I don't think it's a coincidence that Facebook is building censorship tools at the same time they are talking about "fake news". It seems that the tooling to deal with both of these "problems" has a lot of overlap and could potentially be the same.
I lived in China for almost a decade during its economic rise, and many predicted an opening and democratization of China. But it always seemed to me that the US was becoming more like China rather than the other way around, and so far I haven't been disappointed.
Blame the business community that realized you could have a market economy within an authoritarian putatively communist government. Now they've been pushing hard to mold the whole world in that image under mantle of free trade.
It really looked like china was going to open up in 2008 before backtracking in a serious way for he next 10 years. You are probably right about the US, though it has a long way to go, maybe look at the U.K. or Austrailia?
If it's 100% public as to what exactly is being censored: the when, the who, the what, etc - an uncensored list of this - then that'd be a very different situation than something done behind closed doors.
The question of whether we should or how could we trust Facebook or any government if they did publish a list - is it complete or not? How would we know an algorithm isn't reducing it's reach solely because it is on a specific list?
That's really not a fair comparison. What they are saying is actually:
1) "We can't automate the stopping of fake news without hiring an army of trained human censors"
2) "Although since China already has an army of trained censors, it'd be easy to fix stuff for them with an API"
Edit, forgot to save, sorry:
The implication on #1 there is that for Facebook the cost is not worth it. Whether or not you agree with that is fine, but it's incredibly unfair to call it the same problem as China's censorship. It would cost Facebook something like $2-4 billion per year in labor to deploy a similar solution for just the united States
It is, of course, much easier to tell if a piece of news is inconvenient or objectionable to the powerful than it is to tell if it's true. That's what makes the recent push to ban fake news and its laser-like focus on items that are pro-Trump or anti-Clinton so scary.
Has there been anyone gathering statistics on this? i.e. were there also pro-Clinton fake news sites that we didn't hear about? And what are the percentages like?
I don't know if a objective analysis of this is possible, but has anyone even tried?
Facebook is already deciding what you see, that's a fundamental part of their business model. An editorial board deciding which stories get promoted is nothing different from what they already do.
The more fundamental problem is that Facebook makes it far easier and more profitable to run a cheap website stuffed with completely made-up stories than an actual newspaper, because it is much easier to catch people's attention with an outrageous fake headline than with boring real news.
To be fair, a lot of it is fake news. So much crap is "reported" about China that a lot of often exaggerated and spun in a certain way.
So I can definitely see why the Chinese government wants to protect itself.
I think Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" should be required watching to understand how real news can be spun to be positive or negative, e.g. 1 in 10 people die from this drug vs. 90% of people are saved with this medicine.
That's what China is trying to protect itself against.
> To be fair, a lot of it is fake news. So much crap is "reported" about China that a lot of often exaggerated and spun in a certain way.
This is just an excuse.
The rich and powerful in any country wanted to control media. They need fake news and make them prominent. They certainly can eliminate them easily; just like they would to censor real news. But they do need them to become prominent so people can buy in that censorship is necessary.
> It’s difficult to get an entrepreneur to understand something, when their valuation depends on them not understanding it.
Interesting (and unsurprising) that the comments here all focus on Facebook rather than the general problem. Cisco did the same thing by building the great firewall. Dubai has no shortage of western companies selling solutions to censor the Internet. When Wikileaks was raising money on Amazon it only took an angry statement from a Senator to get them banned.
Companies are happy to dump principles and take the money. The solution won't be complaining about Facebook. Trying to legislate companies bad actions is how we got here, so that might work with some issues in the past, but it isn't the solution we need now. Protesting and boycotting can get Apple to stop using child labor and suicide nets, but as a solution it's slow and reactionary.
> Zuckerberg came to a compromise to be chums with the Communist party in China. I wonder if that will ever pay off especially when you are so invested now and the relationship is dictated completely on the conditions of the foreign government. If this is the beginning then I shudder to think what the next compromise will be that affects their end user. It sets an uneasy precedent for future prospects eager to capture the enormous market in China.
I'm really proud of Google that they just got up and left China once they realized it was a one way relationship with a lot of giving and giving.
I think this is a huge blunder from Zuckerberg and it definitely hurts Facebook's brand.
It also shows a more underlying urgency from Zuck, the stock price is tied to user base growth and without it, the perceived future value evaporates with it. That in turn shows how elusive this "zero-interest rate capital funded growth at all cost" is and it's starting to show cracks.
Recall the Porsche story during the 70s when access to capital was really great. The problem was they assumed capital would always be there but what happened was when they most needed it the market conditions have changed and Volkswagen swallowed it up.
Facebook's revenue models are coming under scrutiny as advertisers can't justify the ambiguous metrics and ROI.
I wonder who will buy Facebook, perhaps News Corp?
> I'm really proud of Google that they just got up and left China
For now. We used to say that information wants to be free. We can say today that money wants to be made. Eventually Google's growth will not be sustainable by creating or buying products and eventually killing them, they'll need new markets.
Zuckerberg created Facebook in bad faith (as a hateful hot-or-not site) and it has been run in the same vein ever since. We can criticize him till we're blue in the face, but the only thing that will make a difference is if each and every one of us log off and delete our accounts.
Social media addiction is a real thing - if you want to quit Facebook but don't want to deal with the hassle of installing browser extensions or deleting your account (Facebook deliberately makes this complicated), just log out from all your browsers and delete any installed apps.
If you depend on Facebook for managing a page (work, band, etc), just use the dedicated Pages application. Same applies for Messenger if you don't want to get rid of it.
It's helped me curb the ridiculous "CTRL+T, fa, enter" reflex - seeing the login page instead of my Facebook feed every time I do this makes me notice how out of hand this has gotten for me.
Isn't this amazing? My wife still uses Facebook, and I think she thinks I'm just trying to be like a pushy vegan when I say life's better with no Facebook.
In general I have tried to remove myself from things that keep my attention on my phone rather than what's going on around me. Now I sort of get frustrated when people ask me what they missed or what just happened in the real world while they were glancing down.
I have friends and family who I think have completely forgotten what's it like to just be a passenger in a car watching the world go by, because if they're not driving they're looking at Facebook or Instagram.
- I can understand Facebook's action here, it's either give in or be out of the biggest market of tomorrow.
- I can understand western media trying to stir polemic about it, it's how they make their money.
- I can't understand people buying media crap and getting "shocked". Didn't Facebook do similar things for US Gov in the past? Did they think Zuck was a people's champion?
You say that as if it was obvious. But actually he is successful, he is young, he is rich, he is known as tech-genius that changed the alone with his 2 bare hands, he is everything that we are supposed to aspire to be in the Western world.
As such, he is continuously spin as a good natured fellow tirelessly working for the good of mankind. So yes that will surprise a lot of people to learn he is not the White Knight they thought he was.
If you know Zuckerbergs history it's pretty apparent he was never a white knight of any description, he's talented but there is a lot of right place/right time as well.
Still that doesn't feed the narrative beast so we conveniently forget that.
You see the same with other tech CEO's all the time, I rather like Larry Ellison for that reason, he rarely pretends to be anything he isn't.
I hope you do not believe this yourself. Seeing this on HN makes me sad, and it is an insult to FB employees that it's Zuck built everything with his 2 bare hands. Such media manufactured popular misconception should not have any breathing air on HN.
Readit News
"Look at this thing we built to stop real news."
I lived in China for almost a decade during its economic rise, and many predicted an opening and democratization of China. But it always seemed to me that the US was becoming more like China rather than the other way around, and so far I haven't been disappointed.
The question of whether we should or how could we trust Facebook or any government if they did publish a list - is it complete or not? How would we know an algorithm isn't reducing it's reach solely because it is on a specific list?
1) "We can't automate the stopping of fake news without hiring an army of trained human censors"
2) "Although since China already has an army of trained censors, it'd be easy to fix stuff for them with an API"
Edit, forgot to save, sorry:
The implication on #1 there is that for Facebook the cost is not worth it. Whether or not you agree with that is fine, but it's incredibly unfair to call it the same problem as China's censorship. It would cost Facebook something like $2-4 billion per year in labor to deploy a similar solution for just the united States
I don't know if a objective analysis of this is possible, but has anyone even tried?
The more fundamental problem is that Facebook makes it far easier and more profitable to run a cheap website stuffed with completely made-up stories than an actual newspaper, because it is much easier to catch people's attention with an outrageous fake headline than with boring real news.
I really don't see how Facebook wins here.
So I can definitely see why the Chinese government wants to protect itself.
I think Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" should be required watching to understand how real news can be spun to be positive or negative, e.g. 1 in 10 people die from this drug vs. 90% of people are saved with this medicine.
That's what China is trying to protect itself against.
This is just an excuse.
The rich and powerful in any country wanted to control media. They need fake news and make them prominent. They certainly can eliminate them easily; just like they would to censor real news. But they do need them to become prominent so people can buy in that censorship is necessary.
Interesting (and unsurprising) that the comments here all focus on Facebook rather than the general problem. Cisco did the same thing by building the great firewall. Dubai has no shortage of western companies selling solutions to censor the Internet. When Wikileaks was raising money on Amazon it only took an angry statement from a Senator to get them banned.
Companies are happy to dump principles and take the money. The solution won't be complaining about Facebook. Trying to legislate companies bad actions is how we got here, so that might work with some issues in the past, but it isn't the solution we need now. Protesting and boycotting can get Apple to stop using child labor and suicide nets, but as a solution it's slow and reactionary.
> Zuckerberg came to a compromise to be chums with the Communist party in China. I wonder if that will ever pay off especially when you are so invested now and the relationship is dictated completely on the conditions of the foreign government. If this is the beginning then I shudder to think what the next compromise will be that affects their end user. It sets an uneasy precedent for future prospects eager to capture the enormous market in China.
I'm really proud of Google that they just got up and left China once they realized it was a one way relationship with a lot of giving and giving.
I think this is a huge blunder from Zuckerberg and it definitely hurts Facebook's brand.
It also shows a more underlying urgency from Zuck, the stock price is tied to user base growth and without it, the perceived future value evaporates with it. That in turn shows how elusive this "zero-interest rate capital funded growth at all cost" is and it's starting to show cracks.
Recall the Porsche story during the 70s when access to capital was really great. The problem was they assumed capital would always be there but what happened was when they most needed it the market conditions have changed and Volkswagen swallowed it up.
Facebook's revenue models are coming under scrutiny as advertisers can't justify the ambiguous metrics and ROI.
I wonder who will buy Facebook, perhaps News Corp?
Google has essentially the same relationship with the US government. It's departure from China had more to do with this than any high mindedness.
For now. We used to say that information wants to be free. We can say today that money wants to be made. Eventually Google's growth will not be sustainable by creating or buying products and eventually killing them, they'll need new markets.
Sorry, that item is out of stock.
Dead Comment
If you depend on Facebook for managing a page (work, band, etc), just use the dedicated Pages application. Same applies for Messenger if you don't want to get rid of it.
It's helped me curb the ridiculous "CTRL+T, fa, enter" reflex - seeing the login page instead of my Facebook feed every time I do this makes me notice how out of hand this has gotten for me.
I am so sorry I ever joined that f*cking site.
In general I have tried to remove myself from things that keep my attention on my phone rather than what's going on around me. Now I sort of get frustrated when people ask me what they missed or what just happened in the real world while they were glancing down.
I have friends and family who I think have completely forgotten what's it like to just be a passenger in a car watching the world go by, because if they're not driving they're looking at Facebook or Instagram.
What made the original Facebook hateful when compared with other "hot-or-not" sites?
- I can understand western media trying to stir polemic about it, it's how they make their money.
- I can't understand people buying media crap and getting "shocked". Didn't Facebook do similar things for US Gov in the past? Did they think Zuck was a people's champion?
You say that as if it was obvious. But actually he is successful, he is young, he is rich, he is known as tech-genius that changed the alone with his 2 bare hands, he is everything that we are supposed to aspire to be in the Western world.
As such, he is continuously spin as a good natured fellow tirelessly working for the good of mankind. So yes that will surprise a lot of people to learn he is not the White Knight they thought he was.
Still that doesn't feed the narrative beast so we conveniently forget that.
You see the same with other tech CEO's all the time, I rather like Larry Ellison for that reason, he rarely pretends to be anything he isn't.
I hope you do not believe this yourself. Seeing this on HN makes me sad, and it is an insult to FB employees that it's Zuck built everything with his 2 bare hands. Such media manufactured popular misconception should not have any breathing air on HN.
Deleted Comment
This opening summarizes the entire sentiment. FB and Zukerberg are not on your side and do not uphold any banner of morality.
I am going to have this quote framed and put up on a wall somewhere. For some reason, I suspect life and business will be easier if I remember it.