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by aeturnum
2231 days ago
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I think you're begging the question and using reducto-ad-absurdum here. dilippkumar was highlighting that if people are prepared to believe extremely fringe ideas then simply telling them that a central authority thinks a fact is wrong will not effectively dissuade them. Your question elides that concern by simply re-pointing out that fake information is problematic. Fake information is problematic, but there is reason to believe that simply labeling the article about drinking lysol "false" is a sub-optimal strategy. So the answer to your question is no, we shouldn't avoid labeling that post false "because the poster could be like Galileo or Einstein," but I also do not think that was what dilippkumar was saying. I think he was trying to point out the problematic nature of "fact checkers" for people who don't trust traditional sources of authority. If you'd like an example closer to home, ask the crypto community what they think of NSA advice on ECC curves. |
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It is not were potential Einsteins or Galileos debut their big new ideas. It is not were cover ups about WMD or anything else are initially exposed. All of that is very sensibly on real sites. To the contrary, rather than being where good ideas originate, it's sole purpose is to attract eyes for advertisement.
The catastrophic problem is their algorithm that massively pushes conspiracy theories, outrage and demagogue's propaganda that would otherwise never be seen and would never get beyond the crackpot website they happened to be posted on.
Facebook is not were any valuable information originates, it is instead where failed ideas and advertisements are endlessly push on it's users. But any attempt to correct that algorithm, manually or otherwise is now portrayed as censorship by those who benefit form it to get support from everyone else. Likewise, it is very effectively used as a propaganda tool by some parties yet ironically any attempt to slow that is portrayed as censorship.
It is not remotely where ideas fairly compete. To the contrary: shocking but false ideas are given an enormous advantage but adding an annotation contradicting them is called censorship. To such an extreme that there is a warning on Lysol bottles not to drink it but if a meme on Facebook telling people to drink Lysol has a similar warning attached by Facebook, it is called censorship.
The notion Facebook could ever afford to bother with any but a tiny silver of the most conspicuously false and harmful posts, let alone judge every post for accuracy, is not reasonable. It could not remotely be picking sides on every tv debate, reading every user's post or reviewing posts about the photoelectric effect for accuracy. And at any rate, Facebook is not the web.