[threeseed]

During the recent Australian election there were a number of Facebook advertisements by political figures which were completely false e.g. Labor party imposing a death tax. And given that the election result was pretty close it could've easily have made a difference.

So I couldn't care less whether Facebook culled 3 billion profiles or not. What I need is for Facebook to make the hard choice and stop allowing political advertising on their platform. It's almost single handedly undermining democracy around the world.

[criley2]

Even without political advertising, the amount of fake news spread in Groups in the form of memes and images is absolutely fracking staggering.

If you go through the facebook feed of a conservative facebook user in their 50s+, you quite literally will see all lies and propaganda, and nothing real (for one ex: see the horribly faked Nancy Pelosi video that spread like wildfire yesterday, despite it's obvious fakeness). I'm not being hyperbolic, it's literally all "fake news". It's a completely shocking problem to have but the current state of politics is that there are a lot of people whose media diet consists of mainly of fake facebook group posts.

There is no viable solution either. If you democratize the printing press/mass media so far that every single person can print whatever they want whenever they want to, you will get this race to the bottom where absolute bullshit beats out hard truths every time. Lies getting around the world before the truth is out the door and all that. (Also the reality that this is clickbait x 1000, it's not a business picking articles that drive revenue, it's bad political actors picking stories that drive unrest).

Facebook isn't salvageable. It's destroying democracy around the world and there is nothing that can be done to fix it. I see not just correlation but causation between the rise of facebook and the rise of the fake news fueled far-right that is destroying modern democracy around the world.

(And it's no surprise that with each declassified DoJ report, we learn of yet-another-nation-state running these fake news groups with the explicit intention to subvert democracy and increase civil unrest).

Please delete Facebook before it's too late.

[chiefalchemist]

Fake news is the symptom. The disease is confirmation bias.

The internet, and particularly social media, has become the most efficient and effective confirmation bias machine ever. People gladly (read: voluntarily) crawl into their self-fulfilling echo chamber and instantly become the master of their own universe. They get to believe whatever it is they want to believe. No assumption too strange. No "belief fetish" too bizarre.

I'm not sure what the answer is (aside from a mass education in critical thinking and self-awareness), but I do know that deleting FB is a balloon grab. That is, the disease will simply manifest itself somewhere else sooner or later.

[panarky]

> Fake news is the symptom. The disease is confirmation bias.

When your root-cause analysis turns up an intractable problem that can't be solved, then maybe turn the intractable problem against itself.

Instead of eliminating filter bubbles and confirmation bias, encourage them. Herd the haters, trolls and propagandists into their own subgroups and shadow-ban them so people outside the group can't see them.

It doesn't solve the problem of confirmation bias, but it might help contain it and prevent wider contamination.

[mrguyorama]

>mass education in critical thinking and self-awareness

Does not fix confirmation bias, because people who are in deep in their own little holes don't want to know

[chiefalchemist]

No argument from me. I was being over the top. We're not going to mass educate critical thinking, too many other paper tigers would fall,that's for sure. It's also difficult to scale it and get it to stick.

That said, I still think it's important to keep in mind that fake news is a symptom. Get that context wrong and any potential solutions are simply shooting at the wrong target.

[toasterlovin]

> We're not going to mass educate critical thinking, too many other paper tigers would fall,that's for sure. It's also difficult to scale it and get it to stick.

The bigger problem is that confirmation bias is an evolutionarily useful adaptation. Good luck fighting those.

[pjc50]

It's not enough to delete Facebook. In fact, if your own feed isn't full of fake news then it doesn't help. You have to get other people, especially those you aren't already in contact with, to delete it too.

> bad political actors picking stories that drive unrest

Unfortunately this has been endemic in the British press for as long as I have been around. The latest round is cherry-picked anti-trans articles. It's not just a social media problem.

[NeedMoreTea]

It was much easier to avoid though.

Busses on the Moon was the preserve of the Sunday Sport.

The Daily Heil or Sun reliably gave anti-trans, anti-EU - always anti-something, and hard right sympathy of the "we hate the NF/BNP, but immigrants should stop..." variety, occasionally far more blatant.

Most knew what they were avoiding, as well as what they were choosing from their daily.

Now thanks to facebook illegal political advertising and fringe groups like Britain First - who Facebook took years to ban - have gained a voice that reaches a very wide audience, where everyone appears as credible as everyone else if they can play the social media game.

Until it was eventually generally known what they were, Britain First stuff was shared by all sorts of people whose main failing was believing a story or meme someone shared - because it came from someone they knew.

We either expect everyone to be deeply untrusting and cynical of their friends and family all the time - which they're not and cannot be. Or we require some standards of Facebook, finally.

[specialist]

"conservative facebook user in their 50s+"

I have two additional theories for why the boomers are more prone to spreading fake news.

Maturity

Every person, demographic adopting a new media has to go through the whole maturity cycle anew. We've all been there. (For me it was CompuServe, BIX, FidoNet.) We've always had trolls, memes, jokes etc. So netiquette and its predecessors emerge. It takes a while for the novelty to wear off, cooler heads to prevail.

Entertainment Becomes Reality

Boomers are bored. One article I read quoted a few boomer trolls who regarded fake news as funny, a way to pass the time. No different than the supermarket tabloids.

--

Alas.

Like when the AOL noob tsunami flooded the web, obliterating the indigenous culture, there's a huge cohort of boomers adopting Facebook. Fed and supported by boomerbots, of course, they're having an outsized impact.

More sadly, I fear most boomers are no longer teachable, more so as they age. So they're not likely to adapt or develop their own netiquette. I've all but stopped talking politics with my older relatives. Because they have no memory of prior discussions. Just like Groundhog Day.

Lastly, how we talk changes how we think. Propaganda works. This is more than confirmation bias feedback loops (mentioned elsewhere). This is something like brainwashing. My mom's boyfriend got her watching Fox News and cable news. She's transmuted from educated, progressive, liberated powerful woman (earned a masters degree, marched in DC to support abortion rights) to almost complete dittohead. This "captured by a cult" story is sadly common.

--

The only remedy I can think of is turn off their TVs, log them off facebook. Keep them distracted with knitting, puppies, and church.

My elders are now basically shut ins. Plugged into the TV. They'll happily watch happy shows, like Antique Roadshow, nature shows, cooking.

But when the nontoxic programming ends, they go back to the default channels of Fox News, CNN, and manufactured outrage.

I tried to figure out how to reprogram their TVs, cable boxes to exclude the toxic stuff.

But what's needed is an eldercare streaming TV apps. Like parental controls, but for our parents instead of our kids.

[maximus1983]

The whole fake news / conspiracy stuff gets me.

I find conspiracy theories to be almost like some sort of sci-fi / fantasy lore.

I love watching stuff like Ancient Aliens, I know it is complete nonsense but it is fun laughing at all the begging the question they do.

My other half believes in some super natural stuff such as horoscopes etc and she gets a bit annoyed at me and my brother taking the mickey out of it but that is about as far as the "harm" goes with most of this stuff.

Trying to stop people believing in crazy things just isn't possible and actively trying to suppress it online will just make it worse.

[zrobotics]

As someone who enjoys coast to coast AM, I get the entertainment value; but there is real danger and harm in a lot of it. Just look at the harm Alex "turn the frogs gay" Jones has caused, specifically to the parents of Sandy Hook victims.

Although you are right in that actively suppressing it can make it worse, since that very easily can be spun into "I'm right, the globalists are out to get me and are censoring me because I'm speaking the truth". Perhaps the best thing to do is laugh it down, but after 2016 somehow it's all gotten less funny.

[maximus1983]

Alex Jones is a meme. Everyone knows he is a nutcase.

As for danger, the mainstream media is just as bad. In the UK we are having people Milkshaked, including veterans.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/9144116/ex-paras-turn-up-to-gu...

Because some publications has deemed the likes Nigel Farage to be a "fascist". So saying that Alex Jones is worse than anyone else is crazy. Just watch CNN and their conspiracy theories about Trump, they do the same but they are never mentioned because they are deemed to be "on the right side" whatever that is.

[mlang23]

While I am definitely not a facebook fan, I think the problem lies somewhere else. Its a "dont shoot the messenger" problem. In my book, the problem is that people tend to believe shit. It doesnt really matter if the 50+ person got their fake news from facebook or from some other corner of the web. The issue is that people who are clearly not intelligent enought o tell fake news are eligible to vote.

[bluedino]

>> If you go through the facebook feed of a conservative facebook user in their 50s+, you quite literally will see all lies and propaganda,

There are no lies or fake memes for the left?

[cblades]

The person you're responding to didn't say that.

I'll go out on a limb and say this though: right-focused news organizations have conditioned the US conservative base to believe highly editorialized articles that aren't fact-based (wether or not the actual assertions of the articles are true or not). I believe that style has seeped into other news outlets as well, but those right-leaning news sources have a head start and at this point their audience is more susceptible.

Maybe in a few years the difference will be negligible, but right now it's not.

[criley2]

I didn't say that, but in order to prevent a "whatabout" or "false equivalence" attack, I will state up front: Conservatives are more likely to create, spread and fall for fake news than liberals.

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586

"Conservatives were more likely to share articles from fake news domains, which in 2016 were largely pro-Trump in orientation, than liberals or moderates"

We can speculate as to why. In my opinion, anti-intellectualism is far more virulent on the right than left. Nearly every single left-leaning politician is pro-science and accepts the scientific consensus on a broad range of issues. Conversely, most conservative politicians are anti-science, reject scientific consensus on a broad array of subjects, and consistently parrot mythology in its place. In fact it has become extremely common for conservatives to dislike and distrust higher education, academia, and research all together. It is a common trope in conservative media to attack scientific research as "pointless" and "expensive" and to use religious leaders to discuss intellectual or scientific topics.

Any ideology which preaches anti-intellectualism and mythology over science, evidence, etc, is necessarily more vulnerable to being co-opted in other evidenceless subjects.

[mythrwy]

There is plenty of anti-science thinking in certain camps of the left as well.

Phone radiation, GMOs, nuclear power, dietary trends, mushrooms are conscious, the list of foo is pretty long if you look. Along with the anti-math, anti-logic, anti-historical evidence view of economics.

But I don't disagree there is a fair amount of right wing kookage spread about. Perhaps more than it's left wing counterpart.

For a long time I didn't really believe the "right wing" fake news thing was real. I'd never actually seen it. Then I visited my father in law who breathlessly informed us at dinner Obama was going to jail as they had proved his birth certificate was fake! Curious I looked at his facebook feed and almost fell over, it was almost all fake news right wing straight out of a parallel universe and really obviously nonsense for the most part. I don't know where he even found that stuff. So ya, it does happen. And I say that as a person who is very much not a leftist (nor a facebook user).

For whatever it's worth, I like to think of myself as a member of the "do what makes sense party". But we have few members and no groundswell and no formal organization it appears. Sadly.

[stephenr]

Being anti-nuclear doesn’t mean you’re anti-science, nor does questioning the value/cost/results of GMO foods.

[repolfx]

Indeed not, but I think maybe that's the point. There are lots of cases where you can disagree with the scientific consensus without being "anti-science", whatever that means.

Basically all scientific or logical analysis about power generation yields a pro-nuclear conclusion and thus anti-nuclear campaigners tend to make arguments about priorities rather than claim their opponents are anti-science; they argue the risks are underestimated, the costs of waste are too high etc.

As for GMO foods, again, the scientific consensus is there are no health problems with them, which is why the anti-GMO argument tends to be of the form "but what if they're just so super long term problems that we haven't seen them yet" (a.k.a. the EU's precautionary principle on blocking GMO foods from competing with EU farmers).

Look at it the other way around - lots of climate change skeptics make deeply scientific arguments, typically pointing out errors or mistakes in papers, cases of previous predictions that turned out to be false and so on. That doesn't make them anti-science, it arguably makes them campaigners for better science.

[repolfx]

I think you are being terribly naive, sorry. From the study you just linked to:

> Posts containing links to external websites are cross-referenced against lists of fake news publishers built by journalists and academics

Have you seen opinion polls of these two professions? They are overwhelmingly, and I mean more than 90% left-voting. Conservative academics have published a long list of stories about how they have been made unwelcome or pushed out. There are virtually no conservatives in academic or journalist circles these days.

So all your study shows is that if you ask a bunch of Democrats to make a list of "fake news" sites, they list out a lot of pro-Trump conservative outlets. What a shock. Anyone could have told you that - this isn't science and doesn't deserve a paper, it's just bog standard political mud-flinging posing as science.

This is the exact sort of behaviour that's driving a wedge between people: biased academics use the vague aura and automatic defence to science that they've inherited from prior generations to make absurd claims. Journalists who came straight from college and who retain an automatic deference to professors repeat whatever they say as "findings", conservatives who double check discover scientific fraud and call it out, then liberals go in for the double smear of claiming their opponents are anti-intellectual!

Speaking now as a foreigner watching from abroad, over the last few years I've watched as what looked like the entire American left descended down a crazy conspiracy theory of Trump being a Russian spy or collaborator. We now know that isn't true. How many millions or billions of Facebook posts must have been shared about the whole Mueller investigation, about the idea that Trump and Russia are connected in some way? And yet it's all false, it was a fiction invented by the media to get clicks and ratings. Stories collapsed left and right, even left-leaning journalists like Greenwald and Taibbi have since come out flaming the journalistic establishment because so many of the stories turned out to be false, and yet the left seem to collectively fall for it in a huge way.

So I am very skeptical about your thesis that there's a big difference in people's susceptibility to fake news, or how intellectual they are. You should be especially self reflective give you just cited a supposedly scientific study that makes extraordinary claims about voter intelligence yet is transparently nonsense - it's literally "we asked a bunch of Democrats to pick websites they disagree with, labelled them as fake news, and discovered Trump supporters share lots of fake news". You should learn from the conservatives and trust academia a bit less!

[prewett]

> There is no viable solution either.

There is a solution: make a cost to post. In the past it cost real money to propagate your ideas, so your audience was limited. The only way to get money was to be rich or to be popular enough for people to pay for your newspaper/magazine/mailing list. The internet lets anyone have a language-wide reach for free. I guess one should expect that in this situation the messages that will dominate are the people that have an incentive to shout loudly, which is what we seem to have.

[klez]

Ok, but if you make it pay-per-post than only those with money can post, which is a different kind of problem but still a problem nonetheless.

[Shish2k]

Do you think any other platforms are doing better, or is all social media inherently doomed?

[hombre_fatal]

A favorite format on Reddit is for the entire submission to be a screenshot of tweet text (just the text), or tweet text caption and an image or article headline, possibly with no visible link to the source, not even a link to the tweet. Something you can just create in MS Paint.

And 10k comments taking it for face value, getting riled up over a screenshot of some text. Often when you google the headline, you either can't find it or it's on some bullshit website. Or you read the article and the tweet text everyone is replying to is 100% bullshit like any other clickbait.

It's not just Facebook.

[Loughla]

This all sounds like a necessary outcome to how and why these things were designed.

Social media exists to give you that little shot of happiness.

What makes you feel happier than seeing that the whole world agrees with you (in the case of facebook full of bullshit and reddit's oh-so-happy circlejerk over nonsense)?

This is exactly what these platforms were designed to do. All of them. Hell, look at HN for example. Look at the echo chamber that the Assange article is turning into, with dissenting opinions being downvoted for some reason.

It's all of them. All of them. Every of the social media. I feel like there's something in there about human nature, but psychology and sociology aren't my specialty.

[criley2]

To me, it's Pandora's Box. It's an information singularity. We have political information anarchy. Anyone can do a hack job on a video and get 100,000,000 views and a Presidential tweet and control a news cycle. People are afraid of "Deep fakes" but the reality is is that people are so conditioned towards accepting faked information that "shallow" (lol) fakes are already extremely effective.

It's not "social media" which is doomed, but it's our systems of government. China does just fine with controlled social media that is heavily censored precisely as the government wishes. It's not social media which is doomed, it's democracy, because authoritarians can exert power and control.

It reminds me of the Paradox of Tolerance. [1]

So long as social networks (and we as a society) tolerance this anti-intellectualism and choose fake news over real news, real information can never flourish.

But what can you do? Pass laws (which explicitly violate our American 1st Amendment)? Wait on Facebook to fix one of their biggest engagement (read: profit) drivers? Or just let everything come crashing down and shrug?

Who knows. The answer is aggressive moderation and banning fake news. Recreating the culture of intellectualism and truth. Emphasizing critical thinking. But I am extremely pessimistic that anything will (or even can) be done.

We're in meme-fueled political quicksand. I don't want to sound defeatist, but maybe after a generation or two passes and the millenials are older, this type of information warfare won't be nearly as effective [2]. Until then... good luck.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

[2] https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586 ("We also find a strong age effect, which persists after controlling for partisanship and ideology: On average, users over 65 shared nearly seven times as many articles from fake news domains as the youngest age group.")

[soulofmischief]

This has been freaking me out lately. I am trying to form a model of how a society would typically evolve past this situation and continue to advance and spread while maintaining humane and truly representative systems of government. So far I haven't come up with anything good.

But it is a singularity. We don't know what is on the other side. Or if there even is another side.

We are stumbling backwards into a world where a real video of a politician committing a crime in a private setting is indistinguishable from a fake one, but a citizen is 100% liable for actions captured on a government-sanctioned CCTV camera and cryptographically signed with a secret key.

I think it would be interesting to start a company around the idea of creating a certificate authority and system for provisioning and securely storing keys on a hardware level in order to sign and verify "unmodified" footage.

This would need to work both online and offline and thus require a form of device-unique secure enclave.

Offline is 2 layers of verification, your own keys and the on-device keys. Online is 3 layers of verification, those 2 keys plus a one-time key provided ad-hoc by a certificate server.

This means that users could maintain higher journalistic integrity with a video captured while online, as it could be argued that even if the device key is compromised the server-issued key would still provide some level of trust that the video is undoctored.

If this sounds of interest to anyone, get in touch.

[viraptor]

> I think it would be interesting to start a company around the idea of creating a certificate authority and system for provisioning and securely storing keys on a hardware level in order to sign and verify "unmodified" footage.

This is also described in (if I remember correctly) "The player of games" where videos were widely known as impossible to trust due to how easy it is to make fakes, but AI entities could testify that they received the realtime, live feed if you needed a proof.

Great idea way ahead of its time (1988)

[soulofmischief]

The idea of compelling an AI to testify in court is fascinating. I wonder if there could eventually be a civil case about this.

[mrlanderson]

Full email address in profile?

[soulofmischief]

Yep, just gotta pass the robot test.

[bostik]

> To me, it's Pandora's Box.

That is an apt description. In the myth, Pandora closed the box after the horrors had escaped onto the world but while hope was still in there.

So... according to Pandora's tale, we live in a world where everything is terrible. And hopeless.

[zlakb]

Yes, let's go back to when only the press could lie.

[Kurtz79]

Press can be made accountable for what it reports to a large extent, outright lies can be called out and the newspaper or whoever signs the byline can be sued in extreme cases.

An anonymous fake news article has no risk or accountability for its author, that's the main difference.

[A2017U1]

When was the last time a journalist lost their jobs for printing blatantly false information?

[54635124gddd]

It happens regularly.

https://money.cnn.com/2017/06/26/media/cnn-announcement-retr...

https://www.foxnews.com/us/reporter-resigns-after-false-twee...

These were on the first page of results when I duckducko'ed (duckduckwent?) "journalist resigned false"

[Loughla]

When was the last time a major journalist printed blatantly false information?

[TeMPOraL]

With press, at least everyone is reading the same lies. Hyper-targeted fake news makes it impossible to discuss anything, because across groups, everyone has their own set of "facts", making people talk past each other.

[zlakb]

Yes, because there's only one TV channel and one newspaper.

[TeMPOraL]

For any given news story, there are usually few "traditional" sources covering it, with only a fraction of them being widely popular. It's a manageable amount. Social media has switched the way people consume news (and content in general) - they're no longer consumed on per-source basis, but on per-story basis. I.e. most people don't read a particular news site, they read whatever stories from whatever sources happen to be on their Reddit or Facebook feed.

[baq]

yes, please. that's better than now.

[legooolas]

> e.g. Labor party imposing a death tax.

This was advertised on Australian radio before the elections by other parties too, so it's not exclusive to Facebook.

(Source : Started listening to Gold 104.3 FM streamed because Christian O'Connell moved there and we missed his breakfast show!)

[Deimorz]

WSJ article from yesterday: https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-ends-commissions-for-p...

> In the wake of revelations about Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election, senior leaders at the company debated whether it should cease running political ads entirely, former employees familiar with the discussions said. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg made the final call to stay in the business, though changes will be made to how it operates, one former employee said.

[fredley]

Even if it is banned, how on earth are you going to enforce it in any meaningful way? Truth, lies, boots, World...

[threeseed]

Simple really.

1) Ban any political figure who buys a political ad. If you set an example others will follow.

2) Facebook/Twitter/etc already have a verification mechanism and so anyone who isn't verified and using words like tax, election, vote etc can be sent to a moderation queue.

[dexen]

>anyone who isn't verified and using words like tax, election, vote etc can be sent to a moderation queue

chuckle

Do you propose that in earnest in order to save the democracy[1]? Or are you being ironic and it's simply lost on me...?

What other words would you put on the moderation graylist? "Death penalty", "whistleblower", "sexual assault", "guns", "public education", "welfare", "war", "weapons of mass destruction"? Let's top it up with "conspiracy theory" and "fake news", just to max out the irony meter.

[1] or the republic, where applicable

[threeseed]

No I am quite serious.

Send any ads with politically charged words to a moderation queue where someone reviews the ad. And if it takes weeks to review it then so be it. The status quo is simply not acceptable.

[jobigoud]

He's talking about ads, not regular posts.

[pluma]

Same way you enforce any other rule. Same way they already enforce the rules they have?

I hope you weren't hoping for an argument about slippery slopes. And yes, of course that means they may have to hire more moderators and of course that means more expenses. Who ever said Facebook should get away with no moderation just because they're successful?

[fredley]

I mean what's to prevent me putting up ads that I say aren't political, but are? By the time they've been reported and taken down it's already too late?

[threeseed]

In your case just use the same approach as spam.

Ask all users to report political advertising. If it reaches a certain threshold take down the ad. Manually review it. If it is political then ban the user, payment method and IP address.

[Loughla]

If it's hyper-targeted political ads to folks who you can tell via their profiles will absolutely agree with you, what is their incentive to hit that report button?

Not to blow this up too much, but honestly, these aren't ads for shoe polish or a scammy mobile game or some other bullshit. These are ads that make people feel valuable. These are ads that make people feel like their thoughts and opinions, and therefore their entire being is validated.

[threeseed]

I've seen many of these ads. Mostly they are scare campaigns.

And in the US it maybe a case that they are targeting their base voters. But in other countries with compulsory voting they are targeting swing voters. And those people absolutely will hit the report button.

[nradov]

Facebook shouldn't handle political advertising any differently than any other private media outlet like a newspaper or cable TV channel. And what is "political advertising"? Are issue advocacy ads political?

[wheelerwj]

its an interesting proposition. maybe it would also help remove the need for some of the money that goes into politics.