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707 points patd | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.625s | source
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tuna-piano ◴[] No.23322986[source]
There's an unsolved conundrum I haven't heard mentioned yet.

After the 2016 election, there was a thought that too much false information is spreading on social media. This happens in every country and across every form of communication - but social media platforms seem particularly worrysome (and is particularly bad with Whatsapp forwards in some Asian countries).

So what should the social media companies do? Censor people? Disallow certain messages (like they do with terrorism related posts)?

They settled on just putting in fact check links with certain posts. Trust in the fact deciding institution will of course be difficult to settle. No one wants a ministry of truth (or the private alternative).

So the question remains - do you, or how do you lessen the spread of misinformation?

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1. asdkhadsj ◴[] No.23323197[source]
As a straw man for discussion; I'm not too familiar with what Twitter is doing, but in an ideal world I think the solution would look something like what Twitter sounds like. Notably, posts containing objectively false information would be flagged, but not necessarily censored.

With that straw man though, it's fairly easy to poke holes. How do we ever even implement that? Even if we ignore the sheer volume of posts, a single post is often difficult to fact check. The lie can be subtle, but even worse is the human language and how much room there can be for misdirection, dishonesty, etc.

In my spare time I work on a project (not even close to release lol) with the goal of easing information sharing, retention, etc - as I figure part of the problem to the current age is a lack of information. Wikipedia is great, but it's quite large form discussion and I think we need better tools to help us document our own conclusions. BUT, even in all the effort I've put towards this tool I haven't dreamed of quantifying the truthiness.

I just don't see how we're going to cope with these sort of truth problems. It concerns me. It feels like information is a tool of war these days, and I am concerned we're losing.

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2. jobigoud ◴[] No.23323499[source]
One avenue that has been taken by Youtube for example with the Coronavirus news is to not try to detect lies/truths but just detect the controversial topic and add a banner under the video with a link to official sources. It's much simpler to implement. A disadvantage is that it becomes so ubiquitous that people probably don't care about the link.
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3. mcintyre1994 ◴[] No.23326887[source]
At least they try to detect the topic. Reddit's app has for some time been permanently showing a "look at /r/coronavirus" banner at the top of the default Home tab. I'm not exactly sure how they're moderating that or whatever, but the fact it's there all the time doesn't seem to reduce conspiracies flying around the rest of their site and they don't make any effort to attach it to them posts.