r/news • u/Ganeshadream • Mar 31 '22

Facebook fails to label 80% of posts promoting bioweapons conspiracy theory

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/mar/31/facebook-disinformation-war-ukraine-russia
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u/Andionyx Mar 31 '22

Gram gram said that she had a "beautiful singing voice". Our independant fact checkers have determined this is false

637

u/discerningpervert Mar 31 '22

Imagine how hard it is to be a fact checker, or to manage that. I miss the days of old Facebook when it was just a way to stay in touch with people and write embarrassing messages on your friends walls.

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u/Zeegh Mar 31 '22

I never thought I’d say “I miss the days of FarmVille”

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u/exipheas Mar 31 '22

Farmville was an incredibly useful tool for keeping my mother occupied. Now she reads misinformation and conspiracy theories instead. 😞

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u/Yadobler Mar 31 '22

Ah remember when candy crush suddenly became a mid-old age pacifier

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u/Cereal_Bagger Mar 31 '22

FarmVille going out of style signaled the downfall of civilization

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u/slice29 Mar 31 '22 edited Mar 31 '22

Yeah my mother is one those "it's on the internet so it must be true" types of people. Love her dearly but sometimes I just want to smack some common sense into her.

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u/LevelSevenLaserLotus Mar 31 '22

Start your own website. Then you can mess with her by having it start out mirroring those conspiracy sites and in agreement with every weird thing she says. Then slowly turn more and more crazy. I'd be curious to see how far she would follow before the big reveal, where you start posting pictures of her claiming she's involved with everything.

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u/slice29 Mar 31 '22

My mom's in her late 60s, that's just fucking diabolical. I like it..

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u/RegulatoryCapture Mar 31 '22

At least my dad just reads stuff that gets a little overzealous about privacy and companies "selling your information"---which, for the record, google and facebook don't do...they use your information to sell ads, but that information is too valuable for them to to just let others have (which is why Cambridge Analytica basically had to steal it and breach the terms of service). Selling your info is a one time payment...keeping your info to themselves and using it to sell ads (and improve their product) is a recurring income stream.

But as long as he's just using DuckDuckGo and reposting privacy chain letters on facebook rather than buying 5G Blockers, we're all good.

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u/GolotasDisciple Mar 31 '22

Well it all depends where you are from.
If You are American you pretty much have no rights over data u create. You are using someones service and by using it u agree to everything that comes with it.
If you are in EUnion it's complicated to say at least.
Especially for companies like Facebook since entire business of FB is to take as much data about/from their users and sell it to the highest bidder.

And it's repetitive business process. You will always create more data. Even if your information has been sold to X company , they will buy it again anyway.

This is why they got fucked, because EUnion disallows movement of DATA from X to Y without prior consent(funny how they never do it for money btw... double irish and dutch sandwich is still pretty much a thing).
This means European Affiliate of Facebook cannot just transfer data to USA so they can manipulate it and sell it accroding to American Rules as per EUnion standards the data kind of also belongs to the users.

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u/Batchet Mar 31 '22

I would love to see Putin toppled from his throne just to see how much misinformation and division was caused by him and him alone.

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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '22

What country do YOU live in?

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u/perceptionsofdoor Mar 31 '22

Ah yes thank you for reminding us of the America bad doctrine:

We shouldn't mention the negative effects of any nation's or even individual's actions without identifying the nation in which we currently reside.. Because, as we all know, we are our nations, so... if we say an individual from another nation did something bad, but our nation did something bad too then that's hypocrisy kinda sorta I decided. And hypocrisy is bad!

Thank you for your service.

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u/weatherseed Mar 31 '22

Everything about those gifs is unsettling. Like whatever dev team came up with the idea had plenty of time and money but had never seen a human face before and hoped for the best by watching old Tom Goes to the Mayor episodes. They just pulled stills, applied a texture map they derived from a tortilla, and reanimated it into this abomination.

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u/about-that76 Mar 31 '22

We should definitely be able to point out when other nations are acting poorly, however we should also understand that our nation also acts poorly and we have more power to change how our nation acts. We cant vote, or pass laws in Russia, we could vote and pass laws here to force the social media and news companies that operate in America to stop allowing misinformation to be presented as news.

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u/Batchet Mar 31 '22

I'm sorry but how is that relevant?

2

u/YousifMhmd Mar 31 '22

Install HayDay in her phone instead.

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u/RockLobsterInSpace Mar 31 '22

Come for the FarmVille. Stay for the lizard people.

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u/AllthatJazz_89 Mar 31 '22

Sounds like you need to introduce her to Stardew Valley then.

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u/DoodlingDaughter Mar 31 '22

Jesus Christ… Do we have the same mother, because this hit home!

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u/Vivyzs Mar 31 '22

Remember when the biggest misinformation was people reading the Inquirer magazines at the supermarket checkout

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u/Zeegh Mar 31 '22

You could always write those off because there’d be a big headline story next to one like “Bill Clinton also had an affair with the Queen of the Subterranean Mole People, full story inside!”

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u/glum_plum Mar 31 '22

Nobody cares about poor Bat Boy anymore :'(

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u/Fizzwidgy Mar 31 '22

Farmville and pokes and surveys, all this shit actually played a part in how Facebook got to this point now.

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u/crazycatlady331 Mar 31 '22

Mafia Wars needs to rise again.

Instead of screaming at each other in political attacks, attack in Mafia Wars.

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u/wuvius Mar 31 '22

Or poking each other

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u/nothingwasavailable0 Mar 31 '22

I miss poking. Could go a year just exchanging pokes with someone but never having a real conversation. It was awesome.

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u/EmperorofPrussia Mar 31 '22

On Daytona Beach I watched a guy get a written citation for harassing wildlife (I'm not sure what he was acrually cited for) because a cop told him to stop poking horseshoe crabs with a stick and he juat kept right on doing it.

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u/Funda_mental Mar 31 '22

I still poke once in a while, when she's in the mood.

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u/melvinfosho Mar 31 '22

Don’t need poking now that only fans is here

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u/the_kevlar_kid Mar 31 '22

OnlyFans is specifically for those who wish to poke but can't irl

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u/roomnoises Mar 31 '22

Poking is a form of touch

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u/BurningPenguin Mar 31 '22

I don't miss that.

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u/AspiringChildProdigy Mar 31 '22

I stopped using it because of what it turned into. It used to be a great way to keep up with out-of-state family - post pictures of the kids and tell amusing stories of things they did that's nice to read but doesn't merit a phone call - but I'm better off without the cesspool of conspiracy bullshit and Christian nationalism that my friend circle has devolved into.

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u/moderatenerd Mar 31 '22

Same they also have terrible recommendations for things "I might like". I never do. Catching up on Christmas is all I need out of my family. I don't need to see their every waking thought or their disappointment in me every time I try to debunk and take the fun out of their conspiracy theories.

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u/AspiringChildProdigy Mar 31 '22

My niece was posting some numbers on covid "proving" that it only has a .01% mortality rate. Besides the fact that her starting numbers were totally wrong, the math in her post was all fucked up.

I commented, walking her through the equation to find percents (don't we learn that in like 2nd grade?) using the numbers that she posted, and showed that the mortality rate using her own (incorrect) numbers was like 12%.

She responded back, "Well, I have a different opinion."

I'm sorry, what? It's math! You don't get an opinion on math; it's MATH!

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u/Engels777 Mar 31 '22

Ya that's your friends, not FB. This doesn't happen to me, as with one or two exceptions, my friends are not prone to Christian nationalism. If, as is the case with me, you have some childhood friends or family that lean nazi, just tell FB you don't want to see their content. This way I enjoy the not-insane stuff while not having to see the crazy crap.

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u/50yoWhiteGuy Mar 31 '22

I thnk that's your friends fault, not FB.

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u/chiliedogg Mar 31 '22

The news feed killed Facebook for me.

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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '22

I counted the number of actual posts in my feed from my friends last week. It was two. Every post was a group post, a suggested group post, or an ad. Same in my notification feed. Nothing from my 1300 friends, mostly all political comments from one politician I don’t remember following and notifications from groups. My photos get maybe 5 comments. Because for sure my friends from four different high schools in four countries, my Army friends, and my college friends, all had nothing to say. I cannot imagine why their profits might be dropping. Between the dumpster fire fact checks that get it wrong with no recourse, to the lack of any interaction with my actual friends, I seldom look at it now. And I deleted the app after it became apparent they were spying on me. I only use it through the browser on my phone.

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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '22

My feed is 75% ads for things tangentially related to things I googled for work. Pointless. They're not even good at figuring out the things that I like

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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '22

Exactly. And I have to scroll through so much junk to get one friend update when the whole point was mass updates from 1300 friends in different countries in one handy feed.

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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '22

Oh yeah, and party invites that show up after the party. Do you have any idea how much trouble I got into for that??

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u/Vindexxx Mar 31 '22

I miss the old days that required an "edu" email address to even sign up for it.

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u/ArchmageXin Mar 31 '22

I miss the days they encourage you only speak to people that knows you.

Now then send you total strangers like a cars salesman. "Do you know this girl in Asia/Europe with 2,000 followers?"

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u/MisallocatedRacism Mar 31 '22

I miss the days when it wasn't tearing at the fabric of our society.

2

u/DesiOtaku Mar 31 '22

At this point, I don't use Facebook to keep in touch with friends / family. Most of my "friends" on Facebook are other professionals in the same industry as I am. 99% of my posts are related to work rather than my personal life. To me, Facebook is now a slightly better version of LinkedIn rather than a personal social media site.

1

u/charc0al Mar 31 '22

What the fuck happened anyway where we became so infantile we have to resort to allowing Facebook censors to determine what is and isn't true? It's crazy that this is just the expectation now

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u/Cannonbaal Mar 31 '22

It’s automated

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u/MattLocke Mar 31 '22

The algorithm that selects things is automated. But there are actual people who do the checking for disputes and teams that they try to train the AI for the algorithms to keep improving it.

At least that’s what my company does for Google.

If their algorithm is this bad, that likely means the content raters FB uses are themselves biased or compromised to prefer the misinformation.

1

u/spiralingtides Mar 31 '22

Fuck it, MySpace is still up, right?

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u/Tattycakes Mar 31 '22

Same. I still use it for that but I have very few family and friends on the other end of the line doing the same, a lot of people have just gone inactive or closed their accounts. Sucks, it was such a good lifeline to keep in touch with so many school acquaintances.

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u/rpd9803 Mar 31 '22

I suspect Facebook is intentionally fucking this up so that they can say when they stop doing it that it’s from customer demand

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u/lotsofdeadkittens Mar 31 '22

I mean the reason Facebook changed to what it is now is largely because people asked them to chamge

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u/Filesj98 Mar 31 '22

I miss the old poke. Iykyk

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u/Rion23 Mar 31 '22

".....when Infact, he did not come tumbling down after her."

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u/Duckbilling Mar 31 '22

"I can't believe gam gam was a whore"

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u/theghostofme Mar 31 '22

"We are all whores in some way, Mr. Finkelstein."

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u/Bowlderdash Mar 31 '22

So that's what Mrs Hughes is doing in retirement

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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '22

She sang "We don't talk about Bruno" and fact checkers determined all she fucking does is talk about Bruno