We took these actions to stop unauthorized scraping and protect people's privacy
It's not really unauthorized if people installed the pluggin for the express purpose of providing the researchers with data about the ads they received and how their personal information may have gotten them targeted for those ads. Given IRB requirements, that would have to have been made clear to users as well. Not like the click-wrap "I agree" buttons Facebook and other use to keep knowledge what users are giving to them opaque.
I believe FB is being purposely disingenuous with its statement there - using the language of user privacy and security to protect itself from third-party academic research.
The authorisation it talks about here is not the users - it’s their authorisation. The privacy concerns are the advertisers (yes, really - they claimed at one point some adverts include names and contact details for the advertiser, and hence constitute private information). That’s why they say “people’s privacy” without explicitly identifying the people they are protecting.
> they claimed at one point some adverts include names and contact details for the advertiser, and hence constitute private information
So if Facebook allowed ads do contain PII haven't their privacy protections already failed? And if advertisers are allowed to include PII by design then it cannot really be private. If it is private then surely users whom the ad targets have a right to record their experience.
They are referring to the privacy of _other_ users whose information could be scraped by these plugins, contrary to the privacy guarantees of their post (e.g. "only my friends can see this"). I'm sceptical of Facebook's motivations, but we should at least be accurate.
This is possible with any extension that can scrape site data or every camera ever made. Also the source of the extension can prove such exfiltraion is not its purpose.
This extension is explicit about scraping and storing data from Facebook, which obviously makes it rather more of a target.
And I'm not sure what the point of bringing up a camera is - obviously Facebook can't stop people doing that, but I can't see why that entails that they should simply do nothing about any scraping of data.
By unauthorized, they mean unauthorized by Facebook. They own their users and they'll be damned if they let some researchers shed light on their user exploitation activities.
In this day and age, mere mortals are not allowed to do anything that goes against a corporation's business interests. If it costs them money, it might as well be illegal as far as they're concerned.
>> But the far right and far left media ecosystems are "fundamentally different," Edelson said, with 40% of the media sources cited on the far right actively spreading false information. In other corners of the media ecosystem and other partisan groups, this number doesn't go above 10%.
how are they quantifying this? Or is there link to other sources on this?
Unless you actually have evidence this is the case (other than your own personal bias), this is a completely unhelpful comment. Presumably the study's methodology is documented somewhere, it just may not be published yet.
My methodology is well known: it is an educated guess.
And no, I still think Western civilization including the press is pretty nifty compared to the alternatives, I just try to apply some pressure to get it to self correct.
Is it safe to say censorship, deplatforming, shadowbans, unbanking, watchlisting, and unpersoning is pretty much normalized, and now everyone can just say, "it is what it is," and imagine they aren't going to be caught up in the next wave?
These kinds of practices have always been normalized in the context of internet web forums. They're privately owned and operated sites whose "members" amount to volunteer content contributors with zero legal right to be published via or given access to said site. Facebook is no different.
There's a serious computer and internet literacy problem when the general public believes otherwise.
Hell, doesn't SomethingAwful let users ban others for a fee?
There is a somewhat strange level of mental dissonance that occurs when people approach the policing of 'the internet' and 'social media platforms'.
Internet forums have existed for a long time, and for an equivalent period their moderation policies sufficed. If you disagreed with one forum, there were plenty others to take its place.
However, we've now approached a reality in which these forums have dwindled or become centralized. A much larger audience participates, and these forums have now expanded to be parts of multimedia service conglomerate megacorporations. There are no other choices, and these organizations are spread into aspects of life that would cause being banned to be quite inconvenient.
For example, getting your Google account banned could in theory result in loss of access to most of everything here: https://about.google/intl/ALL_us/products/. It gets worse when you consider that google could be your internet provider. And of course google insists everything be forced through their accounts. Loss of access to your account could mean loss of access to the internet. Hell, you'd lose access to your god damn Nest thermostat.
It's not super hard to resist using your primary Google account to tell people to kill themselves, or that you are going to kill them, or tell others in general to attack people or places.
If you own a Nest Thermostat you probably own your residence or rent relative luxury and therefore should have your life together enough to not be a dick on the internet or have an anonymous profile for your rage/hate projection.
I guess it's a problem if your ISP is truly policing you directly and you can't just vpn/proxy for whatever reason, poverty/security
There are lots of things that can be normalized at a small scale that don't work at a large scale. If you're a 3 person startup with your 2 best friends you can work in your living room, keep whatever weird hours you want, call each other rude nicknames, and joke around. When you're a 1000 person company with an HR department you need to have some clear procedures because there's lots of different people that can't all know and trust each other the way three people do.
Likewise, a small niche forum with an insular community can police itself pretty much however it likes. A global communication network that has become telecom infrastructure for all intents and purpose has do a little more justification before it cuts someone off from what is becoming a vital service.
> A global communication network that has become telecom infrastructure for all intents and purpose has do a little more justification before it cuts someone off from what is becoming a vital service.
Until the Facebooks and Twitters of the world become legally classified as such, you're making the same mistake of expecting as much from what is legally absolutely no different from the SomethingAwfuls of the world.
I’m saying those laws should be made. I get that that is not the case presently. Pretending that a network with 2 billion people and the ability to influence national elections is the exact same thing as the phpBB for your Dungeons and Dragons group and it’s fine if there’s no difference in the way they’re regulated is either naive or disingenuous. Laws are not immutable facts of nature that we have no control over. We can create or change them as needed when something new arises that is harming society.
With wacked US politics lately business regulations are just turned on and off as the parties trade control. Laws will probably make it harder to kick off foreign influencers and bots with plausible deniability if it's protecting regular a-holes
We regulate private businesses all the time when their actions are harmful to the public. Labor laws, environmental laws, workplace safety, discrimination, and on and on. "Private business" is not a magic phrase that means you get to do whatever you want with no regard for the rest of society.
If the State wants a fully regulated communication system, it can put facebook under the same umbrella as the telcos.
Interestingly, it will surely be what you dislike so what is your point?
If facebook becomes public utility I want to be able to regulate speech on it with my tax money. If it's private, I dont care if it tries to regulate harmful speech the way it wants as long as it doesnt impact where my tax money is going (so I dont want to pay for girls empowerement to have facebook massively undermining it by letting sheikhs explain the youth how to beat their unruly wives)
>>Popularity doesn't determine what is and is-not vital
Then, pray tell, what does? It is the assumption that these services are used that turns them into important infrastructure.
Everyone just assumes you have a bank account or a telephone, and that makes both bank accounts and telephones desirable, we wouldn't invest ungodly amounts of money in infrastructure on roads, traffic lights etc if automobiles weren't popular and they surely wouldn't be if we didn't have the infrastructure.
WhatsApp is. Everyone in my country uses it. Not even a judge can get away with blocking WhatsApp as punishment for encrypting messages because the consequences are too great.
Where do you advertise your Etsy/Shopify business?
I don't use facebook myself, but it's pretty hard to deny that they hold a vital position in the market. You can avoid them out of principle, but you're not setting yourself up for an easy start.
Forums? There used to be so many of them. They're about niche stuff, not a public space for all humanity. If they ban someone, what does it matter? It's literally an entertainment site, a hobby. People can always just make a new account if they really want to.
Social media is huge and centralized. Government officials post in there. Not having an account can cost people their jobs. It causes people to be isolated from friends and family.
At some point, the social media platform's freedom must be reduced lest they perpetrate far worse injustices upon individuals.
> Hell, doesn't SomethingAwful let users ban others for a fee?
I couldn’t find anything that said that. You could buy your way out of a ban[1].
You might be thinking of “Another brilliant monetization not mentioned in the article: you could pay to customize your own user image and title. For twice the price, another user could pay to anonymously choose their own title/image for you, usually to insult. Want to change your appearance back? Pay again.” as per philipkglass https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14122169
[1] “When Rich put the paywall in effect, it kept idiots out to an enormous degree. It was probably the smartest decision he ever made in regards to the website. You have to put in a little investment if you want to participate and if you're a real shithead you're going to end up paying Rich like $150 because you keep buying accounts, which is good for the site and it's also kind of funny to watch really, really bad people shell out a lot of money.” - https://www.vice.com/en/article/nzg4yw/fuck-you-and-die-an-o...
Yes. Using the famous private platform argument here, if anything is in violation of their ToS, they can censor, deplatform, shadowban, unbank, etc whoever they want.
Whether if you are Gab using AWS, Onlyfans using the payment processors or Element on Google Play, the whole point is that it can happen to anyone. Doesn't matter if you scream, protest, throw a tantrum about it, etc. They have that right to do it.
don't violate the TOS if you want to use a platform for your research
also based on Edelson statement this research seems to be heavily biased before it even completed, favoring one political wing statements as "true" vs. another as "false", probably not much scientific value was there in the first place
This is the first time I heard of acab. If anything thanks for the laughs. It's a hilarious acronym, I was expecting something highbrow like apartheid government claims.
All the fact checking sites absolutely do treat what they consider to be misleading narratives as outright lies when the right does it though. So at least to some extent, that strong qualitative difference is just due to claims being treated differently depending on which political cause they support.
if you swap the "left" and "right" labels you comment will be just as true (or false, depending on whom you ask).
NYU has very strong reputation in hard sciences but their social studies are hopelessly left-leaning and probably as far from neutral as Taliban studies on women's rights.
The whole idea of investigating "spread of misinformation" in the current politicized climate is unscientific at best and agenda-driven at worse. You've got to take a political stand to declare something "misinformation".
I don't think so. If you openly and intentially select creditable data-driven academic researchers from both sides of political spectrum (or having an established record of being politically neutral), you can run a research study close to politically neutral.
Let's say I grant you this generalization (it seems like it could be true to me). Then it's not really the NYT vs Fox, is it? Doesn't sheer quantity matter? What fraction of the media (say, the stuff you're likely to see on Google News) is "left" vs "right"?
In other words, the suggestion is that the right lies outright, whereas the left lies via omission and cherry-picking to concoct stories. OK -- doesn't it matter that the left has, I don't know, 85% of the market share (that's what the tech giants endlessly blast out)?
I think the debate here was merely on misinformation, so to be honest I'd say market share doesn't necessarily apply here.
You might rightfully say that weaving a biased narrative out of truths could also be labeled misinformation, but in my own personal opinion I'd rather try and unravel that narrative than try to unravel a narrative based on straight up lies.
Also, some of the narrative weaving can be done in good faith or unknowingly (e.g. baively being somones interpretation for which they knoe of no alternative) but lying is never in good faith or accidental.
> OK -- doesn't it matter that the left has, I don't know, 85% of the market share (that's what the tech giants endlessly blast out)?
This isn't true. Fox News has been rated the most watched network many times including in July. According to a previous post here on HN, a lot of highest trending stuff spread on FB is right-wing.
Also almost all US media is to the right of almost all European media (notable exceptions including Poland and Hungary.)
Well, I grant it's hard to quantify. It was recently reported that Fox had more viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined, but that's TV.
On the internet, it's a very different story. If you block left-leaning news outlets on Apple News, your front page may contain nothing at all. Google News has a permanent section devoted to leftist "fact checkers". Their "beyond the headlines" section currently displays the NYT, BBC, Vox, Guardian, Atlantic, WSJ, Slate, Verge, and AP.
WSJ is owned by Murdoch and is pretty far right-wing even for the US, but like I said, all of that is considered right-wing or "centrist" to be very charitable (although obviously not conservative except the WSJ) in Europe and to anyone who actually calls themselves a leftists (or a political sciensit.)
This is a frequent problem with such comments like the one you just replied to.
I am prepared to give them a chance for them to substantiate their claims, however if we ask them for any evidence and we still have no response, then the claim can be immediately be dismissed as baseless.
This one puzzles me. There seems to be a concerted effort with shared messaging preventing neutral discussions of ivermectin, regardless of whether or not it has any benefits with regard to covid. What interests me is the motivations and confluence of groups that are effectively censoring public discourse through suppression, guilt by association, and other mud slinging tactics, despite what looks to be an interesting possible course of treatment and prevention. I don't know that there's any human or group pulling the strings or if it's a coincidental harnessing of an advantageous narrative by multiple parties, but it's completely illegitimate regardless.
But no! Horse dewormer eating Maga cultists will shock and disturb you!
Makes me wonder what else is similarly suppressed and censored in the west.
HISTORY is humans and groups pulling the strings. I've certainly had the impression that there are humans/groups pulling the strings to try and derail the US pandemic response into useless and/or actively damaging directions, from hydroxychloroquine to bleach. Horse paste is particularly well chosen here as it can be procured in farm-animal dosages, allowing for panicked people to poison themselves on a grand scale. And since it's a veterinary medicine, it's less likely to have people bounce off the suggestion than say, bleach.
This does imply that (a) an outside influence is involved, such as for instance the idea that Russia manipulated the election for the benefit of Donald Trump against other perhaps more capable Democrats and Republicans, and (b) that in so doing, Russia did not REALLY want to make a US political faction powerful and healthy, and encouraging bizarre and ineffective 'takes' on pandemic response is in line with what Russia really wants through use of their social media manipulation techniques, which are pretty well documented at this stage and depend on cooperation from US tech giants such as Facebook, sometimes through intermediaries, sometimes not even.
If this seems contentious, I'm interested in which clause is the issue: I've seen a lot of self-interested denial in the very concept of Russia paying Facebook etc. through Cambridge Analytica and so on, to run marketing campaigns with very detailed feedback on effectiveness (this is a social media innovation on par with the invention of radio: the value of microtargeting demographics CANNOT be underestimated). Denying clause A is common, though it seems insane.
What would be more interesting is acknowledging A but denying B: in other words, the position that yes, there are massive covert PR campaigns going on to push these things, to your 'Maga cultists' and anyone else who will listen (there are a LOT of weird left-wingers who eat this stuff right up, just as susceptible to the paranoid tropes), but instead of being suspicious, the reaction is to automatically trust the mysterious sources all the more, because strange people want you to eat veterinary medicine for your own good, protection, and eventual great power…
Ivermectin is worth exploring. Even if only to properly establish its limits. To assert otherwise is anti-science. I think you've inadvertently shown some kind of bias but I'm not exactly sure why or what. Perhaps politics is clouding your judgement?
Here's what some actual experts think:
"Several studies reported antiviral effects of ivermectin on RNA viruses such as Zika, dengue, yellow fever, West Nile, Hendra, Newcastle, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, chikungunya, Semliki Forest, Sindbis, Avian influenza A, Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome, Human immunodeficiency virus type 1, and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2"
The listed studies in that paper are all in vitro besides one study in mice where there was no significant improvement and one in pigs that did appear to show an effect on porcine circovirus 2. I'm not saying it isn't worth trying, but there are an incredible amount of treatments that will kill viral cells in a petri dish and a very small portion of those retain their efficacy once you move to animal models.
Ivermectin is kind of a hopeful one, since it is cheap and pretty harmless to humans. However, it's incredibly important as an agricultural med and it would be a shame if the supply chain was interrupted for a treatment that turned out to have no real effect.
My point still stands: knowing that something doesn't work is useful. The post I was replying to was attempting to justify mocking. As if that is something worth doing.
I've spoken to multiple scientists that are actively avoiding studying or running experiments of possible treatments due to the political impacts. This is a worrying trend.
We should be very concerned when scientists are threatened or mocked for confirming whether or not a drug could work. Especially against a virus we didn't know much about.
BTW that was simply the first article I found in a very lazy web search. I didn't imply it showed anything other than ivermectin could work. Yet according to the narrative, even running an experiment is justification for mockery and ridicule.
That is anti-science. Its also part of a general dysfunction of present science around replication of results because something "obvious" isn't being verified. The old "emperor has no clothes" problem.
How many of the howling monkeys criticizing Rolling Stone have their own followup retractions?
IIRC, Rolling Stone had a campus rape story fall apart a while back, doing a lot of damage. You'd think that'd make them be more careful. (I don't read Rolling Stone, so have no idea what's what.)
In this case, Peter Wade should have second sourced KFOR's original quote from Dr McElyea, the origin of this meme.
This comment shows what a huge effect misinformation has on people. The commenter is saying video of police officer kneeling on man's neck until he dies is "misinformation".
Recent studies have found that while both liberals and conservatives overestimate the chance of dying from police killings and covid, conservatives were significantly closer to the statistical truth. So while there is obvious right-leaning misinformation (obvious because it is always critiqued and mocked openly), we should be aware that misinformation from the left is not critiqued as noticeably, so it can gradually shape general perceptions in misleading ways.
Keep in mind that the label “misinformation” does not usually mean complete fabrication. It includes cases of careful editing of context, labeling, and story association to spread a misleading narrative.
That link is not really that compelling, some of the points made, like this:
> Only 0.6 percent of black men experience physical force by the police in any given year, while approximately 0.2 percent of white men do.
Come across as misleading to me. To compare to the entire race demographic rather than just race demographic in contact with police (which would better give rates than flat population percentage but not be such a tiny number), to not mention the vast difference in those population sizes, to use a national measure when physical force used by police various greatly by location, etc.
> Recent studies have found that while both liberals and conservatives overestimate the chance of dying from police killings and covid, conservatives were significantly closer to the statistical truth.
If the population of the states resembled liberal demographics, does that point still stand? Could the conservative estimation sit closer to the recorded amount because they're less likely as a demographic to see that violence?
This is a private company. As a company they also have freedom of speech. Government should not interfere. They should be free to curate their own platform. You can create your own facebook... -HN after Trump was banned, or after NoNewNormal was banned by reddit
It is amazing how fast the narrative changes, based on how people agree or disagree with the censored group in question. Do people notice they are behaving this way?
I'm sure you've considered that maybe the people that were saying that then (which was far from everybody on HN) are not the same people that are saying something different now
That would be something interesting to find out. One day I might crawl some controversial posts and to try and find people with most contradictory comments
Odd, that wasn’t my experience at all on HN. It seemed most people agreed that he should have been banned a lot sooner for being incredibly rude and racist. If anything the consensus at the time seemed to be Facebook and Twitter were cowards and wrong in that they only took action when it was free of consequences.
I’m curious to know why you felt the need to post as you did though. What were you hoping to achieve? On one hand what you wrote is a strawman argument that’s rather unrelated to the topic, on the other hand, even if we pretend that you were correct and the entire community on HN was as you lay it out here, then why on earth would you come here?
I hope you stay, however, but I think it would be good for you to stop judging people as groups. Every political thread on HN is full of different opinions and they aren’t all coming from the same people. We’re not a “hivemind” by any means. I’m Danish as an example, your mentioning Trump may just be the first time I have heard about him since Biden took office. I’m not sure where I would fit in your “HN” category, but I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t put me in the same box if you ever met me. It must be so hard and frustrating to think an entire community that you are part of is full of hypocrites instead of just full of interesting people. It shouldn’t be a negative experience to browse a social medium such as HN and if you find that it is, well, I would personally take a break, and I often do.
It's not really unauthorized if people installed the pluggin for the express purpose of providing the researchers with data about the ads they received and how their personal information may have gotten them targeted for those ads. Given IRB requirements, that would have to have been made clear to users as well. Not like the click-wrap "I agree" buttons Facebook and other use to keep knowledge what users are giving to them opaque.