[sthnblllII]

Private mega-corporations like Facebook should never be deciding what information is "mis"-information, especially during an election. We as Americans should decide what speech we want to be legal or illegal and use proper transparent legal channels to enforce these collective decisions, whether that speech happens on the street or on-line.

[soneil]

I want to agree; corporations should not be the arbiter of what is and isn’t true.

But they do want to promote content to us, because their entire business model depends on keeping us in a never-ending scrolling algorithmic stupor.

So there’s the catch-22. I don’t want them promoting falsehoods. And most falsehoods only survive be being more interesting, more salacious, more engaging than the truth - so unless the system has some bias against them, it will prefer them.

If there’s a magical solution to not promoting falsehoods without deciding what’s false - there’s probably a lot of money waiting for you.

[sthnblllII]

>I don’t want them promoting falsehoods

Have you're political beliefs been 100% completely static your entire life? Have you ever realized you were wrong about something, and that your previous belief was a falsehood?

[root_axis]

Facebook doesn't "decide what is misinformation". When you need to figure out if something is true, you don't check Facebook as a source because everyone knows it's not an arbiter of truth, it's not productive to speak as if it is one.

[dasil003]

Media companies have always had to decide what is misinformation, and is an entire discipline called fact checking to support it.

Now obviously social media is not the same as traditional media, but they have the same reach, and with orders of magnitude less latency and more virality. I'm not sure how you propose the government and legal system can stay on top of this—by the time the courts hear about something weeks, months and years later the damage has been done and the news cycle has moved on.

It's not ideal for Facebook to be the arbiter of truth (and neither do they want that responsibility), but operationally any solution has to be deeply embedded within their systems.

[rndmind]

Actually the government did have stringent regulations that all broadcast news corporations had to adhere to. This was called the Fairness Doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

That was until 1987 the Reagan administration eliminated the Fairness Doctrine... thanks Reagan!

[tracker1]

Unfortunately, even if it were still a thing it wouldn't apply to online, print or cable news sources more than likely.

[rndmind]

Something should be drafted regarding online news sources, or perhaps classify them as websites that get > 50 million unique visitors a month... something like that

[sthnblllII]

>Media companies have always had to decide what is misinformation

>I'm not sure how you propose the government and legal system can stay on top of this

In my country, (the United States) we have a principal in our cultural called "freedom of speech". It basically means that we do not propose or tolerate any mechanisms for general political speech to be "kept on top of" (or "fact checked" or declared "misinformation"). People are free to decide for themselves what to believe, and when you think something is wrong you publish an argument against it. It may be different in your country.

[tracker1]

I think the biggest issue is that the "Facts" the fact checkers present, often isn't factually based. Not to mention, the fact checking orgs will cover factual, even if mixed with hyperbolic opinion articles in favor of their own news orgs articles (that are monetized to boot).

It's also less than ideal that they body-check facts from right leaning news sources far more than left leaning. FTR, I'm Libertarian not typical left/right.

I posted a humorous meme, and it was tagged with a couple different "get the facts" messages, which was just plain stupid and kind of funny, even drawing in comments to that effect.

In the end, it's hard to trust most of the media sources without getting news/pov from multiple left/right/foreign sources. I'm starting to think that anything that is opinion based over facts in news reporting should have a big red label of "OPINION, NOT NEWS!" on it in order to receive any protection from libel, including videos for a couple seconds. I also think that any social media org that has more than 25% of a country as its' users should probably have to comply with the same free speech norms as a government agency would.

I work in the elections space, and while some things seem really fishy, it's hard to take any of it without a grain of salt considering how many of the things I've seen being accused are purely BS from people who don't know/understand what's happening. I mean, I'm pretty sure there was some fishy stuff going on in at least some places, but I just don't know what to believe anymore... and that's almost worse than just picking a side.

I think having peer review opportunities would go a long way over some of the paid and algorithmic review options. Even if you had a hidden Karma like here and other sites and was randomly chosen to "review" judge/vote on content posts... maybe not private messages, but say public posts or group posts... just a general thumbs up/down.. and the quorum is comprised of say 3-5 randomly selected each of left/right/other for a decent mix. You get a 55% quorum for violation, the post then goes to FB for review/action.

Reviews are done by those in the same locality of the person posting. Private groups or message posts go directly to FB monitors... but there's no reason not to have a community judge for itself if something is over the line.

[mr_toad]

> It's also less than ideal that they body-check facts from right leaning news sources far more than left leaning.

You mean statements like this?