I'd like to hear an informed take from anybody who thinks that Facebook's fact-checkers were a better product feature than Community Notes.
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".
The ideological bits are:
* 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 get how the partisan story is easy to tell here, but I'm saying something pretty specific: I think it would have been product development malpractice for this decision not to have been in the works for many, many months, long before the GOP takeover of the federal government was a safe bet. Community Notes has been that successful, and Facebook's fact-checkers have been that much of a product disaster.
I've never seen a wrong Facebook fact-check; I am warmly supportive of intrusive moderation; that's not where I'm coming from.
Clegg left a few days ago, and the Oversight Board issued a statement which sounds like they were in the dark:
> “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...
As a product decision taken independently, maybe. Running one of those things at scale with all kinds of people trying to subvert it for various reasons, including some downright evil ones, is not an easy task.
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.
> 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.
Austin is very left of center. If they end up there, they will have ideologically strayed in California while geographically moving to Texas.
Infowars was based in Austin. Joe Rogan is in Austin. How does moving to Austin mean they are "ideologically" in California?
Visit Texas. Then visit Austin. You'll know what I mean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...
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Joe Rogan also moved from California.
Elon too, isnt it cheaper taxes for business there?
i mean they can just pretend and get paid
Texas does not have a corporate income tax but does have a gross receipts tax with rates not strictly comparable to corporate income tax rates.
People move to other states due to state laws. City laws can easily be avoided by living and/or working just outside the city limits. Or more likely, state laws will preempt city laws that go against state level politics.
Stayed not strayed.
The intent is clear.
The political bias I agree with is better!!1
Fact checking, Community Notes, whatever you want to call it, is inherently political.
To be clear: I absolutely do not dispute this. But in 2025 it seems pretty clear that you cannot run a mainstream large-scale social network without some kind of moderation, so every platform is going to do something. And all I'm saying is: what Facebook was doing before was bad, just as a product experience. Just wretched. Solved no problems, mostly surfaced stuff I wouldn't have paid attention to in the first place.
How does an average joe evaluate the claim that their content moderation was bad? Cause folks on the left seem very upset that it's being replaced by notes, and folks on the right seem very glad that it's going. How do I judge this for myself?
What I've read of the Community Notes algorithm casts it as far more neutral than any hiring decisions about professional content moderators could possibly be. If it's "political," it's in a similar way to comparing the GDP of various countries is political--reality gives the verdict, the politics is in whether that verdict was the optimal one to ask reality for.
People are going to believe it is political whether or not it is. I've been working at hard at talking about difficult issues in a depoliticized frame. It's hard.
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.
What are more examples of duckspeak and is it context dependent?
Orwell defined it as thoughtless or formulaic speech.
There is an essay at the end of Orwell's 1984
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.
> "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.
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.
> My son bristles at "healthcare" as a word consistently used for abortion and transgender medicine
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.
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I think you'll find basically everything is political. Do you have a fear of debate or criticism?
No. I can't stand it that so many Americans have fallen under the spell of a fraudster while others are sharing hateful memes online and think it is activism. I need stronger language, not weaker language.
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.)
Actually very few things have to be political. Politicising, that is rendering the concept to decision by a "body politic" is a choice that we're making right now, and we could choose to not do that. In fact, we have done that throughout our nation's history, and it's only in the last 20 years that I've seen the rise of "everything is political speech" to the degree that the brand of beans you buy in a store signals something to some group.
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.
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Not a huge problem so long it remains a means to indicate that the post is hallucinatory. Content of checks/notes don't matter, it's tone policing.
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Classically liberal, sure.
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.
Please provide one example of your assertion.
Seems like legal vs. illegal immigration is low-hanging fruit.
What about them? That they exist? No one disputes that. That illegal immigrants cause crime? We have hard data on that; it's not true. That they are a drain on society via social programs? We have data on that too; they get taxes witheld but cannot claim refunds and cannot enroll in social benefit programs due to their lack of SSN.
On any topic you want to pick it's typically the radical right wing who have their fingers in their ears.
I think the bit where it’s illegal is the issue.
Nobody disagrees whether it is illegal. Whether it should stay illegal is the thing people disagree on.
I think you made the GPs point for them.
How? Whether it should remain illegal is not a factual question. You are being deliberately obtuse to avoid admitting you are wrong.
People are mad about a double standard: rules only apply to some people.
This isn’t hard to grasp.
The people who think illegal immigrants shouldn't be illegal don't think anyone should be illegal. What's the double standard? It's not like they think black people should be allowed in but white people shouldn't.
What's hard to grasp is how you think this applies to a discussion about differing facts based on political leaning. Nobody disagrees with the facts here, only on what should be done going forward. So, not really relevant to the discussion.
If you see it that way, things will never change.
I don’t care about immigration either way, I don’t have an axe to grind.
Noah Smith’s entire twitter feed is dedicated to pointing out progressive lies.
Apologies I have no idea who this is or why I should respect their authority on this subject?
Is it universally true that every truth test requires leveraging the existence of false claims/things I don’t agree with? For example if Socrates is a man, if all men are mortal, what false fact would you need to draw the logical conclusion? Or am I missing your point?
I’m not reflecting this idea, of course, because I’m a progressive. It does seem a bit imaginary, though.
"Modern progressives" -- that's a wide net you're casting.
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.
Conservatives believe the truth supports conservative beliefs, and liberals believe it supports liberal beliefs. This type of comment is about the same as just saying "I am a liberal", which almost by definition means you think liberal beliefs are true. It doesn't add much to the conversation.
Well, no. It means when facts are tested by objective means, more of them align with liberal beliefs than conservative beliefs. Unless you believe that facts can't be objectively tested?
If you comment with evidence showing that, you might be enriching the comment section. Simply having a bunch of people leave unsubstantiated comments like "truth has a conservative bias" or "truth has a liberal bias" is only adding noise. And it shows a certain lack of self-awareness.
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I am on the US left by any survey measurable by my principles, while not from US, this logic also sounds juvenile. Stooping to the level that a single person should be able to represent a whole side, did you see Joe at the debates?
Oh boy. Are you trying to do the "both sides" thing? Joe was pretty bad at the debates. His voice was weak. He stuttered. He misspoke. It was bad. And then what happened? He stepped down as the party's candidate, and the rest is history, as they say.
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.
Just because one political party is obviously worse doesn’t mean you should take everything said by the other political party as gospel truth.
Statistically, most US seems to believe that the Democratic party is obviously worse at the Federal level. They just lost an election on every metric, although they did win the lost-to-Trump-twice award after almost a decade of opportunities to come up with an effective counter-Trump strategy.
Trump and his antics are not mainstream conservative thought, especially not on a global or even 'western' level.
He does however have a knack for attracting people disenfranchised from politics.
He's been the undisputed head of the "conservative" party in the U.S. for 10 years now. And just won his second election, this time winning the popular vote. If that's not mainstream, I don't know what is.
Sure they are. People like the Cheneys or Mitt Romney are not mainstream conservatives in the US any more.
Accurate. It's difficult to argue that the mainstream US Republican isn't a populist now. Twice is not a fluke.
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.
> 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.
I think folks undersell Trump's intention to deliver. Just, to him, there's no objective reality outside of the message and the public reaction.
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.
I have definitely heard conservatives complain that reality has a left-wing bias. Not in quite those words, but close enough that you wonder if it’s possible to die of cognitive dissonance.
I guess it depends
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.
> Do males have a natural advantage in sports? Do vaccines cause autism?
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...
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I am not saying vaccines cause autism or anything, but where are you pulling your odds out from?
I don't think any of these are ambiguous. My point is that sometimes right wingers take the nonsense position and sometimes left wingers take the nonsense position. Neither side reliably follows the evidence or "believes the science" so glib lines like "reality has a liberal bias" are shallow and silly.
The point of the phrase "reality has a liberal bias" is not "liberals never take a nonsense position", it's "more of the facts that liberals [just as tribalistically] believe in happen to also be true, when compared to conservatives".
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.
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How do you distinguish partisans from actual knowledge? The Steve Bannon philosophy of flood the zone with shit so it all looks the same seems to have killed public discourse IMO. It is easy to label everyone as partisans.
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.
> The Steve Bannon philosophy of flood the zone with shit so it all looks the same
FWIW, it's called the Firehose of Falsehood and the Soviets invented it.
Liberal as in classical liberalism, or as in progressivism (which is becoming increasingly authoritarian)?
Could you give an example of increasing authoritarianism from progressivism?
Landlords in NYC can be fined up to $250,000 for misgendering tenants, i.e. compelled speech:
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.
This was a thing in the 2010s when “cancel culture” and other SJW shenanigans were prevalent.
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
Tim Walz claimed there is "no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy." That's false--the First Amendment has no such carveouts for those things. So it's concerning that Walz would think otherwise.
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.
In the final analysis, I don't think it matters. The former leads to the latter. The same is true of things like attempts to keep the LGB, but toss the T. The T follows from the LGB. The LGB already presupposes all that is needed to infer the T. You would be drawing an artificial line in the sand otherwise. It's ad hoc and doesn't work.
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.
If you begin with liberal blinders on, then that might be the picture you receive.
(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.)
Only if everything you don't agree with is "political"
Censorship, moderation, what kind of speech is acceptable, what does or doesn’t constitute a “fact”, are all political topics.
> what does or doesn’t constitute a “fact”, are all political topics.
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.
> There are facts that are known to be true beyond all possible doubt.
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
The way Community Notes usually end up working in practice is comments that provide sourced context that may be [arguably intentionally] omitted in a topic. For instance if it happens to be that there have been 27 different studies showing no statistically significant reduction in spread of infectious diseases with healthy individuals wearing masks, then that would likely be a community note on the first one. And vice versa if rent has been demonstrated to keep rents below the surrounding means in the cities of Blah, Bleh, and Bluh, then that would often end up a community note on the second.
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.
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Your example is a false equivalence. Economics does not define "good ideas" and "bad ideas," it only attempts to model resource dynamics. Whereas the spread of infectious disease is clearly quantifiable regardless of value assignment.
Economics is inherently a political venture. Organizing markets is political and obviously impacts politics.
Partly true, but besides the point. Making a blanket statement like "economics says rent control is bad," is only marginally better than saying "physics says nuclear weapons are bad." There is a critical assumption of values which is totally outside the objective of study.
The presumed goal of rent control is to prevent rents from rising. If they actually cause rents to rise even more quickly then they are indeed "bad" (at achieving this goal).
The goal of rent control, as I infer from the mechanism, is to prevent existing tenants from being priced out of their current homes (eventually leading to eviction) - at least as I have seen in the US.
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.
Those aren’t good candidates for fact checking really. They are beliefs really, just very widespread ones with lots of support.
A good candidate for fact checking is something that is well documented objectively verifiable. Politician X said Y on TV the other day.
> Economics: Rent control is always a bad idea
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).
Here's another one - "Trump colluded with Putin to hack the election in 2016".
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.
Another example: fact-checking prominent race activists in 2020. The public was grossly misinformed about the scale of police violence against black Americans: https://manhattan.institute/article/perceptions-are-not-real...
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....
I think someone said it but there's a difference between facts and making an inference about those facts. The evidence in Trumps case was maybe he had a conversation with a person of Russian descent on Day X. That in itself is a fact. Does this fact or other facts like it mean he "colluded", whatever the definition of colluded means, is a matter of opinion. Even in a legal framework, where "collusion" has a definition, its still up to a jury which can get it wrong. Fact-checking is extremely complex as you are alluding to and cannot be simplified the way it has been thus far
Sure, but the fact is that there was never any solid evidence showing that Trump did collude with Putin to hack the election. That's contrary to what many high level politicians were claiming, the fact is that they falsely claimed there was "ample evidence" proving Trump colluded, and they never produced it. That's what was never fact checked, because it is inconvenient, and it would show that many high level people who insisted on there being "ample evidence" to prove collusion were actually being dishonest about it.
Well there is a lot of connections between Trump and Russia. Wiki here shows quite a few: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associates... I'm not interested in auditing the entire thing, but like I said whether what occurred was "collusion" is something that cannot be fact-checked as it will always be a matter of opinion
There's a lot of connections between a lot of people. Obama tried to secretly transmit a promise to Putin that he would "have more flexibility" after his election. How do we know it wasn't Obama who colluded with Putin? It was his whitehouse overseeing the 2016 election. Why doesn't any fact checkers check that fact and come up with "inconclusive" because they are unable to prove it false? Because it's political.
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.
Well yes.
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.
> But how do we distinguish facts from non facts?
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.
The irony is that the example you cite, i.e. F = G * m1 * m2 / r^2 is demonstrably not the correct formula for gravity.
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.
> Science, the process of science, does not prove something as fact.
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.
XKCD has a fun comic about a guy who recalculates the world records of pole vaulters based on the gravity of the locations of various events. Earth's surface gravity is by no means constant -- it varies, presumably due to the density and altitude of any particular location.
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!
> Earth's gravity accelerates at 1m/s^2, they're just flat out wrong full stop
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.
You missed a basic element of what they said: "can't measure it or repeatably demonstrate it"; seeing a non-reproducible event with your eyes is a form of measurement, and that measurement could in principle be done by an objective machine (recorded by a camera). The potential for objective evidence is what distinguishes a matter of fact from a matter of opinion.
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.
> You missed a basic element of what they said: "can't measure it or repeatably demonstrate it"; seeing a non-reproducible event with your eyes is a form of measurement, and that measurement could in principle be done by an objective machine (recorded by a camera). The potential for objective evidence is what distinguishes a matter of fact from a matter of opinion.
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.
The scientific process works amazingly well for repeatable experiments, but it doesn't do anything at all for non-repeatable events. You can't use the scientific method to figure out who blew up the Nordstream pipeline, just for a relatively recent and hotly debated political fact.
And if I take a ballon, fill it with the right helium/air ratio so it sinks at exactly 1m/s²? It's a provable scientific fact that it's falling at 1m/s². Even if I leave off the part that it's a balloon, and talk antigravity fields or aliens or some crap, and "let you draw your own conclusions", the fact that the ballon fell at that rate would still be demonstrably true.
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.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics!
This is not uncovered ground though. Philosophy and logic cover the notion of truth and reality in some depth. The entire field of law is based on proof beyond reasonable doubt.
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.
You're reading them as saying that moderation is suspect because it's political, and all I read them to be saying is that political considerations are unavoidable when you moderate, in a manner distinctive to moderation.
Answering this question has to be a political topic, because there's an infinite stream of people asking you the question (by posting things that may need to be fact checked), and you have to decide which ones to prioritize.
I disagree with gravity though. It makes life a lot easier when you can fly.
It’s just intelligent falling. They want to keep you in the dark.
For most of my life, I would have agreed with you.
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.
Facts exist. Your first sentence has 11 words. Easy to verify, right? Doesn't matter who's counting.
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.
> Your first sentence has 11 words.
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".
> 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).
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?).
I think you are trying hard and writing a lot to miss the parent's point. You're thing about the number of words in the sentence is like what the parent is mistakenly calling "tautological;" another way to say it is blatantly obvious and a banal observation. This is not the type of thing we are talking about here. This is entire post is about "facts" and "fact checking" in the case of socio-political issues, the kinds of things for which there are fact checkers. The parent is obviously correct. Just look at the state of actual "fact checking" of this variety in the real world. There is a lot of controversy and a lot of words are used in a very loose way, these are not simple physics problems that you can punch into a TI-86. The issue is clearly about "who are the fact checkers" or put another way "who decides the facts." In a court of the law in the US, the judge is only arbiter of facts, these can not even be appealed.
How was I mistaken in my use of tautology?
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.
But I agree with your overall point! :) Ok, so the statement "gravity keeps us on the ground" is not a tautology in the strict sense but you have correctly defined it here. I think it probably seems like a tautology because colloquially we might use it that way. I don't think its worth parsing out too much. This kind of stuff about coffee cups and all that has nothing to do with "fact checking" political statements and anyone else being serious knows that.
Thanks!
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".
Everything is political, which is one of the statements made above.
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.
No, whether a coffee cup will break when you drop it or whatever that was is not a political thing. I'm not sure what the rest is about. To deny that there is a lot of subjectivity in the kinds of "facts" we are talking about her is just to deny reality.
The way you eat Pizza became a political thing.
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.
While I get your point, and I think it's strong, I'm entirely unconvinced.
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.
You still have to distinguish between hard, absolute facts which definitely exist and representations thereof in human language. The facts never change (the distance between Dallas and Houstom doesn't change while we are having this conversation), but accurate descriptions require additional concepts and now we get into the imprecise world of human communication. Doubting the precision and accuracy of human language is a fair point, but that doesn't make facts themselves subjective.
I admire the conviction that things become absolutely true at a sufficient level of specification.
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.
> hard, absolute facts which definitely exist and representations thereof in human language
It's the distinction that you're drawing between those things that I'm skeptical of.
What is Dallas? What is Houston? Which parts do we measure. are we talking about road distance? That something doesn't change during a conversation is not the same the thing as them never changing
If someone says "it's 250 miles from Houston to Dallas" you know that there will be some error involved. From precisely what part of Houston to what part of Dallas, does it include the outskirts, are they estimating, is it rounded to a nice number, etc.
If someone claims "it's 500 miles from Houston to Dallas" they're wrong.
I’m going to pretend to avoid asking what is a mile and what is 250 and 500 :)
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
This is much of science: taking a hypothesis, understanding where the bounds of that hypothesis lie, then testing the bounds to try to disprove it. Then creating a more accurate hypothesis within the space of what’s left unknown.
Unfortunately, I missed out a key word “… what knowing that things are not the case tells us about what we can know is [absolutely] the case…”
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
> 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.
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?
“Facts is facts” works for counting words in a sentence.
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”.
> As I've gotten older, I've become increasingly skeptical of the idea of a "fact".
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.
I’d respectfully submit that:
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.
Tautologies are not necessarily uninteresting, all of mathematics is essentially about finding tautologies (on some level), but they're far typically from obvious.
It sounds like you may be heading in the direction of postmodernism, and/or post-Marxist Critical Theory
I certainly hope not.
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.
Subjective interpretation is very fundamental to being human and the way our minds work, but the underlying physical reality -- the wavelengths of light reflecting off the shirt -- can be measured objectively. A physicist might say that gravity is the curvature of spacetime caused by mass, which can be measured and tested.
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.
Your Trump trial example actually proves the opposite of the point you’re making. CNN’s legal analyst of all people wrote an article explaining why the prosecutors “contorted the law” in pursing Trump’s conviction: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-was-convicted-.... Remember, the prosecutor initially declined to bring the case. And those problems with the underlying legal theory are still subject to review on appeal, which very well may result in the conviction being overturned. There’s actually a lot to debate there! Including whether the “shared context” you mention still holds in the circumstance of a blue-state jury trying Donald Trump. And I’d certainly not trust anyone—especially people without a legal background—to moderate people’s statements about Trump’s trial and conviction.
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!
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I take the "this seems to be true, based on what I know, subject to more information" approach.
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.
It would indeed be hard to convince me Trump has not committed crimes, considering a jury found that he had and the whole, "Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck," thing. Tony Accardo ran the Chicago Outfit for 4-5 decades and never spent a single day in jail. I don't think most people would agree that because he was never convicted (or even charged), he was not committing crimes.
If you read a story about a drug kingpin being convicted at trial, do you assume that he might be innocent?
> 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.
> Trump being a criminal is based on a shared legal and societal context.
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.
But, respectfully, even you, in your quest to cite facts require pointing out that your "facts" are not facts at all. The person in question, Trump, was not sentenced and therefore not "convicted" of anything. But this false claim is repeated a lot even by supposed "fact-checkers". Even the rest of that same paragraph is not made up of facts but you are trying to support some vague claim with appeals to things like "his own people wouldn't lie for him even though they loved him" or some such; you're bolstering a negative sentiment but not really clearly delineating anything resembling "facts". That's the issue that is being discussed and addressed by Meta at this point. Sure, we can call high schools physics problems as reflecting facts of nature, that's nice, but this is not what all the fuss is about.
> The person in question, Trump, was not sentenced and therefore not "convicted" of anything.
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.
That's a neat story.
"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...
Not true in New York, where this particular trial took place. From your own link:
So not only is sentencing distinct from conviction semantically, it's also distinct legally in the state of New York.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.Well, he is now a convicted felon.
This is an instance where semantics are nothing more than, well, semantics.
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.
> This is an instance where semantics are nothing more than, well, semantics.
I'm hard pressed to think of an example of a fact that your statement wouldn't apply to.
Sometimes when people complain ”you’re just arguing semantics!”, the semantics do in fact need to be cleared up, because the words being used are confusing, or wrong in a way that’s preventing participants in the discussion from getting on the same page.
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.
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.. from lawdictionary.org :
> 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
Yes and no.
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.
1+1=2 is not a political statement
Apparently, it is now.
There are few things that aren’t political regardless how you feel about them
The earth is "round" can be made political, but there is a factual consensus.
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.
The US is going to endure four more years of post-truth governance. It isn't in Zuckerberg's interest to have his organization pointing out that the emperor is unclothed when there is real risk of blowback in round 2.
I don't at all doubt that they're going to do whatever they can to cast this presumably longstanding product plan in the light most favorable to the governing majority! I just want to get the causality right.
I don't understand though: What makes you think that you are getting the causality right? It seems to me like you're asserting the causality goes one direction, when there doesn't seem to be any evidence (at least in public) for that assertion at the moment. Have I just missed some other information on this that you're basing this on?
I think he is suggesting that this move has favorable PR optics for the incoming administration. Making it appear like a conservative victory may give them some slack or earn them some favors.
Is it not a conservative culture-war victory designed to earn favors? There is no external evidence of this having been anything other than a contingency around November 6 of last year, so it's hard to definitively say it's one or the other.
It's not really, tbh. Like the vast vast vast majority of content reviewers are outside California and have been for well over a decade.
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.
> 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.
Yeah, and it's not really a big deal for them but looks good for Texas politicians. Well chosen pork, I guess.
its called pre-conceding
There was always a political component to it. The Twitter files told us this. It's just the political component is going the other way.
what are the twitter files?
The documents provided by Elon Musk to Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi etc when he took over Twitter.
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Facebook is a corporation and can 'censor' whoever they like. They are not 'the US'.
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.
It turns out that “normies” were people who have the kinds of normal, mainstream beliefs that Facebook has spent the past four years censoring.
The only thing that "turns out" is they wish to curry favor with the incoming administration. FB hasn't been censoring much of anything as far as I can tell; there are all kinds of vile, nasty comments all over it. Just unfriendly, unkind stuff, not even political things. It's probably one reason it's kind of struggling as a platform - that kind of thing isn't much fun.
But is it currying favor? Could just as well be "kiss the ring or you'll see your life's work AT&Ted into oblivion"
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.
The parent's point, is that the incoming administration won the popular vote... they are the 'normies' now.
Most voters don't care much about any of the details of this. They're not terribly unhappy with FB because they're using to keep track of people from high school back in the 90ies, or their families, or local recreation groups or something. Or they're not using it at all because it's for old people like me.
This is all just loud, performative subjugation to the incoming administration, that does take things like attacking trans people and immigrants as good stuff.
I would actually offer they Facebook is changing because their base has grown tired of their antics. My normy friends and family have complained of censorship increasingly over the last year. When I asked why we still use the platform one friend replied: “birthday reminders.” Then I thought that actually does summarize what I use the platform for. Not a great prospect for a company.
What sorts of conversations are you attempting to engage in that it is 'censoring' you? It seems pretty rare to me - even in heated exchanges.
There is a campaign to capitalize on the idea that right wing people are censored.
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.
49.8% to 48.3% of the popular vote.
That's a pretty thin advantage, and still barely not an outright majority.
Nearly all the levers of control of the US government to almost no control over the US government: that's a massive advantage. I can't help believing this, not the popular vote, is the motivation.
Exactly. Particularly the power of the incoming President to create bad PR (with 50% of the country) and the House to haul people into public testimony and yell at them.
Not to mention the federal money spigot.
Big companies aren't stupid and are largely amoral.
That's the silver lining through all of that: when right-wing ideologues start imposing their own groupthink model on social media, it stops being fun and people start to leave. Just look at Twitter. It's just not as fun anymore on there.
I see what you’re saying, but I also think the user demographics of Hacker News reduce the likelihood of moderation to begin with.
I don’t know if that’s true. SV culture has always been a very big tension between monied military-industrial types and (eventually also monied) antiwar hippies.
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).
I agree with what you're saying about SV, especially the military-industrial types. I'm not entirely sure what the makeup of HN demographics is, and would like to know. I have a suspicion that it's not just folks in SV. I also should have clarified more. In my opinion, the discourse here is more civil than on other platforms. I would suggest that has something to do with a combination of education and niche interests that attract a different user base. So maybe not in terms of factual correctness, but certainly in terms of the ability to have a civil conversation.
I think you are like a fish who isn't aware of the water it's swimming in.
HN doesn't need much moderation, because the discourse is so civil here [narrator voice: because of the good moderation].
At scale, the long term community civility balance point is likely dominated by the average user's willingness to change their behavior as a result of peer feedback.
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)
That’s a rather reductionist and slightly disparaging point of view. Moderation has its place I never said it didn’t, but do you really think that moderation is the only thing keeping this place from being 4chan? I think you have one deeply entrenched opinion and are ignoring that these are very different platforms.
HN is heavily moderated through a number of mechanisms: explicit community guidelines, community moderation (through voting), and active automated and manual moderation.
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.
Yea, I’ve become more aware of this since yesterday. I also think I should have provided way more context to what I was saying. I believe I came off as being against moderation but I’m not, I do think there is something unique about the user base just from the quality of content I see compared to other spaces, but I digress. I appreciate your thoughts and it gave me something to think about.
Yeah, and I probably should have figured out a more tactful way to make the point I was making. I wanted it to be more like a "you're one of today's lucky 10,000!"[0] to point out that I think you've been swimming in water without knowing it[1], but I think it ended up just being condescending.
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)
I thought that’s what the reference was. I think it all worked out in the end.
Last I ran the numbers, which was quite a few years ago, about 10% of HN posts were coming from IP addresses correlated to Silicon Valley (well, the Bay Area with a relatively wide radius). About 50% were coming from the US, and so on.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633521 (March 2018)
I should check again.
Thanks @dang. Turned on showdead. I will say that I was completely unaware of the moderation efforts here and appreciate having this pointed out to me. I like this option too. As far as transparency goes I don’t think it gets much better than this.
Showdead doesn’t work on stories AFAIK, just comments.
For stories on the front page, I made https://orangesite.sneak.cloud.
Of course it works on stories. There are eight right now on https://news.ycombinator.com/newest
Oh, I meant on the frontpage. I am quite curious about stuff “popular” enough to make it out of newest and into the top30, but off topic/rulebreaking enough to get nuked (either by mods or by flags).
Thanks for this!
i'm not from silly valley, but its the dominant voice here.
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.
Do you have showdead on? There is definite moderation going on, but a lot of it is collectively imposed (down votes, flagging). But, if you have your HN account set to show dead posts, you’ll see that even with this demographic there are still a good number of low quality posts.
I read with showdead on. I feel like people don't get modded for opinions here. Usually if the comments are dead it's because something is perceived as ad hominem, hostile, aggressive, violent, etc. It's usually the tone that gets them modded out and the content of the message, and a polite version of the same statement would stand.
There are outliers of course, but that's the general vibe.
> I feel like people don't get modded for opinions here.
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?
I do now. Good point. I haven’t been on here very long and should have been more aware before saying something thats incorrect.
That user has six karma and therefore does not have showdead on.
There's no karma threshold for turning showdead on.
That is correct. Possibly would change my perspective. Honestly a lot of these comments have and I do appreciate the input.
Facebook has said it was pressured by the Biden administration to censor topic like covid. This is as clear cut first amendment case as you will ever find.
If it's so clear cut then why did SCOTUS throw that case out?
>Writing for a liberal-conservative coalition of six justices, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said that neither the five individuals nor the two states who sued the government had legal standing to be in court at all.
https://www.npr.org/2024/06/26/nx-s1-5003970/supreme-court-s...
I short: because it wasn't Facebook that brought the case.
And we all know that the first amendment can never be immoral, not even when a tidal wave of deliberate propaganda is causing millions of people to die.
Yes, the lies the administration told about masks are one of the worst things done this century. There should be a reckoning for officials who lie to us for our own good.
Your being down voted is amazingly ironic for a topic on the politicization of fact checking. There are hundreds of comments here talking about how objective facts exists and the correctness of fact-checking. You reiterate the statement of the Facebook CEO and what that statement entails and you are moderated.
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...
I expect it was an easy bone to throw the incoming administration, which the tech world learned from v1 is placatable by giving them PR / sound bite wins.
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?
Obeying in advance, especially the Dana White appointment. Not that this move to community notes wasn't also a good product decision.
No, I meant to say Facebook fact-check.
> Facebook's fact-checkers have been that much of a product disaster.
> I've never seen a wrong Facebook fact-check
Confused between these two statements, then.
Do you believe the success or failure of these moderating features comes down to how accurate they are? People actually like Community Notes; they're part of the discourse on Twitter (even if most of them are pretty bad, some of them are timely and sharp). Meanwhile: Facebook's fact-checking features really do work sort of like PSA's for trolls. All the while, fact-checks barely scratch the surface of the conversations happening on the platform.
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).
> Do you believe the success or failure of these moderating features comes down to how accurate they are? People actually like Community Notes; they're part of the discourse on Twitter (even if most of them are pretty bad, some of them are timely and sharp). Meanwhile: Facebook's fact-checking features really do work sort of like PSA's for trolls. All the while, fact-checks barely scratch the surface of the conversations happening on the platform.
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.
I use Facebook, a lot (again: all the politics in my town happens there), and almost nothing is fact-checked; I see one fact-check notice for every 1,000 bad posts I see. I feel like I'm on pretty solid ground saying that what they're doing today isn't working.
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.
Not seeing fact checks likely means it's working: "Once third-party fact-checkers have fact-checked a piece of Meta content and found it to be misleading or false, Meta reduces the content’s distribution "so that fewer people see it.""
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.
> I feel like I'm on pretty solid ground saying that what they're doing today isn't working
How does that follow at all?
Success in what definition?
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.
> he openly espoused absolutist views about free speech originally, before some PR black eyes made that untenable.
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.
It's not that they're inaccurate, it's just that they cherry-pick the topics to fact-check and their choice (in my limited experience) is always biased leftwards. You can be absolutely correct and absolutely malicious at the same time.
>I think it would have been product development malpractice
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.
But because they are community driven, they are snarky in a way that represents the community, which makes me question if they are intrusive at all. They are what the community grows them into.
It seems pretty clear to me that one of these features generally makes users happy and, at the same time, does correct some misinformation, and the other catches about 0.0001% of the bad stuff and turns it into advertisements for how bad the site is.
How can you possibly call community notes on Twitter a "success" when they demonstrably have not reduced the amount of actively made up shit on the site, and the same people who complain about a fact checker saying "no, vaccines do not change your DNA" are just as upset when that info comes from the community notes box, and the only reason there hasn't been widescale anger about them is because Elon wants to pretend it was his idea.
I'm not saying Twitter it is good. It is demonstrably not. But you're kidding yourself if you thought Facebook fact checking was suppressing the antivaxers and flat-earthers.
Oh, so community notes on twitter are actually not good, but its good that Facebook is implementing them anyway? You make no sense and are constantly equivocating back and forth in all your different posts.
They're not there to eliminate made up shit, they're the to add context - e.g "this post is made up and demonstrably false".
Both professional fact-checkers and Community Notes have a pretty low false-positive rate.
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.
As a product decision, I agree.
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.
As someone active in "resistance"-type organization from 2017-2021, with fundamentally the same politics now as I had then: I think all this "bend the knees" shit is mostly working to the benefit of the GOP, and I wish people would stop it. We lost an election, in part because we bet that the median voter was prepared to disqualify MAGA Republicans. They are not. Find a new angle, so we can win in the midterms. This isn't working.
I'm not trying to convince other voters. The "bend the knee" shit is not something I'm saying to try to change opinions. Like you say, clearly the majority of Americans don't care.
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'm pretty sure they do this every cycle no matter who wins, but Democrats notice and recoil when it happens after a Republican win, and vice versa. There's also a titration of the news media mining clicks from a framing that de-"normalizes" the Trump administration. But that ship has sailed: you could say "This Is Not Normal" in 2017, which was a fluke nobody saw coming, but Trump won decisively this cycle, and absolutely everybody knew what we were getting into. It's time for the media to retire the schtick.
Is it a "schtick" to report such brazen cronyism?
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.
Referring to public company CEOs warmly greeting the newly elected president as "brazen cronyism" is a schtick, yes.
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.
Moving employee jurisdiction to suit the incoming administration is hardly the same as a warm greeting though, is it?
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.
The way to win is with a more appealing set of policy proposals.
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.
Unfortunately there is no party of "the working man" since the citizens united ruling opened the floodgates for legal & private bribery, and arguably before that. Bernie Sanders, whatever you think of his proposals and views generally, is the rare exception who stands against the bribery and acts as a true populist, and for that he was undermined and defeated as a presidential candidate. People know the democratic party is two-faced, and I don't see how that can ever change, with money being so essential to US politics now.
MAGA didn't win with money. The democrats spent far more. They won with a message.
I'm fairly sure this is either untrue or unknowable. If the official "Harris campaign" spent more than the "Trump campaign" that doesn't actually mean much, considering how many other avenues exist to spend money that escape public scrutiny.
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.
I'm pretty sure it is knowable. The democrats spent far more.
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.
Wow what brilliant political insight - this place is shocking sometimes.
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Thanks. I help when I can.
You could argue a particular person spent 44 billion but its a fuzzy argument. It's hard to tell..
I'm saying that the democrats lost because they keep taking corporate/oligarch money and are at odds with the values of the people who would otherwise support them. They aren't the party that supports the little guy anymore, so they're basically without an argument aside from "not Trump". I don't think you understood my previous post, which was a critique of the democrats, which used to have "the working man"'s back.
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.
Ah gotcha. I misread and agree completely with what you state. That does appear (to me anyway) exactly what happened.
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> 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 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.
> I get how the partisan story is easy to tell here, but I'm saying something pretty specific: I think it would have been product development malpractice for this decision not to have been in the works for many, many months, long before the GOP takeover of the federal government was a safe bet.
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.
If it was in the works for a long time, then Zuckerberg has been planning to bend the knee to Trump for a long time.
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 left and right according to the government of the day doesn't tell you where the true center is.
Autocracy is not Left or Right. It is corrupting all the institutions to serve the will of the autocrat, not the will of the people.
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.]
Autocracts doesn't get democratically elected, as far as I understand. Trump is a democratically elected leader who will end his term at most in 2028. Autocracts tend to not be democratically elected (or to change the rules once they're elected to never be deposed). Zuckerberg will bend his knee to the Democrats if they win next term. This is not autocracy, this is just knowing where the wind blows.
That doesn't make sense with the common use of the word. Autocracy is a much wider term than a militia style dictatorship, and is mostly used in the context of democracy.
Most, if not all, autocrats are democratically elected (with some wildly varying definition of democracy of course).
Most autocrats in history have been democratically elected or inherited their position from other autocrats who were.
In current times, democratically elected autocrats include Putin of Russia, Orban of Hungary, Erdoğan of Turkey, Chavez/Maduro of Venezuela, Bukele of El Slavador, and more. Jumping back a most notorious autocrat, Hitler was democratically elected.
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...
I don't think the point of the fact-checkers is so that facebook users like them, and it seems odd to pretend that was ever the point.
I don't understand your point at all. Community Notes on E(x) has been ineffective, because ultimately the point of moderation is to delete posts which aren't true so they receive no reach and spread no disinformation.
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...
> ultimately the point of moderation is to delete posts which aren't true so they receive no reach and spread no disinformation.
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.
> I've never seen a wrong Facebook fact-check;
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.
> like people being in Texas makes them more objective?!
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.
Is the distribution of people in Austin so very different from the Bay Area?
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.
> Is the distribution of people in Austin so very different from the Bay Area?
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.
Its slightly but consistently different. I moved from Austin (after 30+ years in TX) to the west coast, and the group think / speech policing is extremely noticeable to me (spend most of my time in Portland and SF), even though its not extremely different.
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.
I don't see how it matters where the mods are located when their instructions still come from California.
Of course it matters. Have you seen the emotional reaction people get to Trump/Kamala posts?
No because I don’t use these shit platforms. But the point is if policy says to moderate content of type ABC then I don’t see why someone in TX would do something different than someone in CA. It’s the same policy.
If the policy were that precise you would not need humans.
> 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
But... how?
> “maybe it's just a way of saying that certain kinds of 'content' like attacking trans people is going to be ok now”
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...
> it allows “allegations of mental illness or abnormality, based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird.’”
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.
No, it’s explicitly so that allegations of mental illness are forbidden except if the target is gay or trans.
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.
There is ambiguity, insofar as the whole document is a word salad of sentence fragments and rambling sentences that branch off in different directions without logical coherence.
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.
You forgot the biggest one – replacing Nick Clegg as their global policy chief with Joel Kaplan, a Republican lobbyist.
Seems like not the biggest one? That seems like the kind of role you take knowing you're going to hold it only so long as you have a rapport with the current governing majorities.
This is on par for Meta. Don't forget that Cheryl Sandberg was their Democratic Party liaison.
> The ideological bits are: ...
Should we expect Meta doing 180 degrees u-turns every 4 years when another party wins US Presidential elections?
Only when the incoming party has threatened going after anyone who was against them with criminal charges.
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No it doesn't
Given the extremes of presidential candidates, I think the answer is Yes, since there exists no middle ground between fact and fiction.
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.
No, I expect over time they'll gradually settle into an equilibrium that works in both sets of circumstances.
I can’t help but roll my eyes at mindless euphemisms like “attacking trans people.”
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.
Is it not possible that ‘attacking trans people’ is both (sometimes) a euphemism for criticism of maximalist positions and (at other times) a perfectly normal term that designates approximately what ‘attacking x’ generally means? There is such a thing as an unsubstantive and utterly unpleasant insult explicitly motivated by the fact that its target is trans. Many trans people say that there are many such, and one does not need to believe everything that trans people say (surely with the result of inconsistency!) to think that the evidence they present is not wholly concocted.
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?
It’s possible theoretically.
In practice people complaining about attacks on trans people almost always want to shut down discussion about related topics all together.
Yes because it has no real life consequences like https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01979-5.epdf or https://goodlawproject.org/rise-of-deaths-young-trans-people...
I think that it would help if you were to suggest a term people who don’t want to ‘shut down discussion about related topics all together’ should use. Otherwise, the effect (although perhaps not the intention) of deprecating the term ‘attacks on trans people’ is that the sort of discussion you admit is possible theoretically will be impossible for want of a suitable term to designate the sorts of attacks it concerns.
I can't help but roll my eyes at "serious issues" you know in most states these anti trans laws were passes targeting handfuls of children in each state, sometimes a single child. But oh yes that's a serious issue for sure right now
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This is a cheap political gotcha accompanied by a litany of unevidenced and vague allegations against a political out-group (which "particular group"? On what basis do you assert that "some AI somewhere" is involved, and why would that matter? Not to mention the tired "dog whistle" cliche) and a demand for self-censorship.
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".
They are talking about the following, not ‘top’ surgery for trans men/boys:
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.
>you can infer from the number of patients included in just one study that it’s very common
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.
Thanks for digging up the statistic, but seems to confirm that bsder was correct about the relative numbers.
>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.
> basically making it harder for teenage boys to be manlier
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.
My point was that the breathless hyperbole about "gender affirming" surgery is actually in direct opposition to "traditional male stereotype" of the same group--thus invalidating that the concern is a genuine issue rather than political rhetoric.
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.
> thus invalidating that the concern is a genuine issue rather than political rhetoric.
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.
Calling a legitimate argument a "dog whistle" is a classic tactic OP is talking about which is used to shut down discussion. Just debate the merit of what he's saying rather than try to label him as an enemy.
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).
You are repeating the talking point without including the number:
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 are repeating the talking point without including the number
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.)
Thanks for providing actual numbers!
I would just like to say the discussion under your comment is exactly the kind of productive discussion citing papers and statistics I want to see more of.
Too many progressives want to terminate such discussions by censoring any dissenting opinions and attacking any kind of disagreement as bigotry.
> 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.
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.
All right, fine. Let's use your definitions. Here is a report from the US in 2022: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9555285/
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?
Did you read this section of the paper?
> 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.
Not only that, but the number of kids on hormone blockers is in the thousands (and increasing a lot every year). It's claimed that their effects are reversible but that is false, they lead to sterilization if the timing is wrong.
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.
According to this way more recent study they are totally reversible: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0929693X2...
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
I appreciate the study links, but it makes it really hard to take you seriously when you claim trans kids are not allowed to “exist”. That’s extreme hyperbole, as if they’re still alive they obviously exist.
If you don't allow for proper treatment like social transitioning and puberty blockers, they can't be themselves and therefore they can't exist.
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
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So is that "critique"
Do you have any substantive criticism you could share?
For example how it cites the cass report that's been debunked quite a few times already
The Cass Review covers a lot of ground. Which parts of relevance to that article are you claiming have been "debunked", and on what basis?
I posted one of the better critiques (by Yale) already in the parent comment you're reacting to
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>According to this way more recent study they are totally reversible: And this one says the same:
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 see nothing in your links that supports those conclusions.
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.
>I'd start with chapter 5.2.1.7 go from there.
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.
> As far as I can tell, you linked to abstracts for a paywalled academic papers.
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.
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This is exactly what I’m talking about.
A demand to censor any opinions dissenting from what you already believe.
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Surgery on males for gynecomastia IS classified as a "gender affirming surgery" in the statistics regardless of what you, personally, think.
So, when you see statistics about this, know that that particular operation is almost all of the cases.
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Calling trans men "distraught girls" is just pure transphobia.
Being “distraught” is pretty much inherent to being trans.
It’s the feeling that you are in the “wrong body”. That’s going to be distressing to anyone.
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The reversibility of puberty blockers is highly disputed.
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.
Disputed by the disingenuous. Notice who they always exclude from the restrictions from those "dangerous drugs"? Cis children. Magically that 0.01% of the population faces absolutely zero issues.
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> > Whether and under what circumstances trans women have no advantage over cos women is a highly complex question.
> 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.
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Why wouldn't puberty blockers be reversible?
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
Where is your actual evidence puberty blockers are reversible? They are male. Their reproductive systems are organized around creating sperm not eggs. HRT does not change a male into a female. There are myriad aspects of biology that still makes them male and confers all such advantages in athletics. This is just reality.
This comment fundamentally misunderstands what “male” means.
No matter how inconvenient a truth, humans cannot change sex.
>puberty blocker, which are totally reversible
They are not.
Why not? What's not reversible about them?
Bone density, height, vocal changes, etc.
You can't just delay puberty until you're 20
The problem with bone density can be avoid with extra vitamin D (mentioned in the paper I linked).
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.
You can't replace puberty with vitamins.
Puberty is when humans grow the most.
Women do not have low voices: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoQ0ASTTI2g
> "Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas.
Prediction: it'll be cali-expats in Austin and nothing changes.
They’ll be inside the jurisdiction of whatever rules Texas feels like making.
Nah, loads of the current staff will leave, but they'll hire equivalent people in Austin.
Blue Sky is what mastodon was when musk bought Twitter now X.
Also currently in the App Store (iPhone) bluesky sits at 167 .. Musk's X at 46 and Facebook at 19.
BlueSky is what Twitter was some time before Musk bought it. Given time, it will become what Twitter is now, too. It's just too profitable. Mastodon was its own thing and remains its own thing.
Austin is much closer to the center of mainstream American sentiment than the SF Bay Area, but it’s still to the left of center.
And Redding, California is far to the right of it.
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.
It’s a Cost reduction garbed in PR.
They have teams in Austin already.
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Parent obviously meant "center" to be the political center of the U.S. given the previous sentence. I'm not sure they're correct in either statement (not having investigated in any way), or that this is a reasonable thing to consider for a global platform (to the extent that Facebook is one).
Nonetheless, it's trivially true that somewhere in the US must be to the left of the political center of the U.S.
This is a statement about yourself, not the US.
Not really? The democratic and republican parties are both classical liberal parties, invested in business and capital as the standard and correct way to organize a society. Classical liberalism is a center-right ideology, globally.
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.
You are not using the term “left of center” how most people do. Which is fine if you want to but then don’t get surprised when you have to explain yourself every single time.
BTW as an actual “classical liberal” I find it hilarious you describe the two parties that way.
Which of the two isn't a classical liberal party?
Just where exactly do you think the centre of the political spectrum is if anything left of it means full-on Marxist-Leninist communism?
Social democrats (e.g. Nordic model) are left of center, but aren't MLs or communists. Anarchists (e.g. Kropotkin) are left of center but aren't MLs or communists.
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.
You could just as easily say that the Republicans and Democrats are both left of center because neither party wants to restore a politically active monarchy, establish a national church and reform law and government under explicitly religious lines, restrict and revoke citizenship based on ethnicity, or install a military government. You might say, "but those are all crazy far-right things that no sane developed country would do", but I think nationalizing industries and abolishing private property are crazy far-left things that no sane developed country would do, either.
Canadian potash corporation, Chilean mining, French financial sector, gazprom in Germany, Indian fossil fuels, railways around the globe, Amtrak here in the U.S.
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.
> 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.
You're generally correct, but I imagine you won't get a good reaction on HN to this viewpoint. Most people on here unfortunately don't really an understanding of politics beyond a very surface level one.
HN is not a political site and Deng doesn't allow much politics. Your generalization is based purely on only the surface level discussion allowed.
Maybe it's you that doesn't have nuanced 'understanding'?
I'm certainly no expert, I just wish we could at least use the surface level terms correctly.
I'd be thrilled to have the right correctly differentiate between the democrats and leftists. Using the right terms would be a useful start to having some dialogs.
Burlington, Vermont.
Burlington Vermont might be close.
Rutland
...how do you mean? What are you defining 'left of center' as?
Parent was making an observation that the entire US political discourse, including both sides, tends to be right of global center.
Why would the political leanings of other countries matter in a discussion about the US?
Because the US is part of the world.
Not a discussion about "the world."
I can't tell if you're being obtuse or obstinant.
The political systems of other countries are irrelevant when discussing the United States.
The Left Right dichotomy is a fairly broad set of political ideas, especially globally. The Left typically includes socialists, communists, anarchists, labor movements, syndicalists, and social democrats. Typically, these movements are collectivist, whether that's collectivist in a big government or collectivist in small local communities.
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.
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Not at all - I'm just confused about the whole left / right distinction being proposed by the OP, since "nationalization" was never (as far as I can tell) part of the "left" at least when we talk about _socialism_. National socialists were definitely interested in "nationalizing" things, but socialists were a little bit more broad in their interpretation of what they were doing with "the stuff that isn't property" (at least as far as I understand it).
But maybe the OP was not talking about "what they thought they were doing" only describing "what they do / did"?
I was articulating the sorts of things leftists often push for. Nationalizing industry is one such thing - holding industry in common good for the people is one flavor of leftist. You see that in Soviet style communism, for example.
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.
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> most of us would be fine with some experimentation
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.
No it isn't. The only implementation of ATProto so far has been heavily criticized for immediately blocking anyone with wrong opinions, while at the same permitting pedolovers post without much trouble (that butterfly logo is a well-known pedophile logo).
More reports about the awful actions of bluesky/ATProto: https://www.newsweek.com/conservatives-join-bluesky-face-abu...
The Bluesky pedo trope is a right wing falsehood, yet another piece of their misinformation agenda
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
I don't know Dana White and I don't know any predecessor. It isn't really relevant though apart from which actions they indeed did take in their approach.
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.
> I don't know Dana White
Oh, he runs the UFC and also the new slap fighting league. What that has to do with Facebook? I have no idea.
Facebook is a rhetorical slap fighting league.
The whole thing is ideological. Trump and Musk are undertaking their takeover on government, and so the trillion dollar companies which control the rules of the spaces in which the vast majority of our discourse today happens, do their thing and kiss the ring.
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.
Perhaps part of it is the optics that California is interpreting it for other places?
How is it any better for Texas to interpret it for other places?
Not saying it’s better for anywhere, only how California might be seen.
Because liberals in Austin Texas have far more experience in what it means for liberal and conservative opinions to coexist together in one place, vs California where liberal opinions are the default and everything else must be shunned.
Moving the moderation teams to Texas may be a way to induce a lot of the people working there to quit.
Texas is of course also an easier place to run a business.
Well, it's Austin, TX.
Travis County was blue 69-29.
Hardly a politically conservative place.
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Threads is confusing as all hell. Who are these random people? Which post am I replying to? Does this appear on my Instagram?
GP was asking about how fact checking is better than community notes, but you're saying that Meta's community notes will be worse than fact checking, which may be but which is not responsive to GP's question.
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> "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 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.
It's not about actual employees, it's about signalling "Texas - yay!" and "California - booooo!" in order to make good with the incoming administration.
Well, that and moderators being able to afford 1-bedroom apartments.
Says more about fb being penny pinching than anything. The kid working the panda express in california can afford a 1br apartment, why not a fb moderator?
> The kid working the panda express in california can afford a 1br apartment
A lot of them can't, actually, but that's really a different problem.
Have you ever been to or lived in Austin? Are you aware of how high the cost of rent is there now?
Every day "Austin" refers to a larger and larger part of the earth so maybe specifying where in Austin is appropriate?
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...
Actually the cost of rent and housing has dropped there the last few years, because they are doing a good job building. Not so great for my SFH's value, but its definitely dropping from "WTF" to "Seems more normal" pricing.
Grew up in Ohio. Always wanted to live in Silicon Valley. Been here 14 years now. Not leaving. But this is happening because of how terrible the California brand has become. Pretending our prestige and brand is the same as it was 20 (or even 10) years ago is not the answer.
Yeah I was recently given the choice to move for RTO to the bay area versus pacific northwest, and everyone I asked about this expressed their dissatisfaction with California.
That's a complicated topic, but part of that is because California has become a target for a number of people with money, influence and media outlets.
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.
Yes there is a lot of “unfair competition” but ultimately you build a brand by demonstrating your positive qualities and making it clear what you stand for.
This is an us problem not a them problem.
How can you build that brand if someone is determined to tear it down for ideological reasons?
People care less about ideology than they do about their own lives and prosperity.
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.
Oh, I'm 100% on board with the housing stuff. That's what I do in terms of local politics here in Oregon.
But by and large, the 'branding' is places like Fox News crapping on California.
No that’s just talking heads carping on cable tv.
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.
Well, that, but also the worst housing markets in the country.
Techbros are pretty toxic, and that culture was very much SV 10-20 years ago.
That said, most of them have since (loudly) decamped the state.
By the same - entirely unevidenced - reasoning, your posts ITT are about signalling the reverse in order to make good with sympathetic readers on HN.
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.
Thinking Menlo Park (or any of Silicon Valley, really) is in any way "extreme left-wing" is a sure indication you haven't spent any time there and are basing your viewpoints off of what others have said on social media. Billion dollar corporations by definition do not support anything remotely "extreme left-wing".
I’ve lived in SF, Mountain View and also the east bay and I’ve worked at a billion dollar company that did indeed support some very left-wing causes.
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.
That's why I was talking about Silicon Valley, not SF or east bay. They're much different places. Besides that, a corporation giving lip service to diversity =/= "extreme left-wing" views. These billion dollar corporations are still capitalist, through and through. Actual extreme left-wing views are staunchly opposed to capitalism.
Talking about "actual extreme left-wing views" is something that only really works in internet arguments where everything eventually trends into Communism vs Capitalism (TM).
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.
That's a funny way to say "I'm sorry, I should not have assumed you were unfamiliar with the region, when it has instead become clear that you live out there".
Actual extreme left-wing views are those that the average San Franciscan holds. Economics isn't everything.
What are these extreme left-wing views?
Here's Claude's response to your question:
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
- Abortions for convenience
- Men can be women if they believe really hard
- Children should be allowed and encouraged to cut their body parts off
- Parades based around public sexual degeneracy are good
- No guns, no self-defense against criminals
- Open borders
- No punishing criminals, especially black ones
- Said a naughty word? Get expelled, lose your job, be unhireable forever
- Let homeless people do as they please
- White people bad, Asian people bad, men bad, rich people bad, fit people bad, any group that is intelligent, successful, happy, and normal bad
- Censorship good
Very few, if any, billion-dollar corporations are in any way “extreme left wing”.
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.
What I mean is an extreme left-wing views would advocate for the nationalization or abolition of all private companies, so a corporation couldn't fit into that.
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Time to go NOSTR.
Less drama, full speed.
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That's a housing problem. California is very NIMBY and doesn't build enough homes.
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.
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Isn't it a bit of a stereo type prejudgement to say all Texans are like that?
>like people being in Texas makes them more objective
When the dominant ideology in Texas supports freedom of speech more than the dominant ideology in California: yes.
except when it comes to banning books in schools. and prohibiting classroom discussions on race or LGBT topics.
somehow free speech never seems to cut both ways with these people.
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I don’t use either Facebook or X so I have no personal experience. But the New York Times cited this meta-analysis for the proposition that they’re not ineffective:
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
Here's the Community Notes whitepaper [1], for how it all works. Previous discussion [2].
[1] Birdwatch: Crowd Wisdom and Bridging Algorithms can Inform Understanding and Reduce the Spread of Misinformation, https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.15723
Thanks for pushing for clarity here. So: I'm not saying that fact-checker warnings are ineffective because people just click through and ignore them. I doubt that they do; I assume the warnings "work". The problem is, only a tiny, tiny fraction of bogus Facebook posts get the warnings in the first place. To make matters worse, on Facebook, unlike on Twitter, a huge amount of communication happens inside (often very large) private groups, where fact-checker warnings have no hope of penetrating.
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.
So, why wasn't a mixed approach taken? That's the obvious question you should be asking. Paid fact checkers are leaps in quality and depth of research, meanwhile Jonny Twoblokes doesn't have the willingness to research such topic, nor the means to provide a nuanced context to the information. You are saying that the impact was limited, but it was not because it was low quality. If you do both, where the first draft id done by crowdsource with the professional fact checker to give the final version, I don't think you would have a good reason to not do it.
I've answered elsewhere on the thread why I think the warning-label approach Facebook took was doomed to failure, as a result of the social dynamics of Facebook.
Notably Zuckerberg did not cite any data for his assertions that community notes are effective.
A way to quantify this doesn't immediately come to my mind. Maybe reasonable metrics would be:
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].
> Fact-checker warning labels are effective even for those who distrust fact-checkers
Yes, but are they true?
Haha yeah indeed, I was also reading this thinking: "uhm, ok, how can they be 'effective' if they're false in the first place?"
Lol sometimes people just have no logic
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I don't care about the fact checking part but I do care about the "removing the limits on political content on feeds".
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.
Didn't they get in trouble with lawmakers and / or advertisers for that in the first place?
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People who are floating using the military to steal territory from a NATO ally, as just one totally random example.
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."
No, I don’t take press releases as fact - do you not see that mainstream opinion on gender and immigration is clearly not in line with what Facebook were moderating for?
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.
The deep irony is that some of the original contributors to Birdwatch were working on this stuff at Facebook before being blocked for various reasons and leaving to work at Twitter.
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.
Also didn't know Meta was outsourcing fact-checkers which is a very terrible idea that sponsored a shady economy of ghost workers that were paid pennies for reviewing gore content.
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.
> It'll really take a special mind to think Community Notes wasn't a positive feature added to the social network sphere.
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.
Facebook's approach to fact checking has always been cost-optimization.
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.
The most useful result of Community Notes I've seen is when someone posts something Y, and then a few hours later it comes out that actually it was Z, community notes have been able to attach "actually it was Z" to the original viral post, still being shared.
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).
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How about the fact that Meta killing their fact-checking feature will have a very direct impact on the quality of Community Notes? Per today's Platformer:
"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...)
I assume these businesses are ad supported.
Does Facebook’s patronage constitute a significant % of the industry?
I don’t think the fact-checkers were a better product feature in the current environment. I do think that the reasons they aren’t a good product feature are linked to a concerted effort to convince people to distrust fact-checkers. I recognize that many people would say the distrust arose from the way fact-checkers behaved; I don’t think that’s true.
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.
It doesn’t matter if they were better or worse, it’s all relative. It depends on who you ask, everyone will give a different answer. You are looking at this from a technological and problem solving perspective, while the people who made the decision prioritized these much lower on their list. You need to think like a politician and consider the PR side of things. This is not about solving the problem, it’s about perception, only perception.
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 also gives Facebook a new product feature that encourages user activity.
It was the correct chess move given the current board.
I'm not sure about better, but I'm concerned about a second Rohingya genocide.
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.
I tend to blame the people actually doing the genocide for genocide, rather than a social media network. Ultimately I think one can clearly draw the line for personal responsibility well before literal murder.
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.
How convenient it would be for the social media network if people tended not to blame them. I just watched Zuckerberg say that he's glad about the "free expression" that could happen because of Facebook, and these genocidal posts getting boosted by the algorithm are an example of this. What is missing on Facebook is actual free expression, of people seeing posts from people they follow, including small business owners who would like to reach their customers.
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We can look at precedent here. RTLM's involvement in the Rwandan genocide for example would be a good place to start. There's a pretty explicit connection between the radio propaganda (RTLM furthered the Hutu Power ideology) and the actual violence. We should be able to draw a distinction between Jack Thompson and Tipper Gore fearmongering versus explicitly violent rhetoric designed to dehumanize people and promote the eradication of those people.
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.
Eh, I don't think that lens is useful. It appears to me that the genocide very likely may not have occurred -- and certainly would have harmed fewer people -- if Facebook didn't exist.
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.
The genocide also wouldn't have occurred if the internet wasn't available, or if air/water didn't exist, etc
I think blaming the medium for communication is a bit silly. That is just the substrate. The responsibility solely lies with the murderers.
I don't think abdicating responsibility for the consequences of technology you create is a sustainable system of ethics, but I also understand why you feel the way you do and where you're coming from. (I'm not throwing shade, we just have very different systems of ethics.)
Generally fb has trended to worse rather than better. I already passed my personal tipping point years ago and quit fb.
Same. I deleted my account in like 2018.
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?
SAD! Craigslist was a much better product and community even without the luxury of identity verification. It had some obvious spam but by and large worked fine once you got the hang of it. Marketplace is a cesspool of lowballers and sex workers with some shitty ML sprinkled on it, underneath it all some slow and clunky RPCs that need refresh all the time.
Forget about the sucky product. Who has Facebook been hiring in the past decade that built that technical crapshoot.
It is what it is. It's a hotspot for local politics, so quitting it isn't really an option for me.
It's also the marketplace in some countries. Wanna sell some furniture locally? It may be close to the only option.
Just wait until they release a job board. They’ll figure this out soon.
They tried this years ago, but didn't make it work.
Yeah, but same story with the marketplace. There’s a lot of hourly jobs that need to be filled. Restaurant jobs really…
All the burning man camps I get invited to are a bunch of Gen X-ers conferring on Facebook groups
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.
Yeah younger millenials and GenZ tend to do this sort of conversation on Discord.
yeah exactly, its now a better platform and has enough critical mass. With Nitro/Discord's paid plan you can change your profile per server if you identify different ways in different groups
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
Every Xer I know left FB years ago.
> 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
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.
It’s amazingly bad. My feed is just endless blatantly obvious engagement bait, interspersed with occasional posts from people I actually want to see.
> but this feels like the kind of decision that should have been in the works for multiple quarters now
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.
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[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.
> I'd like to hear an informed take from anybody who thinks that Facebook's fact-checkers were a better product feature than Community Notes.
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.
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Yeah I'd like to hear this too. I use both and I love community notes. People are pretending like this is some big culture war issue and a win for the right but I've seen community notes call out Elon for retweeting bullshit more times than I count. (As well as calling Jacobin our on there's)
I also appreciate that if I liked a post that community notes called out and I'm getting a notification that was misinformation.
Well the presidential election was a win for the right. FB and Meta have always complied with and often been an arm of the US govt regarding regulating speech on social media, and they are not really changing that. It's the gov't that's changing.
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Ah right, because calling it a product feature suddenly makes the assessment of it objective and non-political
Facebook has a long, bloody history of expanding their services into areas without investing in content moderation first. Sometimes they don’t have a single employee who can speak the language of their users. As a result, tens of thousands of people have died in genocide.
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.
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I think both are atrocious features. It would be useful to know facts about a site or article: this is a new domain, this is a state-run outlet, etc.
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.
> how about I get to use my critical thinking
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.
> Because no-one, including you, is an expert on everything.
As I said, god forbid I forget my place and use my mind in the domain of my betters.
You can continue to use your mind.
Pretend that the Community Notes are a conspiracy to rob you of your free will and ignore them.
<country hick accent>Looks like we got ourselves a reader…
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...
I'm no expert in this domain, but the larger issue at play here is that:
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.
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I don't really mind how they police things and it's not the point of this announcement. The technology firms think Trump could be so dangerous to their businesses that they are willing to completely give in pre-emptively to this threat. What else are they willing to do given this, interfere in elections for example? Promote misinformation that benefits Trump? Undermine truth about vaccines and safety in our health system? The list of potential problems is quite long.
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> Community notes are just opinions of random people on internet
It's much more complicated than that. Here's the white paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.15723
I "trust" Wikipedia more than I do fullfact and so on. They've all overplayed their hand.
>I "trust" Wikipedia more than I do fullfact and so on
Philip Cross is very pleased to hear that!
You can not sue Wikipedia. You could sue facebook.
I hope I don’t sound condescending, that’s not my intent, but this made me smile, it means you think Wikipedia is special. I like 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.
But could you actually get any money from suing Wikipedia? They would just deflect blame to volunteer editors.
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!
> If facebook publishes "fact" and people get harmed as result, Facebook gets sued to bankruptcy.
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.
Of course you can sue Wikipedia. There's no law against suing Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is just a platform, it is not a publisher. Facebook was the publisher!
Suing Wikipedia would be like suing email and SMTP protocol!
In the U.S. (relevant because it is home to the Wikimedia Foundation), you can sue anyone for any reason at any time. You might get immediately dismissed, sued back ("abuse of process" or similar), or something along those lines, but there is nothing structural that stops you.
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?
Neither email not SMTP are legal entities.
Wikipedia (or more precisely, the Wikimedia Foundation that owns it) is.
You can absolutely sue Wikipedia [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_News_International_vs._W...
edit: My bad, I get the joke now.
I'm referring to the organisations that anoint themselves as arbiters of truth rather than just Facebook but I suppose the point almost stands
"fact-checkers were authoritative source of the truth"
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.
Woosh?
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You can’t possibly seriously believe this?
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.
I think it was very clearly sarcasm.
Well that’s a relief.
Stumbled upon this yesterday or so:
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)
This reminds me of William Buckley preferring to be governed by the first 100 names of the Boston phone book over the Harvard faculty.
Facebook lifts ban on posts claiming Covid-19 was man-made (2021)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/may/27/facebook-...
Thank God Congress finally passed a law that made it illegal to get brain cancer from cell phones.
> Community notes are just opinions of random people on internet. Like Wikipedia.
IDK if you intended to compare this to the world's #1 comprehensive and trustworthy repository of information.
But if you did, mission accomplished.
Joke ;)
> Community notes are just opinions of random people on internet.
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.
When you use the term "open-source" in this context, what do you mean?
> When you use the term "open-source" in this context, what do you mean?
The code for its implementation is literally available on GitHub [0] under the Apache License 2.0.
Thanks!
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Well the most mainstream "news" source Fox news had to pay out almost a billion dollars for dis-information, so the biggest mainstream 'news' (though they did claim in court no one could possibly think they are news so it's ok for them to lie) institution kind of had to apologize.
> Well the most mainstream "news" source Fox news had to pay out almost a billion dollars for dis-information […]
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]
The court made findings though, didn't they? Check page 44 under 'Fair Report'.
https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Civil-Opinio...
Also I saw an interesting interview with Marc Andreessen recently where he mentioned about how the Dems would fund "Disinformation Research" units at universities. These research units would (shockingly!) be staffed by 100% Democrat supporters and (even more shockingly) would tend to view everything the Dems disagree with as "disinformation". These groups would then apply pressure to media/social media companies to suppress content. So they were able to breach the first amendment by using censorship by surrogacy. The Democrat censorship industrial complex was ugly and insidious and leading us to a very dark place indeed.
The comment you're replying to was a joke.
By the time I realized that, it was too late.
Fact checkers will link or establish their evidence.
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.
> 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 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...
Fact checkers are the technocratic solution, they're a panel of experts to Community Note's jury of our peers. Fact checkers are a much better product feature than community notes if we want a feature that best serves people who care about facts. That's not our world, though. People don't care about facts, we are humans, our lives are lived based on vibes. The average person would rather listen to their idiot friend's uneducated thoughts about transgender women in sport than listen to a lecture from an expert. Community notes is probably a better feature for the real world, but it's still junk, "effective" is not a label the feature deserves, because the majority of misinformation on X goes un-noted.
Do you have some kind of analysis demonstrating Facebook fact checkers are more accurate than X’s Community Notes?
Breaking: Leading Fact Checkers Investigate, Find Leading Fact Checkers More Accurate Than Community Notes.
Indeed, how to fact check the fact checkers?
If we could have legitimate fact checking that really works, then I guess we wouldn't need any politics at all.
> Indeed, how to fact check the fact checkers?
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.
Hey, some news came out that might give you an insight to why the fact checking might not always work:
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/10/mark-zuckerberg-says-biden-p...
It are also facts that many politicians are corrupt and are fooling us. But they arranged it nicely so that they aren't being fact checked.
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.
I was answering your question. You asked how fact checkers can be fact checked and the answer is like any other job. Fact checking isn't magic, and it's existed for a long time. It's basically what newspaper sub-editors do.
> 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.
Well I think what you are calling fact checking is actually journalism.
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.
It sounds like you are disagreeing with the concept of facts, but facts do exist. If someone claims that a politician said a particular thing in a speech yesterday, and the politician gave no speech yesterday, then the claim is factually false. It's not a matter of respect or disrespect to say so, and it doesn't matter what you choose to believe on that topic.
> 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.
Well it has a lot to do also with the way you say things, how you interpret the words. Maybe the politician did give some kind of speech, but maybe it wasn't an official speech. There's always more to the story, and multiple ways of interpreting things.
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.
"People don't care about facts" is such an asinine reactionary way of thinking about macro dynamics in the world. It has no predictive power at all.
We don’t. People are social. We care about what the people in our community think, whether it’s factually accurate or not is inconsequential. Those of us wasting our lives arguing on the internet in the pursuit of truth are a tiny minority of atypical people. People yearn for the warm embrace of affirmation, not the cold hard truth challenging them at every turn.
You have too many abstractions between you and understanding other people.
Most people in your country are actually not that different from you.
Well first you've got to define what is meant by "facts". Most people presume the word refers to some kind of community consensus, and then they immediately gatekeep what counts as the "community" among which the consensus is shared.
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.
Americans don't care about facts.
There's a reason why you have Creationists at the highest levels of government.
Europeans are just as silly but mistake failure for sincerity. As a sad fantasist I'm immensely fond of Anglo culture but many brits are totally misaligned and insane.
Unnecessary attacks like this don't help your cause and part of what has driven the other side to the point they are at.
Do you mean that OP is incorrect, or just impertinent? Just because you have to use a light touch does not mean your friend does not have a Problem. (And I'm speaking as an American)
It resembles Objectivism. "The facts are the facts and you should see them the same way I do or else!!"
More like “the facts are the facts and reality does not care if you don’t believe in it”. It’s a special kind of nihilism to want to stick it to the universe and insist on one’s own alternative reality like an overgrown angry teenager edgelord.
Ayn Rand was pretty insistent that we should be able to objectively ascertain the facts. Objectivism failed precisely because we're not really all that rational, and because apart from the irrational part of us there's also the fact that we can manipulate perception and gaslight others. If you're a newcomer to a pair of groups that vehemently disagree as to the facts you might soon find that you have to make a choice yourself as to which group to join, and suddenly you have to deal with social pressures not just facts. Do you want to be in the in-group or in the out-group? Can you deal with the shaming that goes with being in the out-group? Etc.
It's all so tedious, but this is what we humans are like.
It’s true. Fact checking was found to scarcely impact misinfo.
I’m in the field and I am thinking of how to work without focusing on truth, because that’s how most humans work!
