the bush or have time for euphemisms.
Idiot, retard, mentally handicapped, ect. It is all doomed to be a euphemistic treadmill because they can and are used as an insult. The insulting part isn't the word used, but the comparison drawn. Give it 10 years or so and whatever the current word is will also be out of favor as a pejorative.
It’s pretty retarded.
There are, and should be, contexts where insulting people is socially acceptable and where such insults should not be censored. And no matter what words you use (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/euphemism_treadmill), it's fundamentally impossible to get rid of the idea that a lack of (demonstrated) intelligence is inherently negative.
(It's noteworthy to me that the same activists don't seem to be able to identify any terms denoting lack of physical strength that are inherently offensive - except insofar as they invoke gender stereotypes. Why should it be any less objectionable to call someone a "weakling", for example?)
I disagree that any such thing is invoked. It seems that you believe that when the word "retard" is used in these contexts, that it's meant to describe a person with an intellectual disability. I think it's merely intended to describe someone of low intelligence, which neither necessarily qualifies as nor is necessarily caused by a disability.
Nor do I agree that it's mean-spirited in a way that, say, the word "stupid" isn't. It's just more intense.
Freedom and cencorship is another thing. You have the freedom to be rude and impolite, and it shouldn't be censored. But yeah you shouldn't expect people to like you or listen to you.
Because multiple kinds of social space exist, and some people enjoy being able to interact with each other that way and are happy to accept being the butt of the joke their fair share of the time.
Well you know, things can change. In the past it was a family outing to go watch a beheading. That was normal for them and good entertainment. And they would have used the same arguments as you to somebody critical about it.
And you're right, it is a valid choice, and if you really enjoy being humiliated, by all means, you have the freedom to.
I do think eventually when the rest of the people have grown up and moved on to much more intelligent endeavors, that you might start to think differently too. But maybe not, everyone has their own interests.
Plant failing to be properly retarded is a somewhat regular cause of near-miss safety incidents.
As Stephen Fry said: "So fucking what?".
A thumbs-up gesture is offensive in the Middle East, should it be banned world-wide?
Funnily enough the original example upthread was the use of the word "retard" which is harmless in French, which ended up getting the user in trouble.
They're suggesting that the people who conceivably might take issue generally don't and are instead being patronized by and condescended to by privileged, unaffiliated outsiders who assume -- without consent -- to speak on their behalf. And they don't take those people seriously.
It's totally reasonable to disagree with that view, but it's the not the same view your reply tries to engage with.
Priest: “You have been found guilty by the elders of the town of uttering the name of our lord as so as a BLASPHEMER you are to be stoned to death.”
[…]
Priest: “BLASPHEMY! He said it again!”
Old man: “I don’t think it ought to be blasphemy. I just said ‘Jehova’”
Priest: “You said it again! You’re only making it worse!”
Old man: “Making it worse!? How can I make it worse!? Jehova, Jehova, Jenova!”
"Retard" means "thick", in this context, not "will get there eventually".
The technical definition is not how the euphemism is used.
There's an interesting etymology of "retarded". Also "idiot", "imbecile", "moron", etc.
These were clinical classifications, initially used in the early days of psychology and sometimes overlapping discredited ideas like eugenics. But these were diagnoses -- you could be determined to be an idiot, which was worse than being an imbecile, which was worse than being a moron -- by a respected doctor.
Of course, schoolyard kids got a hold of the terms and used them to disparage their (probably cognitively healthy) peers. And so with "retarded" and "disabled" etc.
But "retarded" just means "slowed or delayed". Developmentally speaking, especially when surrounded by other kids in your same age group, that's a noticeably difficult thing to be.
It does not mean (and never meant) that you are certain to reach full cognitive ability eventually. Flights that are delayed are sometimes also cancelled.
This prof lost a gig
It does stick out of Mandarin speech to the US English speaker, but it's typically pretty obvious from context that it's not related to the slur. It's never been worth more than a giggle when growing up, I'm spending like 100x more time on thinking about it right now than I have cumulatively in my life, despite having grown up around Chinese people.
[1]: https://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/grammar/The_fil...
Surprised someone was called out though as all the social cues around should be enough to sense no ill intent.
That aside, I find it offensive a little bit that Meta has taken it upon themselves to decide what the "right" discourse is that their users want to see, and would rather they create a mechanism to let users decide for themselves - which this does at least outwardly appear to be a move towards. They've also in the last few years toned down or removed some of the auto-modding in private groups, and shifted that responsibility towards its community members and moderators - which was also a similarly good step.
that's very different and a case where the closed community should bear that responsibility
but as far global FB community -- which doesn't really exist (there is no "community", just users) -- or, more precisely, what ends up in people feeds, the fact checking was a good thing because a lot of people consume news that way; so this is a big step in the wrong direction
in no region or context does Knopf mean anything offensive, especially not "penis".
1) "knob" *in English* can mean "penis"
2) This is why "knob" was on the English rude words list
3) It looks like a rude word list containing "knob" was translated without context, so that the word "knob" became "Knopf" even though "Knopf" isn't rude.
Wäre es andersherum gewesen, wäre es so, dass „Schlange“ sowohl <<en:queue>> als auch <<en:penis>> bedeutet, und wenn „queue“ in einer englischen Liste mit Schimpfwörtern stünde, wären die meisten Leute sehr verwirrt.
Loose-loose-situation.
It got the account suspended until we deleted the post, claiming the post, and I quote, "could encourage physical violence and lead to a risk of physical harm, or a direct threat to public safety."
I sent an appeal, saying it was a clear joke that isn't directed at anyone, but after supposed "review" they determined the post is indeed against ToS.
At its base, moderation = time = money
Better quality moderation? More money.
The platforms would rather not carry that cost and therefore be more profitable. Convenient how that worked out.
We should stop pretending that that website resembles its preceding namesake, because it does not.
Meta used to pay third party company fact checking companies to put disclaimers on “misinformation” posts on Facebook. They’re going to stop that now.
They’re still going to continue their other more traditional moderation where you’ll be banned for making an obvious tongue in cheek joke or whatever.
Is autistic an illegal word or something? What the fuck?
Go on Twitter and you will see people self-censor the normal swear words too.
Shit becomes “sht”, fuck becomes “fck”
Very dystopian.
Is it though? A lot of this self censorship seems to be a cargo cult thing where people just copy what they've seen other people do and assume it's necessary when it's really not.
Yes. There are countless stories from Youtube creators who had their videos taken down or demonetized or had to edit and reupload them, because the AI detected that words such as "suicide" were spoken. And it's common knowledge that requests for review are routinely denied (presented as "we reviewed your case and the ruling stands", a judgment often received in less time than the runtime of the video).
I don't believe you. I've never seen any evidence of that.
https://www.reddit.com/r/NewTubers/comments/18f7mas/question...
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2802245
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/13qhtu1/...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/youtube-co...
https://www.businessinsider.com/youtubers-identify-title-wor...
And there's a clear cause for it:
2) I find it completely inane that you are willing to self-censor yourself for an algorithm. I guess we no longer need a ministry of truth if the people just produced censored content to begin with, right?
Whereas if you replace those words with "unalive" and **'s, then you get far more views.
I'm sure there is some kind of filter.
Same thing with when Bezos declared that the Washington Post would no longer be endorsing presidential candidates, claiming that it was a neutral decision about returning the paper to its roots with unfortunate but coincidental timing. Despite that potentially being a reasonable decision in a vacuum, only an idiot would have believed that Bezos was being honest about his motivation.
But it was eating my brain. I found myself mostly having tweet-shaped thoughts, there was an irresistible compulsion to check mentions 100 times a day, I somehow felt excluded from all the "cool" parts which was making me miserable. But most importantly, I was completely audience captured. To continue growing the account I had to post more and more ridiculous things. Saying reasonable things doesn't get you anywhere on Twitter, so my brain was slowly trained to have, honestly, dumb thoughts to please the algorithm. It also did something to attention. Reading a book cover to cover became impossible.
There came a point when I decided I just don't want this anymore, but signing out didn't work-- it would always pull me back in. So I deleted my account. I can read books again and think again; it's plainly obvious to me now that I was very, very addicted.
Multiply this by millions of people, and it feels like a catastrophe. I think this stuff is probably very bad for the world, and it's almost certainly very bad for _you_. For anyone thinking about deleting social media accounts, I very strongly encourage you to do it. Have you been able to get consumed by a book in the past few years? And if not, is this _really_ the version of yourself you really want?
Plenty of people can drink or consume weed in moderation. Likewise I know a lot of people who mostly use socials in the bathroom or before bed but rarely elsewhere.
Anyway I'll probably delete my twitter, haven't used it in a long time.
I think you also just proved my point that if HN users can't even get basic facts about an event right, how do you expect the average FB user to do so? Goes to show that even on HN "community noting" would be a disaster.
With Silicon-Valley people being in charge of "fact-checking" for the past decade there's been countless examples of them doing mass cancellations calling things lies that we all know ended up being true.
really? like what, exactly? please give concrete examples or this is just hot air
"Facebook lifts ban on posts claiming Covid-19 was man-made (2021)"
It is not known to be true of course, but it always obviously a possibility.
IS this a reasonable expectation of fact checking?
I’m very curious now, I actually would love takes on this. I feel we are implying that the standards of fact checking validity weren’t met, but the standards haven’t been stated.
People regularly say “let me know the full facts, even if they aren’t confirmed.”
This is a common claim from people when it comes to medicine or nutrition, for example.
I think you can acknowledge that people have contradictory impulses - because you’ve experienced it.
All reporting on developing situations will be inaccurate, and yet people want it.
So how would you reconcile this? This need for the best effort information and the need for perfect information?
Removing Freedom of Speech is the first thing Tyrannical gov'ts do to control people. Look at what Trudeau tried to do to Canadians, and look at the UK also. People are now being put in JAIL for being rude online. Luckily conservatives all around the world are fed up and finally fighting back.
That’s from the Abram’s dissent.
Does it resonate with you?
But the OP did make a claim that "calling things lies that we all know ended up being true"
I challenged that with a request for actual examples. Feel free to link to them.
The act of not providing the evidence, is essentially a sign of not having an argument, and resorting to bluffs in the hope that people will take the emotions as facts.
But thats entirely self defeating - it reduces your argument to one about feels and vibes.
I always find this to be annoying, because I dont think people are so inaccurate.
You may well have evidence, and bringing it up makes the case.
And if you dont find evidence, then you improve your own argument. You end up checking and figuring out what made you hold that position.
It’s just a lost chance. And if people said they dont care to do this, then why the heck did they make the effort? You just lost your peace for no reason.
Asking people to list evidence for well known things is a well known troll-tactic, and often used as a way to deflect and redirect a discussion into the specifics of specific cases, especially when the main argument has nothing to do with any of the specific cases.
Be fair. You may be getting downvoted but I think that you are arguing in good faith.
If it helps. I’m not a troll.
There IS a norm where the person making the claim is expected to provide evidence the evidence.
If you asked me, I would have to get something to show you. (Do ask, if only it creates effort on my side to make it fair)
And I don’t think the issue here is whether cancel culture exists.
If you go through your comment chain, your original claim was that it was countless example, ie one of magnitude.
Based on that, you dismissed fact checking entirely.
Which is what people are basically responding to.
Not that cancel culture didn’t exist- but that it was mostly wrong.
And therefore - that fact checking is mostly wrong.
I also have seen fact checking in other countries other than America - it’s absolutely correct in many situations, but is still problematic because it’s unpopular.
There's a high probability that heavily influenced the presidential 2020 election outcome.
https://judiciary.house.gov/media/in-the-news/facebook-execs...
There was a long period where people were getting banned from Twitter and Meta platforms for posting (true) claims about the Hunter Biden laptop story (which was, of course, extremely politically consequential)
If you read the article you linked to, you find that 1) Twitter blocked tweets about the WP story, not banned users, and 2) they reversed that decision and unblocked the tweets 24 hours later as they realized their mistake.
Your attempt to minimise this as “people don’t care about a laptop” is either incredibly ignorant of this matter or deliberately misleading framing of the question.
They won't allow themselves to think it's important because that's an open admission (to themselves and others) of how thoroughly brainwashed they've become by trusting the MSM left-wing perspectives on every issue.
It was definitely real, it was mostly seen as a politicized fight.
I heard nominally credible commentators claim the laptop story was a "russian disinformation" campaign at least 50 different times.
Didnt people dismiss it initially, then change tune once it was confirmed? All the liberal sides knew it existed, they were mostly focused on the fact that the prosecution was being incredibly focused, which was out of the norm for how cases like that are typically punished.
You had subreddits which had zero moderation, because again “the best ideas succeed”. Those places got filled with the hate speech, vitriol, harassment, stalking and toxicity.
Minorities and women left, because they were basically hunted.
Logical arguments dont work, because hate, harassment and anger are emotionally driven behaviors.
This creates the toxic water cooler effect. The fact that its ok to say horrible things, attracts more people who are happy to say those things.
You lose diversity of arguments, view points and chances to challenge ideas.
You increase radicalization, dramatically speed up the sharing and conversion of anger into action.
Eventually, the subs brought in moderation. As did every social media platform in existence. The people who didn’t like it, created their own spaces.
Which didn’t do well. Because those positions and spaces are NOT popular. Facing this fact, they are now turning to shut off opposition and moderation, because that is necessary to keep the ball going.
This isn’t even opinion, this is the history of the past 30 years. It’s not even that old!
I really do hope this time its different. Genuinely, I said it when the new communities were created. I meant it then, I mean it now.
Moderation is fucking toxic and unhealthy. I rejoined moderation recently, and in the first 10 frikking items, I had to see a dead baby pic from an un covered ethnic war zone.
I really want this to succeed, and want it to be good for users. I am hoping it is.
But experience is clear - making space for hurtful speech, results in more hurtful speech and people just leaving to places where they dont have to be harassed.
Blue sky should probably see a jump in users over time this year.
I hung on to facebook largely because marketplace makes parenting markedtly cheaper. I've used it less and less to the point I forget about it. This finally inspired me to full delete the account.
So, while this announcement certainly seems to be in bad faith (what could Mark mean by "gender" other than transphobic discussion?), this should be a boon both for far-right and left discussion.
Does that mean increased polarization and political violence? Surely, surely.
This is a bold claim. I see a lot of people in this discussion that seem to have a very different experience. Your point would be much stronger with evidence, if only to calibrate everyone's understanding of what you mean by "left content".
>what could Mark mean by "gender" other than transphobic discussion?
From what I've been able to tell the last several years, the overwhelming majority of your ideological opponents here have no interest in visiting physical harm upon others simply because of how they view and present themselves. They just don't want to be, or feel, compelled to treat the other person's self-image as an objective fact. Some of them additionally have concerns about capacity of minors to give informed consent for the related medical procedures, or consider it suspicious that the prevalence of such self-identification has risen drastically in recent years (to the point that they imagine social pressures toward such identification).
>Does that mean increased polarization and political violence? Surely, surely.
I have seen statements like this from your opponents interpreted as veiled threats in the past.
I think it's extremely likely that people will see the "de-ranking" of content they agree with as bias, regardless of their place on the spectrum.
Similar: "Biden must have committed election fraud, because all of my friends voted for Trump and I don't know anyone who voted for Biden." (previous election, obviously) Well, is that because no-one voted for Biden, or that the friends/content you see is tuned to how you lean.
Not really though. It means that feminist campaigners can advocate for single-sex spaces and services without the looming threat of being banned. This is great news and a win for free speech.
https://transparency.meta.com/en-gb/policies/community-stand...
That said, if they remove the political filter, they're opening the door for all discussion (even from the left).
Of course, they could surreptitiously filter out the left. Hell, why not?
Just moving the needle for allowed content to include transphobia and racism.
If by left discussion you mean discussion of the genocide in Gaza, don't count on it, because this censorship is bipartisan in the United States.
Zuck cares about currying favor with the powerful. He doesn't give a crap about the powerless. Also, he's pretending that Texas, the proposed site for content moderation, is not politically biased, which is laughable. "We're moving from a blue state to a red state" is not a serious proposal for reducing or eliminating bias.
It’s also a right wing complaint, and they’re also silenced for bringing it up.
But Trump, Fox News, and the Republicans are absolutely actively aiding the genocide and squashing dissent.
The “bad faith” is in the pretending that we don’t all participate in gender performance with every single person we come into contact with, every single day, for our entire lives.
Again: it is specifically pointing out that other people are not obliged to participate in other people’s performance.
People are free to act, have whatever cosmetic surgery or take whatever hormones they wish to.
Where their rights end is asking other people to refer to them based on their performance rather than their sex.
Again, it is not ‘bad faith’ for Meta to allow discourse from people to disagree with gender ideology. Meta are not hiding anything, they are directly saying that they want to allow people that disagree with gender ideology - which judging by the last election is most Americans - to use their services.
This is not good imho.
To claim internet discussion worked better without fact checking is something I haven't seen any actual evidence for, just opinions like yours.
Community notes is just a watered down, more easily 'ignored' version that appeases people that were angry about fact checkers to begin with.
Hopefully there is a push-back, likely from EU legislation. Between the AI generators many of these companies are implementing and changes like this, platforms need to be held more accountable for what they allow to be posted on them.
EU legislation tries to introduce "trusted flaggers". A ridiculous approach, an information authority by a state-like entity doesn't work, even if they paint these flaggers as independent. They simply are not, a trusted and verifiable fact.
Community notes provide higher quality info, it is the better approach. That is an opinion of course.
We will probably see community notes on trusted flaggers.
I've only seen a handful of cases where they were wrong of heavily biased, but I've seen hundreds of cases where the poster refuses to accept they are wrong and the fact checkers are right.
>Community notes provide higher quality info, it is the better approach. That is an opinion of course.
Roughly the same info but from less trusted sources and with less controls being higher quality sounds like a big bag of wishes but not grounded in reality.
>We will probably see community notes on trusted flaggers.
I expect lots of partisan complaining and yelling, but not a lot of actual valid challenges.
A fact checker however has economic incentive towards their employers. You can paint them as independent, but the will always be in a precarious situation or are influenced by third party financiers. This does not at all evoke more trust than a random internet person. Trusted source is pretty subjective, but for me "official" fact checkers don't have too much of that.
Seems to me in my experience after decades of watching and participating in online discussion extremism really only became more problematic when fact checking and active efforts to suppress took hold. Whatever the good intentions may have been, the results were worse.
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/6zg6w6/reddits_ban... / https://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf
"Sunlight is the best disinfectant" is a great pithy slogan, but modern society needs bleach and chlorhexidine sometimes.
So removing a censored platform eliminated the problem? Amazing how that works!
Essentially what it showed was that if you pull people out of a particular echo chamber, then that had a sustained effect on how they behaved. Which is evidence contrary to the often made claim that they'd just leave and go somewhere else. It's in line with the theory that the internet fosters extremism because it enables insular pathological communities that in the analog era you'd have been slapped out of long ago by people who aren't nuts.
So…silos and echo chambers are bad. Seems to me that was part of my original point. I am suggesting that censorship of information leads people to the silos.
Because when they got banned, many other communities saw improvements as well, not just those?
You don’t need to ban people from echo chambers if they don’t land there in the first place.
Your solution is reactive to a problem you caused. My solution is don’t create the problem in the first place.
What people don’t seem to grasp is that all speech is not equal, and that our brains react very predictably to certain arguments and content.
For example, your argument is not supported by the paper, which I have read. Because the paper shows behavior of the bad actors changed across the site, and became less hateful.
However the argument is complex, and goes against commonly held beliefs, such as sunlight is the best disinfectant etc.
More exposure results in more reinforcement of popular ideas, until something happens externally.
If you get to the point where you feel you need to censor, suppress, or outright ban voices to be heard, you have already lost the communication high ground and no matter how true or good your opinion/idea/position. It will lose in the court of public opinion…and frankly should…because you did not put the appropriate effort in to be persuasive.
As mods, we removed it, since it’s traumatic to simply see it, and it’s out of scope for our community. It’s not an ‘acceptable’ argument and it was removed. That was censorship.
Should pro beastiality arguments be allowed? Am I admitting the anti beastiality argument is not as persuasive as the beastiality argument, when I choose not to give them space in my communities?
What about when children are engaging with an experienced cult recruiter?
Users are spamming your community with random content, to bury headlines about a heinous rape case that makes the ruling party look bad. That’s fundamentally more speech and it is acting as an antidote for ‘bad’ speech.
How do you address roving bands of users who go around Reddit, and downvote all negative news about China and India on r/worldnews? The demographics and time they are online, are sufficient to shift the news.
What would your conscience have you do? Have you been in a position to make similar decisions? I have, so I can give these examples.
This.. isn’t an attempt by me to prove you wrong. These aren’t hard questions, but pretty common place ones. Its just that all mod choices are essentially censorship.
I believe you are defending a principle. If you choose not to moderate/ censor in those examples I would respect you for holding to your principle.
If you decide to censor, I would be fine with it too. Because you would still be making a decision based on a principle.
I’ve struggled with the idea of censorship since I first volunteered as a mod nearly 15 years ago.
I valued free speech as a core principle to enable humanity succeed and thrive.
I have, stopped seeing free speech as an end to itself. I had to reconcile the limited options with the results I saw in communities.
I hated it. Eventually I had to ask why we value free speech in the first place.
And we value it because we value a fair marketplace of ideas. I see the goal as being able to have fair debates and exchanges of ideas between normal people.
And they suffer failings and weaknesses possible in any market place. So the goal is to ensure the marketplace is effective at being fair.
Perhaps you would have a different idea, and I am happy to hear it. If only to see a different solution.
And if you agree with me to some degree and also think that having effective market places is a good idea, thats fine too.
We Sure as heck need the average person to decide what principles need to be held up, and at what costs.
I am of the opinion that net positive benefit of free expression outweighs negatives when it’s allowed and the negatives of censorship outweigh the positives of it when it’s practiced.
Also, generally I think civil people will simply reject spaces where uncivil discourse or “not appropriate” content to them is present. If I was a moderator I can see where that would create a challenge of balance towards censorship, because you would want your forum to thrive and not dry up from the garbage.
Ultimately it’s not a decision I would need to make, I don’t moderate anything, nor would I. Even here on HN, I only upvote. I am not a fan of how HN handles the downvoting (content dimming), but at least I can still see it if I choose to. I also use a feed reader for HN post delivery so, flagged/dead posts still make it to me and I can choose whether those posts are worth my time.
I think its pretty critical that people who believe in Free speech get their blasted hands dirty.
I cant be amongst the few people trying to communicate the stupid complexity of this issue! If you believe in free speech, then you really really have to see how the sausage is made, so that you can articlate the issues to people who believe the same thing!
I'm serious! To an extent I know its uncomfortable to be put on the spot, but please at least consider it.
Back to our main point:
>I am of the opinion that net positive benefit of free expression outweighs negatives when it’s allowed and the negatives of censorship outweigh the positives of it when it’s practiced.
I would like to think we both agree, but there is much that hinges on what you mean by positives.
I ended up reading everything from court cases to research papers to reconcile the options mods have, with the principles of free speech. I eventually had to lean heavily on the analogy of the market place of ideas from the Abrams dissent, to reconcile the two.
That means the good engendered by free speech, is primarily to enable the exchange of ideas - which in turn is what serves the ultimate goals of humanity. Free speech is a subordinate principle to the free and fair exchange of ideas.
To illustrate -I can and do have users flood the front page with content, to suppress content that is hurtful to their ideas and image. This is speech meeting more speech.
Any action I would take to stop this, is censorship and the prevention of the free expression of users. This happened over and over again, for all content critical of positions by the ruling party.
The frameworks I had to figure out helped me navigate this choice, but how would you approach it?
would you stop the users who are coordinating the multiple submissions of topics to prevent visibility of a post?
Or would you let that behavior continue?
Or would you find a way to signal boost the content that is being suppressed?
I am way too old, opinionated, and my ability to “suffer fools gladly is long in my past”
But, I do appreciate your point that it’s good to see the sausage being made. Then again, I am a person who knows exactly what is in scrapple and how it’s made, but when I am in Philly if I go to a diner it’s what I order and scarf up every morsel.
It’s the reconciliation and articulation of principles reasoning.
Look you may not do it.
But there is a contradiction at the heart of modern American society between principles and how conversations actually function online.
And this needs to be articulated by normal people for normal people. Otherwise it’s always going to be an imposed reality,
Or think of it this way. Unless people who care about free speech don’t reassure mods that the consequences of not modding are acceptable - that they will also be the conscience keepers when inevitably society turns around and says “oh you should have modded more”
And that has to be an informed choice.
And consider that you are crotchety and old but get annoyed by free speech discussions.
You aren’t crotchety and old and annoyed by discussions on ancient Roman mining methods.
There’s things we can be sort of arsed to do which are within range of our interests.
This is within range of yours.
I hope you understood why I would make this plea specifically to people arguing for their principles.
And single subreddits aren't really convincing about the reliability of fact checkers if their independence is in question. In the end they do rely on a truth-authority, which is problematic, especially for political content. And Meta reported that political demands increased.
That does not imply it reduced hateful speech overall, maybe the censorship just increased antipathy and drove that speech underground or to other platforms where it couldn't be seen.
I don't know if that's what happened and there's probably a lot more research to do here but I'm not convinced that deplatforming is actually a good outcome societally without more data.
"Off reddit" is just a win for reddit's PR, and that's why they did it, and no other reason and no other effects can be inferred.
And that claim is evidenced, It’s not conjecture. I dont have it handy on me, but we have mapped out the ways people are recruited, and things like fatpeoplehate, coontown, are the funnels for groups to find new recruits.
Here’s one - https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3447535.3462504
There’s several others on things from ISIS to hacktivists. The mechanism is the same, heck - “red pill” is the term for this, it’s actually quite known.
There’s a reason surgeons disinfect their hands with more than a skylight. Sunlight is a shitty disinfectant.
Edit: I did not want to imply that you meant it that way. But in a different context, or coming from the wrong person, it may sound like a dog whistle.
Fact checkers don't suppress information, they add context and information to posts others make and provide the exposure to many viewpoints that echo chambers often do not have.
People haven't stopped posting wrong and biased information with fact checkers, they just have the counterpoint to their bullshit displayed alongside their posts on the platform.
>Seems to me in my experience after decades of watching and participating in online discussion extremism really only became more problematic when fact checking and active efforts to suppress took hold. Whatever the good intentions may have been, the results were worse.
My decades of watching is exactly the opposite. Extremism is and was rampant long before fact checking, and fact checking really only served to push some of the most extreme content to the margins and to smaller platforms that don't have it. It concentrates it in some ways as many of these opinions fall apart quickly when exposed to truth and facts.
I think some moderation is important, but misrepresenting fact checkers (damn ironic actually) doesn't serve us. Of course fact check suppresses information! That's the whole point. Sometimes it results in straight up deletion, but even when not it results in lowered reach aka suppression of what the algorithm would normally allow to trend, etc.
Its not. The fact checkers in this case, and almost all cases we're discussing ADD information that challenges the posted data, not censor or restrict it from being posted.
Outside of illegal content that is. Content deemed illegal was removed by moderation teams, this was before fact checking, and will continue with community notes with little to no change.
What they really do is spin information.
Seems like the opposite. Traditionally we only had siloed forums which were often heavily moderated by volunteers who considered the forums their personal fiefdom, read every single thread and deleted stuff for being "off topic" never mind objectionable, plus the odd place like /b/ which revelled in being unmoderated. Then you ended up with more people on big platforms that were comparatively-speaking, pretty lightly and reactively moderated. Then you ended up with politicians weighing in against moderation with the suggestion even annotating content published on their platform was a free speech violation, let alone refraining from continuing to publish it.
The difference between antivax sentiment now and circa 2005 isn't that nobody ever determined that they weren't having that nonsense on their forums or closed threads with links to Snopes back then or that it's become difficult to find any references to it outside antivaxxer communities since then. Quite the opposite, the difference is that it's now coming from the mouth of a presumptive Health Secretary, amplified on allied news networks and now we have corporations running scared that labelling it a hoax might run the risk of offending the people in charge. Turns out sunlight is a catalyst for growth
The antivax movement literally grew exponentially when vaccine information started to be actively censored on the largest social media platforms and you think that is because there wasn’t enough censorship? People were literally driven into antivax information silos because a bunch of idiots decided that vaccine criticism should be forbidden in the public square
Wow.
People in the US didn't need to be "driven into antivax information silos", because those antivax information silos were their favourite talk show hosts and some of the country's most prominent politicians. Turns out that promotion of antivax sentiment as an important issue that must be discussed and constant attacks on public health officials doesn't "disinfect" people against the belief that there might be some truth to it...
Not sure where you live, but if those are the things that are important to your leaders and people, I wouldn’t want to live there or even visit. Sounds awful.
I note that the original topic was about Zuckerberg being so afraid of his corporation being censured by the incoming government that he's pledged to move his moderation team to a state which voted for them and refrain from publishing any "fact checking" notes in Facebook's name lest they conflict with the government and its supporters. That doesn't sound like a libertarian paradise either
Perhaps I misunderstood your intentions then.
If you believe that antivax debate was in the mainstream in the US and there wasn’t an active attempt to suppress just because some voices bled through the censorship, you are simply wrong. Zuckerberg even noted in this announcement that pressure from the Biden administration to censor speech was significant.
My consistent point here is that censorship drives extremism because it suppresses the debate where the debate wants to take place and pushes the conversation to those interested in the topic to siloed echo chambers. That definitely happened around vaccines in the US over the last 4-5 years. I know that happens for a fact and have personally tried to gently encourage people I know that felt the censorship frustrations and leapt to other platforms to still read all sides before making decsions.
Whatever Zuckerberg’s internal motivations are on this change of policy, I don’t care. Community notes seems to be a better way than suppression. Others may have a different opinion and thats ok. I encourage them to freely express it and would never support any one trying to shut that debate down.
It seems a little unlikely that people who decided to delete their Facebook account and seek out an echo chamber because they didn't like seeing FactCheck.org links slapped on vaccine function would have nevertheless listened very carefully to FactCheck.org or the public health officials their favourite politicos were slagging off if only they were able to d̶e̶b̶a̶t̶e̶ post misleading memes about public health on Facebook first. I mean, the anger at third party fact checkers is explicit rejection of the idea there's anything to debate.
Anyway, regardless of whether self-proclaimed fact checkers actually live up to their label, it's difficult to describe a corporation bending the knee to an incoming administration that's determined that corporations shouldn't link to them as a victory for free speech or enabling controversial viewpoints to be debated as opposed to merely promoted on internet platforms. Must be wonderful for Zuckerberg to be able to express himself freely without any threat of censure whatsoever on the day he announces that he'll be firing his his moderation team so he can relocate it to a state the incoming administration considers less susceptible to wrongthink
Funny how you aren’t critical of when Meta bent their knee to the existing administration by participating in the censorship requests. I guess that was ok…because you supported that action?
The mechanisms of online speech show us a few other issues.
For example certain ideas are far more “fit” for transmission and memory than others. Take a look at something as commonplace as “ghosts” or the idea of penguins. Ghosts are in all cultures, and they are essentially people with some additional properties. Penguins are birds that dont fly.
Brains absorb stories and ideas like flightless birds easily, because they build on pre existing concepts.
Talk about spacetime, or multiple dimensions and you aren’t going to have the same degree of uptake.
So when I put certain ideas into competition with each other, all else being equal - the more suited for human foibles, the more successful the idea.
People also dont make that much effort to seek out forbidden knowledge. Conservative main stream media has made many things forbidden - 1/3rd of America isnt aware that Obamacare and the ACA are the same thing.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant for certain breeds of germs. Many others get on just fine.
In my many decades of online existence, which includes being on multiple sides of moderation, extremism was on the rise from before, because we had created the arguments and structures that thrive on it.
Content moderation was a hap hazard effort created out of necessity to stall it.
Personally - I hope this works. Moderation sucks, and is straight up traumatic. If we can get better, more effective market places of ideas, then I am all for it.
I care about the effectiveness of the exchange of ideas. I see free speech as a principle that supports this. But the goal is always the functioning of the marketplace.
This is just overtly and flatly wrong. I reject your experience fully because over the past few decades the internet has become more open, not less. We openly debated people that believed vaccines caused autism and gave them microphones. Every single loud asshole and dipshit was given maximum volume on whatever radio show or podcast or social media platform they could want.
Specifically to vaccines, the antivax crowd was pretty minimal to a some nutjob soccer moms, holistic medicine fanatics, and RFKjr until you stopped having conversations with them, because you folks who want or believe that censorship is good silenced the debate and did not follow them to the forums where they went to spread their ideas to continue the debate.
I am absolutely convinced that the growth in the antivax movement is directly tied to the censorship effort (and the desire of the government to not be completely honest about the vaccines at the time).
In the past people were told they had Free Speech, but they didn't have Free access to Broadcast Media (newspapers/radio/tv/movie studios/satellites). It was always up to someone else with Access to Broadcast(one to all messaging) to prop up voices they thought was important.
Shannon's Information theory tells us Social Media as a system can't work cause - once you tell people their voice matters, give everyone in the room a mic, plugged into the same sound system, and allow everyone to speak, firstly you get massive noise, secondly as a reaction people will scream louder and louder and repeat their message more and more. Noise only compounds. The math says it can't work. The way people are debating about this is under an assumption that it can.
Yet here we are…the math seemed to work overall just fine minimizing the anti-vax movement until someone started externally futzing with the numbers to try and force a specific result to that math. When you do that apparently more of your components run off to form other equations and no longer participate in your equation then before you tried to manipulate the messaging.
You are not going to get everyone to agree with you…ever. But suppressing and censoring debate in the real world example of vaccine acceptance to try and achieve that result backfired spectacularly by galvanizing and growing that movement far far beyond what it was…or should have ever been.
You are rewriting history to fit your viewpoint which is wrong. The reality is that you are wrong. And those silos that people moved to were equally sinful of censoring voices and banning people not aligned with their beliefs. Even now Musk has no problem censoring and banning people off Twitter for being too mean to him.
Citing the simple fact that every western government ignored their own pandemic plans and did adlib bingo instead was enough to get you banned of Twitter, Facebook and reddit for close to two years.
The idea that there is some official governing body that has access to undisputable facts and they have the power to designate what you or I or anyone else can talk about is preposterous and, frankly, anyone on a site called Hacker News should be ashamed for supporting it.
Platforms were encouraged to create their own departments, and have. There is no "one" or "governing" body here, so this is more hyperbole in this already flagrantly absurd discussion.
>have the power to designate what you or I or anyone else can talk about is preposterous
No one is stopping you from posting bullshit, fact checkers simply post the corresponding challenge or facts that allow others to see the lack of truth in your statements.
The idea you can say whatever you want, lie all you want, and be unchallenged as some form of right is absurd. Claiming because you can be challenged is censoring you or preventing you from talking is also completely absurd.
>and, frankly, anyone on a site called Hacker News should be ashamed for supporting it.
Frankly anyone on this site should be able to separate hyberbolic strawmen from reality.
> Finally, in the midst of operating or considering up to three different avenues of “misinformation reporting” (switchboarding, EI-ISAC, and the “misinformation reporting portal”), by early 2020, CISA had dropped any pretense of focusing only on foreign disinformation, openly discussing how to best monitor and censor the speech of Americans.
That's a quote taken directly from the House Judiciary report on "disinformation", page number 31 - https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-j...
Here's another one
> The EIP repeatedly used its fourth category, in particular, to justify the censorship of conservative political speech: the “Delegitimization of Election Results,” defined as “[c]ontent that delegitimizes election results on the basis of false or misleading claims.”166 This arbitrary and inconsistent standard was determined by political actors masquerading as “experts” and academics. But even more troubling, the federal government was heavily intertwined with the universities in making these seemingly arbitrary determinations that skewed against one side of the political aisle.
So please, let's not pretend that the fact-checking organizations, the information streams they themselves depended upon and the pressure that was applied to all of the social networks was organic "encouragement" meant to challenge bullshit posted online - it was a censorship campaign by the United States government, plain and simple.
As for that laughably partisan report from many of the politicians aligned with the biggest sources of American disinformation claiming their lies as political speech, nice pile of garbage.
citation please
but it in no way can this case be translated into "wrong quite often"
[1] https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/jun/21/cheap-fake-vi...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/biden-trump-videos-age-cheap-fake...
[3] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/misinformation/biden-g7-video-j...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/01/07/five-times-f...
https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o95
https://reason.com/2021/12/29/facebook-masks-false-informati...
Even when they aren't wrong, they can be biased. See for example:
https://www.allsides.com/blog/media-bias-alert-politifact-fa...
Also, compare and contrast how they handled Sanders and Trump's presentations of substantially the same claim:
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/jul/13/bernie-san...
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/jun/20/donald-tru...
There's an entire site dedicated to pointing out more examples, aptly named https://www.politifactbias.com/ . They show their work in great detail.
It's trivial to introduce bias by simply being selective about who you hold to greater scrutiny (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demand...).
> In May, the bureau said the employment-population ratio for blacks ages 16 to 24 was 41.5 percent. Flipped over, that would mean that the unemployment ratio - although such a statistic is not published by the bureau - would be 58.5 percent. That’s pretty close to the 59 percent figure Trump cited, Sinclair noted.
> Mostly False
Crazy
> The unemployment rate reflects the number of jobless people who are actively seeking work as a percentage of the available workforce - defined as those who have jobs or trying to find one.
> The May unemployment rate for blacks ages 16 to 24 was 18.7 percent. The rate for whites in the same age group was 9.1 percent.
> The employment-population ratio is a far broader measure that counts all civilians in its equation - even those who don’t work and aren’t looking for a job. In the 16- to 24-year-old category, it includes high school and college students who are not employed or seeking jobs.
Given that there seems to only be two articles that are listed as falsely reported as misinformation (the Reason article and the BMJ article also mentioned in the Telegraph report from today), I have to assume that there actually aren't that many large errors on the part of the fact checkers. If there were more than two or the mistakes were much bigger, then the free speech advocates would never stop mentioning it.
There can definitely be bias when it comes to fact-checking, I wouldn't deny that. I also think that education and knowledge sharing can be greatly harmed by social media incentives to provide the most "engagement". Having an actual human in the process somewhere introduces some error but also cuts down on a lot of the dumb crap that would otherwise spread.
There certainly are more examples, and the free speech advocates I know do talk about the subject generally quite a bit.
One I just now remembered: Dr. John Campbell (https://www.youtube.com/@campbellteaching) has run into issues with this and has pointed out many other cases where established "knowledge" about Covid that we were previously not allowed to criticize, turned out to be objectively wrong. These disputes have resulted in many other people being censored despite later being shown to be correct, or at least reasonably justified by the best information available at the time.
This is someone who was proactively warning about the potential severity of Covid well before others, and advocating for proper hand-washing very early on (before more science emerged suggesting that skin contact is a relatively minor transmission vector). In the early days of the pandemic, he was complaining loudly about Fauci's initial mask rhetoric, arguing that the general population absolutely should wear masks and that production needed to step up. He's been doing serious medical content on Youtube for 17 years (sort by oldest to see) and first posted about Covid on Jan 26 2020 when awareness was still low and it was imagined that the virus had been contained to China and presented extensive detail on what little was known at the time (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPvpfC7NfR0).
But now he mostly makes videos against "the establishment", out of frustration with their unwillingness to consider new science over dogma.
I don't have time to search through an entire Youtube channel, but I will say this: there are many, many doctors out there with factually incorrect views about medical science. I personally have talked with doctors who think that the Covid vaccine killed hundreds of thousands of people (it didn't). I do not necessarily think this doctor is wrong, but from the perspective of a fact-checker who is given the current best knowledge of Covid it is hard to determine who is making genuine good-faith efforts to criticize vs who is simply repeating what they want to be true.
And for the record, you absolutely are allowed to criticize the establishment views. When it comes to important topics like medical science, however, you may just have additional context added saying that this is a contrarian view which (statistically) is more likely to be false than the consensus. Everybody likes to complain loudly about being censored, but the reality is that their views are just being disputed and information provided that they are going against the mainstream view.
This does not match the experience of several people I have followed through all of this, including some I know personally.
>Everybody likes to complain loudly about being censored, but the reality is that their views are just being disputed and information provided that they are going against the mainstream view.
Systems which deliberately restrict access to your work on the basis of its content are ipso facto engaging in censorship. It is not about "getting community noted". Free speech advocates are in favour of Facebook's change; it reflects more speech from more directions. The problem is when state-like authority comes in and assumes the right to judge truth for hoi polloi.
So, you do now admit there are examples of official" fact-checkers being wrong?
Zuck has probably done exactly that cost-benefit calculation — FB has put enormous resources into fact checking, and to most people it hasn't moved the needle on public perception in the slightest. Facebook is still seen through the lens of Cambridge Analytica, and as a hive of disinformation. The resources devoted to these efforts haven’t delivered a meaningful return, either in public trust or regulatory goodwill.
I personally think aggressive fact checking authorities impedes this process, because people don't change their minds when faced with authoritarian power against which they are powerless, and because they are powerless here, they get angry and they disengage. This ends up which reinforcing their beliefs and now you've lost all chance of change.
One such instantiation of this: https://chomsky.info/consent01/
Now, consider that in most "free speech" societies, those with money can repeat things many orders of magnitude more than others. Over time, this results in influence. Thus, while many countries have "free speech," I'd say they don't have "fair speech." The two concepts complement each other, but one is not the opposite of the other.
If these "facts" are so obviously facts, we wouldn't need a team of researchers to establish the fact whether they are facts.
The fact that these "facts" need to be "fact-checked" means they are so open to interpretation and depend on context, that we came to the conclusion that this "fact-checking" concept in fact does not really work.
You can still "fact-check" for yourself; do your own research, make up your own mind yourself. Then you will become more of an independent thinker, be less influenced by authoritarian figures.
Snopes was careful to show degrees of freedom with this fact check, but most social media fact checkers will not be so careful. Social media fact checkers will have a tendency to censor in the direction of the currently-in-power political party, because that party is able to set regulatory policy on social media companies. So the only thing which will prevent censorship from blowing with the political winds is to not have centralized censorship.
Community notes (as implemented at Twitter) require agreement of multiple people who are not in agreement on issues to agree on Notes. I am cautiously optimistic that it may be possible to correct wrong speech with more speech in a nonpartisan manner.
Edit for the reply below: yes that very obviously includes being a member of a group that attacks civilians for political purposes.
There being debate over whether other groups that do other things should be called terrorists is a separate matter.
Given all armoured car robbers would engage in such activities (unregistered firearms, explosives, fake papers, etc),
is it your position that all armoured car robbers are terrorists?
Seems to me that if some authority is determining what are facts and what are not for me, that I am easily shapable and foolable.
Community Notes at least don't claim they have the facts. So that leaves you more with a responsibility to make up your own mind.
I know this isn't for everyone, there are still a lot of people that like to have leaders tell them how they should live. But nowadays there are more and more people that like to have more independence. You will have to live with that too.
Do you really think the company which has openly admitted it wants to create AI profiles that post as if they're humans and not tell you they are AI care at all about facts or what you think or believe?
But then is community notes right-wing?
They could also have kept the fact checking system, but just alter the facts to please their agenda.
But they didn't do that, they are replacing it with Community Notes, which isn't some small group supposedly figuring out the facts for everyone, but a community build information system.
To me that seems a lot more fair and less prone to corruption. So regardless of the real motivation behind the move, I think it will have positive effects for society. At least a step in the right direction. Still a long way to go.
Yes you understand. Meta, due to its problems with moderation over the years, both legal and political, has largely ceded direction of that to the government. Previous government wanted things like fact-checking, an oversight board for moderation decisions, and censorship of certain issues. Current government doesn't want any moderation at all, like X, the social media owned by Trump's biggest ally, which he personally loved so much that he created his own Twitter clone when he was booted off of Twitter. So in that environment, the easiest, simplest thing is to treat Meta platforms like X. That's all there is to it. It signals commitment to the new administration, it heaves political and legal pressure off Meta, etc. much more than your suggestion, that they keep fact-checking but bias it towards the right (which would need to be explained to the administration, etc.) Just saying "We're like X now" gets the point across most cleanly, and it's cheaper
I guess we know the real reason now.
The result will be even more poisonous to users.
Just like cigarette companies using chemicals in the papers so that they burn slower. Does it improve the product? Maybe, along one dimension.
It's a bit more than giving up. They are also going to push more political contents on feed.
As someone who worked on harmful content, specifically suicide and self injury, this is just nuts - they were raked over the coals in both the UK by an inquest into the suicide of a teenage user who rabbit holed on this harmful content, and also with the parents of teenagers who took their lives, who Zuck turned around and apologised to as his latest senate hearing.
There is research that shows exposure to suicide and self injury content increases suicidal ideation.
I'm hoping that there is some nuance that has been missed from the article, but if not, this would seem like a slam dunk for both the UK and EU regulators to take them to task on.
"For example, in December 2024, we removed millions of pieces of content every day. While these actions account for less than 1% of content produced every day, we think one to two out of every 10 of these actions may have been mistakes (i.e., the content may not have actually violated our policies)."
That is first order data and it's interesting. However, before making policy decisions, I would want the second order data: what is the human cost of those mistakes, and what percentage of policy-violating content will not be removed as a result of these changes? Finally, what's the cost of not removing that percentage?
For that matter, by talking about the percentage of active mistakes without saying how many policy violations are currently missed, you're framing the debate in a certain direction.
The human cost of a piece of content being taken down depends on the piece of content, and the reason behind posting it.
In the case of someone posting about recovery from self injury and including a photo of their healed self-harm scars, having that taken down by mistake would be more harmful than someone who posted a cartoon depiction of suicide for the lolz.
My personal belief, for whatever that's worth, is that communication and speech are one of the most powerful tools any of us have. Talking can change minds, move societies, arouse emotions, and in general makes a difference. This is true no matter the format (text, voice, etc.).
That means that restricting communication should not be a casual activity. Free speech is a good ideal for a reason.
It also means that, if you believe in the primacy of free speech, you are obligated to consider the implications of that belief. Speech has effects. In my adult life, since 1990, we have seen a major change in the ease of communication. IMHO, society hasn't been able to fully adjust to that change -- or rather, that huge suite of changes. I sincerely do not know what a healthy society using the Internet looks like; I don't think we're in one now. All of these arguments (on all sides, mine included) are hampered by our lack of perspective.
Meta seem to be making the case for those who would see social media banned for people under the age of 18. To enforce that properly would require needing ID, and that then opens a whole can of civil liberty issues.
Yeah, making that my ideology is a hill I'm willing to die on, sorry.
If you or I happen to agree with the people who wield that power, rest assured it's only a temporary coincidence.
There's more people online than any of us has heartbeats, and the n^2 number of user-user pairs generates detrimental effects that track any positive effects.
Much better, I think, for each of us to have a small and private personal social network, not to hand everything over to a foreign* company trying to project its social norms worldwide.
* Facebook claims about 3 billion active users, so for 89%-93.5%** of its users, the fact that Facebook is American makes them foreign.
** https://thesocialshepherd.com/blog/facebook-statistics#:~:te....
I think this the wrong lens. The correct lens is: if they don't voluntarily make this change, will they be forced to?
The incoming administration seems committed to banning "censorship", so I believe making a cost/benefit analysis is something of a false choice.
FWIW I would not be surprised if the bluster about championing free speech abroad gets quietly forgotten; we’ll see. They explicitly state they will comply with laws, which in EU likely means continuing to moderate (more not less over time, given the regulatory trends).
May have been a mistake? Reminds me of RTO and the subjective feeling of being more productive in the office. They have the feeling they may have made mistakes and base their new policy on that feeling.
I don't think it's malicious wordsmithing where they are mis-representing the internal data, though I don't have the data to confirm.
Yes. However, I find this obsession with harm-based value judgment to the exclusion of all other considerations ethically problematic, to put it mildly. Ethics does not reduce solely to considerations of harm.
I also think normalizing an infrastructure whose sole purpose is to suppress speech is ethically problematic. Rights are rarely expanded once taken.
You're right that people post abhorrent stuff on such sites, but I prefer approaches like filters over suppression. I also think that if reducing indirect harm is important to certain people (like reducing suicide), then there are known effective ways that don't require coercive power, like the public campaigns against smoking and MADD which have both had significant impacts.
I'm sorry, but maximalist free speech positions fail in the face of reality.
The content I'm talking about is graphic photos of suicide and self injury, fresh, blood soaked cuts, bodies hanging, graphic depictions of eating disorder (that goes beyond "thinspo", which is more borderline, and so downranked and not recommended rather than removed).
It's the latter that we believed (based on the advice of experts who we relied on for guidance) is harmful when consumed in large quantities.
Not to mention, people just straight up have a right to talk about these things. It is not moral to hold one person responsible for an unintended and not reasonably foreseeable reaction to the discussion. And joking about these topics is legitimately therapeutic for some.
I'm talking about graphic images of self harm, suicide, eating disorders. And at some point you have to weigh the maximalist interpretation of free speech "you have to host whatever I want, as long as it's not illegal" with "promoting this stuff causes active harm, no".
The burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that it causes such harm.
I don't generally think people should be held responsible for the unintended reaction to their speech of a small minority of the audience.
Also as per the inquest into the death of Molly Russel found based on the preponderance of evidence, exposure to this kind of graphic content was largely the causative agent in her suicide.
What would the bar you require be, is there a bar?
I believe it's only going to get worse going forward as they all adopt these policies.
I don't think this is exhaustive, and I think SSI (suicide/self-injury) + ED/etc. stuff is considered high-severity.
They are admitting that there has been a global push against free speech on these platforms.
>There is research that shows exposure to suicide and self injury content increases suicidal ideation.
I mean do you really need research to show this link? Of course it does.
We are okay with slapping an “R” rating on movies and allowing parents to be the ones who decide what content their kids can see. Why can’t we decide that parents also need to be the ones to stop their kids from consuming bad content on social media?
But at this point, I'm siding with the "no social media for adolescents" people more and more.
Are there reproducible studies showing that? What is the effect size?
(These objections go both ways!)
To see why, consider that the space of possible actions someone could not take is infinite. If there's an expectation that someone do a ton of research and work to argue for why they are not doing something, then the amount of work they would have to do is thus also infinite. This way lies madness, which is why in reality the default outcome that results from not acting is always taken as a given.
Sometimes this reality is obfuscated by activists. They find some group of people who are just doing their thing, and demand that those people do some extra things (usually some costly things). The arguments they make for this are weak, but when the targeted people say they'd rather not do those extra things the activists demand their targets argue for not doing what the activists want to whatever level of effort (or greater) they themselves made. This can be an effective bullying tactic but isn't legitimate: it's on those who want action to argue the case for it, not those who don't to argue against.
Digital platforms like social networks default to uncensored. If the operators do nothing, then by the way they are built content is allowed. It takes additional work to categorize posts and block certain kinds of content. So the default outcome is free speech. If someone wants someone else to do work to suppress that, then it's on them to prove that it's truly necessary and that the benefits outweigh the harms. But that doesn't cut both ways; it's not required for other people to take on the argument for free speech. That's the default outcome so it just wins by default if the other side can't prove their case to a sufficiently convincing level.
> Duty (criminal law), is an obligation to act under which failure to act (omission), results in criminal liability
You failed to act, which is why a law is sometimes required to compel action. However, saving a drowning person isn't something that triggers such a legal obligation in the USA unless you're the person who actually pushed someone into the water in the first place.
I don't get why this thread is getting so long or so abstract. The principles here are straightforward. Facebook don't actually have to care about what arguments activists make, but even if they did, it's on activists to win the argument for what they want. You don't get to automatically have your own way unless someone sits down and does a randomized controlled trial showing that you're wrong - and this is independent of what domain we're talking about.
In this particular case, changing the rules (and making the blog post explaining those changes!) is pretty clearly an action.
Activists use abstraction to attempt to overcome settled understandings and norms. Of course there is a distinction between action and inaction—as you recognize it’s even a legally significant distinction. The very existence of that norm is the reason anyone would say “inaction is really a form of action.”
It’s like how the notion of “antiracism” is an effort to reframe race neutrality as a form of racism.
But even if you want to play word games, choices and actions aren't the same thing. Choosing to act is quantitively different from choosing not to act because it involves a different level of effort. It's wrong to assume that they are morally equal.
Say for example I'm passing by a beggar on my way to work. Before deciding whether I give them money, I can first decide to ignore or not ignore them. From a basic human perspective I want to say hello and be friendly (and I choose to do this), but it does make me feel worse if I decline than if I had ignored them, exactly because it makes it feel like a choice. But if I ignore them, can I call passing by without giving them money less of a choice? I only moved my choice up one level in the tree of all possible decisions I can make.
Or, moving it to the example of the drowning man: imagine you're holding out your arm to see how long you can do it, and see the life ring flying towards you. If you choose not to act, it'll hang on your arm, and the person will drown. Is it nevertheless inaction on your part?
The way I like to think about it is that once a choice has risen to the level of conscious awareness, it is an illusion that a person can just decline to choose.
Though personally preponderance of evidence seems to be a shitty standard too because I might be listening to two awful theories and be forced to conclude one is the winner. Theories should rise above a minimum threshold to even consider sniffing at before we consider one as superior over the other.
Regarding my previous comment, my intent was to point out the GP comment’s position (because the parent’s comment seemed to be beside the point), not necessarily to endorse it.
Why? And how, in principle? Why is the burden of evidence not on others - and equally, how, in principle, could they furnish evidence?
The entire point is that freedom of speech is a core moral value; they have weighed the potential harms and come out against censorship, because they consider censorship to be inherently harmful. There is no objective way to compare different kinds of harm to each other; each individual's moral values are what they are.
When a free speech absolutist argues that freedom of speech is more important than whatever goal the censor has in mind, that argument is of fundamentally the same kind as the censor's argument, just with opposite polarity. When the censor says that "hate speech" needs to be prohibited, that, too, is based on a relative weighing of values and purported rights (i.e. freedom from hearing it).
Consider hate speech. There is a clear short-term benefit of moderation: reducing the harms to marginalised people from being exposed to threats to their person, identity, and way of life. In the face of this benefit, the absolute free speech advocate must provide a counter-argument for why free speech overrides that harm-reduction.
Why are you not the one who must provide an argument for why this "reduction of harm" overrides the benefit of freedom of speech?
Further, a very large fraction of what I have seen classified as "hate speech" simply cannot reasonably be argued to constitute any kind of threat.
Finally: what do you mean by "identity"? When I have seen this term used by opponents of "hate speech", it generally seems to refer to something like a person's self-image. I cannot understand how this can in principle be "threatened", nor how it could constitute harm to learn that someone else sees you differently from how you see yourself.
There are some strong arguments for harm reduction being a more fundamental human value than freedom of speech.
Firstly, the modern conception of freedom of speech is often seen to be grounded in libertarian thought, in particular the works of Bentham and Mill. Yet Mill himself explicitly stated that these freedoms should be limited in the case where they cause harm to others. Thus freedom of speech has historically been seen as lower priority to harm reduction.
Secondly, there are in fact two competing interpretations for "freedom of speech": on one hand the equality of access to a public forum, on the other hand the ability to say whatever you want. I say "competing" because in a public forum without moderation, the tendency is for loud and offensive voices to drown out the discourse, effectively leaving marginalised people without a voice. This is especially potent in modern social media. To me it is similar to antitrust regulations in the market: we put these in place for the benefit of competition, as this typically improve social impacts. However in doing so we are limiting the freedom of corporations with large market share to collude, fix prices etc... .
Thirdly, history suggests that it's problematic for ideological values to trump the basic tenet of harm reduction. We see this for example in the Catholic church's refusal to support abortion rights or the use of condoms to prevent AIDs. If we don't ultimately assess the long-term social impact of a "core moral value" in terms of human harm and flourishing, then we risk entrapping ourselves in an ideological morass.
> what do you mean by "identity"? ... I cannot understand how this can in principle be "threatened"
As an example, homophobic comments are an attack on the sexual identity of homosexual people. It sends a message that they are unacceptable to society due to their inherent preferences, and that they should not express themselves as they naturally wish to. This causes psychological suffering.
This only makes sense if you use a recent definition of "harm" created by censorship advocates that's divorced from the traditional meaning. In criminal law, harm traditionally (and still does in America) mean actually physically harming someone's body or making threats to do so. Censorship advocates are the ones making the claim that mere words should also constitute harm, so the onus is on them to justify why they want to change the meaning of the word like that.
Fraud can be criminal, without bodily harm or threats.
Verbal child abuse can be criminal, without bodily harm or threats.
There are lots of criminal harms not covered by your claimed definition in the American legal system.
Community notes has worked well on Twitter/X, but looking at the design it seems super easy to game.
Many notes get marked 'helpful' (ie. shown) with just 6 or so ratings.
That means, if you are a bad actor, you can get a note shown (or hidden!) with just 6 sockpuppet accounts. You just need to get those accounts on opposite sides of the political spectrum (ie. 3 act like a democrat, 3 act like a republican), and then when the note that you care about comes up, you have all 6 agree to note/unnote it.
> It is likely to please President-elect Trump and his allies.
that's what journalism is about; otherwise we don't need newspapers, all we need are company PR releases
Companies like Facebook pretending they are not publishers, people posting content believing they should be able to publish anything without consequences, and professional weather makers ( PR/comms/lobbyists etc ) using this confusion to get around traditional controls on their dark arts.
In the end I think the only solution that works in the long term is to have everything tied back to an individual - and that person is responsible for what they do.
You know - like in the 'real' world.
That does mean giving up the charade of pseudo-anonymity - but if we don't want online discourse dominated by bots controlled by people with no-conscience - then it's probably the grown up thing to do.
I don't buy favourite argument of the US gun lobby - that only criminals ( yes by definition ) would have guns/anonymous accounts if you banned it therefore we shouldn't do anything.
You could apply that to anything that's illegal - by definition only criminals are outside the law - so why any laws at all?
I'd also be concerned about repressive governments - but I think you could distinguish between mass/public communication and private 1:1 communication. Just like in the real world there is a whole world of difference between saying something in private and publishing something in a national newspaper.
Filing a civil suit can be pretty expensive if you want a lawyer -- which, yes, you do effectively need one.
This is effectively a tax on the victims of harassment.
Obviously I don't know which legal system you are talking about - but it does raise the issue of cross-boundary jurisdiction which I think is more of a potential challenge.
On top of that, even when publishers usually curate content, there is no obligation to do so. It's just something that has been done, because publishing used to be expensive.
Now, when sharing data online is cheaper and cheaper, this limiting factor is fading away.
--
At the same time, we have just 16 hours of attention per day. So you have to decide whether you want to invest your time in more curated publishing (I read a lot of books, often old books which stood the test of time), or if you want to go to the public square where practically anyone can shout as he sees fit. I do that too, but I try to moderate both my time using social media and what I see there. And I am proud I haven't used TikTok, I stopped using Facebook, Instagram, I don't watch any Reels, Shorts, etc.
So publishers still are not lost, but what they are selling is not curation because of technological limitations, but because of limits of how much we can read and see in the day.
--
At the same time, publishers are biased. They publish what they see as high quality. They publish what they consider worthy. They publish things they would want to read. And they have publication checklists that prohibit publishing certain things even if they are true.
Public squares don't have such an attribute.
There are things to be published and heard, even when mainstream people would disagree. There are things that should be public, even when it's against a law in certain countries.
And online anonymity mixed with public square enables people to tell about atrocities that happen, or about corruption, government inefficiencies, about people breaking human rights and so on.
--
If you end anonymity and public squares, you end a channel for democratic feedback. Because publishers don't play this role any more. They are biased, people realize it and are fed of it.
I'd believe that if they didn't promote or suppress content - in my view as soon as you get into that game you become part of the publishing process.
> On top of that, even when publishers usually curate content, there is no obligation to do so. It's just something that has been done, because publishing used to be expensive.
Eh? Publishers take care of what they publish because they are responsible for it in law - if they publish a lie about somebody ( even if it's a quote from somebody else - ie somebody elses 'content' ) - they are on the hook for that.
In a similar way, if I defame you and then a newspaper/facebook promotes that around the world, most of the damage actually comes from the promotion of the original defamation - the publishing/amplification.
> If you end anonymity and public squares, you end a channel for democratic feedback.
You are already assuming we live in a society where people are too afraid to say what they think in public . And I would also argue if you stand on a soap box in a public square then you are not anonymous - you are public. You are confusing a public square with people whispering behind masks.
Optimising simply for demand without any principles leads to things like street fentanyl, and junk food and mass shootings ( there is a demand to own assault rifles ).
Online right now there is a heady mix of large monetary incentives and the ability to rapidly optimise objective functions.
Let's not pretend Meta's recent change isn't simply about Zuckerberg maintaining his power.
Good luck with that considering:
>"Europe has an ever increasing number of laws,institutionalizing censorship and making difficult to build something innovative."
• Lack of a DMCA equivalent. DMCA lays out a lightweight process for platforms to process copyright disputes which if they follow it will avoid legal liability, which is needed on any platform that hosts user generated content. The EU Copyright acts require platforms themselves to enforce copyright and prevent users violating it. This is a gigantic technical implementation problem all by itself. Also, the US has the legal concept of fair use but that's not a concept in much of Europe, so people posting parodies etc thinking it's OK can still create liability problems.
• No equivalent of Section 230. Many new laws that specifically criminalize the hosting of illegal speech, and which don't give any credit for effort. As what's illegal is vague and political in nature you can't make automated systems or even human-driven systems that reliably handle it, so the legal risks are large even with a good faith effort to comply.
• GDPR, "right to be forgotten" and NetzDG style laws have large fixed costs associated with compliance which established companies can absorb but startups can't. For instance it's common for EU lawmakers to demand 24 hour turnaround times, which you can't reliably comply with if you're a one man startup.
• Algorithmic transparency laws, which mean you can't obtain any competitive advantage by better ranking (being good at this is how TikTok got so big), and which can threaten your ability to clear spam or use ML.
• Laws around targeted advertising mean you can't generate revenue comparable to what the US based firms can do, so you can't be competitive and your users will be annoyed by low quality barrel scraping ads for casinos after they click "No" on a consent screen without reading it.
There's probably more. For example, running a commercial search engine or training AI models on the internet is illegal in the UK, because UK copyright law only allows "data mining" for research purposes. There's no way to argue it's fair use like they do in the US. Just one of many such problems off the top of my head.
Good. It's heavily misused here.
> No equivalent of Section 230.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Services_Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Commerce_Directive_...
> Laws around targeted advertising mean you can't generate revenue comparable to what the US based firms can do...
Good! Agriculture is cheaper with slavery, but that isn't a great argument for permitting it.
I don't know how to say this inoffensively, but a lot of US people seem to mistake the slightly higher chance (from 1/inf to 2/inf) of becoming a billionaire with a higher quality of life, and the ability of the select few to hoard capital for a rich society.
Z-E-R-O.
I don’t even think companies have their own mailservers anymore, its mostly gsuite and microsoft office 365; people aren’t even hosting business critical applications in Europe unless compliance forces them- let alone using European made tools to do it.
There's a lot more to life than a lot of things, I'm not really trying to discuss personal fulfilment, moreso mentioning that there's no reality where we can get by with European technology right now, and if the US decided to sanction a european country that country would suffer a pretty significant (trillion-euro most likely) shock to productivity, as not only would they need to find new tools and retrain, but they would also lose all their mail and documents.
If the USA sanctioned europe (lol) we'd be completely fine, don't worry.
The whole threat here is you can't regulate Meta away, because they'll use the US Government to bully you into not doing so. I'd imagine if the EU tried to publicly prop up a platform not making any profit, they'd do the same.
But yes, the only way is for this to happen. But either way, this was the scariest statement of the announcement(s).
But... is it just luck or is it this Nanny-state issue that makes it very hard to think of a single major Internet destination or tech company that was born in Europe?
The through-line is US/China with the vast majority. Eu I can only think of Spotify for non-retail.
Being in Europe I find no shortage of local versions of companies for all kinds of providers but only the large social media or platforms are outside of EU mostly in US as a rule.
The issue seems to be that saturation is real and the moat gets larger with time when companies just gobble up all their competition. How could Here maps compete with the free google maps + apples large pockets, etc. TomTom used to be much larger and European, seems to still survive but nowhere near to the size it could've otherwise.
When I visit every few years, it amazes me how quickly Europe is “Americanizing”. More fast food and less traditional food. Ripping up vineyards that have been there for centuries. Fewer protections for your farmers. More people walking around staring at their phones and less people talking to each other in cafes. Seems like almost everyone dresses like Americans and can speak English now. And it’s hard to tell the difference between the coffee shops in Spain and those in San Francisco. How long until you start building suburbs and driving everywhere?
Don’t get me wrong—I love the U.S., and I love living here. But its culture is not for Europe.
For example: People weren’t walking around staring at their cellphones in Europe in the 90s because they were distinctly European. It was because we didn’t have smartphones anywhere. The smartphone changes happened in lockstep across the globe.
Likewise, many of your other points are purely people’s personal preferences. I think your criticisms are largely nostalgia for the 90s and your time spent living abroad, not an indictment of “Americanizing” Europe.
America is the most successful country on this earth and we bankroll most of the rest of the world but somehow we’re always the bad guys.
As an American I’d be very happy if my tax dollars stopped getting spent on Europe.
I'm going to need a source (and some definitions) for that.
And you wonder why you're viewed as baddies.
I'd be happy if your tax dollars stopped going outside of US, too.
According to what metrics? life expectancy? crime rate? wealth per inhabitant? education? work life balance? health care? happiness? incarceration rate? human rights? corruption? freedom of press?
American tax dollars aren't spent in Europe or elsewhere in the world for some altruistic reason. The US want to maintain their hegemony and prevent other powers from emerging. They certainly don't care about Europeans or Taiwanese or whoever.
> I challenge you to find another economic system that has worked in history, because it sure isn’t communism if that’s what you’re referencing.
Not that I'm a big fan of communism or China, but communist China has been doing pretty well, and is getting more innovative than the US
China is the most brutally capitalist society in the world, with a dictator sitting on top managing it at the margins and ensuring media will never be free and threaten the communist party.
We're entering a dangerous period, and it's not for anything as noble as the virtues of absolute free speech
* Push to ban Tiktok
* Drop antitrust lawsuits against Meta
* Meta will relax "conservative" posts on its platforms
* Zuckerberg will donate to Trump's cause
So far, Zuckerberg has already donated to Trump's cause. Now he has relaxed "conservative" posts on its platforms directly or indirectly.
When Trump comes into power, he'll likely ask the FTC to drop its antitrust lawsuit against Meta under the disguise of being pro-business.
My last speculation is push to ban Tiktok. I'm sure it was discussed. Trump has donors who wanted him to reverse the Tiktok ban. Zuckerberg clearly wants Tiktok banned. Trump will have to decide who to appease when he comes into office.
I would be really interested in how someone could spin advocating for less moderation and at the same time asking to ban the competitors' social media platforms.
Ok. But then, if the country of the platform's owner is the issue, why only ban TikTok? And leave other Chinese social media platforms unaffected?
In other words, how is e.g. RedNote safer from foreign influence than TikTok?
So they have also given a board seat to a friend of Trump.
But yeah, I think you're right that there is clearly some combination of dealmaking and bending the knee going on.
Zuckerberg says Facebook is going to be more "like X" and "work with Trump". It has changed its content policy to allow discussions that should horrify anyone.
"In a notable shift, the company now says it allows “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird.’”
"In other words, Meta now appears to permit users to accuse transgender or gay people of being mentally ill because of their gender expression and sexual orientation. The company did not respond to requests for clarification on the policy."
But Zuck himself says that they are also dialing their algorithms back in favor of allowing more bad content. It's not right.
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-immigration-gender-policies...
Fwiw, not everyone on 'hacker' news is like this, and many of the thoughtful ones are smarter than I am and skipped this post entirely. But its so disheartening the rot in the Silicon Valley ideology that's everywhere here.
What exactly is SV ideology?
Chain for reference:
>>It is disheartening to see people on a forum like HN who I assumed have values similar to mine fall right in line with conservative propaganda
>Yeah, its pathetic. Fwiw, not everyone on 'hacker' news is like this, and many of the thoughtful ones are smarter than I am and skipped this post entirely. But its so disheartening the rot in the Silicon Valley ideology that's everywhere here.
I took GP to be saying that they're sad that other HNers are falling for conservative propaganda, and I agree - specifically the sort that appeals to the already rich and incurious.
I don't share that with some of the people here, but we do all find tech interesting. For a while it did really hurt me when I'd see a Supreme Court post talking about how great it is that the EPA is gutted and feel kinda lost, like these should be my people, what am I doing here, sorta thing. Mostly over that now, just have less attachment.
Don't see TESCREAL & conservative thought being opposed. Its silly how someone as Turbo-atheist as Elon is now talking about how schools should teach Christianity
If Musk’s ideological experiment with Twitter had proven the idea that you can have a pleasant to use website without any moderation then Mark’s philosophical 180 would at least make sense, but this doesn’t, at all. What’s to gain? Musk has done everyone a favor by demonstrating that moderation driven by a fear of government intervention was actually a good thing.
Hell yes he does, Twitter helped Musk get a seat at the table with Trump and the ability to influence US policy decisions at an unprecedented level. Zuck craves power and sees sucking up to the incoming administration as an easy path to get more of it.
Is this the same Elon Musk that recently called a British member of parliament a "rape genocide apologist"?
Elon Musk has been radicalised and now he is using his platform to radicalise others.
Additionally, if you haven’t read the article you’re commenting on, community notes is an excellent replacement so-called fact checking services which are notoriously biased.
Across the industry, tech companies are rejecting this framework. Only epistemic and moral humility can lead to good outcomes for society. It's going to take a long time to rebuild public trust.
Isaac Asimov - Hitting the high notes even after 30 years from the pulpit.
Mark doing what Mark needs to do to keep that Meta stock elevated.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/22/business/facebook-content-mod...
Also: perhaps the occasional soul-destroying post would help people break their social media addictions.
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Molly-Ru...
I am not trying to trivialize this persons death. If it were up to me, I'd completely get rid of social media in an instant.
As of 2022, Meta employed 15000 content moderators. Expected salary of 70K to 150K per person (salary + benefits, plus consulting premiums) so lets assume 110K.
This implies $1.65B in workforce costs for content moderation.
Meta is more likely to make their earnings....
Though I wonder if they will redeploy these people to be labelers for LLMs?
In reading the comments, it's clear to me that "community-based fact-checking" will not work since not even HN users can get basic facts straight (not due to any lack of intelligence, probably just didn't read the article or understand the context), how do we expect the FB userbase to do so?
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-warns-mark-zuckerberg-c...
Trump himself confirmed this today:
https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lf66oltlvs2l
I cannot believe anyone would actually be okay with this situation.
Correlation is not causation, and coincidence definitely isn't.
Trump is politically incentivized to take credit for this. But he cannot in principle "confirm" anything about Zuckerberg's mental state.
Repubs have all 3 branches for at least a few years now, and there will be enormous changes in tax policy in legislation that will be passed this year, due to many popular provisions of the 2017 TCJA expiring at the end of 2025. And Dems will basically be left out of the conversation as their votes are not needed.
- the filibuster still exists
- almost certain one or both houses flip in 2 years
There are also quite a few Democrats in swing districts who I bet will vote for tax cuts. They are basically only in office instead of their Republican opponents because their opponent opposed women’s rights.
So you're right on the practical effect, but the details are slightly off.
They got here, by destroying our ability to fight disinformation. They beat climate science in the 90s, by giving air time to cranks, and then senators used those specious arguments to stall climate bills. When scientists came onto Fox to try and reach the audience, they were thrown to the lions for the entertain of the audience. Derided and mocked with gotchas and rhetorical arguments designed to win the perception game.
This is a continuation of that game. Because it works. The idea that free speech is at risk because of moderation is amazing, because it is being revived after being tested by everyone online. We started the internet without moderation, we believed that the best ideas win.
We have moderation everywhere now, because we know that this fact is empirically untrue. The most viral ideas propagate. The ones most fit to survive their medium - humans.
I agree that they won, because they played the game to win. But we should not miss how they worked hard, to set up the conditions for this type of a win.
But that was shown to be completely wrong, even after women lost rights in quite a few states. The message was clear that Republicans are here to stay, and businesses better learn how to do business with them, or else face the consequences.
In the legislature, it is almost impossible for Dems to regain control before 2028, as the majority of states electing senators in 2026 are very unlikely to elect a Dem. And I am not optimistic on Dems' chances in the 2026 House:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_divisions_of_United_Stat...
As far as I can tell, Repubs have the executive for at least 4 years, the judiciary for who knows how long, the Senate for at least 4 years, and the House for at least 2, if not 4 years.
Knowing this, it makes sense why businesses would want to cozy up to Republicans.
I have my serious gripes with how Instagram currently manages reports. I've recently reported a clear racist post promoted to me on Instagram that did not get removed or acted on. They seem to go the route of "block it so you cannot see the user anymore but let everyone else see it".
So as far as I can tell the only thing that Instagram actually moderate at the moment are gore and nudity, regardless of context. So barely dressed sexualised thirst traps are ok, black and white blurred nipples are not, everything else is a-ok.
The Metaverse and the WFH bets made by Zuck were controversial but at least it was something rooted in tech and population habits trends and vision without any political poop attached to it.
This one is pure political poop to please Orange Man.
Also I believe that fact-checking needed to be slowly sunsetted after the COVID emergency was over, but the timing of this announcement and the binary nature of the decision means that it was done with intention to get in the graces of the new administration.
If these techs executives become the American equivalent of Russian Oligarchs I hope that States would go after their wealth based on their residence and even ADS-B private jet trackers if they were to move to say Wyoming but partying every weekend in Los Angeles/NYC etc.
During COVID, there were people spreading lies about the vaccine, which many people believed, and many people died as a result of believing those lies. Even Louis Brandeis, one of the fiercest advocates of free speech, made an exception for emergency situations[0], which is arguably what a pandemic is.
But again, lies about a vaccine do not constitute reasonable public discourse, it is more akin to screaming fire in a crowded theater. If you have counter examples of regular public discourse that has been censored by a social media company, please share it.
* I realize "ever" is a stretch, I'm sure there are instances, but my understanding is that they are the exception rather than the rule.
[0] "If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence. Only an emergency can justify repression. Such must be the rule if authority is to be reconciled with freedom." - Louis Brandeis, Whitney vs. California
I would point towards immigration as a topic where meaningful discourse is missing from social media. On most social media sites, the discussion will be dominated by people who think immigration should rarely if ever be restricted; Twitter has been colonized by some people who take the opposite extreme, often for overtly racist reasons, although this is tempered a bit by Elon Musk's personal support of high skill visas.
The "normie" immigration restrictionist position, that immigrants are great but only so long as they enter the country lawfully, is something I very often see expressed in news interviews or supported by older relatives and rarely if ever see expressed on a social media platform. I don't know how I'd go about proving this is downstream of fact checking, but there's a lot of orgs who argue that it's factually false to characterize, for example, someone who crosses the border without authorization and then applies for asylum as an illegal immigrant.
For example:
- whether crime is up or down
- whether the earth is warming or not
- how many people live in poverty
- what the rate of inflation is
- how much social security or healthcare costs
- etc
These are all verifiable, measurable facts, and yet, we somehow manage to disagree.
We always used to disagree and that is healthy, we avoid missing something. But in the past we could agree on some basic facts and then have a discussion. Now we just end a discussion with an easy: "Your facts are wrong." And that leads to an total inability of having any discussion at all.
Fact checking is not censorship. Imagine math if we'd question the basic axioms.
Every single example mentioned by the GP isn’t just a statistical measure, they measure of a wildly political (as in, defined by humans in a deeply imprecise manner) issues:
> - whether crime is up or down
Which kinds of crimes? In which political boundaries? In which reporting period? Did definitions change? Is reporting down because of ineffective policing? Is reporting up because of effective policing? That statistical games played with crime stats are criminal.
> - whether the earth is warming or not
There is a reason the phrase “global warming” went out of fashion in preference of “climate change”. Warming up how much? Over what time period? With what error bounds? Assuming which runaway processes? In which areas? Due to which causes? What are the error bounds around the sign of the change?
> - how many people live in poverty
The government literally draws a line in the sand and declares anyone below a certain income level is living in poverty. Who set the level? Why did they set it there? What is the standard of living at that income level? In which areas? How long do people live in poverty? What, if anything, prevents them from moving upward? What is there effective standard of living after government programs and charitable giving is taken into account?
> - what the rate of inflation is
This is literally defined by bureaucrats at central banks. Inflation according to which index? How were the index components chosen? How are the index components weighted? Over what time period? In which areas? Even the concept of “inflation” is highly suspect and basically incoherent.
- how much social security or healthcare costs
Over what time period? How did the demographics change? How about inflation? Where did the cash flows go and how did they net out? Which purchasing regimes were in place? How did the programs change? What was the quality of the services?
However, I think the key point here still stands. Most disagreements (at least in my experience) are not reaching this level, and are instead diving towards anti-intellectualism and dismissing statistics and data interpretation wholesale.
Not without reason though. Many statistics are pretty bad and very partisan. Unpacking this is not trivial, and who wants to invest that effort to settle a debate with one other person?
> whether crime is up or down
Was the reporting consistent between the two timeframes (apathy, directions from police station, etc)? Was the reporting system fully operational both timeframes being compared? Is the reported vs actual crime ratio the same between the two timeframes?
> how many people live in poverty
> what the rate of inflation is
Is the metric calculated the same way between the two timeframes? If not, what's the justification for the new metrics? Is the answer the same if the old and new metric is used with the same data?
If the original claim is that crime is really up but it doesn’t show in the official figures because of subtle factors X Y and Z, then sure, a fact check saying this is wrong needs to dive in and explain why those factors don’t account for it.
But if it’s just “crime is up 87% since Biden took office” then “actually, crime is down N% in that period, see link from relevant stats agency here” is fine.
The latter is about a million times more common.
It's no different to someone claiming on twitter that they are a great programmer who can fix twitter's search in a weekend who then has to tweet for suggestions on how to write a search feature in javascript. People familiar with the subject matter can see right through your bravado.
I'm so tired of people with no expertise on anything insisting that people who have clear expertise "didn't think of trivial point A that just came to mind" as if some of these fields aren't centuries old and have been around the block a few times.
It's similar to the teenager insisting "you just don't get it mom", but like, mom totally gets it, she was a teenager once too. And while there are occasions when mom might not get it, like how she didn't grow up in a world with social media so she might not be able to help you through that, but she ABSOLUTELY gets that it feels like your world is ending when your first love leaves you, and in fact it is YOU who does not "get it" that you will move on eventually.
The world we exeprience and the language we use to describe it doesn't have axioms like math, so it's no surprise people routinely disagree about these topics. Most of the subjects in your list contain a great deal of nuance. For example:
> whether crime is up or down
What counts as "crime"? Is it based on a legal definition or a moral defintion? What jursidictions does this include? What time period are we using as a baseline? Do we account for the fact that different jurisdictions measure crime differently and do we use the raw reported numbers or adjust for underreporting in the statistics? Do we weight our consideration by the severity of the crime or is it just the number of recorded offenses? The laws themselves may have changed over the period of consideration, so how do we account for that?
These questions don't have objective answers, so it's unsurprising people disagree.
> - whether crime is up or down
Manipulable by the agencies that keep track of and publish those stats. Governments often manipulate these.
> - whether the earth is warming or not
There is a huge amount of controversy in climate science. Check the "Climate Gate" files from 2009 for example. Check out the controversies over weather station siting for another.
> - how many people live in poverty
Poverty levels vary with time and by country, and are typically set by governments. People often disagree as to what defines poverty. Poverty stats are manipulable.
> - what the rate of inflation is
You should look into what Argentina did around 2012.
> - how much social security or healthcare costs
The figures from the budget are not controversial. How much healthcare spending is wasteful is a completely different matter. Quality of healthcare is also very much subject to debate.
> These are all verifiable, measurable facts, and yet, we somehow manage to disagree.
They are not easily verifiable because they are mostly susceptible to manipulation. Therefore it's not surprising that people disagree.
> [...] And that leads to an total inability of having any discussion at all.
No, it means that discussion might have to start with the fact that there is disagreement as to facts and then you can have an open discussion about why, what is being done to prevent consensus forming as to those "facts", what needs to change to make that possible, etc.
No need to imagine, it's enough to look into non-Euclidean geometry (obtained by excluding Euclid's fifth axiom), non-standard models of geometry, or reverse mathematics (studying which axioms are necessary for a specific theorem to be provable).
Nothing I’ve seen suggests that mass media or mass propaganda contains less nuance now versus any other time. Propaganda of all forms (regardless of whether delivered by newspaper, radio, tv, or facebook) has always been a blunt instrument.
But with social media, his bullshit post looks just as authoritative as an expert who’s been studying the topic for decades.
Exactly. We aren't capable of discussing shit online, which is unfortunately where the bulk of our culture's negative discourse is occurring. It's not the posts, even - it's the comment sections.
I don't care if someone shares propaganda, I care about the discussion that happens after they share it, in the comments. When was the last time on FB/IG that you saw someone share some propaganda (true or untrue, doesn't matter), and looked in the comments to find someone correct them, and then the two had a reasoned conversation wherein they traded perspectives and ultimately came to a healthy understanding of one another even if they disagreed?
Do you see that sort of conversation, or do you just see a shitload of people yelling at each other?
Specific crime is such a complex system now that we can (both accidentally and maliciously) post factual information that presents a small fragment of the issue, sometimes helpful, sometimes misinforming for the context we're talking about.
Aside from maybe "whether crime is up or down" (because of under-reporting), everything else can be objectively measured. The measurements might not fit with everyone's specific circumstance (eg. earth is warming as a whole but it's unseasonably cold where you live), but that's not a reason to throw up our hands and say "those things are actually not verifiable measurable facts within any useful definition".
And of course you have to incorporate of the Earth's interior which is cooling. Are you sure that "fact" doesn't silently ignore almost all of the Earth?
The Earth is warming, but how much of it is caused by humans is under debate. The Earth is still coming out of an ice age, so it would be warming even without humans.
Also, the more important question is: how much will it accelerate based on our emissions? If there are no positive feedback loops, it would only warm up 1C maximum, no matter how much more CO2 we will emit. But because of the positive feedback loops (warmer earth -> more water evaporating -> more warming), this warming can trigger a 4-5C further warming. The feedback loops are just theoretical(you can't measure them empirically) and the quality of the estimations is based on our understanding and modelling of the climate.
We've had in the last 100 years a temperature swing that usually takes a thousand years or more. We've already seen greater than +1C of temperature increase compared to before widespread use of fossil fuels.
Is that caused by humans? Sure that's up for debate, in the same way whether tobacco causes cancer is. People are willing to be wrong when being wrong gives them money/status/utility.
A cute xkcd is not a time machine. You rely here on indirect measurements of tree ring measurements or ocean sediments. You can't verify if there were any other factors at play over the millennia, and I seriously doubt that these methods can even be theoretically +/- 0.5 degree C accurate. You may believe that, but you can't verify unless you travel into the past. Besides, 1000 years are NOTHING on the scale we are looking at. If you live anywhere north of the 40th degree, the place you now sit was probably covered by an ice sheet without a living thing in sight, only 10000 years ago. And a 100000 years ago. There is no way that you can divide that timescale into thousands and measure every one of them with a high enough precision to compare it with the present. The bold claims of climate science have lost any scientific humility.
Do you believe in the method of radiocarbon dating? What about dinosaurs?
GHG emissions are still increasing. If we assume that temperature increase is only linear in the amount of atmospheric GHGs, that means temperature will continue to increase, not remain flat.
But yes, the temperature will increase slightly because of CO2 emissions. That triggers more warming due to feedback effects though, and those are hard to quantify, and more scary.
The level of crime is pretty hard to measure. You can measure reported crime, but crimes are reported at different rates in response to complicated incentives.
How much the earth is warming depends on what you measure. Do you measure atmospheric temperature? Ocean temperature? And of course how much the world will warm is dependent on complicated models with tons of inputs.
How many people live in poverty depends on what your threshold for poverty is. There's a "Federal Poverty Level", but cost of living varies by significant amounts across the country.
The rate of inflation is highly dependent on the basket of goods measured and how improvements in goods are measured and so on. There are easily a dozen different measures of "inflation" and they're all reasonable and carefully considered, but none of them is the ground truth.
It is of course relatively easy to measure Social Security inflows and outflows, but usually when we talk about the "cost" of programs like this, we mean something like the net cost, which incorporates lots of societal effects. Also the interpretation of the accounting concept of the Social Security Trust Fund, despite being a fairly simple concept, has significant camps with diametrically opposed views.
Even with warming, a 'fact' would be a data point at a particular time and location, assuming your sensor was correctly calibrated. You have to look at millions of data points across the entire globe for decades to get a sense of the current warming rate (which could be negative, flat, or positive). You have to do complicated statistics on all those data points to get a warming rate, and you'll have error bars on that, and the end result is not a 'fact' so much as a bounded estimate (+0.1 C / decade +/- 10% is plausible for the average surface temperature change averaged over the entire planet).
We can't even say with real certainty that 2100 will be warmer than today, as a supervolcano, asteroid impact, or global nuclear war could reverse the trend.
For a question like the earth warming, it would usually be something like "according to ___.org website on Y date", which in that case the final prediction becomes: will the average temperature in the period from 2016-2026 be greater than Y on ___.org, which is a bit different than the original but easier to arbitrate.
Take inflation for example. Measure inflation in terms of gold, broken arm repairs, hamburgers, or houses and any will give you wildly different figures. The government preferred index prices a basket of goods but the particulars of the basket may not match you or anyone you know, and various corrections are necessary but are themselves subjective. An often disputed one is correction for goods substitution-- if steak goes up people buy less steak and more rice. The current preferred model of the government chains these corrections even though in reality you can only replace so much steak with rice before it's all rice and no steak. These indexes also have corrections for goods increasing in quality-- the price went up but its because the thing got better, not because inflation. etc.
yadda yadda, I don't mean to import the debate here but the point is that there is something to debate particularly when the statistics don't match a person's lived experience -- when the things they need to live are rapidly increasing in price-- especially when politicians are abusing the stats beyond the breaking point (I think of the time when the Biden administration was crowing about something like the rate of inflation increase no longer increasing. What a jerk! ... or is that a snap? ;) ).
And even when the fact itself isn't really in dispute there is often plenty of room for reasonable people to debate the implications or relevance.
When people confused these subjective issues for "basic axioms" and then impose their understanding as "facts" it's extremely problematic and highly offensive to people whose experience has taught them otherwise.
Crime statistics/reporting are extremely gamed. It took a friend having a heinous crime committed against her by a large group, on a side street just off downtown Santa Cruz with no reporting for me to realize just how bad. We've probably all at this point had crime committed against us that the police didn't document which then destroys our faith in crime statistics.
I'm a super hippie. But there was a lot of manipulation/playing fast and free by the earlier global warming folks to try and get their message across breaking peoples trust and you are never going to get that trust back with models/projections no matter how good/accurate the assumptions used for those models/projections once the trust was lost.
Things like using COVID funds to KNOWINGS TEMPORARILY reduce child poverty with the goal of having INCREASED CHILD POVERTY statistics in the near future so that it could be used as a policy weapon again just does damage and makes poverty statistics more meaningless. Just politicians using abusing and manipulating instead of leading, breaking down more levers.
Stop with how gamed 'rate of inflation' was by this administration. You are never going to convince people WHO CAN'T AFFORD TO LIVE and are in CONTSANT distress that 'things are getting worse more slowly' is good. Sorry, you are going to have to lead and convince people on that one, not lazily use numbers. Again, it's lack of leadership.
See how the same things can be interpreted differently by different people and how much it's that these have been abused/used for manipulation/out of laziness/instead of leading?
Source: Other than my personal crime experiences it's from living in a red state and talking with people why they support crazy stuff or reject what seems like common sense to me.
Crude example:
- I believe climate change is exaggerated because the Summers haven’t gotten notably hotter.
- If you say that, then you are unaware and uninformed. You must be watching Fox News.
Another:
- I think we are in a cost of living crisis, because every year, more US men are in crippling debt.
- Wow, look at your use of ableist misogynist language! Way to pretend women don’t suffer with debt 13% more than men!
Another:
- As society, we should be respectful of others online, because internet is an important (and sometimes only) social network some people have.
- Social media is unnatural, harmful and should be banned.
These are three failed debates, in each there is no clash of opinions, and no side provided meaningfully stronger arguments to win the debate. In fact, the two debate opponents stated opinions on different subjects entirely. And yet nowadays, this is how most people debate, it is considered appropriate, even in academia. In politics, this technique is considered a total winner.
So it is a bit like refusing to engage with the basic axioms when arguing mathematical proofs and just saying “math is for nerds”. We have totally accepted that as normal, as a society.
No, they absolutely are not:
> whether crime is up or down
Depends on the definitions; what is or isn't a crime changes over time in a given society. Taking "crime" as an aggregate conflates many different possible crimes and relies on a subjective weighting of their relative severity. Crime rates can vary wildly between various subgroups of the population. We can only meaningfully compare rates of crimes that are actually detected and result in law enforcement actions; an unknown and broadly unknowable amount of crime is overlooked.
> whether the earth is warming or not
Most of the disagreement is about the rate of change, the predicted future rate of change, the predicted impacts of those change, the extent to which we can do anything about it, and especially about the relative importance of the predicted impact vis-a-vis the effort that might be required to do something about it.
> how many people live in poverty, what the rate of inflation is
"Poverty" is generally measured in terms of income versus an arbitrarily decided baseline. The baseline at best varies over time specifically to remain in "real" terms, i.e. adjusted for "inflation" which is calculated on a basis which may bear no relation whatsoever to the rate of change in costs practically faced by the poorer segment of the population. Furthermore, income is nowhere near the entire picture of wealth, which in turn is not a full picture of economic well-being. Inflation measures are designed with "hedonic quality adjustments" (https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/questions-and-ans...) in mind which involve subjectively putting numbers on a wide variety of factors - they're literally trying to measure "how much better" a cell phone becomes if the screen resolution increases, so that they can decide whether the increase in price is justified; and in many cases they just resort to assuming that the initial price is fair relative to existing devices when the new one hits the market.
>How much social security or healthcare costs
Again, this has to be considered in the context of inflation adjustments, because the value of currency is not objective. World currencies are not a unit of measurement for value; it's just another thing that you can exchange for other valuable goods and services. If they were objective, there would be no reason for exchange rates to vary over time; they vary because, among other things, of varying relative faith in the issuing governments, and varying supply (which governments can generally control more or less at will).
Aside from which, there are valid reasons why the per-capita costs might vary due to demographic changes. The disagreements I've seen haven't been about the bottom-line number in (say) the American federal government budget; they're about how to contextualize that number. Are per-capita costs changing? Are your personal costs changing? Are the costs of people like you changing? (Those answers could be different for many reasons.) How do they compare to costs in other countries? Is that justified? Is it explained by extenuating circumstances? How shall we compare the corresponding quality of care?
Community notes is good news, and something I was expecting to disappear from Twitter since Elon bought it a couple years ago, especially since they have called out his lies more than once. Hearing Facebook/Instagram/Threads are getting them is great.
Then he claims "foreign governments are pushing against American companies" like we aren't all subject to the same laws. And actually, it wasn't the EU who prohibited a specific app alleging "security risks" because actually they can't control what's said there; it was the US, censoring TikTok.
Perhaps we the europeans should push for a ban of US platforms like Twitter, especially when its owner has actually pledged to weaponise the platform to favour far-right candidates like AfD (Germany) or Reform UK. And definitely push for bigger fines to monopolistic companies like Meta.
I think I should have a right to let others lie to me, and decide for myself if I believe them. In the alternative where someone prevents me from hearing it, that other person is deciding for me. Why should I accept that other person as more qualified to do my own thinking?
It's really strange to me how calls for banning "misinformation" in the US seem to come from the same political direction as complaints about controversial books being taken out of educational curricula.
Humans tend to strongly identify with such things and motivate their moral reasoning to fit.
I would wager Mark and other sharks like him would find this entire thread very amusing. For they have no ideology other than self interest, nothing they do is for any other purpose other than their own.
I'm not in (or from) the US, I'm european and probably "more used to" regulation :). Thing is, banning misinformation isn't the solution, but the artificial algorithm should stop recommending accounts that keep feeding fake news to people, since community notes take a while to appear.
Or some indicator like "this account's posts has received a lot of community notes in the last 30 days, please take what this tweet says with a grain of salt". Young people keep getting feed far-right bullshit, which is the reason a party like Se Acabó La Fiesta (Alvise Perez) got to the European parliament in the first place, because he kept posting fake stuff, and until the justice ruled otherwise, people would just believe it. Because unfortunately, many people aren't able to "do their thinking" because of confirmation bias. "They say what I want to hear, so it must be true".
But the real reason I can't use FB much any more is that the feed is stuffed full of crap I didn't ask for, like Far Side cartoons etc.
Sure "Meta" won't, but I wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of "contributing users" end up being facebook's AI accounts
# Meta eliminating fact-checking to combat "censorship"
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/07/meta-ends-fact-checking-zuc...
Bots and gov-psyop trolls are certainly (hopefully) like 95% of the gross misinformation, right?
I'd give some reasonably trustworthy platform my Passport and identity to speak to only other people who have done the same.
The problem becomes, do you trust the company implementing it?
Meta, as a company, doesn't have values beyond growth.
A lot of comments in this thread reflect a conflation of these two, with stuff like "great! no more censorship!" or "I was once banned because I made a joke on my IG post", which don't relate to fact-checking.
Meta has a big problem coming up. They'll get to the point where they won't be able to hide Facebook and Instagram's lackluster appeal. I suspect we'll start seeing advertisers peel away, followed by a few savvy investors first. Let's just hope this doesn't trigger a market-wide correction.
My flippant, "I hate social media and think it was largely a mistake and needs to go away," view is to cheer for that correction. That said, I understand that I'm very biased here and might be ignorant.
Is there a reason I shouldn't cheer for such a correction?
Facebook and Instagram's (pre-Reels) strength was that it was easy to have accounts of all sizes engage and be engaged with. Whether you have 10 or 100000 friends/followers/etc, the barrier of entry to have some engagement wasn't high and it encouraged people with all sizes of accounts to post, comment, and "like". Social networking felt much more intentional with these platforms.
Instagram Reels certainly has a lot of activity, but it's activity is driven by users passively consuming popular and trending media. This isn't a bad model, but it's a shift away from intentional social networking.
Ultimately, I think Reels is more evidence that Meta has had a user engagement problem for a while. Their current strategy for Instagram seens to be to hope passive consumption keeps everyone in the app and fall back on the "town square" model for comments as a means of engagement.
Every one of their core user value propositions is worse now than it was in the 00s.
And all of them by allowing revenue optimization by 1,000 cuts to whittle away customer centricity over time.
Facebook has positioned itself so that it’s almost a necessity if you want to be involved in your community, however you define it. You may hate Zuck, moderation, and ‘the algo’ and yet you can’t get away from Meta the company. And millions of other users feel the same way.
not really; I haven't had a FB account in 10 years
I use Craigslist for local ads.
Also I wonder if they will be federating with truth social and gab.
But I think community notes (the model, not necessarily the specific implementation of one company or another) is one of those algorithms that truly solve a messy messy sticky problem.
Fact-checking and other "Big J Journalist" attempts to suppress "misinformation" is a very broken model.
1) It leads to less and less trust in the fact checkers which drives more people to fringe outlets etc.
2) They also are in fact quite biased (as are all humans, but it's less important if your electrician has socialist/MAGA/Libertarian biases)
3) The absolute firehose of online content means fact checkers/media etc. can't actually fact check everything and end up fact checking old fake news while the new stuff is spreading
The community notes model is inherently more democratic, decentralized and actually fair. and this is the big one it works! unlike many of the other "tech will save us" (e.g. web3 ideas) It is extremely effective and even-handed.
I recommend reading the Birdwatch paper [0], it's quite heartening and I'm happy more tech companies are moving in that direction
[0] https://github.com/twitter/communitynotes/blob/main/birdwatc...
CN predates Musk burning Twitter to the ground, and CN is actually a decent product that can only get better as it is honed.
Frankly, if it worked, it would have been removed by now. It's "controlled opposition" basically.
The effectiveness of Community Notes is up to debate. Though I personally have seen some really brutally honest or hillarious fact checks (check out Community Notes Violations on Twitter) but I still feel it can be brigaded by trolls to say the inverse is the truth. I have an anecdotal example from recent memory which on a post of someone commenting on the new Superman trailer, with a shot of Corenswet as Clark Kent gushing about how much he looked like Superman. I saw a humorous community note on that post that claimed the person in the image is not Superman but Clark Kent and they are separate people.
To me this raises the question, couldn't Community Notes potentially be overwhelmed by trolls to claim a falsehood as the truth for more nefarious reasons (this may have happened already, though I have not seen it yet).
I suspect the changes to the fact checking / free speech will align with Trump's political whims. Thus fact checking will be gone on topics like vaccines, trans people, threats from immigrants, etc.
While the well documented political censorship at Meta affecting Palestine will remain because it does align with Trump's political whims...
- https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/12/20/meta-systemic-censorship...
- https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/29/m...
Here's the topics the announcement mentioned:
"We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate."
Palestine is completely absent.
The official fact checking stuff is far too easily captured, it was like the old blue checks — a handy indicator of what the ancien regime types think.
What I am concerned about is their allowance of political content again.
Between genocides and misinformation campaigns, meta has shown that the idea of the town square does not scale. Not with their complete abandonment of any kind of responsibility to the social construct of its actual users.
Meta are an incredibly poor steward of human mental health. Their algorithms have been shown to create intense feedback loops that have resulted in many deaths, yet they continue down the march of bleeding as much out of people as possible.
Completely agree. Instead of one giant town square ("Facebook") what we would benefit from are 1000 smaller ones ("Facebook competitors") and some way to "travel" between them. That is a smaller more human scale that can be responsibly governed. It does not create hyper-billionaires though.
This is insane and clearly a political move. Maybe we just don't require social media as a species. That might be nice.
Sad thing is, this move isn't motivated by Mark Zuckerberg having a eureka moment and now trying to seek out the truth to build a better product for human kind.
This move is motivated by Mark's realizing he is on the wrong side of American politics now, being left behind by the Trump/Musk duo.
News story about other CEOs sucking up to Trump.[2]
News story about Bezos stucking up to Trump.[3]
"The Führer is always right" [4]
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/04/business/zuckerberg-trump-mus...
[2] https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/kevin-oleary-explains-why-...
[3] https://newrepublic.com/article/188170/jeff-bezoss-shocking-...
CNotes were extremely successful on X.
The problem with censorship, why digg and reddit died as platforms, you end up with second order consequences. The anti-free speech people will always deeply analyze their opponent's speech to find a violation of the rules.
They try to make rules that sound reasonable but are beyond section 230. No being anti-LGBT for ex. But then every joke, miscommunication, etc leads to bans. You also ban entire cultures with this rule. Ive had bans because I meant to add NOT to my 1 sentence, but failed to do so.
Then when it comes to politics. You've banned entire swaths of people/viewpoints. There's no actual meaningful conversation happening on reddit.
Reddit temporarily influenced politics in this way. In a recent election a politician built a platform that mirrored the subreddit. There was polls and if you were to go by reddit... the liberals were about to take at least a minority government, if not majority.
What actually happened? The platform was bizarre and very out of touch with the province. They got blasted in the election. The incumbent majority got stronger.
> reddit died
By all measures I can find, reddit continues to grow year over year, while X seems to have been flat or in decline, so I’m not sure this is a strong premise.
Tiktok is 4th.
Linkedin is 8th.
X is 12th.
Reddit is 16th.
Reddit fell a great deal in rankings. They mostly use bots to make it appear like they are still relevant. Which ironically is creating a 'dead internet' conspiracy theory. In reality its just 'dead reddit'
What were their relative rankings on the same metrics, say, five years ago?
The Community Notes model works great on X at dealing with misinformation. More broadly, this is a vindication of the principle that putatively neutral "expert" institutions cannot be trusted unless they're subject to democratic checks and balances.
I believe Elon and Trump, being the internet's biggest liars, have the goal to remove Section 230 making moderating online more or less a crime that will open you to litigation and allow them and all of their followers to spread lies not only unchecked but with the threat of punishment if a company, like Blue Sky, were to try to moderate them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Prod....
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubby,_Inc._v._CompuServe_Inc.
To tag a post, they need to produce several pages of evidence, taking several days of work to research and document. The burden of proof is in every way on the fact checkers, not the random Facebook poster.
Generalizing this work as politically biased is a purposeful lie.
Not really. Because if you make the argument that it was censorship then you have to say that any feed that is generated by an algorithm is censorship because the company is determining what, among what all users post, you should see, allowing certain posts to bubble up to the top and others to fall to the bottom.
Why was the Hunter Biden laptop story thus categorized? As I recall, "several days" did not elapse between the New York Post publication of the story and its suppression on social media.
They also appointed Dana White, a prominent Trump supporter, to their board this week.
Their content moderation team is moving from California to Texas.
If people think all this is Meta going "neutral", you are delusional.
Zuck is making the right noises. Time will tell.
> drugs, terrorism, child exploitiation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide doesn't fit neatly into any of those, but it does fit more into immigration, at least in the rhetoric (the Rohingya have long been present in Myanmar but have been denied citizenship by the government):
> We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate.
...and in Facebook's warped views, the ones that permitted the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal, that means ready to be boosted by the algorithm.
This is to please the incoming president.
Both the far-right and far-left live off misinformation, but right now the far-right is experiencing a renaissance, and tech moguls are bending the knee to be on good terms with the leaders.
MAGA and European far-right politicians have been moaning for ages that fact checking is "politically biased". The Biden laptop controversy was the catalyst for this.
Free expression my ass. Freedom of speech is not about protecting speech you agree with.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2025/01/06/nx-s1-5250310/meta-dana-white...
For context, in Germany you can face up to 3 years prison time for insulting a politician: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-greens-habeck-presses-charges-...
Taking steps to not be pushed around by an incoming president who has clearly suggested he'll push them around is, quite literally, currying favor.
They may not like that but they also don't like to take responsibility either.
[1] https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/12/20/meta-systemic-censorship...
Maybe the people elected Trump in a historic GOP win with demos that Reagan wouldn’t have won with… and Zuck sees the writing clearer than most?
The way you put it leaves out the cause and only gets the effect.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/elon-tru...
> When the White House called up Twitter in the early morning hours of September 9, 2019, officials had what they believed was a serious issue to report: Famous model Chrissy Teigen had just called President Donald Trump “a pussy ass bitch” on Twitter — and the White House wanted the tweet to come down.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/08/us/politics/twitter-congr...
On video, if you like: https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1623357770933145607
My mom and my wife’s mom both have remarked in the last year that they’re upset with speech policing. My mom can’t say things about immigration that she thinks as an immigrant, and my mother in law is censored on gender issues despite having been married to a transgender person in the 1990s. They’re not ideological “free speech” people. Neither are political, though both historically voted left of center “by default.”
The acceptable range of discourse on these issues in the social circles inhabited by Facebook moderators (and university staff) is too narrow, and imposing that narrow window on normal people has produced a backlash among the very people who are key users of Facebook these days (normie middle age to older people). This is a smart move by Zuckerberg.
They’re doing everything they can to suck up to the incoming administration.
If you want to identify contagious emotionally negative content you need ModernBERT + RNN + 10,000 training examples. The first two are a student project in a data science class, creating the second would wreck my mental health if I didn't load up on Paxil for a month.
The latter is bad for people whether or not it is true. If you suppressed it by a large factor (say 75%) in a network it would be like adding boron to the water in a nuclear reactor. It would reduce the negativity in your feed immediately, would reduce it further because it would stop it from spreading, and soon people would learn not to post it to begin with because it wouldn't be getting a rise out of people. (This paper https://shorturl.at/VE2fU notably finds that conspiracy theories are spread over longer chains than other posts and could be suppressed by suppressing shares after the Nth hop)
My measurements show Bluesky is doing this quietly, I think people are more aware that Threads does this; most people there seem to believe "Bluesky doesn't have an algorithm" but they're wrong. Some people come to Bluesky from Twitter and after a week start to confess that they have no idea what to post because they're not getting steeped in continuous outrage and provocation.
I'm convinced it is an emotional and spiritual problem. In Terry Pratchett's Hogfather the assassination of the Hogfather (like Santa Claus but he comes on Dec 32 and has his sleigh pulled by pigs) leads to the appearance of the Hair Loss Fairy and the God of Hangovers (the "Oh God") because of a conservation of belief.
Because people aren't getting their spiritual needs met you get pseudo-religions such as "evangelicals who don't go to church" (some of the most avid Trump voters) as well as transgenderists who see egg hatching (their word!) as a holy mission, both of whom deserve each other (but neither of whom I want in my feed.)
now it's been normalized and the other party is doing it. but the news outlets have waited until now to start crying wolf?
You can't argue with someone who thinks their beliefs are merely "reality." At least the other side recognizes it as religion, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/?redirect=no&title=Reality_has_a_we...
I'm not clear what your larger point is though or why you're singling out my comment with your rebuttal.
What if a fact is disputed? Do you not have to choose which fact to believe?
Gestalting between two disputed facts is the basis for scientific revolutions.
Ptolemaic astronomers certainly had a belief that epicycles were "fact" and made every non-scientific attempt to destroy heliocentrism. Only when enough people didn't _believe_ in that "fact" did we evolve to better understanding.
You can say "these were not facts and were just flawed observations", but you'll ignore that Ptolemaics _said_ these ideas were facts and had strong evidence and a belief that it really was.
This model can be applied over and over again to many domains. This isn't my idea, rather it comes from the seminal work "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by TS Kuhn.
So, no, there is not a bold line between belief and fact. We choose what facts to believe.
this just might be the craziest thing I’ve read recently but given the current state of affairs not all that surprising…
They were expected to? Hmm, hot take.
Expecting me to "actually read them" in this context is not reasonable and constitutes a massive shift of the burden of proof.
I have seen many times before the assertion made by that comment, but never anything resembling evidence for it. It's also not something seen in Taibbi's analysis (Taibbi is a former political columnist for Rolling Stone and the author of several books that clearly show he is no friend to "conservatives").
Plenty of people read the twitter files years ago... when they came out.
There's literally plenty of examples of exactly what the other poster was talking about.
Considering all the political triangulation you are relying on to make your point, I find it odd that you leave out that, ultimately, Taibbi and Musk fell out because of the twitter files, because Taibbi wouldn't say what Musk wanted him to say about them. Because they are by and large innocuous.
Now, on the other hand, "no" is a perfectly fine answer to which you seem to refuse to be willing to say, even when it is true, and instead you just go and link to summaries of things and pass that off as being informed, but you're not even skimming.
Like, there's no need for you to have posted that you have "no idea" how the other poster came to their conclusion based upon you only having skimmed a general summary, and then making assumptions about what you think it wouldn't contain based upon your perception of wikipedia's politics. That was your decision, not mine. So don't act like I'm imposing anything on you. You are playing detective when others are just conversing. At least do your research if you want to play officer.
The burden of proof is not on me.
>I find it odd that you leave out that
I have already gone above and beyond my obligation here. But what you say is not relevant, because I only seek to refute the claim that the files somehow demonstrate favourable treatment of conservatives. What Taibbi says about them, if anything, demonstrates the opposite.
>on the other hand, "no" is a perfectly fine answer to which you seem to refuse to be willing to say
This is just a condescending personal attack. A higher standard of discourse is expected on HN.
>but you're not even skimming
I read the link I gave you and it does not demonstrate anything that would evidence the original claim, while giving plenty of reason to doubt the original claim.
>and then making assumptions about what you think it wouldn't contain based upon your perception of wikipedia's politics
No. I surmised that Wikipedia, due to its politics, would have included such material if it existed, but does not include such material. This is reason to doubt the claim that such material exists, and therefore to reaffirm the demand for evidence.
>At least do your research if you want to play officer.
Again: the burden of proof is not and never was on me, and your rhetorical style is not in accord with my understanding of HN guidelines.
