Yeah, lets turn the whole planet into shithole because Drumpf stole an election despite being a convicted traitor...
Zuck takes a page from Musk: Meta dumps fact-checkers, loosens speech restrictions
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced a whole bunch of changes designed to "get back to our roots around free expression" that, among other things, include ditching fact-checking moderators for the United States, and loosening content policies to allow previously restricted speech to proliferate. The Instagram supremo gave a …
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 02:46 GMT DS999
Trump isn't president of the rest of the world
Despite what he thinks. If Meta's lack of fact checking violates the laws of other countries and doesn't correct that or pay the legally required fines, then hopefully those countries will block Meta entirely. Little Zuck might learn there are consequences for public fellatio of a politician.
I had diminished my use of Facebook quite a lot after the last election because of all the crazy bullshit about stolen elections flying around, but it got better once Trump had (or so we thought at the time) walked off into irrelevance at his swamp hotel. It REALLY got better last year when they said they were going to quit serving political material. The stuff that pops up in my feed now is all about college football or cats or similarly inoffensive subjects. I can reply to something about the college football playoff and people might tell me I'm wrong or even that I'm stupid but they don't question my patriotism right to live in America (or live at all) if they feel something I've said insults their orange deity. There's been zero about Trump or red or blue or abortion or trans or any other that shit, and I didn't realize how bad it had gotten until all of that disappeared overnight. Suddenly Facebook was fun again.
If I start getting that back I'm gone for good. Even if it is 50/50 balanced I will go, and we all know it will not be it will be like Twitter and take a wild slide into MAGA dreamland. I bet I will be far from the only one, and that Zuck will ultimately feel the consequences of this action in his stock price.
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 05:29 GMT HereIAmJH
Re: Trump isn't president of the rest of the world
If I start getting that back I'm gone for good.
So now would be a good time for a Facebook/Instagram rival to go viral. Like BlueSky and Mastodon did with Xitter.
Frankly, if Facebook Marketplace traffic would go back to craigslist, nothing about FB would interest me at all.
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 21:18 GMT DS999
Re: Trump isn't president of the rest of the world
So now would be a good time for a Facebook/Instagram rival to go viral. Like BlueSky and Mastodon did with Xitter
Honestly Facebook could be traded for Bluesky with no loss of the things people care about. What would be missing? Add support for Instagram's photo gallery type interface in a tab of Bluesky and you'd handle that. The big hurdle is getting people to overcome inertia and leave, but if you make a platform terrible enough it'll happen. That's why everyone left Myspace for Facebook, because Myspace enshittified too much (though by today's standards would be a paradise)
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 21:22 GMT FirstTangoInParis
Re: Trump isn't president of the rest of the world
Not only Facebook and TwiX but also Substack. It seems anywhere people are allowed to post, sooner or later the non mainstream peeps show up and we get off topic posts on whatever is bugging them this week. On Substack you see feeds that the publishers you subscribe to have liked. Yes you can block feeds you don’t like or agree with but it’s very depressing to have to keep doing it. I left TwiX because of the off topic rubbish and might do the same with Substack. Plus a paid subscription per publisher is a third of a Netflix subscription and I don’t feel I’m getting the content that’s worth it.
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 08:33 GMT Bebu sa Ware
Re: Trump isn't president of the rest of the world
consequences for public fellatio of a politician.
I guess unless you swallow long and deep you are left with mud on your face (or something.)
But we had already guessed these tech billionaires were a handful of tossers and felatores so seeing them line up to teabag Trump should not come as a great surprise.
MAGA is likely the sound a sychophant make while choking on Trump although I never imagined that he could bring enough to the party to choke a gnat.
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 09:15 GMT abend0c4
Re: Trump isn't president of the rest of the world
Elsewhere in his epistle, Musk is reported as saying he wants to;
work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more
So, I'm afraid the gospel according to Zuck is pretty much predicated on Trump being exactly that. It's a pretty extraordinary statement for a company leader to make - effectively saying that nation states have no right to make their own laws - and it's equally extraordinary that there hasn't been immediate condemnation from America's potential future colonies. I can't help feeling that the policy of not poking the beast with a stick in the hope it will go away is backfiring: we seem to have moved very rapidly from "tariffs" to "potential annexing territory of former allies and imposing US law".
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 16:30 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Will Trump last four years?
The Mrs has a bet on that he won't last, enough to buy a nice bottle of champagne to celebrate on the day. I merely find these people distasteful/dangerous and wish they would go away, she has a level of hatred towards them that even Emperor Palpatine would think is a bit much.
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 21:22 GMT DS999
Re: Will Trump last four years?
Are you talking your Mrs or Mrs Trump? Your statement is probably true for either. They've only been together in public a handful of times in the past couple years, if that doesn't read "their lawyers negotiated a deal where he can call on her to be with him for x times per year and she gets to stay the hell away the rest of the time" I don't know what does!
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 14:26 GMT ChrisC
Re: Trump isn't president of the rest of the world
I think you've just been lucky in the specific bits of FB you've been interacting with in recent times, because my first thought on seeing this announcement from Zuck was "god, it's bad enough now, how much worse could it get..."
i.e. even if you deliberately avoid groups which are obviously going to be largely populated by conspiracy theory-fuelled loons (the existence of such groups, in itself, is enough evidence that FB was never really cleaned up) then it's still fairly easy to stumble across such comments in groups that initially come across as being the sort of benign, well balanced ones you're talking about.
That's not to say benign, well balanced groups *don't* exist at present, but don't be fooled from your personal experiences of FB in thinking they're the *only* sort of groups that the present level of scrutiny/fact checking/etc allows to exist on the platform. It might presently be easier to avoid coming into contact with the crap than is likely to be the case once the announcement takes effect, but it IS there already, and has been steadily getting worse over the past year or two IME.
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Thursday 9th January 2025 07:44 GMT Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck
Re: Trump isn't president of the rest of the world
Yeah, just look at how Zuckerborg and Meta pay their fair share for Canadian media.
Oh, yeah, they just blocked our entire nation's people from commenting on or sharing any news articles from anywhere in the world instead.
American corporations can be expected to engage in even more abusive behavior than that on the world stage with Mein Fuhrer Drumpf in charge.
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 14:57 GMT ChrisC
Re: @Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck
Can't believe I'm defending Trump here... No, it's not logically correct, because in his mind the election was his to win all along, so he'd not need to resort to theft or any such nefarious behaviour to achieve that result. As this mindset wouldn't then allow him to comprehend the possibility that Harris might win fairly, the only way such a result could occur in his world would be if she'd stolen the election, and thus his comment was born.
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 15:16 GMT codejunky
Re: @Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck
@ChrisC
"As this mindset wouldn't then allow him to comprehend the possibility that Harris might win fairly, the only way such a result could occur in his world would be if she'd stolen the election, and thus his comment was born."
And as clearly demonstrated by the election that is a correct mindset, for many reasons (even just the difficulty of a run at such short notice).
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Tuesday 7th January 2025 22:08 GMT 45RPM
What a spineless bunch of oxygen thieves. All this does is prey on the gullible. Oh yes - and ruin the world for everyone else.
The correct response is for all countries which haven’t sworn fealty to the ultra right to insist that fact checking is strong and in place - or block non compliant social networks.
It won’t be easy, but the value of such a course of action is beyond price.
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 07:35 GMT 45RPM
Re: "Ruin the world"
I’d love to agree with you. I don’t have a Facebook account but…
It makes it very easy for a business to set up a web page - so much so that a lot of businesses only have pages on Facebook. Those businesses would have to set up websites ‘properly’
Facebook Marketplace does seem to be very popular and have a mindshare that Freegle, Vinted, Craigslist and even eBay can’t match.
People do like to mouth off without having to provide evidence - I hear in the pub about the ridiculous feuds and arguments on Facebook in our local community. I’m well off out of it - and everyone else’s mental health would improve if they dropped the sugar high of social media too.
So no. Sadly I don’t think it will be easy for the world to drop its social media crack habit. Even more so when the hangers on are taken into account (Insta, TikTok, SnapChat etc)
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 22:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
Id suggest the best course of action for Europe is to cut their losses and disengage from the us and Russia, kick out Hungary from the EU. Shutter all us military bases and deny us forces overflight rights and sever intelligence sharing. Heck I'd go so far as to recall ambassadors and shutter embassies cutting off diplomatic relations totally. Block US based media, social media etc sites to cut off the flow of disinformation and root out those who are allied to putinism or trumpian beliefs.
If another global war kicks off then there will be some people with a large public profile (Inc politicians) who like Oswald Moseley will likely face interment for security reasons.
At the same time build a large European military with a much larger nuclear deterrent to ensure neither Putin or trump kicks off any further "special military operations"
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Tuesday 7th January 2025 22:33 GMT MrDamage
Sheer Bollocks.
>> "Fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the US,"
Translation: Putin and his lickspittles have been caught out spewing absolute bullshit that is easily disproved. This has lead to the GOP and their toadies whinging about "woke leftist global conspiracy", which is, again, easily disproved.
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Tuesday 7th January 2025 22:44 GMT Howard Sway
a whole bunch of changes designed to "get back to our roots around free expression"
To this end, they have devised new policies specifically allowing certain things :
Users are now allowed to, for example, refer to “women as household objects or property”
Whether the women who are now considered property will also be allowed free expression is not made clear, but it says quite a lot that somebody could sit down and write a policy and think "hmmm, what should we allow? I know, that part of the Venn diagram where incel losers and the taliban coincide".
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 08:51 GMT Telecide
Re: a whole bunch of changes designed to "get back to our roots around free expression"
I looked at the CNN post which you linked to, and also the Meta policy which CNN in turn linked to, and could find no mention of users now being allowed to refer to £women as household objects or property”. Can you detail where exactly that is stated? I'm not trolling. I just want to see the facts either way.
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 11:04 GMT rg287
Re: a whole bunch of changes designed to "get back to our roots around free expression"
and could find no mention of users now being allowed to refer to £women as household objects or property”. Can you detail where exactly that is stated?
Their policy seems to have a "today" tab, which is what you were looking at, and then previous versions. In the "Policy Rationale" section of the 7 Jan 2025 tab, they state "We remove define a hate speech attack as dehumanizing speech, allegations of serious immorality or criminality, and slurs."
The dehumanizing speech bit was what you're after. They also seem to be washing their hands of responsibility for republishing libel by removing the definition of "allegations of serious immorality or criminality", which to be fair is a bit odd in "Hate Speech", but ought certainly to be a Tier 1 "don't f-ing do that" matter for any sort of responsible platform.
If you click back to (say), the 29 Feb 2024 version it includes wording that covers "dehumanizing language" which was a "Tier 1" hate speech definition:
Dehumanizing speech in the form of comparisons to or generalizations about:
*Certain Inanimate Objects and Non-Human States:
** Certain objects (women as household objects or property or objects in general; Black people as farm equipment; transgender or non-binary people as “it”)
This has now been removed. Referring to women as household objects is no longer considered problematic. Black people as farm machinery is still in - it's moved down the page to "Harmful stereotypes".
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Tuesday 7th January 2025 23:02 GMT Jellied Eel
Re: America has gone down the toilet
Until the US figures out a way to field candidates that are neither insane nor politically impotent, the nonsense will continue.
Biden provided a peek behind the curtain. It isn't the person that reads the autocue who's important, it's the people who put the words on that screen.
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 10:41 GMT Charlie Clark
Re: America has gone down the toilet
Forget Biden, that was Reagan's main appeal: able to deliver the scripts written for him by others.
Trump tends to tear up the script, but this can and does lead to contradictions which a pliant Congress is likely to codify in to laws that SCOTUS will uphold. Yep, as usual, the lawyers win.
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 05:51 GMT timrowledge
Re: America has gone down the toilet
Don’t be obtuse. Actual Satan would have been a better choice than convicted felon and traitor Trump.
The squeeze is on. Rich buggers thought they’d get to run the nuthouse and are finding out that when you give the levers of power to truly evil people your paltry multi-hundred-billion bank accounts are as nothing to the holder of the serious legal powers and weapons. FAFO suckers.
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 13:04 GMT Jamie Jones
Re: America has gone down the toilet
Oh come on. The democrats were crap, but a paper bag is a better candidate than trump.
Please tell me why Kamala was worse than someone who
* will indict political enemies
* will use the American military against the US population.
* Is a convicted felon.
* kept secret documents in his toilet.
* reduced taxes for the top 1% and has promised to reduce them further.
* is a know rapist.
* only cares for himself, and playing gold.
* only avoided jail because he will be president.
* thinks he can buy Greenland and Canada.
* thinks the trade surplus with Canada is a subsidy.
* is generally more stupid than a five year old (and less mature)
* said he will ban wind turbines and replace them with "clean gas"
* said he will roll back all gun restrictions so that your local nutter can buy all the shit he wants.
* Constitution lover? Ha! He'll torch the first amendment by going after anyone who isn't a sycophant.
* said he will pardon the January 6th terrorists.
* will codify the discrimination of trans people.
* decimate education (because he doesn't want an intelligent population. They scare him. Besides, for clever stuff, he has his H1B1 employees)
* put conspiracy nutjob RFK in charge of health(!)
* is probably the most narcissistic and immature person ever.
* tariffs. He doesn't understand them.
* said that windmills cause cancer and whales to beach.
I could go on, but I'd be here all year.
This is not a "left-vs-right" issue, this is crappy option vs batshit insane criminally corrupt disaster.
Sources:
https://newrepublic.com/article/187252/trump-100-worst-things-list-2015-2024
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 19:07 GMT Steve Davies 3
Re: why was trumpo better than Kamala?
Easy,.
1) Trump is a far better liar than her
2) His opposition was a woman. Many MAGA cult members can't stomach the idea of a smart woman.
3) Trump lied and lied and lied. No one in the important media called him out.
4) His opponent was not squeaky white. Many MAGA cult members hate anyone who is not pure white.
5) He lied and lied
6) He promised billionaires that they would become trillionaires over the next 4 years.
That good enough?
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 20:07 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: why was trumpo better than Kamala?
MAGA cult members were never going to vote blue so your ravings are completely irrelevant.
Biden and then Harris also lied and lied and lied and the media SUPPORTED them.
It was blatantly obvious that Harris was not going to do what she said as:
* Billionaires are not stupid and are not going to support someone who will tax them (the dems have talked and talked and never done)
* Depending on the audience her message changed, especially around Gaza, so you can't trust what she was saying
* Sorry but she ain't smart. Every event was scripted so carefully and the moment she ran off script it all fell apart. 32 days!! hehehehehe! 32 days!
No-one wanted her as president in 2020, she did naff all as VP, was generally disliked and was just another DC elite.
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Tuesday 7th January 2025 23:28 GMT EricM
Re: America has gone down the toilet
The real reason probably is: Not enough voters could be bothered to prevent a madman taking power while another part expressively wanted a madman in power - for probably religous reasons like advancing judgement day or so.
Whoever conned the American People into destroying their own country did it very well.
Guess it's true: Empires are destroyed from within.
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 11:19 GMT breakfast
Re: America has gone down the toilet
If you want to think of it in imperial terms, the British Empire lasted about 250 years, looks like maybe the American one has a similar lifespan. However things go, I don't see how the America we have known in our lifetimes will still exist in four years time. Whatever that future is shaped like, it's going to be very different.
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Tuesday 7th January 2025 23:54 GMT Andrew Hodgkinson
We need more Bluesky thinking
Don't forget that (despite its many limitations) Bluesky is not an alt-right shithole, is federated so you can even run your own server if you prefer and has a time-based feed, not an algorithm-based one.
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 00:21 GMT Scotech
Re: We need more Bluesky thinking
Bluesky genuinely feels like it's been created specifically to address the issues that emerge from the centralisation of platform policies and control on earlier platforms...and that's because it basically was. Dorsey deserves a lot of credit for seeing the flaws in Twitter and its peers, what they might lead to, and doing something about it. Bluesky's emergence has been nothing if not timely!
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 01:09 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: We need more Bluesky thinking
>Dorsey deserves a lot of credit for seeing the flaws in Twitter and its peers
Doubly so given how much he still has tied up (or has presumably mentally written off) in X Holdings - indirectly through various funds he's almost certainly into and hugely through two of his own trusts.
Before the 'Yes but Elmo owns X now' crowd weigh in:
https://fortune.com/2024/08/22/elon-musk-x-twitter-owner-list/
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 02:55 GMT DS999
Re: We need more Bluesky thinking
The best thing about it is that you can follow who you want to follow, and choose not to get a bunch of other crap.
I wouldn't care what Zuck was doing with Facebook's fact checking and so forth if they'd just offer an option to follow only your friends and pages you like, and nothing else. Because while I might have some friends sharing some questionable crap occasionally, if I had anyone that just filling my feed with it I could fix that by unfriending them. There's no way to tell Facebook "never show me any 'recommended' content that has anything to do with politics" because apparently feeding the outrage machine is profitable for him. I'm not playing that game anymore. If the politics come back and I can't shut them off, then I'm unfriending Zuck, permanently.
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 15:34 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: We need more Bluesky thinking
The best thing about it is that you can follow who you want to follow, and choose not to get a bunch of other crap.
An echo chamber, in other words. Block out all other viewpoints that do not correspond with your own, up until the point where you lose touch with reality.
This is precisely what has driven Western politics to its current position. Out of touch elites in their Westminster, Washington, Paris and Berlin bubbles failing to understand why the great unwashed aren't interested in voting for them any more.
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 21:34 GMT DS999
Re: We need more Bluesky thinking
It isn't an "echo chamber" to choose to follow only your friends. I have plenty of friends who voted for Trump, but they aren't constantly posting about him. I had a few who did, I blocked or unfriended them. I also unfriended one who constantly posted anti Trump screeds. I don't want to see politics on Facebook, PERIOD. It is SOCIAL media, I should be able to choose what I see. I do not need to get political "news" from Facebook, even if it was completely unbiased and neutral. It is not a news site, despite a lot of stupid people claiming in polls they get most of their news from Facebook.
Anyway if I really wanted to construct an "echo chamber" and follow AOC and Bernie and similarly aligned pages only, that should be my prerogative. Do you watch MSNBC and read Mother Jones to get the "other side"? I doubt it. Musk has turned Twitter into a right wing echo chamber. There's no escape from it, especially since you can't block HIM and he's become the most radicalized of all! He's so radical that he's fighting with the leader of Germany's ultra right wing party because there's some guy who is apparently so toxic even they won't have him and Musk thinks he's a great guy. Heck, Musk canceled (took away the blue check and lowered visibility) of some prominent right wingers like Laura Loomer recently because she disagreed with him. So if you're on Twitter you're in Musk's echo chamber and he's going to control what you see to try to turn you even further right than you are now (unless you want to end H1B visas, in which case he'll cancel you too)
It is funny how the MAGA moron squad kept whining about the left wing bias of Twitter, and now that it is biased FAR more in the other direction they think it is great and anyone who wants to leave only does so because they want to create an echo chamber. They're just mad that they can't force everyone to sit in their bath of orange Trump juice and have their brains turned into mush so they can start loving Trump.
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 06:54 GMT Dan 55
Re: We need more Bluesky thinking
Dorsey was kicked out/left a while back. He has the same ideas about Freeze Peach as the rest of the untouchable billionaire set so it's for the best.
Also, BlueSky is not really decentralised and Dorsey only wanted to aim for decentralisation in the first place for massive bigly Freeze Peech.
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 01:48 GMT Omnipresent
Money for nothing, and ...
It's open grifter season people. The Purge is upon us. These guys are going to be as obnoxious and disgusting, and evil as possible, because it makes them money.
Every time someone visits, clicks, links to, or looks at a headline with these criminals in it.... they get paid. They are all going to be trying to out do one another to the bottom, and then roll around naked in a pile of crypto laundry smelling like swamp gas. The worse they are, the more people click. They HAVE to be the center of attention. It's their jobs. Facebook not only is up for the grift, Suckerberge has AI to spit out the russian content and brainwash you FOR him. He can just sit back and watch the world burn.
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 03:08 GMT DS999
Re: Money for nothing, and ...
Except people can opt out. I've been on Facebook since 2005, back when it was college email only. That's my way of keeping in touch with more distant friends who I otherwise would have no idea if they were even still alive or not (and the way I found out a couple them died) So I've been willing to put up with a lot of bullshit over the years as it enshittified, but when they stopped the political spigot last year it was a revelation. Facebook was suddenly fun again! I was shared stuff I was actually interested in, like college football, chess, math, golf, cats, even totally random stuff that I never really had that much interest in but I guess I looked at the posts a bit too much a few times and started getting stuff like kitchen design that for some reason I've become interested in.
I'm not going back to seeing crap about Trump, abortion, trans, immigration and everything else all the MAGA morons want to mainline their entire lives with. I'm done with it. If that comes back and it sounds like it might, then I'm out. None of those fools will make a penny off me, because I'll be on bluesky or maybe I'll just give up social media entirely and go back to how things were before social media when college friends you hadn't seen in decades would move or get married or die and you had no idea.
I think people who aren't MAGA should quit Twitter and (if it follows Twitter down the hardline MAGA path) Facebook. Go to bluesky, go to Tik Tok, or give it all up. If Facebook becomes populated entirely by right wingers and there are no sane people listening to their bullshit, it is going to lose all value - because they'll lose engagement from the MAGA side too if they find they have no one to troll. There's a reason why no platform built as a right wing alternative could achieve any value, so they decided to turn existing platforms their way. That will destroy value in them and they'll end up as worthless as Gab, it'll just take longer to get there.
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 21:42 GMT DS999
Re: Money for nothing, and ...
Name one. I've never used anything that requires a Facebook or Twitter or whatever social media account. Yes some sites have options to let you login with your Facebook account, alongside options to use your Google or Microsoft or Apple account. That's not "hooking you" unless you choose to be hooked.
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 16:58 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Money for nothing, and ...
I used to have an account, but used the Fluff Busting Purity browser plug-in, it (used to?) Allow you to block words such that it ommited any and all posts containing those words (and adverts).It was as if it they just weren't there, you didn'teven see a blank spot where they would have been. Trump, Corbyn, Brexit. A great way to stick your head in the sand, I found. It only blocked on words, so topics indirectly referring to them got through, but it did turn down the temperature.
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 08:28 GMT David M
I look at FB through a browser with an ad blocker and the plugin from fbpurity.com installed, and that makes it usable - I see nothing but posts from friends and from groups that I follow. Which is how it should be. Occasionally I look at it on my phone (without the filters) and yes, it's then 99% BS.
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 03:10 GMT PhilipN
Nothing special in the context
That is, in the context of media generally, when print media including its online versions without exception routinely make false statements and innuendoes. Was it ever thus since the first message was inscribed on a clay tablet.
Let's face it none of us is scrupulously honest. The World would be a dangerously tedious and boring place if we were.
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 10:06 GMT Jellied Eel
Re: Nothing special in the context
Let's face it none of us is scrupulously honest. The World would be a dangerously tedious and boring place if we were.
But.. but.. I am! Honest!
I think the problem is facts just aren't what they used to be. 1+1=2. Fact! 1+1=3 is an opinion, and if the 'fact checkers' decide that 3 is the correct answer, they could suppress anyone who disagrees. This is not a great idea, but is what has happened sometimes with the independent 'fact checkers'. So during the great Panicdemic, 'fact checkers' were deciding 'facts', even though experts were still trying to figure out WTF was going on.
My favorite example is Ivermectin, and whether that was effective, or not. But the 'news' broke, 'fact checkers' decided we're not horses, so people shouldn't try it. Actual facts were Ivermectin is widely prescribed to humans, and has been very effective at saving people's eyesight. What wasn't known at the time was whether it had any effect as a treatment for Covid, or if it was a safe treatment. There was some evidence that it might have been in high and possibly dangerous doses. But determining actual facts requires proper science, so clinical trials that take time. So real facts weren't known, but discussion was suppressed, scientists de-platformed and misinformation spread.
But I know actual scientists and very few do their work via 'social' media. If they've got a paper being published, they might announce it but actual discussion between peers doesn't happen on FaceMelta. Which is where BlueSki gets a little more interesting, if it can be federated and most importantly, moderated by those peers. Then, providing the moderators can be trusted, quality debate and discussion can happen. Which is nothing new, ie the concept of CUGs (Closed User Groups) has been around for a very long time. People might be able to read discussions, but not post, or have posting privileges revoked if they spammed or trolled.
But as a result of discussion and debate, a consensus might be formed, and actual facts emerge. But in science, or pretty much any field, facts may change based on new research or evidence. Kind of like happened with established facts around stuff like plate tectonics or ulcers. Which is back to moderation. Experts may have their own pet theories and be reluctant to change those theories, even though the preponderence of evidence suggests they're wrong. If the 'fact checkers' aren't experts, they have no chance of determining actual facts, and if they're influenced by politics, they have zero chance.
Which is where 'community notes' get interesting because they may be less biased. Or they could be more biased, depending on how those community notes are decided. I think a neat feature could be to borrow from the Supreme Court and also allow a dissenting opinion. The biggest challenge though is to educate people to do their own fact checking, and be able to differentiate between facts, and opinions.
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 11:32 GMT Jellied Eel
So let me see if I understand this .... Facts are too politically biased?
They can be sometimes. So case in point, Hunter Biden's laptop. So there was a carefully choreographed 'fact checking' campaign that produced stuff like the '51 intelligence experts' claiming this was 'Russian misinformation'. Actual facts were the laptop was real, the FBI had it, did nothing with it and the content (probably) wasn't manipulated. Yet people still believe the 'Russian misinformation' meme was really 'fact'.. Which is the problem with 'fact checkers' and trust. If it turns out they were wrong, or had been (willingly) manipulated, then they lose all credibility and trust.. Even if they might sometimes get their facts correct.
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 14:05 GMT Anonymous Coward
Doesn't mean the Russians weren't involved in some fashion. The store owner was blind so anyone (like a Russian agent) could have taken it to him, a Russian agent could have tripped the media off or another Russian agent could have used their troll farms to promote the false story. There's multiple angles for the FBI to have legitimate concerns.
The Steele dossier proved just how deep their actions went in 2016 so it's crazy to think they didn't do even more in 2020 or 2024.
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 15:58 GMT Jellied Eel
Indeed, it showed just how far the US would go to stop Trump. Oh, you think what was in the dossier was REAL?
I suspect most people who believe it was real never bothered to actually read it. FBI counter intelligence officers did, and were probably very glad the ($600k?) didn't come out of their budgets. Subsequent events, along with other very crude and ridiculous propaganda claims added some very large clues which countrys citizens actually provided that 'intelligence'.
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 10:25 GMT hammarbtyp
Community Notes
"community notes system like the one on Elon Musk's X, which Kaplan said has worked well for that site"
It worked well for me. In fact I haven't seen a false fact on X for months. Even better I haven't seen X for months and I am so happier as a result.
Next stop facebook...
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 11:59 GMT prandeamus
Can someone who understands these better explain why "Texas" is the right place for this work to take place? I don't have the context to understand that remark. I'd assume that in general Texas is more generally a conservative/Republican state, thus more generally MAGA-facing, but don't want to jump to conclusions. How dull of me to ask for facts :)
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 12:08 GMT Annihilator
Let's be honest, Facebook only introduced them in the first place because the political landscape was pushing them to do it. And let's also face it, the content moderation didn't really work. I've reported what feels like dozens of comments, posts, for blatant racism, sexism or just spam/virus-bait over the years, and every single request was reviewed and rejected as "not going against our community guidelines".
I also recently tried to report a blatantly fake profile of someone (Hannah Fry), that was a legit looking fake. But Facebook doesn't allow you to report a fake profile unless they have a presence on Facebook already, so the reports were rejected. (She or her PR have seemingly reactivated an old FB profile to get around this issue)
So unsurprising that the introverted version of Musk has decided to drop it as soon as he was politically able to.
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 12:22 GMT codejunky
Wow
"Fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the US,"
Colour me shocked!
"Zuck also called out the Biden administration, which he complained "has pushed for censorship" over the past four years"
And facebook and twitter participated. And people saw through it and voted for Trump after the state, media and social media did everything they could to keep him out.
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 12:37 GMT anthonyhegedus
America's compulsory freedom
Zuckerberg muttered something about showing the rest of the world how free speech is meant to be done. Yes, the American way.
No.
With social media leaders either already with that Trump or having just aligned themselves with Trump, there's going to be a bit of a culture war.
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 13:20 GMT Anonymous Coward
Getting News from Social Media
If you are one of those then sorry, you are a lost cause. Stop being so thick. If you believe all the bovine excrement that gets posted there then the men in white coats will be along soon. The same goes for any [cough][cough] news outlet controlled by Rupert Murdoch. Fox News is not a news service. Their then CEO testified to that fact before congress. It is entertainment.
Just stop using social media. YOU ARE THE PRODUCT. Get a life.
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Wednesday 8th January 2025 17:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
Any attempt to remove restrictions on free speech should be welcomed
Like it or not, the large social media platforms are now the de facto town square. Freedom of speech is essential for a functioning democracy which is why the First Amendment exists. Lessons from history should act as a guide that things never end well for regimes enforcing restrictions on speech.
One particularly egregious recent example of the suppression of free speech on social media was the banning of accounts on Twitter and facebook for simply discussing the lab-leak origin of COVID. So called "fact"-checkers went to work labeling such discussion as misinformation, but what does that word mean? Even today we are unclear as to where COVID came from, with the lab-leak hypothesis actually being the leading candidate according to at least one US governmental agency, the Dept of Energy.
There are now calls for China to be more open and transparent and release whatever information they have about the pandemic. That, to me, is closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. Social media "fact"-checkers did the job of the CCP helping to toe the official line and enable the cover-up, at a time when a ground swell of voices on social media platforms and elsewhere could very well have forced the Chinese to come clean.
In short, nobody should mourn the demise of the "fact"-checkers. The very term is deployed to trick people into believing they are the arbiters of truth, when in reality they are merely there to enforce the opinion of whichever regime happens to be in power at the time.