
Facebook removes misinformation related to Oregon wildfires - turtlegrids
https://mashable.com/article/oregon-wildfires-facebook-removes-misinformation/
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specialist
Asymmetrical warfare. Truth can never win. Fact checking is akin to boiling
the ocean.

Just require attribution and real names.

Then ban algorithmic newsfeeds, targeted advertising, and bots.

Sure, let the Freedom Speeches™ trolls keep their conspiracy theories and
hoaxes. Anything approaching omission will trigger the cancel culture keyboard
commandos. And who needs that heart ache?

But ffs stop promoting it. And if it's not signed with a real name, don't pass
it off as any thing more than it is.

PS- I'm open towards banning likes and retweets. I haven't dug into the data,
but I'm reasonably sure they're part of the dopamine addiction too. And if
these obvious, common sense, proven remedies are not enough, start adding
other frictions to the feedback loops.

~~~
Barrin92
I think another underrated solution may be geographically restricted posting.
Someone else was talking about massive amounts of trolls flooding local groups
that try to inform people about the fire, so why not have a feature where
communities are effectively GPS locked down to some radius.

Otherwise agreed with all the points.

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nkurz
It's worth noting that the "misinformation" cited by Facebook regards the
attribution of the fires to particular groups, and that they are not disputing
that some of the fires may have been intentional. They are not claiming that
all of the fires are natural, or that people have not been arrested for arson,
just that those arrested are not shown to be associated with the particular
groups that are being accused. This page has details on six individuals who
have in fact been arrested for setting recent West Coast fires:
[https://thatoregonlife.com/2020/09/signs-in-oregon-fire-
zone...](https://thatoregonlife.com/2020/09/signs-in-oregon-fire-zones-show-
looters-and-arsonists-will-not-be-tolerated/).

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ogre_codes
We are about 10 miles from the fire and about 5 miles from people who have
been evacuated.

Frustratingly, one of the best sources of information about the fires has been
community meetings and content posted on Facebook by the agencies involved.
Often those same community meetings and PSAs about the fire have been
bracketed by non-stop streams of people reposting this same bullshit about the
fires.

In general, I think posting siloed content is really bad policy by government
agencies, but in this case it's particularly bad. I don't see this as a
failure of the fire agencies—it's not their job to be a platform for
delivering content. The problem is our government lacks effective channels for
delivering this content outside of these silos.

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jasonlfunk
Why is Facebook's policy communications manager tweeting?

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tuesdayrain
>We are removing false claims that the wildfires in Oregon were started by
certain groups.

I don't get how Facebook can say with certainty this is misinformation? It's
information that hasn't been verified. There is an important difference.

~~~
phatfish
This trouble for Facebook and well anyone attempting to combat misinformation
is that the falsehood can be created in seconds. The clever ones are designed
to be hard to fully disprove, or at least seem that way.

Everyone else has to then scramble and spend hours, days or more gathering
evidence to prove lies are incorrect. It's a denial of truth attack that is
impossible to police fairly on a time scale that matters.

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souprock
Facebook removes lots of truthful stuff, so that says nothing about the
validity of it. It does tell us that Facebook employees dislike the
information.

~~~
rbecker
> Facebook removes lots of truthful stuff

Such as? Examples would be appreciated.

~~~
souprock
Anything pointing out that Kyle Rittenhouse acted in self-defense seems to get
banned.

All [https://JoeBiden.info/](https://JoeBiden.info/) links are banned. It's
100% truthful, with citations, and unmodified video that you can watch with
your own eyes.

~~~
scarface74
How do you go across state lines with a gun in the middle of protest and then
claim “Self defense”?

~~~
souprock
According to Kyle's lawyer, that never happened. The gun never crossed a state
line, not that it matters. The lawyer is a reputable source. See what happens
when information is suppressed? You didn't know that fact.

~~~
scarface74
> The lawyer is a reputable source.

Johnnie Cochran also said OJ wasn’t guilty.....

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panpanna
Don't remove posts.

Mark them as lies and don't let the writer modify or delete them.

Once people see they have been upvoting lies, some might reconsider next time.

~~~
Nuzzerino
More likely that they'll just become cynical and stop believing everything
altogether. Marking a post as a lie doesn't educate the user how, or give them
the tools they need to independently confirm the truth of a post.

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rdiddly
If anybody really wanted to know "who started the fires," that's easy: It was
you, driving that car of yours, running that air conditioner, heater, stove,
fridge, washer/dryer, buying those products, living your life. Not a mystery.
But nobody wants to know that. Consider each downvote a confirmation of that
last sentence.

~~~
samatman
If carbon dioxide brought the bark beetle to our shores, then forced the
federal and state agencies to not treat the resulting megatons of dried out
trees as the emergency they were, then ok.

But you're going to have to explain how that works, because I'm not seeing it.

Sure, climate change is a real and increasingly urgent problem. And you can
make a case that it made the situation worse; fine.

But the bark beetle was both necessary, and sufficient, to cause the crisis
we're seeing. I've seen estimates of 30% kill rates in Western forests over
the past five years.

~~~
rdiddly
Here is how it works: "Many species, such as the mountain pine beetle
(Dendroctonus ponderosae) attack and kill live trees. Most, however, live in
dead, weakened, or dying hosts."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bark_beetle#Ecology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bark_beetle#Ecology)

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drewcoo
Political extremists did not start the fires. But decades of the political
status quo in both dominant parties led to mismanagement that led to the
current situation. Are any of the "corrections" correcting that omission?

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knaq
It sounds like Facebook fell for misinformation, or they are willingly
involved in a political coverup.

Here we have a distraught witness:
[https://www.bitchute.com/video/tNgWGZBxPtGx/](https://www.bitchute.com/video/tNgWGZBxPtGx/)

~~~
amanaplanacanal
She didn’t witness anything, if that makes a difference. She is claiming her
husband witnessed something.

Also, even if her claim is true, there is no evidence that the people involved
had any affiliation with antifa or proud boys.

