When will the media realize the Facebook misinformation problem isn't easily fixable via humans or AI, is endemic to a planet's-worth of humans interacting unmediated via social apps, and will always be there in some form, assuming there's a semblance of free speech?
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please. second clause is absolutely accurate. there's no right to freedom of reach. it's not enshrined in the constitution. it wasn't even a possibility until a 10 yrs ago. conniptions are by people who don't understand how an algorithmic feed works (sometimes willfully ignorant)
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The 'this isn't the government therefore no 1A' arguments about this are the most tiresome and pointless. That's clearly not public perception. If anything, the people who think posting with no feed distribution is speech are the ones who don't seem to get it.
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Instead of me defending what's reality right now, why doesn't one of you opinionated disinformation people actually sketch out a vision of how this would work in practice. Who's doing the truth patrolling? In a world where much news is becoming op-ed, what's held to the standard?
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What's funny is even if you're right, we're still fucked. In a world of wildly divergent values, truth alone is enough to get to Civil War II levels of polarization. Nobody needed to do a viral deepfake of the Kavanaugh hearings for that to become what it did.
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I hate to go all Notebook, but it is conceivable that a way out of this is not in ‘the tech’ but ~within ourselves~. Were a credible authority to argue convincingly that (for eg) sharing fake news was morally wrong, then we might see some changes
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Yes. The only way out of this is human culture around media and virtualized identity changing. Most polls show major differences between pre and post-Internet generations and their views on things like privacy, or discernment between real and fake news. But that takes a while.
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Alternatives can emerge. As more people wake up to the idea that when you optimize for engagement, you optimize for lies—they might be willing to switch
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What’s the opposite of engagement? Engagement, in good faith, was intended to be a proxy for what us disgusting humans care about, like and would want to see. I don’t blame big tech for that assessment. Turns out humans engage with emotionally charged stuff, both good & bad.
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I didn’t say “no distribution” — free speech in a roomful of one is pointless. I said algorithmic distribution. To date the algorithms (and the products they populate) have been designed to maximize engagement with caustic results.
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A revised incentive structure and UX — along with more transparency and accountability — could yield less toxicity. It's not as if we’ve seen many permutations beyond FB's status quo. And yes, those whose mics are currently on blast will object to having their peaks clipped.
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