Maybe I’m misreading Barry Ritholtz’s prescription for “fixing” Facebook:
I propose a simple three-step test for what determining what should not be circulated on the site as news:
- Is the item demonstrably false?
- Does it target a specific group for discrimination, harassment or abuse?
- Does the dissemination of the false claim hurt this group of people?
If the answer to all three of those questions is yes, than the posts/news items are deleted. If this nonsense amounts to a substantial enough chunk of their content, they get banned. They are free to find another place to post their false, abusive, bullshit.
but it seems to me that he’s saying that Facebook’s problems were inevitable when it made the transition from being a small club to a massive platform and public accommodation.
I think it’s much more difficult than Mr. Ritholtz seems to. Both #2 and #3 are ultimately subjective. “Target” implies intent and there is nothing so benign that cannot be construed as hurting someone. What is missing from his formulation is the concept of reasonableness. Would a reasonable individual find the statement hurtful?
And #1 is much more difficult than Mr. Ritholtz seems to think. When there isn’t even a general agreement on what are facts and what are fictions, how can you prove something is false? Consider an example fairly frequently encountered in certain circles: “President Obama saved the economy”. Is that true, false, or unprovable. You might think it is true, another false, while I think it is unprovable. With enough craft practically any statement can be rephrased so as to be unprovable.
How about this one: “Donald Trump is an imminent threat to America”. True, false, or unprovable?
I think that Facebook was doomed from the start. Unless the company could grow big and powerful enough quickly enough to prevent upstarts, the caravan was always going to move on. And no company should be allowed to be that powerful.
Sandy Hook conspiracy theories or Alex Jones or Holocaust denialists are to true/false as some guy sending an unsolicited picture of his genitals is to a picture of a Renaissance sculpture. Bullshit is bullshit, and it’s not about being true or false. We know intuitively that harassment and manipulation are different from honest acts of communication. It’s also pretty clear that an ideology based on harassment and manipulation has clearly morphed into the soul of the American right. How to deal with as a whole is beyond me. But it’s not dangerous to wade into reality, as Facebook should be doing. Banning Alex Jones is a no-brainer. If conservative cranks want to form their own online social network and then ban any criticism of Lord Trump, they’re more than welcome to.
I agree that the evidence that the Germans murdered millions of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and physically or mentally impaired people in the 1930s and 1940s is incontrovertible as is the evidence that there was a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School that wasn’t a false flag operation or any other sort of deception.
Will banning users that promote such claptrap solve Facebook’s problem with “fake news”? I don’t think so. I think it’s a rabbit hole of ever-closer calls.
We will always have cries for censorship and despite vigorous efforts, it fails; the samizdat of the Iron Curtain days, photocopied talking point sheets found in laundromats, pirate radio, the turkbots, graffiti about bald headed bisexual lechers, etc.
Try regarding your fellow humanoids as a capable of separating feces from shinola.
MM,
Facebook is a private org, so can do what it wants, but it can’t be an effective arbiter of speech.
Facebook will do whatever is necessary for the bottom line, which means its policies will always be vulnerable to the whims of a sufficiently large and angry (online) mob. Or, consider what they’ve agreed to in order to get into the Chinese market.
Ah yes–the angry online mob capriciously angry because (checks notes) parents of Sandy Hook victims have to go into hiding because of death threats.
This isn’t samizdat or controversial speech. It’s the exact same thing as Gamergate; the same deeply-confused spectrum-ish humans. People telling Alex Jones to screw off forever is how decent normie society is supposed to function. Instead the most rigidly normal are listening to QAnon about the Deep State.
MM,
Let me put it this way – A company like Facebook needs an evenly enforced standard if it plans to police content – that is something I’m doubtful Facebook can actually do.
Never take any of it as true without multiple sources, Include Snopes.
Oh, and drop Facebook, everyone else has.
Declare Facebook, Twitter, etc. to be utilities and regulate them as such.