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Comment by jacobwilliamroy | Hacker News Reader

I think it's more harmful to keep insisting that a public forum where ANYONE can make an account and start posting is a place to find truth. It just legitimizes the misinformation campaigns which manage to slip through. Plus there aren't enough bodies at facebook to actually moderate the amount of data they receive.

Conversely, Wikipedia, despite all its bureacracy, policies and mechanisms still publishes a general disclaimer: "WIKIPEDIA MAKES NO GUARANTEE OF VALIDITY."

I really think the management at Facebook should give up on trying to become a source of truth, because they don't have the resources to publish accurate information and doing so is ultimately incompatible with their business model.

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I agree that FB is trying to sweep back the tide, here. But they probably think they have to at least pretend to be making efforts to sweep back the tide. They don't want to go the way of Yelp, where the reviews were not only inaccurate and gamed, but so obviously and widely known to be inaccurate and gamed that the average internet user avoided them. A pretense of authenticity is what they're shooting for.

Now, whether even that is in the long run tenable is an open question, but at least they think it might be.

In the United States, success is typically measured quarterly, thus it is pretty easy for someone or a group of someones to try and create a very quick sort of growth which is simultaneously impressive and unsustainable. Just keep pumping the pig until it explodes, then move on to the next job. It happens all the time. I wouldn't be surprised if it was happening at Facebook too.

Why is yelp still around?

Integration into Apple Maps.

I think the awkward name of this report suggests they agree with you somewhat. It seems like this doesn’t address how true or not any post is on Facebook, just that those posts should be the result of ordinary users using the service in sincere ways.

> they don't have the resources to publish accurate information and doing so is ultimately incompatible with their business model.

Advertisers will demand not be shown alongside info which is 'inaccurate'.

Exactly.

Consider that Facebook has entire teams of people dedicated to figuring out what behavior is compatible with their business model, and they also have more direct data about where revenue comes from than any of us here do (at least those of us not bound by a Facebook NDA!). There's probably a PM whose entire job is just putting together these reports and they're getting a Facebook salary for doing so. It's definitely possible they're all misguided, but they're a very successful company and they've probably considered the tradeoffs of investing in these efforts versus not.

Also, consider that e.g. 4chan is making nowhere near as much revenue as Facebook, despite also providing a forum for people to post things and selling ads next to those posts.

It's just a game. Someone at Facebook is trying to min/max the numbers to get as much money as possible. It's just plain to see that one of the consequences of winning this dumb game is that they are completely destroying the concept of truth with one hand while insisting with the other that they are publishing the truth. That's the optimal strategy to make the most money, but all the money in the world isn't worth destroying trust in information.

Sure - "stop doing this because, despite being profitable, it's bad for society" is an entirely reasonable take. (Though perhaps one should figure out how to incentivize that action.) "Stop doing this because it's not profitable," from an outsider, doesn't make sense.

I checked out other "free speech" sites which regularly publish misinformation and lies (yet still insist that they are publishing the truth) and they still have ads. Breitbart, Newsmax. Alex Jones infowars platform primarily exists to sell supplements. Even Coast to Coast AM, the ghosts and goblins show, still runs ads.

Plus you have to consider that there is big money to be made lying to the public. For instance the Koch brothers spend a pretty penny funding climate denial.

> Advertisers will demand not be shown alongside info which is 'inaccurate'.

I find that unlikely: Facebook has an enormous amount of dis- and mis-information, and an enormous amount of advertising. Have you noticed that Facebook pages with inaccurate information lack advertising?

In regard to immediate revenue, advertisers just don't want to be embarrassed.

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