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posted by hubie on Thursday January 09, @06:42AM   Printer-friendly
from the fact-checking-the-fact-checkers dept.

Facebook, Instagram, and Threads are ditching third-party fact-checkers in favor of a Community Notes program inspired by X, according to an announcement penned by Meta's new Trump-friendly policy chief Joel Kaplan. Meta is also moving its trust and safety teams from California to Texas:

"We've seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see." Meta said. "We think this could be a better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they're seeing – and one that's less prone to bias."

The Community Notes feature will first be rolled out in the US "over the next couple of months" according to Meta, and will display an unobtrusive label indicating that there is additional information available on a post in place of full-screen warnings that users have to click through. Like the X feature, Meta says its own Community Notes will "require agreement between people with a range of perspectives to help prevent biased ratings."

The moderation changes aim to address complaints that Meta censors "too much harmless content" on its platforms, and is slow to respond to users who have their accounts restricted. Meta is also moving its trust and safety teams responsible for its content policies and content reviews content out of California to Texas and other US locations, instead of wholesale moving its California headquarters like Elon Musk did with SpaceX and X.

Also at BBC, MSN and NYP.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Thursday January 09, @04:42PM (2 children)

    by Beryllium Sphere (r) (5062) on Thursday January 09, @04:42PM (#1388067)

    From Heinlein, a character who came into a huge unexpected inheritance. The judge in the case warned him that the bigger something is, the less one person owns it.

    We are in a situation where a single person can control the discourse of millions. This is fundamentally unhealthy and risky however s/he manages it. https://xkcd.com/743/ [xkcd.com]

    Notice I'm failing to propose a solution. Federated or user-controlled social media is interesting but IMO still unproven.

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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 09, @08:17PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday January 09, @08:17PM (#1388125)

    > Notice I'm failing to propose a solution.

    The problem demonstrates that any real solution will be more social / legal / financial than technical in terms of innovations and paradigm shifts.

    > Federated or user-controlled social media is interesting but IMO still unproven.

    Socially, I'm weird - like out on the 1% fringe in several dimensions, so when I say "I have no problem with the LGBQT+ orientation of most of the public faces of the Mastodon / ActivityPub / Spritely development and technical team" - I genuinely mean that, and that I believe what follows is simply a pragmatic analysis of why they're not experiencing the kind of growth that Twitter / Facebook / even Reddit did upon initial launch. However socially unjust, wrong, and in need of improvement the following may be, it is also "how it is" in the world from my perspective.

    The self proclaimed "Queen of Mastodon" and her crew are a bunch of uncomfortably self-assured tranny nerds, and that puts off a LOT of people, including people with serious money who could 125x fund their current quaint little $80K fundraising goal at the stroke of a check on a whim, just to see what happens. If you appeal to "that crowd" they will fund projects in $10M increments if their tech advisors assure them of something approaching a 5% chance of success. Having known two projects funded by that crowd over the past 20ish years, I wouldn't want that money, but the reality is: if you're not taking that money, you're competing against people who do.

    I haven't had the time to fully wrap my head around ActivityPub and Spritely to get a sense of how developed it is, or isn't. ActivityPub seems to be the basis of Mastodon? And it seems to talk a good talk about what technically should be happening in such a distributed / federated system, but what I don't know is how much of that is just "should" talk in general descriptions vs "has been done as well as it needs to be for low effort deployment at global scale" stuff.

    Federated Mastodon seems to work on a technical level, at least from the piece of the elephant this blind man is touching. As a 6 week user, I still feel like I'm struggling to add enough content (followees) to make it a compelling community to participate in, as if I need such a thing anyway.

    I started using BlueSky about 8 weeks ago, and it (non-distributed as it is) has a very similar feel to Mastodon - but is much more developed as a quick-start engaging experience. For one thing, almost instantly upon signing up, I had been guided to follow George Takei and Mark Hamill - which was quaint. Not long after I moved George off to a list that I only look at when I'm in the mood for his mostly politically oriented stuff (which is rarely), but Mark doesn't SPAM so much downer content and so I left him on my main Following list and got his recent post about the fires... Getting past the celebrity side of things, you can preview the kind of things that people have been posting and follow them if that's the kind of thing you want to read / participate in the discussion of. Mastodon is much the same, but just a bit more techy oriented, a bit clumsier interface, and quite a bit harder to find the people you might like to follow - at least for me so far. In the end, I think I might just build up a much more interesting / valuable to me community on Mastodon, but for now I definitely see how BlueSky had the appeal to add 20 million users (including me) in such a short timespan.

    Those millions of users attract people like Mark Cuban: https://globelynews.com/americas/mark-cuban-is-a-bluesky-fan-could-he-become-an-owner/ [globelynews.com]

    Mastodon's nerdy DIY independently controlled federation... still in competition with the big players.

    Bad analogy warning: if you look at weather underground, you'll find a lot of independently operated weather station data, there are 6 active stations in my immediate neighborhood - of probably 3000 houses. Those 6 weather nerds invested at least $100, probably closer to $300 on average, and at least an hour or two of their time, setting up and maintaining their home-run weather stations. I was contributor #7 in my neighborhood until a hurricane dropped a tree on my sensor pod, it will be a while before I get motivated to start up again.

    So, for Weather Underground users around here, only 0.2% of the homes do the nerdy thing providing a community of real-time temperature, humidity, rainfall, wind speed and direction data... and most people still use The Weather Channel's website instead.

    You can launch a turnkey basic Mastodon instance for $6 per month, tweak the server to your preferences - dig into the source code if that's your thing. But so far they only have 1 million active users on an estimated 4000 server instances vs Suckerberg's claimed 3 billion users... Apparently SESTA and FOSTA have chilled the legal landscape for hosting porn on privately owned servers, so that's a barrier that Reddit and others didn't have in their early growth, and at this point X seems too big to fail just because there are a bunch of hooker bots trolling for tips... BlueSky is getting a fair number of those as well lately.

    And that segues into my closing observation on all of this: if I really were to "dive in" to Facebook, or BlueSky or Mastodon, I feel almost compelled to spin up multiple accounts - one to proselytize to my Followers, one to react to and debate politics, one to share cat photos, one to talk nerdy Unix tech, maybe a different one to talk car stuff, etc. etc. etc. Maybe I'm missing something about how to use # tags, but if I were to follow me I certainly wouldn't want to catch all those different subjects in my feed from me and 100 other weirdos out there.

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]
  • (Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday January 09, @09:09PM

    by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Thursday January 09, @09:09PM (#1388134) Homepage Journal

    From Heinlein

    Which book? I have several. Have you read the short story Jerry was a man? Most racist piece of fiction I ever read. That didn't affect the quality of the story, though, or make him any less of a writer.

    As to the cartoon, why didn't the open source guy just say "I refuse to pay good money for a thing that advertises to me after I've paid them when I can get a superior product for free"?

    I had to use Word before I retired. Not a bad word processor, but I prefer both Open Office and Libre Office. Photoshop? Phuk that! GIMP FTW! Do I look like Elon Musk?? Photoshop is stupidly priced for stupid people with too much money.

    Oh, and you can save an Oo or Lo to a .DOC file readable by Word; none of the periodicals will take anything but that and RTF (which Word always mangles). Microsoft produces shitty software that people who have had nothing else think is professional. Guess what? I only have to boot the Linux computer when I want to, the OS never forces me, and only asks when it updates the kernel.

    Microsoft is a synonym for "shit".

    --
    A man legally forbidden from possessing a firearm is in charge of America's nuclear arsenal. Have a nice day.