[HN Gopher] Birdwatch, a community-based approach to misinformation
___________________________________________________________________
Birdwatch, a community-based approach to misinformation
Author : razin
Score : 65 points
Date : 2021-01-25 18:20 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.twitter.com)
| hezag wrote:
| > _[...] we're designing Birdwatch to encourage contributions
| from people with diverse perspectives, and to reward
| contributions that are found helpful by a wide range of people._
|
| > _For example, rather than ranking and selecting top notes by a
| simple majority vote, Birdwatch can consider how diverse a note's
| set of ratings is and determine whether additional inputs are
| needed before a consensus is reached. Additionally, Birdwatch can
| proactively seek ratings from contributors who are likely to
| provide a different perspective based on their previous ratings._
|
| > _Further, we plan for Birdwatch to have a reputation system in
| which one earns reputation for contributions that people from a
| wide range of perspectives find helpful._
|
| https://twitter.github.io/birdwatch/about/challenges/
| [deleted]
| Pfhreak wrote:
| I'm curious what mechanisms will be in place, and how effective
| they will be, at preventing dogpiling on people using this
| system.
|
| As a specific example, as a nonbinary person, I'm constantly
| running into people online who tell me there are only two
| genders, or that singular they is some sort of new concept. My
| concern with a consensus system is that it will be used to shut
| down people like me (or trans folk, or socialists, etc. etc.
| etc.)
|
| How do you build a consensus system that protects minority
| persons and also weeds out misinformation?
|
| Edit: Downvotes for... being non-binary I guess?
| cwkoss wrote:
| That's a great example of how this could go wrong. I hope the
| folks at Twitter are keeping examples like yours in mind as
| they develop this.
| whymauri wrote:
| Reminds me of the Overwatch moderation system used by Valve to
| collect cheater data from human evaluators in Counter-Strike.
| Eventually, they leveraged that data to improve their automated
| cheat detection systems. [0]
|
| Although Twitter's problem is way harder, IMO.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc
| 5AMUR41 wrote:
| This was actually a genius system on Valve's part. I think what
| makes these two systems different are a few things:
|
| -Overwatch at least had some method of selecting people that
| "knew about the game." People that had never ranked
| competitively in CSGO couldn't make decisions if someone was
| cheating, whereas it seems that the hopes for this new Twitter
| feature will be that anyone can "fact-check" a tweet. Even if
| evidence is required, it is beyond easy to find secondary
| sources that skew facts or statistics into a different
| connotation.
|
| -Whether or not someone is cheating is pretty binary. They
| either are or they aren't. One of my biggest concerns for
| Birdwatch is that it was likely be used on tweets that aren't
| binary statements of "write/wrong" facts, and will likely be
| used in mass-reports of those of other political stances. That,
| or shitposting
| thimkerbell wrote:
| Muddying the discourse is next-generation trolling.
| neartheplain wrote:
| How will Twitter prevent the sort of organized brigading and
| domination of the always-online crowd which plagues such
| crowdsourced review programs?
| kyleblarson wrote:
| They won't prevent it. This is clearly by design on Twitter's
| part given that the always-online bluecheck crowd leans so far
| left.
| manojlds wrote:
| I liked some blockchain / crypto based ideas people were having
| - like you have to use crypto to even say something is fake or
| not. A journalist has to "pledge" crypto that a news is not
| fake and the smart contract releases the amount back based on
| certain evaluations like if the post was voted as fake or not
| etc. (I am sure as described there will be holes, but I like
| the direction it was heading.)
| jethro_tell wrote:
| Lol, now you have two problems.
| fwip wrote:
| That just becomes "rich people decide."
| qertoip wrote:
| Not good indeed. But better than "poor people decide".
| fwip wrote:
| Why?
| Pfhreak wrote:
| This is the central question. If someone isn't asking, "What
| would a malicious user do with this system?" and inserting
| their favorite internet bogeymen as a thought experiment, they
| haven't finished their design.
|
| This is doubly true for safety systems. I don't see much of the
| press release focused on how abuse of the safety system will be
| avoided beyond, "We'll eventually let it be reviewed by outside
| parties."
| ourlordcaffeine wrote:
| I'm pretty sure this project will just turn into opposing
| groups marking anything they disagree with as disinformation,
| the bigger group succeeding in having control of the
| narrative.
|
| What's to stop a flood of Russian accounts gaining control of
| what's marked as disinformation?
| olah_1 wrote:
| I just want to point out that Minds[1] has a pretty clever
| content moderation policy that involves an appeal process with
| randomly selected users of the platform making blind judgements.
|
| I haven't been part of the process myself, nor have I used the
| platform yet at all. But this feature sounds quite good in
| theory.
|
| [1]: https://www.minds.com/content-policy
| herewegoagain2 wrote:
| Did anybody even ask for fact checking notes by Twitter? I don't
| think so.
|
| Whatever the Twitter fact checking note says, you should still
| not take any information from the internet at facee value.
| markmiro wrote:
| A lot of people are wondering how this will stop misinformation.
| I agree that we can't crowdsource truth. But we can crowdsource
| information that can help reduce misinformation. When you have
| two sides disagreeing the first step is to build some common
| ground.
|
| Twitter is trying to solve a tough problem. On one hand you've
| got people accusing Twitter of hosting and platforming hateful,
| harmful content. On the other hand you have people claiming that
| Twitter is calling the shots about what's true and suppressing
| information it doesn't like.
|
| Maybe this is the first step towards something like a digital
| court. People on both sides present evidence, experts, witnesses.
| The two sides get a hand in picking the jury.
|
| Or maybe the solvable problem is that information gets
| misconstrued and propagated. A video clip might get edited a
| certain way, for example. Solving this problem may not help us
| all agree on what happened in the video clip. However, we should
| at least be able to agree on what the two interpretations are. To
| make this happen, both sides would have to steel man the other
| side. Otherwise, the opposing side would claim they're being
| misportrayed. Having things that opposing sides agree upon would
| greatly help reduce unnecessary conflict.
| anewaccount2021 wrote:
| This will be a kangaroo court used to blunt-force-trauma a select
| subset of strawmen and deplorables off of the service. In the
| end, does anyone really care if Twitter is "truthful"?
| 5AMUR41 wrote:
| > In the end, does anyone really care if Twitter is "truthful"?
|
| As it's becoming an ever-increasing method of communication
| between government officials and whatnot, I'd say some amount
| of "truthfulness" and "validity" is warranted. The other day a
| member of the US government (I think it was Ted Cruz? I can't
| find it at the moment) wrote a tweet that implied he thought
| the Paris Climate agreement only affected the citizens of
| Paris. Something as factually "write/wrong" as that should be
| able to be contested and held accountable to being "wrong"
|
| That being said, I agree with you that this will not be used as
| intended and will undoubtedly lead to more confusion and
| confirmation bias from all sides. Using crowd-sourced knowledge
| in this manner leads to the assumption that "what the majority
| thinks is right is factual," and I'm reminded it was once
| "fact" that the sun rotated around the Earth
| szhu wrote:
| There's a lot of reason to doubt that this will work. But one
| thing makes me hopeful that this might actually work is that
| Wikipedia's "Talk" pages appear to serve a similar purpose, and
| they serve that purpose adequately.
| salmonellaeater wrote:
| > As we develop algorithms that power Birdwatch -- such as
| reputation and consensus systems
|
| Consensus is the enemy of understanding. For topics where there
| is conflicting or poor evidence or that bear on the culture war,
| I do not want people voting on what is the consensus truth. I
| want to see all the evidence. We have enough problems with
| researchers not publishing uncomfortable data; I don't want the
| little that exists flagged because it conflicts with the average
| Twitter user's sensibilities.
| x86_64Ubuntu wrote:
| What kind of uncomfortable data are you talking about that
| isn't being published?
| Bedon292 wrote:
| Maybe I am interpreting it wrong, but this seems like it
| provides what you want. It lets people provide whatever
| evidence is relevant in response. People provide responses to
| the tweet, with the evidence in the response. And then are
| rated on if they are helpful or not. Its certainly not perfect,
| and probably going to be subject to brigading if people don't
| like the evidence provided though.
| ardy42 wrote:
| > Consensus is the enemy of understanding. For topics where
| there is conflicting or poor evidence or that bear on the
| culture war, I do not want people voting on what is the
| consensus truth. I want to see all the evidence.
|
| That's a nice sentiment in a vacuum, but we're not in a vacuum.
| It's sort of like focusing on getting every child a college
| education when you can't even manage to teach them all literacy
| yet.
|
| At the point, I feel like the priority needs to be around
| figuring out a way to defeat disinformation and misinformation
| to restore some kind of common ground understanding of the
| facts. The marketplace of ideas can't function if major
| factions reject truth-seeking in favor of blatant lies that are
| appealing for various other reasons (e.g. emotional
| satisfaction, ability to manipulate others, etc.).
| offby37years wrote:
| Groups search for consensus, individuals for truth. Without
| consensus groups fracture. Without truth we're destined for
| the next dark age.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| We can all agree that chocolate is the best form of ice
| cream. Those who would disagree are obviously trolls
| spreading disinformation. The marketplace of ice cream can't
| function if we have other flavors like pistachio or
| strawberry being labeled "best" instead of the only truely
| best ice cream. Obviously these strawberry promoters are just
| manipulating other gullible ice cream consumers for their own
| ends.
| ardy42 wrote:
| > We can all agree that chocolate is the best form of ice
| cream. Those who would disagree are obviously trolls
| spreading disinformation. The marketplace of ice cream
| can't function if we have other flavors like pistachio or
| strawberry being labeled "best" instead of the only truely
| best ice cream. Obviously these strawberry promoters are
| just manipulating other gullible ice cream consumers for
| their own ends.
|
| You're confusing preferences and facts. I was talking about
| facts [1], you're talking about preferences.
|
| [1] like Donald Trump is not waging a secret war to defeat
| a conspiracy of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who harvest a
| (fictitious) drug from trafficked children and Trump lost
| the 2020 election fairly.
| bnralt wrote:
| > The marketplace of ideas can't function if major factions
| reject truth-seeking in favor of blatant lies that are
| appealing for various other reasons (e.g. emotional
| satisfaction, ability to manipulate others, etc.).
|
| The problem always becomes that few think their faction has
| this problem. Most people think that they and their side
| believe in the truth, and that the other side is peddling
| false information. In such an environment, "combating
| misinformation" inevitably becomes "trying to get everyone to
| agree with me."
|
| In order to combat misinformation we'd probably have to start
| by combating the emotional commitment we hold to a certain
| narrative before we even examine all of the facts. That's not
| easy to do, but I imagine a good first step would be to cut
| out the constant 24/7 news cycle that a lot of people are
| addicted to and that seems to feed into these emotions.
| Twitter, of course, is a large source of this stuff.
|
| Getting away from the news is an excellent way to start
| thinking more clearly.
| ardy42 wrote:
| > The problem always becomes that few think their faction
| has this problem. Most people think that they and their
| side believe in the truth, and that the other side is
| peddling false information. In such an environment,
| "combating misinformation" inevitably becomes "trying to
| get everyone to agree with me."
|
| The problem with your line of thinking is that it assumes
| good faith and a certain amount of competence, which are
| assumptions that I don't think we can reasonably make
| anymore in light of the insane success of things like QAnon
| and "Stop the Steal."
| nailer wrote:
| No. Truth does not flow from consensus like a college degree
| follows from literacy.
| username3 wrote:
| We need to see when a someone on one side disagrees with their
| own side. Echo chambers drown the voice of dissenters.
|
| We need to see when one side ignores the other side. We need a
| list of unanswered questions to hold every side accountable.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Every side? "The other side"?
|
| Like you're going to hold the Leninists accountable for their
| unanswered claims against the Breadtubers for today's Voash
| drama?
|
| Or intervene with a fact check when someone says the 8052 is UV
| reprogrammable when only the modern clones are?
|
| Or for when the guy who talks about Magic the Gathering and was
| in Mulan makes an offhand comment about the new Harry Potter
| series and literally everyone gets upset?
|
| How are you even dividing sides?
| colllectorof wrote:
| Nearly all attempts to "fix misinformation" on social media I've
| seen in the last several years ranged from hopelessly clueless to
| downright sinister.
|
| _" Birdwatch allows people to identify information in Tweets
| they believe is misleading and write notes that provide
| informative context."_
|
| You're not going to fix anything by attacking the symptoms, which
| is exactly what this seems to propose. To fix the actual problem
| we need to create systems that generate and propagate trustworthy
| information, which people actually _want_ to consume rather than
| attacking information _you_ don 't want people to consume.
|
| _" we have conducted more than 100 qualitative interviews with
| individuals across the political spectrum who use Twitter"_
|
| There is already a selection bias in play then, because there are
| large numbers of people who don't use Twitter for various
| reasons.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I agree with your characterization about attempts to fix
| misinformation. However, I don't think "what people actually
| _want_ to consume " is a good signal for "trustworthy
| content"-if the social media era has shown us anything, it's
| that (barring a narrow band of critical, independent thinkers)
| we have an insatiable appetite for any content that reaffirms
| our tribalist priors, no matter how patently absurd the content
| may be.
|
| To the extent that Twitter's goal is to combat post-truth-ism
| (as opposed to propagating it by way of its current business
| model), I think it pretty much has to develop its own strict
| code of ethics which prizes honesty, integrity, neutrality, and
| objectivity like the academics and journalists of yore.
| Specifically, we need a media landscape (including social
| media) that once again rewards both sides for bringing their
| best arguments, rather than dual partisan media outlets.
|
| There's a very popular straw man counter-argument which is that
| I'm assuming that abhorrent racist ideas should be given the
| same attention as, I don't know, climate science, but that's
| not the case at all. Rather, I'm arguing that a neutralist and
| objective framework would discourage abhorrent racist ideas and
| encourage more respectable conservative intellectualism instead
| of the status quo which is to regard anything to the right of
| the far-left as uniformly vile (I'm oversimplifying a bit for
| sake of brevity). Similarly, such a platform wouldn't regard
| climate science and blank slatism as uniformly virtuous. The
| best left-wing thought would face-off against the best right-
| wing thought, and as a moderate liberal, I think the best left-
| wing thought will win.
|
| Importantly, this pulls everyone toward more fact-based
| positions, which tends to have a moderating effect.
| Unfortunately, the corollary is that this presents a political
| obstacle--those who are deeply committed to these kinds of
| post-truth ideologies tend to vigorously oppose such reforms.
| dang wrote:
| There's another active thread here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25908439. Not sure whether
| to merge them.
| peanut_worm wrote:
| Totally thought this was related to the Backyard Bird Count this
| year lol
| hanniabu wrote:
| Who fact-checks the fact-checkers?
| md_ wrote:
| The point here seems not to have independent professional fact-
| checkers, but to crowd-source it.
|
| On the one hand, I certainly struggle to see how _more_ crowds
| will improve upon what is fundamentally a problem with crowds
| to begin with.
|
| On the other, Wikipedia seems to work reasonably well--and
| purely as a result of the community mores, not due to any
| sophisticated moderation algorithm or ranking structure or
| similar.
|
| I'm not holding my breath, but it is interesting to see if a
| community-driven effort imbued with a Wikipedian-like spirit
| might succeed where more automated efforts have not.
| ardy42 wrote:
| > On the one hand, I certainly struggle to see how more
| crowds will improve upon what is fundamentally a problem with
| crowds to begin with.
|
| When you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
|
| I believe that the social networks have built technologies
| that probably can't actually be made to work in a socially
| beneficial way, since they're utterly dependent on
| crowdsourcing and automation for economic reasons, but those
| tools aren't actually up the the problems they face.
| briantakita wrote:
| The underlying question is philosophical freedom vs
| authoritarianism. The same tactics can be utilized by
| different actors who have different worldviews. The Stasi
| utilized Crowdsourcing to enforce authoritarianism for
| example. One person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter.
| One's misinformation is another's truth particularly when it
| comes to how information is interpreted & what is focused
| upon.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| Once a proposition is falsified a rational community would
| rejected it.
|
| Once your community or protocol "philosophically" rejects
| checksums it is only a matter of time before your system
| breaks catastrophically.
|
| This philosophical freedom vs authoritarianism thing you're
| proposing is a view that is incomplete and small to the
| point of being false.
|
| The actual underlying question is do you accept that
| grounded truth exists and are you willing to have a large
| and nuanced enough view to include all non false
| propositions and reject all false propositions.
| seqizz wrote:
| Wikipedia works because you can remove content (even remove
| accounts afaik) once you're sure it's providing wrong
| information. On Twitter, people will interpret this as
| censoring.
| bena wrote:
| The problem with this statement is that it assumes that "fact-
| checkers" are a single entity when that is not the case.
|
| The answer to "who fact-checks the fact-checkers" is "the fact
| checkers".
|
| And we can use consensus, reputation, and checks against known
| facts to validate the checks themselves. If group A, group B,
| and group C all agree and group D disagrees, then we can say
| with relative confidence that D is probably wrong in this case.
| It is safe to go with the consensus.
|
| However, if A, B, C are notoriously unreliable and have a
| history of distorting claims, then it is beneficial to see why
| D disagrees with all three. Or even not use A, B, and C as
| sources.
|
| We can also judge a fact-checker's veracity by how they
| evaluate a claim. Do they provide sources for their claim. It's
| one thing to say "This will murder 40 people a minute" and
| quite another to say "This claim disagrees with a recent study
| by the CDC [link to study] that says it will only murder 39
| people a minute".
|
| The only reason to cast doubt on the process or activity of
| fact-checking is if you don't want people checking your facts.
| [deleted]
| call_me_dana wrote:
| On the surface, it sounds really nice. But anyone who's paying
| attention in the fake news era has a general idea on what this
| will be used for.
|
| Any tweets questioning the official narrative will be roundly
| criticized and ridiculed. Instead of having to delve into a long
| reply thread to see debunkers make their case, there will be an
| easy to digest notice within grasp. Which is not necessarily a
| bad thing if it is used fairly and responsibly. But judging on
| Twitter's past performance, it likely won't be.
|
| Dissent will be publicly humiliated while pure disinformation
| from governments, think tanks, and corporations have no such
| objections. Any doubts to the accepted story will be pointed at
| one of the fact checker sites and further inquiries censored.
|
| In an honest world, this would be one giant step to finally
| getting at the truth. But this isn't an honest world, is it?
| mc32 wrote:
| I also don't see how this is not corrupted to cover
| embarrassing or inconvenient things up by governments who have
| influence/infiltrate such thing.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| It don't think it is possible with a format like Twitter - I
| can imagine something like Wikipedia, but with sources limited
| to scientific publications, where each person improves upon a
| shared document.
|
| Maybe Google wave is a better fit, allowing rich non-text items
| to enter it.
|
| On Twitter you will have each person fight for their side, and
| you will never see a convergent product.
|
| Of course this answer (and your question) presupposes that we
| are trying to achieve some form of shared consensus, whereas on
| Twitter, it is really two or more sides of a culture war
| fighting and wars are zero or negative sum games. If we are
| trying to find the truth I benefit even if every theory I had
| was wrong, because it still helped us get to the one that
| works, but in a war if I don't win I am sure to lose.
| [deleted]
| beerandt wrote:
| Popular speech doesn't need protection.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| That's a pithy retort devoid of content. If 60% of the
| population believes the truth (for the sake of argument) and
| 40% believes another, the 40% can still do quite a bit of
| damage by intentionally spreading misinformation (causing
| confusion and chaos that the 60% have to distract themselves
| from) and/or violence (government overthrow doesn't have to
| come from the majority).
|
| Similarly, it's not hard to imagine that if the minority is
| the one that's correct, the majority can cause some damage
| enforcing the belief that the emperor is indeed wearing
| clothes.
|
| The truth is the thing that needs protection, not speech. The
| challenge is that objective truth can be epistemologically
| difficult to protect without protecting lies (or conversely
| fighting falsehoods can inadvertently end up fighting some
| truths).
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Worse, if the 40% are more enthusiastic about spreading
| their viewpoint than the 60% are about spreading the truth,
| then social media may have a majority of posts supporting
| the falsehood.
| beerandt wrote:
| >The challenge is that objective truth can be
| epistemologically difficult to protect without protecting
| lies
|
| Which is why even lies are, and should be, protected
| speech, even if that's not the current trendy thought.
|
| Ultimately what it comes down to is: protecting unpopular
| minority opinions. If they're not protected, how would it
| even be possible to evaluate the "truth" of the content.
|
| There is no universal truth. That's why everyone's speech
| should be protected. Even lies.
|
| Consider: Every civil rights achievement made in the last
| 100 years. If the minority opinion was squelched without a
| chance to be considered, what progress would have been
| made?
|
| Would a "Ministry of Truth" in whatever form it might take,
| have even allowed statements questioning racial or gender
| equality?
|
| Any system that enforces such censorship becomes a
| theocracy dictating dogma.
|
| A statement as simple as "There is no god" would become
| blasphemous again.
| jerkstate wrote:
| To be fair, this is the same way all broadcast media has been
| since the Gutenberg Press was primarily used to print
| indulgences for the church. We got a good 25 years between the
| time the internet was relatively widespread before it was
| completely subverted by the powers that be, that's pretty good.
| Now onward to the next communication technology, because the
| internet is now only useful for maintaining the status quo,
| just like TV, radio, newspaper, and every broadcast medium
| prior.
| wtetzner wrote:
| > In an honest world, this would be one giant step to finally
| getting at the truth. But this isn't an honest world, is it?
|
| Not to mention that in an honest wold, why would you even need
| something like this?
|
| You don't need it in an honest world, and it will end up being
| worse than nothing in a dishonest world. It doesn't seem like a
| good idea in any scenario.
| mistermann wrote:
| > Not to mention that in an honest world, why would you even
| need something like this?
|
| The world is what we make it - we are the masters of our own
| destiny. This is _literally true_ (subject to boundaries
| imposed on us by nature: the laws of physics, the physical
| resources available to us, the nature of the evolved human
| mind and the societies we have built for ourselves to operate
| in, and other things I may overlook).
|
| If a variable in the world is not to our liking, and it is
| fixable, we can choose to fix it (as a collective species),
| or not. Mother Nature imposes some restrictions on this, but
| not many.
|
| From the article:
|
| > To date, we have conducted more than 100 qualitative
| interviews with individuals across the political spectrum who
| use Twitter, and we received broad general support for
| Birdwatch. In particular, people valued notes being in the
| community's voice (rather than that of Twitter or a central
| authority) and appreciated that notes provided useful context
| to help them better understand and evaluate a Tweet (rather
| than focusing on labeling content as "true" or "false"). Our
| _goal(!)_ is to build Birdwatch in the open, and have it
| _shaped(!)_ by the Twitter community.
|
| > To that end, we're also taking significant steps to make
| Birdwatch transparent:
|
| - _All(!???)_ data contributed to Birdwatch will be publicly
| available and downloadable in TSV files
|
| - As we develop algorithms that power Birdwatch -- such as
| reputation and consensus systems -- we _aim to_ (!) publish
| _that code_ (!) publicly in the Birdwatch Guide. The initial
| ranking system for Birdwatch is already available here.
|
| > We hope this will enable experts, researchers, and the
| public to analyze or audit Birdwatch, identifying
| opportunities or flaws that can _help us_ (!) more quickly
| build an _effective_ (!) _community-driven_ (!) solution.
|
| If what they are saying is 100% true (and not _at all_
| misleading, and remains true going forward through time),
| this would be an _extremely big deal_. Modifications to the
| fundamental systems we use for collective communication and
| sense making is the obvious place a benevolent dictator would
| start to improve the current state of affairs.
|
| However, history strongly suggests that this is not only not
| true, but most likely _knowingly untrue_ (aka: a lie). I am
| obviously speculating, but I think this is a reasonable
| speculation.
|
| Speculating sucks though. I think we are forced to do it far
| more often than is necessary (under the limitations imposed
| upon us by nature).
|
| So how about this idea:
|
| Let's say, in the spirit of uniting the country (USA), we
| make a bi-partisan decision to create a new role for the
| government: an as-honest-as-possible, process of constant
| audit of all "major" public communication platforms.
| Carefully selected, _proven to be honest and trustworthy_ bi-
| partisan technical people (from the "grassroots" community)
| would be _forcibly_ embedded within all major corporations,
| with 100% visibility into all source code, processes, and
| meetings (where "necessary"). They would carefully monitor
| _the nature of_ all of this software that is exerting such a
| powerful force on our society, and that of the world. Where
| possible (which should be most of the time), their findings
| would be published for the public to see (and "sniff for
| imperfections or corruption").
|
| These would be positions of extreme power and insight, and
| would offer genuine risks to intellectual property and
| confidential strategy of the companies subject to this
| treatment. As _a first pass_ at managing this, these people
| could be paid _extremely well_ , but they would also be
| subject to extremely punitive measures if they were to ever
| behave in a compromising manner.
|
| Of course, the flaws in such a plan _are numerous_. Reality
| is complex - we can face that head on and manage it, or bury
| our heads in the sand with _speculative_ claims like "this
| wouldn't work".
|
| The general goal of this is to _force(!) truthfulness (as
| opposed to honesty) into society_. The world is what we make
| of it, and we can make this little corner of it _how we want
| it to be_. And if we happen to disagree with the specifics of
| "how we want it to be", then deal with it head on: _figure it
| out, and ship to production_.
|
| As I understand it, all politicians desire what is best for
| the entire country (and the world - they only differ on how
| to achieve this), as well as desire to govern based on The
| Truth - so I wouldn't expect we would get any pushback from
| them (and if we did, journalists would be _on it, publishing
| salacious exposes on the obvious corruption_ ) - that leaves
| the decision up to "we the people".
|
| On a scale of 1 to 10, how good/bad is this general idea? Is
| it a complete non-starter due to something I have overlooked
| (that _cannot be changed_ )? Are there even better approaches
| than this? I have no idea, I am just trying to put some ideas
| out there for consideration. At some point, I think we have
| to do something to alter the trajectory we are on.
| wtetzner wrote:
| > As we develop algorithms that power Birdwatch -- such as
| reputation and consensus systems -- we aim to(!) publish
| that code(!) publicly in the Birdwatch Guide. The initial
| ranking system for Birdwatch is already available here.
|
| I think the idea of finding truth through consensus _is_
| the flaw here. A system like this would have silenced the
| great revolutionary thinkers of history.
| wtetzner wrote:
| > People come to Twitter to stay informed
|
| This seems to be the heart of the problem.
| bserge wrote:
| Introducing Watchbird, a community-based approach to
| misinformation (heh).
|
| Posters: Get paid to post online, starting at $0.20/post! Our top
| posters earn up to $50/hour! Join now!
|
| Sponsors: We have over 50,000 active users ready to post whatever
| you need online, no questions asked!
|
| _Similar services actually exist, but you know, one could always
| create a new one aimed at "fact checking" the fact checkers._
|
| I guess my point is, you can't solve this problem with even more
| crowd bullshit. It needs to be done at a fundamental level,
| preferably by governments in school.
|
| Afaik, there's still zero official
| classes/courses/lessons/whatever in most schools that would teach
| you to not trust everything you read and triple check everything
| yourself before believing anything.
|
| Plus, this is pretty prone to abuse. Individuals are inherently
| dangerous, and crowds even more so. Someone doesn't like person
| X, so they "fact check" his tweets. Others see this coming from a
| "reputable" poster and jump on the bandwagon.
|
| Seen it so many times it got old. Experimented with it myself. A
| post on Reddit (same content) that gets 8-12 fake upvotes in the
| first 30 minutes after being posted is infinitely more likely to
| start getting upvoted by hundreds of real users and get to the
| subreddit's hot front page than a post that got 0-3 upvotes, for
| example.
|
| I was interested in Reddit's voting system and learned some
| interesting stuff. They're really smart about it, you can't just
| have multiple accounts and some proxies/VPNs and go at it like in
| the good old days. Votes are going to be ignored unless you know
| what you're doing. Probably not news for anyone in the industry,
| but I found it interesting.
| LargeWu wrote:
| Would be very interested to see how this addresses one of the
| primary underlying pathways of misinformation - confirmation
| bias. Many people believe information because it confirms their
| worldview; whether it's provably true or false is often
| irrelevant. In fact, I suspect that having a belief proved wrong
| often even reinforces that belief in some cases.
|
| How much does truth matter in a post-truth society?
| call_me_dana wrote:
| Truth still exists whether it's completely hidden. Truth still
| exists if bad actors have injected 10 other believable stories
| alongside it. Truth still exists even if every fact checker
| calls the claim false.
|
| People have spent enormous sums of money and time to hide the
| truth from the public. Just because every effort has been made
| to hide the truth, doesn't diminish the fact that the truth
| matters. In my opinion, it's just the opposite. It matters more
| than ever.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Whether you believe in Covid or not if you inhale the virus you
| may develop the decease. If you don't believe in guns you may
| find some nasty people in your house who do, and you will not
| be able to defend yourself.
|
| The truth still reigns supreme, it is just that people
| sometimes suffer unnecessarily because they do not know what
| the truth is.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| It's much worse than that--those people who are, shall we
| say, misaligned with the truth impose consequences _for
| others_. Especially when those people are in prominent
| positions in government and culture.
| c22 wrote:
| I feel like we moved from pre-truth society to post-truth
| society alarmingly quickly. Perhaps we should dwell for longer
| in the age of truth.
| [deleted]
| oh_sigh wrote:
| I suspect this will be minorly used for direct misinformation
| control("Donald Rumsfeld is not a lizard person"), but mostly
| used for narrative control("While this fact is true by itself,
| you need to look at the bigger context..."), and so will be
| entirely ineffective. People readily take up new information, but
| are very hesitant to change their internal narrative on a matter.
| Especially when they're being told by others what their narrative
| should be. Double especially if part of their narrative is that
| big tech/liberals/academia/coastal elites/etc are trying to feed
| you the Big Lie.
|
| Conservative misinformation is a big talking point for liberals,
| and maybe the big societal issue at the moment, but as a small
| scale test run, I'd love to see birdwatch try to correct the
| record for misinformation that is commonly believed in liberal
| circles: Anti-GMO, anti-vaxx, toxic whiteness, the extents of
| systemic racism in our society, some of the more dire
| prognostications of nuclear war and global warming.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-01-25 23:03 UTC)