Mark Zuckerberg: Identifying The "Truth" Is Complicated

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Mark Zuckerberg took to Facebook this weekend to say that the social network will do its best to get rid of fake news but, at the same time, he also said that identifying the truth is "complicated."

Our goal is to show people the content they will find most meaningful, and people want accurate news. We have already launched work enabling our community to flag hoaxes and fake news, and there is more we can do here. We have made progress, and we will continue to work on this to improve further. This is an area where I believe we must proceed very carefully though. Identifying the "truth" is complicated.
 
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I know he's trying to be politically correct here but he's wrong, at least most of the time. The truth is the truth. It's not subjective or based on opinion. It is fact. Just because someone (or a group of someones) chooses to disbelieve a fact because it doesn't fit in with their preconceived ideas about how things work doesn't suddenly make the truth "complicated". The truth is still the truth, regardless of perception. Just because some people can't disentangle "truth" from "opinion" doesn't make it complicated. It makes those people wrong.
 
Kind of the self-delusion of the election chances of Trump is an explicit case in point they can't dodge. Consensus is not Truth. Especially when talking about the News media.

Facebook can take some of the blame for a self-reinforcing bubble.
 
My big problem with any of these statements is that Facebook isn't creating stories, fake or real. It's the users who use facebook.
So is this avocation of censorship?
If it is, i'm fairly sure facebook's popularity is about to take a big hit
 
most of the fake news are similar to the fake shock stories ... and most of the people posting them on FB are folks I do not consider extremely intelligent. However some of the fake news stuff is often racist/shock crap. And 99.99999% of the urls are from sites you have never head of before. Why they show up in feeds is beyond me or who is finding these articles in the first place. They probably start from similar sources to the "make 501350135 $ a month " fb links that FB is ok with even if you list as spam when its a news article about someone dying.... FB allows those comments no probs.
 
Steve said:
Mark Zuckerberg took to Facebook this weekend to say that the social network will do its best to get rid of fake news but, at the same time, he also said that identifying the truth is "complicated."

Our goal is to show people the content they will find most meaningful, and people want accurate news. We have already launched work enabling our community to flag hoaxes and fake news, and there is more we can do here. We have made progress, and we will continue to work on this to improve further. This is an area where I believe we must proceed very carefully though. Identifying the "truth" is complicated.
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Meaning we can't automate it without creating bias, and we can't do it manually, because it will be biased.

Dwango said:
I know he's trying to be politically correct here but he's wrong, at least most of the time. The truth is the truth. It's not subjective or based on opinion. It is fact. Just because someone (or a group of someones) chooses to disbelieve a fact because it doesn't fit in with their preconceived ideas about how things work doesn't suddenly make the truth "complicated". The truth is still the truth, regardless of perception. Just because some people can't disentangle "truth" from "opinion" doesn't make it complicated. It makes those people wrong.
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I think he is referring to the difficulty of identifying the truth, not that truth itself is complicated. Short of going out and putting eyes on every event yourself, it is difficult to verify the veracity of truth.

The old way of verification, i.e. hearing it from multiple sources, has been invalidated by the fact that the sources are now echos of each other. So how do you handle that, programatically?
 
Dwango said:
I know he's trying to be politically correct here but he's wrong, at least most of the time. The truth is the truth. It's not subjective or based on opinion. It is fact. Just because someone (or a group of someones) chooses to disbelieve a fact because it doesn't fit in with their preconceived ideas about how things work doesn't suddenly make the truth "complicated". The truth is still the truth, regardless of perception. Just because some people can't disentangle "truth" from "opinion" doesn't make it complicated. It makes those people wrong.
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I think he has his programming geek hat on fully in this one is simply saying it is algorithmically complicated to determine if information is 100% accurate. Two examples.

1) Breaking news, especially something investigative. There's going to be zero ability to corroborate it for some period of time that is not insignificant.
2) Clinton e-mail. Specifically the presence of classified information vs. the law. Yes, there are a few pieces of mail that are classified. However, they have the classified notations removed. The rules state that knowing transmission of them is the problem. Someone definitely broke the rules by redacting the classified tags and transmitting it via email, but can you stick Hillary with the charge of having violated that rule. At that point you are asking how legally defensible her position is, and that is 100% opinion, even if you ask a lawyer very knowledgable in going to trial in that area.
 
Fakebook just announced: "Kellyanne Conway will lead the new and improved facebook news department."
 
All this would be straightened out real quick if 1 billion people would not use FB for a week. After that a day at a time more. Advertisers have more power than the 1 billion users at this stage. The advertisers need 2 billion eyes on FB pages. See, FB users still wield the power if they would just band together.
 
The issue is that in practically all cases, noone reports the news anymore. There is no longer journalism, or journalists or at best they are in the extreme minority.

The "news" be it printed, digital media, or television, has become a race to drop a story first, at the cost of accuracy or as a medium for opinion based editorials.

There is almost no fact finding anymore, no more vetted sources.

And what is the point, the average news consumer will gladly believe any crap they are fed as long as they can get the news via thier "friends" on social media, or the verbal diarrhea spewed out of the mouth of whatever talking head working for the news media outlet the consumer decided was most in line with their (biased) views.

To get even close to the truth, you have to look at multiple outlets, and even then the truth is muddied.
 
termite said:
The issue is that in practically all cases, noone reports the news anymore. There is no longer journalism, or journalists or at best they are in the extreme minority.

The "news" be it printed, digital media, or television, has become a race to drop a story first, at the cost of accuracy or as a medium for opinion based editorials.

There is almost no fact finding anymore, no more vetted sources.

And what is the point, the average news consumer will gladly believe any crap they are fed as long as they can get the news via thier "friends" on social media, or the verbal diarrhea spewed out of the mouth of whatever talking head working for the news media outlet the consumer decided was most in line with their (biased) views.

To get even close to the truth, you have to look at multiple outlets, and even then the truth is muddied.
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It was a race to break the news first always. The difference, is that they no longer care if the news is factual, or false anymore. A few decades ago any journalist who came out with news that turned out to be a hoax, or a lie, would've not just lost their job, but would've been ridiculed out of the industry.
 
Well... he is correct. Consider how very wrong the New York Times and the Washington Post (among others) were with regards to the recent election. If they were publishing news they considered to be factual but was in fact not factual doesn't that make their stories "fake news"?

Who decides what is fake or not? IMO it is better to be 100% uncensored and allow public debate and the harshness of reality to settle issues in the twilight zone.
 
The issue with the media is they started believing their own BS.
Surveys and poll were slanted toward liberals (as they always have been) to get the answers they want.
Media figures move in the cult of celebrity for the most part and that is a bubble. Nothing penetrates to pop that bubble. That is how they always get it wrong.
 
thejokker said:
Well... he is correct. Consider how very wrong the New York Times and the Washington Post (among others) were with regards to the recent election. If they were publishing news they considered to be factual but was in fact not factual doesn't that make their stories "fake news"?

Who decides what is fake or not? IMO it is better to be 100% uncensored and allow public debate and the harshness of reality to settle issues in the twilight zone.
Click to expand...
But for the election those were the facts. It was a survey, they published what the survey data said. That is still factual for what it was, it wasn't like the real data was out there they just didn't bother to check the facts. A journalist can't go and check if a survey is actually accurate, the most he can do is to compare it to other independent surveys, but every survey said the same thing.

The problem is when they run with bullshit, which can be easily fact checked, but they don't bother. Sorry to say, but much like how front page news work here on [H] they don't fact check anything just publish whatever they find often not even reading the story before publishing it not to mention fact checking.
When I for a short period was working for an IT site publishing news, I always researched every news before putting it up. I don't want to delve too deep into things, but it might have to do something with why I gave up doing that after about a month. They paid absolutely shit for each news article. So you either worked as a charity or published unchecked crap. It took me about half an hour to fact check and research each news item, to the level that I deemed acceptable. But what they paid meant that I'd have to churn out 6-8 news articles an hour to make any sort of living off it. So rather than producing crap I quit. But the same problem was evident with large articles as well. It took me a week to produce research illustrate a 5-6 page in depth article. But the payment was only enough if I only took 1-2 days doing it.
So it's possibly a top down problem as well. And that on the Internet almost none of the people writing articles on sites are actually journalists. Being a journalist used to mean something. Not so much anymore.

Sorry for the long rant.
 
... hire a small army of fact checkers? Pretty sure that will reduce the problem significantly.
 
Dr. Righteous said:
View attachment 10536

/thread
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LIXrC62.gif


Put it away. I've read it, you and I are gonna disagree on that one.

This is not the place to witness. We've either read the book or are pretty familiar with the myth of the jewish zombie carpenter's adopted son, and either believe or think it's bullshit.

You come off as smug and self righteous - course I get that from your name too, you Pharisee. Might be time for you to reread Matt 23 and EVERYTIME Jesus talks about the Pharisees think "that's me."

"Everything they do is for show."

"Outwardly you look like righteous people, but inwardly your hearts are filled with hypocrisy..."
 
Kor said:
... hire a small army of fact checkers? Pretty sure that will reduce the problem significantly.
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They did that. Then they canned their team of news curators for bias. Then they churned out an algorithm that surfaced a story about a man masturbating with a McDonald's sandwich. Should we take another turn on the merry-go-round, or just settle on the notion that it's "complicated"?
 
spugm1r3 said:
I think he is referring to the difficulty of identifying the truth, not that truth itself is complicated. Short of going out and putting eyes on every event yourself, it is difficult to verify the veracity of truth.

The old way of verification, i.e. hearing it from multiple sources, has been invalidated by the fact that the sources are now echos of each other. So how do you handle that, programatically?
Click to expand...

This is why I said "most of the time". For example, there are still people out there that will tell you that the science is still out on climate change despite the fact that the vast, vast majority of climate scientists will tell you that it is being caused by human activity. That is a fact. It is not in doubt. The science on it is not still "out". Not believing it doesn't change that. And yet you'll find all over the alt-right "news" pages that no one is sure or that it is totally a natural phenomenon.
 
Dwango said:
This is why I said "most of the time". For example, there are still people out there that will tell you that the science is still out on climate change despite the fact that the vast, vast majority of climate scientists will tell you that it is being caused by human activity. That is a fact. It is not in doubt. The science on it is not still "out". Not believing it doesn't change that. And yet you'll find all over the alt-right "news" pages that no one is sure or that it is totally a natural phenomenon.
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I'll agree, in regards to events that accumulate over a long period of time, finding a wealth of corroborating evidence is relatively easy. The problem arises in "breaking" news however, because there is no timeline or trend to point towards to increase the confidence in the "truthiness" of a particular story. And frankly, the efficacy of clickbait headlines is predicated on a reader not having immediate context to discount fake stories.
 
Dr. Righteous said:
View attachment 10536

/thread
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This thread is about truth. What does a book compiled of stories written by multiple people living in a desert 2000+ years ago have to do with anything here? If a magician went back and performed his 'magic' to the people back then he's be worshiped as a god and have book written about him as well.... Religion is just a nice way to control the gullible masses, lets keep on topic here.

*edit* I also went to christian school K-12 and have read it many many times....
 
M76 said:
But for the election those were the facts. It was a survey, they published what the survey data said. That is still factual for what it was, it wasn't like the real data was out there they just didn't bother to check the facts. A journalist can't go and check if a survey is actually accurate, the most he can do is to compare it to other independent surveys, but every survey said the same thing.

The problem is when they run with bullshit, which can be easily fact checked, but they don't bother. Sorry to say, but much like how front page news work here on [H] they don't fact check anything just publish whatever they find often not even reading the story before publishing it not to mention fact checking.
When I for a short period was working for an IT site publishing news, I always researched every news before putting it up. I don't want to delve too deep into things, but it might have to do something with why I gave up doing that after about a month. They paid absolutely shit for each news article. So you either worked as a charity or published unchecked crap. It took me about half an hour to fact check and research each news item, to the level that I deemed acceptable. But what they paid meant that I'd have to churn out 6-8 news articles an hour to make any sort of living off it. So rather than producing crap I quit. But the same problem was evident with large articles as well. It took me a week to produce research illustrate a 5-6 page in depth article. But the payment was only enough if I only took 1-2 days doing it.
So it's possibly a top down problem as well. And that on the Internet almost none of the people writing articles on sites are actually journalists. Being a journalist used to mean something. Not so much anymore.

Sorry for the long rant.
Click to expand...
Polls and surveys have statistical methodology. When you over-sample certain demographics, and under-sample others, your poll or survey becomes invalid. But the failure of the mainstream media is about more than promoting invalid surveys. Distorting stories about Trump to emphasis negative points is dishonest as is suppressing negative stories about Clinton.

Hindsight allows us to see that the news that Hillary was leading Trump by a large margin was a "fake" story. The news that multiple women had been molested by Trump (women paid by the Clinton campaign) was a fake story. Most of the media outlets, once respected for responsible journalism, has abandoned their sacred duties to the citizens of the United States. Thankfully alternative news sources have risen up to provide the public what it needs. The authorities on what is fake and what is not is now in question.

I suggest to you that "we" do not need authorities to tell us what is fake and what is not. We do not need authorities to censor the news in any way (in any way!!!). We all have a greater probability of finding the truth by discussing and debating the merits of news stories among ourselves. Sure many people will be blinded by their ideology, but those who are objective and free-thinking, having all the information, will arrive at the correct conclusion. Who needs fake experts or fake news stories when we have ourselves...
 
thejokker said:
Polls and surveys have statistical methodology. When you over-sample certain demographics, and under-sample others, your poll or survey becomes invalid. But the failure of the mainstream media is about more than promoting invalid surveys. Distorting stories about Trump to emphasis negative points is dishonest as is suppressing negative stories about Clinton.

Hindsight allows us to see that the news that Hillary was leading Trump by a large margin was a "fake" story. The news that multiple women had been molested by Trump (women paid by the Clinton campaign) was a fake story. Most of the media outlets, once respected for responsible journalism, has abandoned their sacred duties to the citizens of the United States. Thankfully alternative news sources have risen up to provide the public what it needs. The authorities on what is fake and what is not is now in question.

I suggest to you that "we" do not need authorities to tell us what is fake and what is not. We do not need authorities to censor the news in any way (in any way!!!). We all have a greater probability of finding the truth by discussing and debating the merits of news stories among ourselves. Sure many people will be blinded by their ideology, but those who are objective and free-thinking, having all the information, will arrive at the correct conclusion. Who needs fake experts or fake news stories when we have ourselves...
Click to expand...

Reporting on the statistics is an entirely different thing than suppressing one kind of news for another kind of news. What one news outlet talks about and what they dontt talk about is entirely up to them. The important bit is that what they report should be factual. Or when they come out with an opinion piece it should be clearly stated that it's not based on facts just opinions.

I never said we need the authorities to tell us what is fake and what is not. Journalists should hold themselves to higher standards. Journalism is not about discussion. It should be about reporting stories, not manufacturing them. It's the editor's job to only publish stories that are factual and cross examined. They dilute the entire industry, and it's not dying because of the internet, it's dying because they are no longer doing their job correctly.
 
thejokker said:
What if the fact-checkers are partisan hacks?
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Then they should be fired. Anyone in that position worth their salt should be able to validate claims against actual data without actively trying to skew things.
 
Dwango said:
I know he's trying to be politically correct here but he's wrong, at least most of the time. The truth is the truth. It's not subjective or based on opinion. It is fact. Just because someone (or a group of someones) chooses to disbelieve a fact because it doesn't fit in with their preconceived ideas about how things work doesn't suddenly make the truth "complicated". The truth is still the truth, regardless of perception. Just because some people can't disentangle "truth" from "opinion" doesn't make it complicated. It makes those people wrong.
Click to expand...

Are we talking about math or something here? There is much opinion in "truth". Saying some one committed murder is a truth. But is saying murder is wrong a truth?

You are confusing, or rather mixing, a result with an idea. Results can be factual, but ideas are completely subjective.

Global Warming (aka Climate Change) is probably our best example at the moment. Many believe it is a truth because of the evidence which they have seen. But they cannot show anyone that they are definitively right, because they can't show the future. The idea is there, but the result is not.

The point is, right and wrong are not set in stone. Which is what many people associate truth with.


That being said........

This shit needs to go!

KAM0DbW.jpg
 
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