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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I get how the partisan story is easy to tell here, but I'm saying something pretty specific: I think it would have been product development malpractice for this decision not to have been in the works for many, many months, long before the GOP takeover of the federal government was a safe bet. Community Notes has been that successful, and Facebook's fact-checkers have been that much of a product disaster.

I've never seen a wrong Facebook fact-check; I am warmly supportive of intrusive moderation; that's not where I'm coming from.

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Clegg left a few days ago, and the Oversight Board issued a statement which sounds like they were in the dark:

> “We look forward to working with Meta in the coming weeks to understand the changes in greater detail, ensuring its new approach can be as effective and speech-friendly as possible.” [1]

So is it possible this was only announced recently. It might have been "in the works" in the C-suite for a bit longer, but there doesn't seem to be any evidence it was widely known before very recently.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/07/meta-face...

As a product decision taken independently, maybe. Running one of those things at scale with all kinds of people trying to subvert it for various reasons, including some downright evil ones, is not an easy task.

Announced together with everything else and given the timing, I just can't help but think there's a political component to all of it.

> I just can't help but think there's a political component to all of it.

"We're moving to Texas to eliminate perceptions of bias" is the biggest giveaway of this.

Austin is very left of center. If they end up there, they will have ideologically strayed in California while geographically moving to Texas.

Infowars was based in Austin. Joe Rogan is in Austin. How does moving to Austin mean they are "ideologically" in California?

Visit Texas. Then visit Austin. You'll know what I mean.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...

Joe Rogan also moved from California.

Elon too, isnt it cheaper taxes for business there?

i mean they can just pretend and get paid

Texas does not have a corporate income tax but does have a gross receipts tax with rates not strictly comparable to corporate income tax rates.

People move to other states due to state laws. City laws can easily be avoided by living and/or working just outside the city limits. Or more likely, state laws will preempt city laws that go against state level politics.

Stayed not strayed.

The intent is clear.

The political bias I agree with is better!!1

I don't at all doubt that they're going to do whatever they can to cast this presumably longstanding product plan in the light most favorable to the governing majority! I just want to get the causality right.

I don't understand though: What makes you think that you are getting the causality right? It seems to me like you're asserting the causality goes one direction, when there doesn't seem to be any evidence (at least in public) for that assertion at the moment. Have I just missed some other information on this that you're basing this on?

I think he is suggesting that this move has favorable PR optics for the incoming administration. Making it appear like a conservative victory may give them some slack or earn them some favors.

Is it not a conservative culture-war victory designed to earn favors? There is no external evidence of this having been anything other than a contingency around November 6 of last year, so it's hard to definitively say it's one or the other.

It's not really, tbh. Like the vast vast vast majority of content reviewers are outside California and have been for well over a decade.

The change here is to move the people designing the policies to Texas (basically a stealth layoff, tbh).

That being said, the moderation has been insanely bad for a while now, so all the model tuning seems like a worthwhile change to me.

The Texas thing sounds like PR but isn't really given their huge offices in Austin.

> The Texas thing sounds like PR but isn't really given their huge offices in Austin

That distinctly smells like pork barrel politicking: we're moving jobs from Commiefornia to your great state, and if your criminal [1] state AG sues us again over this function, he'll be putting Texans out a job.

1. Allegedly. Meta wouldn't dare call him thar, but he agreed to 100 hours of community service and paying restitution to those he allegedly defrauded to avoid a trial.

Yeah, and it's not really a big deal for them but looks good for Texas politicians. Well chosen pork, I guess.

its called pre-conceding

Fact checking, Community Notes, whatever you want to call it, is inherently political.

To be clear: I absolutely do not dispute this. But in 2025 it seems pretty clear that you cannot run a mainstream large-scale social network without some kind of moderation, so every platform is going to do something. And all I'm saying is: what Facebook was doing before was bad, just as a product experience. Just wretched. Solved no problems, mostly surfaced stuff I wouldn't have paid attention to in the first place.

How does an average joe evaluate the claim that their content moderation was bad? Cause folks on the left seem very upset that it's being replaced by notes, and folks on the right seem very glad that it's going. How do I judge this for myself?

What I've read of the Community Notes algorithm casts it as far more neutral than any hiring decisions about professional content moderators could possibly be. If it's "political," it's in a similar way to comparing the GDP of various countries is political--reality gives the verdict, the politics is in whether that verdict was the optimal one to ask reality for.

People are going to believe it is political whether or not it is. I've been working at hard at talking about difficult issues in a depoliticized frame. It's hard.

Lately I've been talking with a lot of people trying to help find answers and something I am learning is to delete all the duckspeak from my vocabulary (there was an otherwise good article about "placement poverty" in medical education that I didn't post last weekend because but "X poverty" is duckspeak)

If I say anything at all to anyone about this or that and get a negative response about the words I use I take it very seriously and most of the time resolve to use different words in future.

What are more examples of duckspeak and is it context dependent?

Orwell defined it as thoughtless or formulaic speech.

There is an essay at the end of Orwell's 1984

https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt

called "The Principles of Newspeak" that coins the word.

The slogan "My Body My Choice" has some of this character. It rolls off the tongue and stops thought. There is no nuance: the rights of the mother are inalienable. Opponents will talk about the inalienable rights of the fetus. There is no room for compromise but setting some temporal point in the pregnancy is a compromise like Solomon's that makes sense to the disengaged but gives no satisfaction to people who see it as moral issue. [1]

Note that this phrase turned out to be content-free and perfectly portable when it got picked up by anti-vaccine activists.

"Illegal Alien" is a masterpiece of language engineering that stands on its own for effectiveness. I mean, we all follow laws that we don't agree with or live with the threat of arrest and imprisonment if we don't. It's easy to see somebody breaking the law and not getting caught as a threat to the legitimacy of the system. "Undocumented Migrant" has been introduced as an alternative but it just doesn't roll off the tongue in the same way and since it is not so entrenched it comes across more as language engineering.

(Practically as opposed to morally: Americans would rather work at Burger King rather than get a few more $ per hour to get up early for difficult and dirty work which might have you toiling in the hot or the cold. An American would see a farmhand job at a dairy farm as a dead end job. A Mexican is an experienced ag worker who might want to save up money to buy his own farm. Which one does the dairy farmer want to have handling his cows?)

My son bristles at "healthcare" as a word consistently used for abortion and transgender medicine to the point where he shows microexpressions when reading discussions about access to healthcare in general.

This poster burns me up

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/741405157385448245/

in that teaching small children the alleged difference between two words will make a difference in the very difficult problems that (say) black [2] people have in America trivializes those problems. It trains them to become the kind of people who will trade memes online as opposed to facing those problems. In the meantime I've heard so many right wingers repetitively talk about "Equality of opportunity" vs "Equality of outcomes" which is a real point but reduces a complex and fraught problem to a single axis.

[1] There's a great discussion of this https://www.amazon.com/Rights-Talk-Impoverishment-Political-... although that book has a discussion of the Americans with Disabilities Act that hasn't aged well

[2] Bloomberg Businessweek has a policy to always say capital B when they talk about "Black" people. Do black people care? Does it really help them? What side of the barricades are they on when they write gushing articles about Bernard Arnault and review $250 bottles of booze and $3000/night hotel rooms.

> "Undocumented Migrant" has been introduced as an alternative but it just doesn't roll off the tongue in the same way and since it is not so entrenched it comes across more as language engineering.

It definitely comes across as language engineering. It's a legitimate category ("I'm an asylum seeker directly on my way to claim asylum from the nearest office") but expanded to include people who are just in the country illegally. It's too obvious to convince many people for very long.

> My son bristles at "healthcare" as a word consistently used for abortion and transgender medicine

In terms of cost, the items you cite are vanishingly small, and to conflate the two, one must have no experience of the medical system beyond twitter.

Is your son on his own? Did he have to pay the cost for a broken limb or a child's disease, or has he seen a family member go through a cancer? Maybe he would have a better sense of what "healthcare" means if he had actually been facing these situations.

I think you'll find basically everything is political. Do you have a fear of debate or criticism?

No. I can't stand it that so many Americans have fallen under the spell of a fraudster while others are sharing hateful memes online and think it is activism. I need stronger language, not weaker language.

I don't like the word "debate" because it makes me think of a high school debate where you are assigned which side of the issue and it is about to winning or losing.

https://depts.washington.edu/fammed/wp-content/uploads/2018/...

in the current situation people feel they have exactly one candidate to vote for every time and thus we have no ability to vote out corrupt politicians. The political class wins and the rest of us lose.

(I am so concerned about people's inability or reluctant to change that I've experienced a call to the ministry and I'm working to use practices that I developed for selfish ends in the past to help others. Ideally when I offend you I want to strike you at the core and leave you haunted for months and not be able to think about the issue the same way ever again. If you're reacting to bits of trash somebody else stuck on me that I'm not aware of, I'm not going to get that strike in.)

Actually very few things have to be political. Politicising, that is rendering the concept to decision by a "body politic" is a choice that we're making right now, and we could choose to not do that. In fact, we have done that throughout our nation's history, and it's only in the last 20 years that I've seen the rise of "everything is political speech" to the degree that the brand of beans you buy in a store signals something to some group.

To wit there are a lot of totalitarians out there, and just because some group claims to be on your side or looking out for your interests versus some other group it doesn't mean they don't want your mind, body, and soul for their own purposes. We must take it upon ourselves to think for ourselves and to hold our own interests rather than to adopt the interests of the group we're in. Humans can engage in enterprise as a group for their own reasons, and we ought to embrace that instead of seeking to identify so wholly with the group that we lose ourselves.

Not a huge problem so long it remains a means to indicate that the post is hallucinatory. Content of checks/notes don't matter, it's tone policing.

Only if everything you don't agree with is "political"

Censorship, moderation, what kind of speech is acceptable, what does or doesn’t constitute a “fact”, are all political topics.

> what does or doesn’t constitute a “fact”, are all political topics.

It clearly is not. A fact is a fact by definition, regardless of what anyone happens to feel about it. There are facts that are known to be true beyond all possible doubt.

If it is uncertain or in doubt, then it's not a fact and shouldn't be corrected by fact checkers.

> There are facts that are known to be true beyond all possible doubt.

The problem is that some people believe a fact is one way beyond doubt, and other way believe it is the other way.

Epidemiology: Respirator masks help prevent infectious diseases

Economics: Rent control is always a bad idea

The way Community Notes usually end up working in practice is comments that provide sourced context that may be [arguably intentionally] omitted in a topic. For instance if it happens to be that there have been 27 different studies showing no statistically significant reduction in spread of infectious diseases with healthy individuals wearing masks, then that would likely be a community note on the first one. And vice versa if rent has been demonstrated to keep rents below the surrounding means in the cities of Blah, Bleh, and Bluh, then that would often end up a community note on the second.

It basically helps reduce the hyperbole/echo chamber effect of such comments/topics. Vice/versa if those topics were "Respirator masks are useless." and "Rent control is always good." then the community notes would tend to go in the opposite direction. It's just a really good idea. For that matter I think a similar algorithm would also work well on general upvote systems at large.

I'd also add that one of the biggest issues with "fact checkers" was not only sometimes questionable checking, but also a selection bias - where the ideological bias becomes rather overt in both directions. Whether that be in deciding to "fact check" the Babylon Bee (in an overt effort to get it deranked), or in choosing not to not fact check statements from the lying politicians that one happens to like.

Your example is a false equivalence. Economics does not define "good ideas" and "bad ideas," it only attempts to model resource dynamics. Whereas the spread of infectious disease is clearly quantifiable regardless of value assignment.

Economics is inherently a political venture. Organizing markets is political and obviously impacts politics.

Partly true, but besides the point. Making a blanket statement like "economics says rent control is bad," is only marginally better than saying "physics says nuclear weapons are bad." There is a critical assumption of values which is totally outside the objective of study.

The presumed goal of rent control is to prevent rents from rising. If they actually cause rents to rise even more quickly then they are indeed "bad" (at achieving this goal).

The goal of rent control, as I infer from the mechanism, is to prevent existing tenants from being priced out of their current homes (eventually leading to eviction) - at least as I have seen in the US.

If the goal were to prevent rents from rising, the mechanism would do so directly, ie. regulate all rent, rather than limiting to continued rentals on certain types of property. Which would by definition prevent rents from rising, presumably along with other undesirable effects.

Anyways, the whole issue with conflating "bad" with objective consequences is the "presumed goal," which is of course totally subjective.

Those aren’t good candidates for fact checking really. They are beliefs really, just very widespread ones with lots of support.

A good candidate for fact checking is something that is well documented objectively verifiable. Politician X said Y on TV the other day.

> Economics: Rent control is always a bad idea

Well this is definitely false. If you're a politician who can afford a nice place then rent control is a great idea: it gets you elected (look, I made things cheap for you) and keeps you elected (look, I will solve all the problems underpriced rent brings).

Here's another one - "Trump colluded with Putin to hack the election in 2016".

I have never seen an accepted fact checking site answer this, which is very strange since it is such an enormous and grave conspiracy theory if it were true. The Mueller report is extensive and quite conclusive in stating that no such evidence of collusion (conspiracy) was not found. Yet fact checkers are happy to check peripheral and far less consequential claims around the case for some reason (e.g., https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mueller-report-no-obstruct...), but are strangely hesitant to address the elephant in the room.

Or for another example, there were many false or poorly substantiated claims made about covid and vaccines during the pandemic. I saw "reputable" fact checkers address a certain set of those claims about the virus and drugs, but were strangely silent when it came to a different set of claims.

So fact checkers don't even need to provide false content at all, they can be very political and biased simply by carefully choosing exactly what "facts" or claims that they address.

Another example: fact-checking prominent race activists in 2020. The public was grossly misinformed about the scale of police violence against black Americans: https://manhattan.institute/article/perceptions-are-not-real...

But even straightforward stuff goes unchallenged. Jada Pinkett Smith released a movie trailer claiming Cleopatra was black. When NBC covered the issue, they couldn’t even bring themselves to fact check her. They did a “he said, she said” article asserting that Egypt contested whether Cleopatra was black: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/queen-cleopatra-black-egy....

I think someone said it but there's a difference between facts and making an inference about those facts. The evidence in Trumps case was maybe he had a conversation with a person of Russian descent on Day X. That in itself is a fact. Does this fact or other facts like it mean he "colluded", whatever the definition of colluded means, is a matter of opinion. Even in a legal framework, where "collusion" has a definition, its still up to a jury which can get it wrong. Fact-checking is extremely complex as you are alluding to and cannot be simplified the way it has been thus far

Sure, but the fact is that there was never any solid evidence showing that Trump did collude with Putin to hack the election. That's contrary to what many high level politicians were claiming, the fact is that they falsely claimed there was "ample evidence" proving Trump colluded, and they never produced it. That's what was never fact checked, because it is inconvenient, and it would show that many high level people who insisted on there being "ample evidence" to prove collusion were actually being dishonest about it.

Well there is a lot of connections between Trump and Russia. Wiki here shows quite a few: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associates... I'm not interested in auditing the entire thing, but like I said whether what occurred was "collusion" is something that cannot be fact-checked as it will always be a matter of opinion

There's a lot of connections between a lot of people. Obama tried to secretly transmit a promise to Putin that he would "have more flexibility" after his election. How do we know it wasn't Obama who colluded with Putin? It was his whitehouse overseeing the 2016 election. Why doesn't any fact checkers check that fact and come up with "inconclusive" because they are unable to prove it false? Because it's political.

Trump Putin election hacking collusion was always a wild baseless conspiracy theory. Sure there is no absolute proof he did not, and there is various incidental connections and circumstantial evidence you could arrange to fit some crazy narrative. But what it not in dispute is that many people lied and mislead claiming to have "ample evidence" of collusion, when no such thing was ever produced.

Well yes.

But how do we distinguish facts from non facts?

That is a dilemma humanity has struggled with for millennia. Humans are very bad at recognizing their own biases and admitting to themselves they were wrong about something.

> But how do we distinguish facts from non facts?

What do you mean how? Science. The process of science.

There might be people who want to believe gravity on Earth accelerates objects at 1m/s^2, but we can trivially establish through countless experiments repeatable by anyone who wants to try that this is not true.

If you can't measure it or repeatably demonstrate it then it's probably not a fact. If it can, then it is a fact and no amount of emotionally wanting to believe something else can make it not a fact.

The irony is that the example you cite, i.e. F = G * m1 * m2 / r^2 is demonstrably not the correct formula for gravity.

Science, the process of science, does not prove something as fact. It can only eliminate non-facts, and even then, the experiments may be flawed in their recognition.

> If you can't measure it or repeatably demonstrate it then it's probably not a fact. If it can, then it is a fact and no amount of emotionally wanting to believe something else can make it not a fact.

This is demonstrably false. If you witness an event once, you cannot necessarily repeat it, but you know for a fact that it happened. Unless you redefine the term "fact" narrowly, what you suggested is an ideology.

See how even the definition of "fact" is up for debate.

> Science, the process of science, does not prove something as fact.

I intentionally picked a wrong value for Earth gravity instead of the correct one to avoid nitpickery on precision, location, yada yada.

If someone has a feeling that Earth's gravity accelerates at 1m/s^2, they're just flat out wrong full stop. This is the problem with the anti-intellectual crowd who believes everyone's opinion has equal weight. No, it doesn't. If someone wants to believe Earth's gravity accelerates at 1m/s^2, then their opinion (on that topic) is worthless because it is known to be false and they don't deserve any recognition for the nonsense. Facts are facts, beliefs don't make them go away.

> This is demonstrably false. If you witness an event once, you cannot necessarily repeat it, but you know for a fact that it happened.

Not at all. Human memory is fallible so if you are the only one who saw that event and swear it is true that does not make it a fact no matter how hard you believe it.

That's why scientific process requires repeatable results that anyone can (re)validate over and over, not one-off recollections.

XKCD has a fun comic about a guy who recalculates the world records of pole vaulters based on the gravity of the locations of various events. Earth's surface gravity is by no means constant -- it varies, presumably due to the density and altitude of any particular location.

Indeed, "sea level" is defined as the level that the sea would be at, if the area of question didn't have the land mass, but still had the same gravity. Of the various possibilities, this particular definition is useful, in that it you can expect the air pressure at a particular altitude to be the same, regardless of where you are, after factoring in things like temperature and humidity -- which is kindof important if you're a pilot of some sort!

> Earth's gravity accelerates at 1m/s^2, they're just flat out wrong full stop

You do realize it depends on the distance of the object to Earth? So perhaps you are wrong not them depending on the context.

Now someone comes up and says I am nitpicking blah blah... well, the author should have been clear and not stating falsehood as fact! This is just your belief which does not change the incompleteness/incorrectness of the statement (as per the original post).

And this is the whole goddamn point. What's "fact" to someone can be incorrect, half-correct, wrong with completely good faith, or wrong with intent to mislead, etc. Who gets to decide all this is not as simple as "I am ScienceTM" Dr Fauci style.

You missed a basic element of what they said: "can't measure it or repeatably demonstrate it"; seeing a non-reproducible event with your eyes is a form of measurement, and that measurement could in principle be done by an objective machine (recorded by a camera). The potential for objective evidence is what distinguishes a matter of fact from a matter of opinion.

As to the "correct formula for gravity" - that's just bad faith nitpicking. "Newtonian gravitation is a fact" is both a strawman and completely irrelevant when it comes to social media fact checkers.

> You missed a basic element of what they said: "can't measure it or repeatably demonstrate it"; seeing a non-reproducible event with your eyes is a form of measurement, and that measurement could in principle be done by an objective machine (recorded by a camera). The potential for objective evidence is what distinguishes a matter of fact from a matter of opinion.

No. Recording an experiment does not constitute scientific repeatability of an experiment. (Not to mention Quantum Mechanics explicitly rejects your claim as a universal principle at the micro level.)

> As to the "correct formula for gravity" - that's just bad faith nitpicking. "Newtonian gravitation is a fact" is both a strawman and completely irrelevant when it comes to social media fact checkers.

No, it is not a strawman at all. It clearly illustrates via an example of something we have known to be false for about a century, yet not only we do not censor it on social media, we teach it to kids, and almost no one would object to it.

So, where do you draw the line?

I posit there exists facts that are unknowable by the scientific method. The GP claimed science as the end-all-be-all method to fact-check. My statement is that it's not sound, nor complete, in its ability to fact-check.

The scientific process works amazingly well for repeatable experiments, but it doesn't do anything at all for non-repeatable events. You can't use the scientific method to figure out who blew up the Nordstream pipeline, just for a relatively recent and hotly debated political fact.

And if I take a ballon, fill it with the right helium/air ratio so it sinks at exactly 1m/s²? It's a provable scientific fact that it's falling at 1m/s². Even if I leave off the part that it's a balloon, and talk antigravity fields or aliens or some crap, and "let you draw your own conclusions", the fact that the ballon fell at that rate would still be demonstrably true.

People want to sell you lies and get you to believe them, and they'll give all the half truths they can to support their version of the truth. they'll use misleading graphs with real numbers, so you can fact check the numbers on the graph and come away thinking the graph represents the truth of the matter. But X axis that don't start at zero, logarithmic Y axis that don't say they're logarithmic, Or pie graphs viewed from a funny angle, with slices that don't represent the percentage they're labeled by, or with percentages that add up to greater than 100%.

If all we wanted to run were trivial physics experiments, we'd be golden. The real world of social media facts include things we can't run science experiments for, or go back in time to redo, like economic stats that use a different formula today and there's not enough information to see what it was in the distant past. So we get these narratives from people who are trying to convince us to believe theirs by leaving off important context. Which is totally dishonest of them, but they have a vested interest in us believing a particular narrative.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics!

This is not uncovered ground though. Philosophy and logic cover the notion of truth and reality in some depth. The entire field of law is based on proof beyond reasonable doubt.

The aim of fact-checking isn't to be a perfect system that covers every single possibility and edge case. The aim is to reduce the effectiveness of lies and propaganda, so that people are less misinformed when they go about their daily actions and democratic duty.

You're reading them as saying that moderation is suspect because it's political, and all I read them to be saying is that political considerations are unavoidable when you moderate, in a manner distinctive to moderation.

Answering this question has to be a political topic, because there's an infinite stream of people asking you the question (by posting things that may need to be fact checked), and you have to decide which ones to prioritize.

I disagree with gravity though. It makes life a lot easier when you can fly.

It’s just intelligent falling. They want to keep you in the dark.

For most of my life, I would have agreed with you.

As I've gotten older, I've become increasingly skeptical of the idea of a "fact".

There's no way to separate information from human context. Even seemingly obvious things like "that shirt is blue". To who? My wife sees it as green, frequently.

Or things are reduced to tautological nonsense like "gravity keeps us on the ground". Hard fact, right? But define gravity. A physicist will give you an answer, that may or may not mean much. A layman's definition might be something like "it's the thing that keeps us stuck to the ground", and now we're back to tautological nonsense. The entire "water is wet" class of "facts".

Anything less trite instantly becomes less fact-like the more humans are involved.

"Trump is a criminal" many people would argue passionately that this is a hard, incontrovertible fact.

Nearly as many, (or maybe more?) would argue the opposite.

I like the approach of the Fair Witness in Stranger In A Strange Land: "What color is that house?" "It's yellow on this side."

I'm increasingly convinced that the belief in "facts" is more about the desire to be right and know things than anything to do with objective reality.

Facts exist. Your first sentence has 11 words. Easy to verify, right? Doesn't matter who's counting.

May I suggest that your confusion comes from a conflation between facts and generalizations. Hard facts exist in strictly defined contexts. Relax the context, and you need to eventually reach for generalizations that less precise and potentially ambiguous.

If somebidy asked me whether the cup in you hand would fall and and shatter when they release it from their grip, my answer would of course depend on a few things I pick up from the context: what gravitational attraction would the cup experience in your current location? What material is the cup made of (porcelain, metal...)? So if we're standing on earth and the cup was made of porcelain, I'd answer that it would fall and likely shatter. Doesn't mean that any cup would shatter. Metal cups doesn't. But that's a different fact. So there is no generalized fact that all cups shatter when they fall. Some do, some don't. We can play the same game with gravity. The cup wouldn't fall if we were floating on the ISS. So the same cup doesn't fall in all locations it might conceivably be.

Many people don't want to deal with the level of precision that hard facts require. They get sloppy and then start these endless discussions of "this isn't true because..." etc. and everyone gets gradually more confused because nothing seems to be entirely true or false. The fundamental counter here is to dig in and tease the generalizations apart until they become sets of constrained hard facts.

> Your first sentence has 11 words.

It's, I think, quite relevant here to note that "word" is a famously hard to define concept in linguistics. That is, there is no generalized definition of the concept "word" that works across languages, writing systems (e.g. Chinese and Japanese writing don't traditionally use spaces to separate words), and ways of analyzing language (phonological words are different from grammatical words).

So to make your sentence more accurate, you'd have to say "there are 11 groups of letters separated by whitespace characters or punctuation before your first period".

> It's, I think, quite relevant here to note that "word" is a famously hard to define concept in linguistics. That is, there is no generalized definition of the concept "word" that works across languages, writing systems (e.g. Chinese and Japanese writing don't traditionally use spaces to separate words), and ways of analyzing language (phonological words are different from grammatical words).

True, but for a language like English, the various definitions for "word" agree in many (though definitely not all) cases, and in the particular example, I think you'd have to argue somewhat harder to convince me that that sentence doesn't have exactly 11 words (maybe if you argue that "would have" often turns into "would've", which is a single phonetic unit, but then I would also write it that way). There are however other cases where it's less clear (e.g. is possessive 's a separate word or an affix?).

While I get your point, and I think it's strong, I'm entirely unconvinced.

Everything we see, do and understand exists in a context window of an individual. We have a shared language, with which we can inexpertly communicate shared concepts. That language is terrible at communicating certain concepts, so we've invented things like math and counting to try to become more precise. It doesn't make those things "true" universally. It makes them consistent within a certain context.

How far it it from Dallas to Houston? On a paper map, it might be a few inches. True, within that context. Or you might get an answer for road miles. Or as the crow flies. In miles? Kilometers? It's only fairly recently (in human history) that we've even had somewhat consistent units of measure. And that whole conversation presupposes an enormous amount of culture knowledge and context - would that question mean anything to a native tribesman in Africa without an enormous amount of inculturation? Are their facts the same?

I'm not trying to make a "nothing is true, we can't know anything" kind of argument, that's lazy thinking.

I'm making an argument for maintaining skepticism in everything, even (especially?) things that you know for sure.

You still have to distinguish between hard, absolute facts which definitely exist and representations thereof in human language. The facts never change (the distance between Dallas and Houstom doesn't change while we are having this conversation), but accurate descriptions require additional concepts and now we get into the imprecise world of human communication. Doubting the precision and accuracy of human language is a fair point, but that doesn't make facts themselves subjective.

I admire the conviction that things become absolutely true at a sufficient level of specification.

So long as facts are represented in language, they are subject to language’s imprecision and subjectivity. And I don’t think that platonic ideals of facts, independent of representstion, have much utility.

> hard, absolute facts which definitely exist and representations thereof in human language

It's the distinction that you're drawing between those things that I'm skeptical of.

What is Dallas? What is Houston? Which parts do we measure. are we talking about road distance? That something doesn't change during a conversation is not the same the thing as them never changing

If someone says "it's 250 miles from Houston to Dallas" you know that there will be some error involved. From precisely what part of Houston to what part of Dallas, does it include the outskirts, are they estimating, is it rounded to a nice number, etc.

If someone claims "it's 500 miles from Houston to Dallas" they're wrong.

I’m going to pretend to avoid asking what is a mile and what is 250 and 500 :)

I could imagine ways we could interpret “500 miles” the same way as The Proclaimers i.e. as a noteworthy or arduous distance, under which that claim “it’s 500 miles from Dallas to Houston” isn’t contextually false.

More interesting is what knowing that things are not the case tells us about what we can know is the case. I don’t think it reveals much, but I’m not sure

This is much of science: taking a hypothesis, understanding where the bounds of that hypothesis lie, then testing the bounds to try to disprove it. Then creating a more accurate hypothesis within the space of what’s left unknown.

Unfortunately, I missed out a key word “… what knowing that things are not the case tells us about what we can know is [absolutely] the case…”

My apologies for this and with the omission I don’t disagree one bit with your reply.

On the other hand I can see how we might imagine ways we could scientifically sarisfy ourselves beliefs are not absolute, but I’m not sure how we could satisfy ourselves they are

> How far it it from Dallas to Houston? On a paper map, it might be a few inches. True, within that context. Or you might get an answer for road miles. Or as the crow flies. In miles? Kilometers? It's only fairly recently (in human history) that we've even had somewhat consistent units of measure.

No one’s opinion is going to make them closer together or farther apart, though. The distance (in whatever context) can be known. Can be objectively measured. That makes it a fact.

> I'm making an argument for maintaining skepticism in everything, even (especially?) things that you know for sure.

Are you skeptical about which way to put your feet when you get out of bed? Do you check to make sure every single time?

I think you are trying hard and writing a lot to miss the parent's point. You're thing about the number of words in the sentence is like what the parent is mistakenly calling "tautological;" another way to say it is blatantly obvious and a banal observation. This is not the type of thing we are talking about here. This is entire post is about "facts" and "fact checking" in the case of socio-political issues, the kinds of things for which there are fact checkers. The parent is obviously correct. Just look at the state of actual "fact checking" of this variety in the real world. There is a lot of controversy and a lot of words are used in a very loose way, these are not simple physics problems that you can punch into a TI-86. The issue is clearly about "who are the fact checkers" or put another way "who decides the facts." In a court of the law in the US, the judge is only arbiter of facts, these can not even be appealed.

How was I mistaken in my use of tautology?

My understanding is that it's supposed to be a reduction of a logical argument into the form A = A, or true = true.

When the words are different, but essentially mean the same thing, and used as a flawed proposition.

Am I wrong about that? I certainly don't want to bandy the word about incorrectly.

But I agree with your overall point! :) Ok, so the statement "gravity keeps us on the ground" is not a tautology in the strict sense but you have correctly defined it here. I think it probably seems like a tautology because colloquially we might use it that way. I don't think its worth parsing out too much. This kind of stuff about coffee cups and all that has nothing to do with "fact checking" political statements and anyone else being serious knows that.

Thanks!

With "gravity keeps us on the ground" I was trying to point out that the word "gravity" to most folks is the same thing as "the thing that keeps us on the ground", it's just a language symbol/shorthand for that concept, so the statement would reduce to A=A, and isn't a meaningful "fact".

Everything is political, which is one of the statements made above.

Facts are political. Because facts actively change how you live your life.

The playwright who created the “kill all climate denialists” talks about how it took years for the play to get onto stage.

And then how he began to see the truth of climate denialists positions. That climate denialists believed the facts, and realized it meant their whole way of life was over. So they had to do something about it. They responded with denial. In a very real way, they lived their beliefs.

The fact of climate change IS political.

EVERYTHING is political, there is no fact that I cannot convert into a weapon, through some means or the other. Blaming fact checkers, is simply trying not to blame humans.

No, whether a coffee cup will break when you drop it or whatever that was is not a political thing. I'm not sure what the rest is about. To deny that there is a lot of subjectivity in the kinds of "facts" we are talking about her is just to deny reality.

The way you eat Pizza became a political thing.

Whether evolution occurs became a political thing.

It may odd, but political reality is a ‘motivated’ reality - there is a goal to be achieved.

Anything that can be used to create a political win, will be used to create a political win.

I agree that subjectivity exists though.

“Facts is facts” works for counting words in a sentence.

It does not work for anything with nuance or context, or for unprovable propositions. It is a fact that there is no elephant in my house. But if you want to doubt that fact for the lulz or for profit, I will be hard pressed to prove it.

That’s where our modern populist / fascists have weaponized disingenuousness to prove that “up is down” is just as valid a statement as “up is up”.

> As I've gotten older, I've become increasingly skeptical of the idea of a "fact".

I think the problem actually lies in your personal interpretation of what a "fact" should be, and how it contrasts with what facts actually are.

The definition of "fact" is "things that are known or proven to be true". Consequently, if you can prove that an assertion is not true then you prove it is not a fact. If your wife claims your shirt is green and not blue, does that refute the fact that your shirt is actually blue? No. Can you prove your shirt is blue? Can she prove your shirt is green? That is the critical aspect.

Just because someone disagrees with you, that does not mean either if you is right or wrong. You can both be stating facts if it just so happens you're presuming definitions that don't match exactly in specific critical aspects.

If your shirt is cyan, you can argue it's a fact the shirt is blue and argue it's a fact the shirt is green, because in RGB space both the blue channel and green channel is saturated. You can also state that it's a fact that your shirt is neither blue or green because there's a specific definition for that color and this one is in fact cyan, not blue or green.

If you can prove your assertion, it's a fact. If you're making claims you cannot prove or even support, they are not facts.

And more importantly, the problem tackled by fact checking is people making claims that are patently and ostentatiously false and fabricated in order to manipulate public perception and opinions. Does anyone care if your shirt is blue or green? No. Does anyone care if, say, Haitians are eating your pets? Yes.

I’d respectfully submit that:

1) While “facts” undisputed exist, there are vanishingly few people sufficiently versed in both epistemology and myriad substantive areas for “fact checking” to make sense. In particular, domain experts are rarely sufficiently versed in epistemology to distinguish between facts they know by virtue of their expertise, and other things they also believe that aren’t really facts.

Moreover, the folks employed checking facts for companies like Facebook typically don’t have any expertise in either epistemology or the range of substantive areas in which they perform fact checking.

2) In practice, the issue in society isn’t “facts” but “trust.” You can build trust by being consistently correct about facts in a visible way. But you can’t beat people over the head with putative facts if they don’t trust you.

Tautologies are not necessarily uninteresting, all of mathematics is essentially about finding tautologies (on some level), but they're far typically from obvious.

It sounds like you may be heading in the direction of postmodernism, and/or post-Marxist Critical Theory

I certainly hope not.

My intent isn't to devolve into some sort of bastardized nihilism, it's to inject skepticism into anything that I can be bothered to think about.

I find it useful as a tool for critical analysis. To question a premise, to poke at the facts, especially the inarguable, indisputable ones.

There seems to be an inverse relationship between the accuracy of a fact and the amount of trouble you get in for questioning it.

Subjective interpretation is very fundamental to being human and the way our minds work, but the underlying physical reality -- the wavelengths of light reflecting off the shirt -- can be measured objectively. A physicist might say that gravity is the curvature of spacetime caused by mass, which can be measured and tested.

Trump being a criminal is based on a shared legal and societal context. As a society, we accept that if you are convicted before a jury of your peers, you are guilty and have been convicted of a crime. Jury's get it wrong and the justice system is flawed and has made mistakes. A black man in the 1920s (or even the 1960s for that matter) being tried for murder with absolutely no evidence and sentenced to death is a clear miscarriage and corruption of justice. The testimony of Trump's employees during the trial, who all said they loved working there (most of them still worked there), but weren't willing to lie on the stand about checks and phone calls they participated in, was pretty clear cut. This wasn't random people off the street of [insert preferred liberal enclave here] testifying against him: it was his own people who still work for him.

Some people prioritize political allegiance over legal judgments when it suits them.

If we dismissed facts entirely, science, medicine, and countless other fields reliant on objective reality would collapse.

This exchange is a great example of the subjective nature of our experiences: as I've gotten older -- 38 now -- I've come to accept more and more that some things are objective reality, whereas in my teens and 20s, I questioned reality and society on the structural level, torn down to the studs. From Plato's cave, to brain in the vat, Kant, the Hindu Brahman and Maya, Buddhism, etc.

Your Trump trial example actually proves the opposite of the point you’re making. CNN’s legal analyst of all people wrote an article explaining why the prosecutors “contorted the law” in pursing Trump’s conviction: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-was-convicted-.... Remember, the prosecutor initially declined to bring the case. And those problems with the underlying legal theory are still subject to review on appeal, which very well may result in the conviction being overturned. There’s actually a lot to debate there! Including whether the “shared context” you mention still holds in the circumstance of a blue-state jury trying Donald Trump. And I’d certainly not trust anyone—especially people without a legal background—to moderate people’s statements about Trump’s trial and conviction.

Heck, even lawyers don’t treat legal judgments as god-given “facts” except in specific legal circumstances. The questions at the back of every chapter in a law school textbook will ask the student whether a particular case was rightly decided or wrongly decided and why.

The better way to think about legal judgments is not in terms of “facts” but rather “process.” Even a final decision by the U.S. Supreme Court does not establish god given facts. It merely is the end of the line in a set of procedures that lead to a particular result in a particular case. But even judgments of the Supreme Court are second-guessed every day by 20-somethings in law schools around the country!

I take the "this seems to be true, based on what I know, subject to more information" approach.

I'm ok with not knowing things.

We can measure all sorts of things, and put them in a human context, which is very reassuring. What's a wave? What's a wavelength? What's a unit of measure? These are not universal truths, these are human inventions. Things we've created in order to communicate a shared understanding with each other of things we've observed. It makes us feel knowledgeable, lets us build cool things, and that's a good thing!

It also interferes with learning, and that's a bad thing. For example, (and I'm not taking a position on this either way, because I don't know) I think it's very unlikely, based on your comment, that it would be easy to convince you that Trump is not a criminal. Or, to pick a less controversial topic, to convince the early Catholic church of the heliocentric model of the solar system. Because they already had the "facts."

It's a comfortable position to know things.

It's uncomfortable to not know. As I've gotten older, I've become more comfortable with being uncomfortable.

It would indeed be hard to convince me Trump has not committed crimes, considering a jury found that he had and the whole, "Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck," thing. Tony Accardo ran the Chicago Outfit for 4-5 decades and never spent a single day in jail. I don't think most people would agree that because he was never convicted (or even charged), he was not committing crimes.

If you read a story about a drug kingpin being convicted at trial, do you assume that he might be innocent?

> If you read a story about a drug kingpin being convicted at trial, do you assume that he might be innocent?

That's a very fair question.

To answer: I try as hard as I can to not draw any conclusion from something like that.

I'll be 50 this year. I've seen so many examples of media manipulation, "spin", crooked prosecutors, etc... that I try very hard not to jump to a conclusion. Especially with outrage stories like "child pornography was found on his laptop". There are countless examples of police and three letter agents getting caught red-handed planting this stuff, so I'm always skeptical of news stories like that.

Then there's the whole argument of "what's a criminal?". It's frequently the ethical choice to violate an unjust law. Was Ghandi a criminal? If someone broke a law, but then the law was changed or removed, are they still a criminal?

What kind of drug kingpin? (I'm purposefully being pedantic here for rhetorical purposes) Were they "dealing" ibogaine? Maybe for injured vets, but the news is just calling him a drug kingpin? It's strange to me that ibogaine is schedule 1, and I probably wouldn't consider them to be a criminal for doing that. Or maybe they were doing some combination of things, some good some bad. Or maybe there's a good reason why it's schedule 1, and I just don't understand and they really are a bad guy.

My point is that there's usually nuance. I don't trust stories like that, I don't "believe" news articles. I read them, take them in, and reserve judgement. Really. My initial, unconscious reaction and inner voice immediately says "are they framing him? What's the other side of the story? If he is a bad guy, does he see himself that way?"

I've just been burned too many times in my life by getting sucked into media stories that I believed were true, and made an idiot out of myself because I didn't think critically about it and jumped on a bandwagon that later turned out to be BS.

> Trump being a criminal is based on a shared legal and societal context.

To think that someone is a criminal, you have to believe they committed a crime. A trial is one way of establishing whether they did with certain standards of evidence and process. But it is very far from the be-all-end-all of the matter.

For example, virtually everyone believes OJ Simpson is a criminal, even though he was found not guilty at trial, and even though plenty of biases worked against him in that trial, theoretically.

For myself, I do believe that Trump was rightfully convicted and is a criminal. But that doesn't mean that "he was convicted" should force anyone else to believe this. It only means that a particular group of jurors believed it given the evidence that a judge found correctly collected and presented to them.

But, respectfully, even you, in your quest to cite facts require pointing out that your "facts" are not facts at all. The person in question, Trump, was not sentenced and therefore not "convicted" of anything. But this false claim is repeated a lot even by supposed "fact-checkers". Even the rest of that same paragraph is not made up of facts but you are trying to support some vague claim with appeals to things like "his own people wouldn't lie for him even though they loved him" or some such; you're bolstering a negative sentiment but not really clearly delineating anything resembling "facts". That's the issue that is being discussed and addressed by Meta at this point. Sure, we can call high schools physics problems as reflecting facts of nature, that's nice, but this is not what all the fuss is about.

> The person in question, Trump, was not sentenced and therefore not "convicted" of anything.

Sentencing != conviction. Conviction is the legal finding of guilt, sentencing is the appropriation of punishment.

Given your excessive use of scarequotes around "facts", getting this simple fact wrong is ironic.

That's a neat story.

"in United States practice, conviction means a finding of guilt (i.e., a jury verdict or finding of fact by the judge) and imposition of sentence. If the defendant fled after the verdict but before sentencing, he or she has not been convicted,"

https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/106159/if-someone-ha...

Not true in New York, where this particular trial took place. From your own link:

  S 380.30 Time for pronouncing sentence.

  In general. Sentence must be pronounced without unreasonable delay.
  Court to fix time. Upon entering a conviction the court must:
  (a) Fix a date for pronouncing sentence; or
  (b) Fix a date for one of the pre-sentence proceedings specified in article four hundred; or
  (c) Pronounce sentence on the date the conviction is entered in accordance with the provisions of subdivision three.

So not only is sentencing distinct from conviction semantically, it's also distinct legally in the state of New York.

Well, he is now a convicted felon.

This is an instance where semantics are nothing more than, well, semantics.

The people who say that Trump has been ”convicted but not sentenced” actually mean that he’s been ”found guilty but not sentenced”, they just aren’t intimately familiar with legal terms of art.

If they simply say ”Donald Trump was found guilty but not sentenced” instead, they’ve silenced the nitpickers while still conveying the exact same message they intended to in the first place.

> This is an instance where semantics are nothing more than, well, semantics.

I'm hard pressed to think of an example of a fact that your statement wouldn't apply to.

Sometimes when people complain ”you’re just arguing semantics!”, the semantics do in fact need to be cleared up, because the words being used are confusing, or wrong in a way that’s preventing participants in the discussion from getting on the same page.

Here, no one is actually confused. Everyone knows and agrees that Trump was found guilty, but that he hasn’t been sentenced. The only sticking point is whether you can use the word ”convicted” to describe someone who is in that situation, and whether or not that’s the case doesn’t have any material effect on people’s understanding of reality. It’s just a matter of arguing over which words should be used, i.e. it’s just semantics.

.. from lawdictionary.org :

> 2 : any of the circumstances of a case that exist or are alleged to exist in reality : a thing whose actual occurrence or existence is to be determined by the evidence presented at trial see also finding of fact at finding, judicial notice question of fact at question, trier of fact compare law, opinion

Yes and no.

This is the line in the sand that makes sense in the pre internet era.

Online, EVERYTHING is political speech, because moderation is the only effective action we can take, and moderation is currently conflated with censorship. Even though it’s on a private platform.

I was working towards researching this and building the case out fully - but online speech efficacy is not served by the blunt measures of physical spaces, where the ability to speak is not as mediated.

Online, diversity of voices, capability of users to interact safely, resolution of conflicts, these are better measures of how healthy the market of ideas is.

The point of free speech is to have an effective exchange of ideas, even difficult ones. The idea of free speech is not in service of itself, its in service of a greater good.

1+1=2 is not a political statement

Apparently, it is now.

There are few things that aren’t political regardless how you feel about them

The earth is "round" can be made political, but there is a factual consensus.

Therefore, we rely on experts that decipher information to transcend political opinions. It saddens me when scientists become political, only to add confusion to the consensus, in an attempt to weaken it.

Long live Wikipedia.

The US is going to endure four more years of post-truth governance. It isn't in Zuckerberg's interest to have his organization pointing out that the emperor is unclothed when there is real risk of blowback in round 2.

There was always a political component to it. The Twitter files told us this. It's just the political component is going the other way.

what are the twitter files?

The documents provided by Elon Musk to Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi etc when he took over Twitter.

I expect it was an easy bone to throw the incoming administration, which the tech world learned from v1 is placatable by giving them PR / sound bite wins.

To the broader concern, this feels like Facebook making their original sin again.

Namely defunding and destroying revenue for a task that takes money (fact checking) and then expecting a free, community-driven approach to replace it.

Turns out, hot takes for clicks are a lot cheaper than journalism.

In this case, where is the funding to support nuanced, accurate fact checking at scale from?

Because it sure seems like Facebook isn't going to pay.

> I've never seen a wrong Facebook fact-check

Did you mean to say Note here?

Obeying in advance, especially the Dana White appointment. Not that this move to community notes wasn't also a good product decision.

No, I meant to say Facebook fact-check.

> Facebook's fact-checkers have been that much of a product disaster.

> I've never seen a wrong Facebook fact-check

Confused between these two statements, then.

Do you believe the success or failure of these moderating features comes down to how accurate they are? People actually like Community Notes; they're part of the discourse on Twitter (even if most of them are pretty bad, some of them are timely and sharp). Meanwhile: Facebook's fact-checking features really do work sort of like PSA's for trolls. All the while, fact-checks barely scratch the surface of the conversations happening on the platform.

Facebook and Twitter are also unalike in their social dynamics. It makes sense to think of individual major trending stories on Twitter, which can be "Noted", in a way it doesn't make sense on Meta, which is atomized; people spreading bullshit on Meta are carpet bombing the site with individual hits each hoping to get just a couple eyeballs, rather than a single monster thread everyone sees.

(This may be different on Threads, I don't use Threads or know anybody who does).

> Do you believe the success or failure of these moderating features comes down to how accurate they are? People actually like Community Notes; they're part of the discourse on Twitter (even if most of them are pretty bad, some of them are timely and sharp). Meanwhile: Facebook's fact-checking features really do work sort of like PSA's for trolls. All the while, fact-checks barely scratch the surface of the conversations happening on the platform.

You're making a whole host of assumptions and opinions about this, with little in the way of data (I get it, you don't work at FB, how much data could you have?), just making blanket statements: "People hate Fact Checks", "People actually like Community Notes" and accepting them as accurate.

I use Facebook, a lot (again: all the politics in my town happens there), and almost nothing is fact-checked; I see one fact-check notice for every 1,000 bad posts I see. I feel like I'm on pretty solid ground saying that what they're doing today isn't working.

Meanwhile: Community Notes have become part of the discourse on Twitter; getting Noted is the new Ratio'd.

Accuracy has nothing to do with any of this. I don't think either Notes or Warnings actually solves "misinformation". I'm saying one is a good product design, and the other is not.

Not seeing fact checks likely means it's working: "Once third-party fact-checkers have fact-checked a piece of Meta content and found it to be misleading or false, Meta reduces the content’s distribution "so that fewer people see it.""

The issue with Community Notes is that if enough people believe a lie, it will not be noted. This lends further credence to a certain set of "official" lies.

> I feel like I'm on pretty solid ground saying that what they're doing today isn't working

How does that follow at all?

Success in what definition?

PR/political success is certainly not correlated with accuracy, given the very act of telling a group they're wrong tends to piss them off.

In terms of encouraging discourse that maximizes user enjoyment of the platform? That's a difficult one. Accuracy probably doesn't do a whole lot there either: HN knows the people love someone being confidently wrong.

Success in terms of society? Probably more yes, albeit with the caveat that only a correction that someone feels good about actually wins hearts and minds. Otherwise they spiral off into conspiracies about "the man" keeping them down. (Read: conservative reality)

It's also important to remember that Zuckerberg only tacked into moderation in the first place due to prevailing political winds -- he openly espoused absolutist views about free speech originally, before some PR black eyes made that untenable.

To me, both approaches to moderation at scale (admins moderating or users moderating) are band-aids.

The underlying problem is algorithmic promotion.

The platforms need to be more curious about the type of content their algorithms are selecting for promotion, the characteristics incentivized, and the net experience result.

Rage-driven virality shouldn't be an organizational end unto itself to juice engagement KPIs and revenue. User enjoyment of the platform should be.

> he openly espoused absolutist views about free speech originally, before some PR black eyes made that untenable.

Note that openly espousing absolutist views about free speech means less than nothing. Elon Musk and Donald Trump openly profess such views, while constantly shouting down, blocking, or even suing anyone who dares speak against them with any amount of popularity.

It's not that they're inaccurate, it's just that they cherry-pick the topics to fact-check and their choice (in my limited experience) is always biased leftwards. You can be absolutely correct and absolutely malicious at the same time.

>I think it would have been product development malpractice

the thing is both community notes and top down moderation, if they have any purpose at all, are product malpractice. If they work, they are always going to be intrusive because that's what they're supposed to do, correct factually wrong information. Community notes is the neighborhood police, top down moderation is the feds but if they do their job either one is going to be annoying by definition.

If they're not intrusive they don't perform a corrective function and that's what largely happened to community notes. As time goes on they're more and more snarky and sarcastic meta comments rather than corrections.

But because they are community driven, they are snarky in a way that represents the community, which makes me question if they are intrusive at all. They are what the community grows them into.

It seems pretty clear to me that one of these features generally makes users happy and, at the same time, does correct some misinformation, and the other catches about 0.0001% of the bad stuff and turns it into advertisements for how bad the site is.

How can you possibly call community notes on Twitter a "success" when they demonstrably have not reduced the amount of actively made up shit on the site, and the same people who complain about a fact checker saying "no, vaccines do not change your DNA" are just as upset when that info comes from the community notes box, and the only reason there hasn't been widescale anger about them is because Elon wants to pretend it was his idea.

I'm not saying Twitter it is good. It is demonstrably not. But you're kidding yourself if you thought Facebook fact checking was suppressing the antivaxers and flat-earthers.

Oh, so community notes on twitter are actually not good, but its good that Facebook is implementing them anyway? You make no sense and are constantly equivocating back and forth in all your different posts.

They're not there to eliminate made up shit, they're the to add context - e.g "this post is made up and demonstrably false".

Both professional fact-checkers and Community Notes have a pretty low false-positive rate.

It's the false negatives that are the differentiator, but false negatives are by definition invisible to the user.

When you evaluate moderation as a "product" you place more weight on factors that are mostly losers for third-party fact checkers and winners for Community Notes: speed and annoying tone.

But since false negatives are never seen, there's no visible "product" to be annoyed by. Sure, the platform fills up with even more disinfo, but users blame that on other user, not the moderation "product".

And this is where Community Notes fails. Because Notes require consensus from multiple groups with histories of diverse ideological perspectives, when one perspective has an interest in propagating disinfo, no Community Note appears.

Some studies show something like 75% of clear disinfo doesn't get a Community Note on X when it involves a hot partisan shibboleth.

False negatives are mostly invisible failures that make the entire platform worse, but the user can't blame it on a "product" because it's really the absence of a product that's the problem.

As a product decision, I agree.

But I think that can still be addressed separately from the fact that all the tech leaders in Silicon Valley are bending the knee to Trump (e.g. the Mar-a-Lago visits, the "donations" to his inauguration, etc.)

I'll give you an example I find analogous. When Bezos forbid the Washington Post from giving a presidential endorsement, he wrote an op-ed, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/28/jeff-bezo.... I pretty much agreed with the vast majority of what he wrote there. What I think is total BS, though, is his purported rationale and the timing of the decision. I think it's absolutely clear he did it because he didn't want to piss off Trump should he win (the "obeying in advance" part), which he did. The reason I believe this is because he made this decision so close to the election, and he apparently didn't feel the need to do this in previous years, or even the fact that WaPo made other political endorsements (e.g. Senate races in Maryland and VA) just before the presidential endorsement was banned. Bezos subsequent Mar-a-Lago visits and Amazon's inauguration "donation" pretty much confirm my view in my opinion.

In Zuckerberg's announcement, I thought the part he put in about fact checkers being "politically biased" was unnecessary (not to mention dubious IMO), and cleared seemed done to curry favor with the current powers that be.

As someone active in "resistance"-type organization from 2017-2021, with fundamentally the same politics now as I had then: I think all this "bend the knees" shit is mostly working to the benefit of the GOP, and I wish people would stop it. We lost an election, in part because we bet that the median voter was prepared to disqualify MAGA Republicans. They are not. Find a new angle, so we can win in the midterms. This isn't working.

I'm not trying to convince other voters. The "bend the knee" shit is not something I'm saying to try to change opinions. Like you say, clearly the majority of Americans don't care.

But it I'm pretty surprised at the outright transparent speed with which all these business leaders were willing to pay these naked fealty bribes, especially since for so long so many of them talked about these lofty goals besides just making money.

Italians in the 1930s didn't care either when Mussolini made corporations an arm of the state. But that doesn't mean what is happening now is any different.

I'm pretty sure they do this every cycle no matter who wins, but Democrats notice and recoil when it happens after a Republican win, and vice versa. There's also a titration of the news media mining clicks from a framing that de-"normalizes" the Trump administration. But that ship has sailed: you could say "This Is Not Normal" in 2017, which was a fluke nobody saw coming, but Trump won decisively this cycle, and absolutely everybody knew what we were getting into. It's time for the media to retire the schtick.

Is it a "schtick" to report such brazen cronyism?

I agree with the parent that Americans in general seem not to mind corruption, but we can't become so jaded as to think that it's not even worth mentioning that this is a problem.

Referring to public company CEOs warmly greeting the newly elected president as "brazen cronyism" is a schtick, yes.

It annoys me a lot that I have to point things like this out, because I think Trump is a grave problem for the country, but you have to beat him at the ballot box, and the schtick obviously isn't working there.

Moving employee jurisdiction to suit the incoming administration is hardly the same as a warm greeting though, is it?

In my country we have a different word for people giving large sums of money as gifts to incoming politicians, yet we seldom impose that definition on others. US politics is different and affects the climate here too, even though that population is around 20% or less of all Facebook users.

The way to win is with a more appealing set of policy proposals.

More centralized government control, "Karen" style moralizing, DEI, gun banning, global warming, more bureaucratic (and ineffective) regulation, abortions everywhere and the entire "woke" platform apparently isn't it.

I'd suggest defocusing on those and instead return to being the party of the "working man" and a stable economy.

"Wealthy corporations want to force you to work 80 hours a week to enjoy unfair profits or they will replace you with immigrant labor" should be the vibe while never once speaking about things like systemic racism or climate change. Also "the rent is too damn high!". Definitely don't have the party fronted by people who appear airheaded or unintelligent.

You have to speak to the concerns of the voter which I think are individual freedom and economic prosperity.

Once in power you can do whatever you like of course, as is traditional in politics and Trump won't be any exception.

Unfortunately there is no party of "the working man" since the citizens united ruling opened the floodgates for legal & private bribery, and arguably before that. Bernie Sanders, whatever you think of his proposals and views generally, is the rare exception who stands against the bribery and acts as a true populist, and for that he was undermined and defeated as a presidential candidate. People know the democratic party is two-faced, and I don't see how that can ever change, with money being so essential to US politics now.

MAGA didn't win with money. The democrats spent far more. They won with a message.

I'm fairly sure this is either untrue or unknowable. If the official "Harris campaign" spent more than the "Trump campaign" that doesn't actually mean much, considering how many other avenues exist to spend money that escape public scrutiny.

Even if you could account for all the dark money, that still leaves you with leveraging soft power - e.g. Musk using X as a de facto propaganda arm of the Republican party, which doesn't show up on any books.

I'm pretty sure it is knowable. The democrats spent far more.

Musk and X propaganda helped. Also Rogan and other podcasters, but look at how much propaganda the democrat side has/had. All the major media outlets. Reddit, etc etc. Plus the power of the federal government in censorship, courts and the like.

Look, I don't really care and don't trust anyone running for office much. I'm just pointing out what a winning platform would look like. MAGA won because they were speaking to things that more people found important. When the Democrats figure this out, they will be in the winning seat again. If they don't, then they will not win.

Wow what brilliant political insight - this place is shocking sometimes.

Thanks. I help when I can.

You could argue a particular person spent 44 billion but its a fuzzy argument. It's hard to tell..

I'm saying that the democrats lost because they keep taking corporate/oligarch money and are at odds with the values of the people who would otherwise support them. They aren't the party that supports the little guy anymore, so they're basically without an argument aside from "not Trump". I don't think you understood my previous post, which was a critique of the democrats, which used to have "the working man"'s back.

Republicans have always been and continue to be pro-elite, pro-oligarchy, and against the economic interests anyone outside the upper class. They still have a better message than the democrats at the moment.

Ah gotcha. I misread and agree completely with what you state. That does appear (to me anyway) exactly what happened.

> More centralized government control, "Karen" style moralizing, DEI, gun banning, global warming, more bureaucratic (and ineffective) regulation, abortions everywhere and the entire "woke" platform apparently isn't it.

I totally agree with that.

> The way to win is with a more appealing set of policy proposals.

I completely disagree with that. At this point I think it's a bit laughable to think that the majority of Americans care about policy proposals. Trump's appeal, I believe, is that he gave a voice and an outlet for anger to large swaths of people who felt they had been ignored (which they largely had) and talked down to for years. The "elites" (often of both parties) had basically told people in hollowed-out communities and those with failing economic prospects that it was their fault - you just should have gotten a college education, or retrained for the new economy. The Democratic messaging made things worse by also saying "Hey, you know those social standards that were the norm up until the mid 90s? Well, if you believe those, you're a knuckle dragging bigot."

When people have simmering anger and rage, a "nice guy" approach isn't going to cut it. That's why so many people vote for Trump even when they find so many aspects of his personality distasteful.

I'm baffled why a politician hasn't taken more of the lead with the rage that has exploded since the CEO murder. Some elites on the right are trying to frame this as "The crazy Left condones murder!", while I see some elites on the left doing their usual useless finger wagging against insurance companies (see Elizabeth Warren). I just don't understand why a politician hasn't taken this torch and gone into "We're going to tear it all down" mode. I mean, of course there's Bernie, but at this point it needs a younger and more "firebrand" type of person.

> I get how the partisan story is easy to tell here, but I'm saying something pretty specific: I think it would have been product development malpractice for this decision not to have been in the works for many, many months, long before the GOP takeover of the federal government was a safe bet.

You're just stating that, in your personal opinion, a scenario would be bad. That says nothing about it actually taking place.

You're expressing your personal opinion in response to a message listing facts supporting the belief the scenario is actually taking place.

Meaning, it's still plausible this is what is actually happening.

If it was in the works for a long time, then Zuckerberg has been planning to bend the knee to Trump for a long time.

Today, Trump in press conference (video at [0]:

Q: "Do you think Zuckerberg is responding to the threats you've made to him in the past?"

TRUMP: "Probably. Yeah. Probably."

This tells us all we need to know. It has nothing to do with facts and everything to do with yielding to political pressure to bend the media to his whims.

This is just the most standard and basic elements of autocracy, the autocrat must make all the institutions serve him, not the people. This includes not only the branches of government, but also of society, starting with the press, but also the corporate world, the academy, social groups, and everything else.

This is bog-standard autocracy, not democracy.

[0] https://x.com/atrupar/status/1876683641113248036

Bending left and right according to the government of the day doesn't tell you where the true center is.

Autocracy is not Left or Right. It is corrupting all the institutions to serve the will of the autocrat, not the will of the people.

Bending the knee to the autocrat, in this case explicitly changing your rules and operations to enable the autocrat and his followers to more easily spread their lies and intimidation is not political flexibility, it is obeying in advance to be complicit in implementing the autocracy.

It would be better if you didn't have to learn that the hard way, but our educational system and information distribution system has failed. This is just a more advanced and accelerated example of that failure.

[Edit: yes, my mistake to phrase it as political pressure — it was nothing of the sort — it was authoritarian extortion. Note Zuck has a case before the FTC.]

Autocracts doesn't get democratically elected, as far as I understand. Trump is a democratically elected leader who will end his term at most in 2028. Autocracts tend to not be democratically elected (or to change the rules once they're elected to never be deposed). Zuckerberg will bend his knee to the Democrats if they win next term. This is not autocracy, this is just knowing where the wind blows.

That doesn't make sense with the common use of the word. Autocracy is a much wider term than a militia style dictatorship, and is mostly used in the context of democracy.

Most, if not all, autocrats are democratically elected (with some wildly varying definition of democracy of course).

Most autocrats in history have been democratically elected or inherited their position from other autocrats who were.

In current times, democratically elected autocrats include Putin of Russia, Orban of Hungary, Erdoğan of Turkey, Chavez/Maduro of Venezuela, Bukele of El Slavador, and more. Jumping back a most notorious autocrat, Hitler was democratically elected.

Autocracy is not typically imposed by conquest, it is mostly created by corruption of institutions. It is not binary, it is on a scale.

In full democracies, all the institutions of government, legislative, executive, and judicial, are independent and serve as checks & balances against each other. And the institutions of society, industry, trade, press, academic, sport, social, etc. are also fully independent.

Under autocracy, all of these governmental and societal institutions are corrupted to bend to the will of the autocrat, often by his using force of government to his corrupt ends.

This is exactly what Trump just admitted to and Zuckerberg just did — he threatened Zuckerberg with unfair government actions, and Zuckerberg is now converting Facebook to work to further Trump's goals instead of remaining an independent institution.

Here's just a few resources on elected autocrats [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/meet-the-new-auto...

[1] https://nps.edu/-/nps-professor-takes-a-deep-dive-into-elect...

[2] https://academy.wcfia.harvard.edu/publications/democrats-and...

[3] https://press.umich.edu/Blog/2022/07/Elections-in-Modern-Dic...

I don't think the point of the fact-checkers is so that facebook users like them, and it seems odd to pretend that was ever the point.

I don't understand your point at all. Community Notes on E(x) has been ineffective, because ultimately the point of moderation is to delete posts which aren't true so they receive no reach and spread no disinformation.

Not to turn them into a public debate which might as well continue in the posts themselves.

Meta's political history has consistently been shady. Meta patented behavioural targeting technology in 2012 and was fined $5bn for its "accidental" links to anti-democratic election-fixers Cambridge Analytica/SCL, who have ties to far-right oligarchs in the US and the UK.

If you're looking for an ideological position, look there. The historical record is absolutely clear.

And then there are comments from Meta insiders, who - perhaps - have a clearer picture of what's going on than outsiders do.

As for malpractice, consider the recent AI rollout and rollback. It was an absolute fiasco for all kinds of reasons, PR and technical, not least of which was the way the bots themselves turned on the company.

Threads has already had a mini-exodus because of slanted moderation.

Meta is simply not a trustworthy company. So "Oh, let's scrap our moderation and do community notes" is hardly an isolated slip-up on an otherwise unblemished record of noble public service.

https://fortune.com/2025/01/04/meta-ai-accounts-bots-false-r...

https://www.platformer.news/meta-fact-checking-free-speech-s...

> ultimately the point of moderation is to delete posts which aren't true so they receive no reach and spread no disinformation.

That assumes that the correct amount of disinformation is zero, personally I wish to maintain my right to be wrong, and my right to tell others of my wrong ideas, and I hope they maintain the right to tell me I'm full of it.

Your position on censorship, moderation, as you call it, is your opinion, and your opinion only, and it is at odds with the position of X, and now Meta, who are taking the position that the point of moderation is to respect everyone's right to speech, while making it very obvious to those that care, that the speech may be less than truthful. Essentially everyone gets to speak, and everyone gets to make up their own mind. What a concept!

I also maintain a position of truth dies in the dark, and lies die in the light.

Most people aren't stupid, community notes breaks the echo chamber and provides a counterpoint.

That debate of free ideas has been working pretty well so far. So much so that we can usually tell who the bad guys are by how much the create darkness; how much they take on the role of arbiters of truth, how much they silence critics, think Soviet Russia, or North Korea for some good examples.

> I've never seen a wrong Facebook fact-check;

Probably because fact checkers are able to make content become unshareable so you not seeing them is the point? But "fact checking" NGOs have a long history of embarrassingly stupid, biased and self-serving decisions.

To pick just one example, in 2020 an op-ed in the New York Post arguing that COVID might have come from the coronavirus research lab in Wuhan was banned from Facebook and Twitter because of being labelled by an anonymous fact checker. Who was this fact checker? Turns out one of them was Danielle E. Anderson, an assistant professor at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, who had literally conducted experiments at the Wuhan lab and collaborated with its scientists.

You can't possibly get more biased than that, but because she was an academic the sort of people who chose the fact checkers assumed she would be automatically correct. And worse, that anyone who disagreed with her - even mildly - should therefore be banned from the internet.

That is the common pattern in every incident that make people mad at "fact checkers" and the reason they have no credibility is that these events happen all the time, are always in favour of left wing beliefs, and they never attempt to learn from these events strongly implying they're deliberate. Indeed the assumption that government funded people are always correct is basically hard-wired into the fact checker ecosystem. They don't attempt to actually work out what's true themselves, so they can't be fixed.

This is the kind of thing that Zuck is referring to when he says they're discredited. Wrong fact checks are commonplace, you just won't notice them if you rely on news feeds they control.

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