Meta Plans To Test and Tinker With X's Community Notes Algorithm (arstechnica.com) 26
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Meta plans to test out X's algorithm for Community Notes to crowdsource fact-checks that will appear across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. In a blog, Meta said the testing in the U.S. would begin March 18, with about 200,000 potential contributors already signed up. Anyone over 18 with a Meta account more than six months old can also join a waitlist of users who will "gradually" and "randomly" be admitted to write and rate cross-platform notes during initial beta testing.
Meta claimed that borrowing X's approach would result in "less biased" fact-checking than relying on experts alone. But the social media company will delay publicly posting any notes until it's confident that the system is working. For users of Meta platforms, notes could help flag misleading content overlooked by prior fact-checking efforts. However, Meta confirmed that users will not be allowed to add notes correcting misleading advertisements, which means notes won't help reduce scam ads that The Guardian reported last August have been spreading on Facebook for years. Meta confirmed that the company plans to tweak X's algorithm over time to develop its own version of community notes, which "may explore different or adjusted algorithms to support how Community Notes are ranked and rated."
Meta claimed that borrowing X's approach would result in "less biased" fact-checking than relying on experts alone. But the social media company will delay publicly posting any notes until it's confident that the system is working. For users of Meta platforms, notes could help flag misleading content overlooked by prior fact-checking efforts. However, Meta confirmed that users will not be allowed to add notes correcting misleading advertisements, which means notes won't help reduce scam ads that The Guardian reported last August have been spreading on Facebook for years. Meta confirmed that the company plans to tweak X's algorithm over time to develop its own version of community notes, which "may explore different or adjusted algorithms to support how Community Notes are ranked and rated."
Seems to be working for X (Score:1)
https://x.com/IfindRetards/sta... [x.com]
I am a Community Noter on X and a Slashdot Mod (Score:3)
Both X and Slashdot's approach to moderation have their pros and cons. On balance, I'd say that X's approach does a better job of suppressing misleading/fraudulent posts, and Slashdot's approach does a better job surfacing higher quality posts.
For a really active site like X where there are huge incentives to try and "shape" opinion, I think their focus on suppressing misleading information is spot on. The difference between "misleading" information vs. the dirty triad ("misinformation, mal-information and disinformation") is whether the intent of the post is to mislead readers -- "information deception", really -- or if the information is just merely wrong. This is achieved mainly by letting posts go without notes by default. To gain a community note, more than one rater has to agree that a note is needed to clarify the information. And, those raters have to come from more than one family of opinion. Further, a note cannot be attached simply because the author expresses an opinion that the raters disagree with. The post has to have a deceptive fact, such as attaching a picture of one event while describing another, or trying to impersonate another accounts, etc.
For a place like Slashdot, the moderation system does surface the better posts, I think, and that is very useful. It also does a good job of relegating truly trash comments to the bottom of the heap. Unfortunately, the mod system is routinely -- and I mean EVERY FREAKING TIME -- broken and used to suppress unpopular opinions regardless of quality. What would fix this is to have mods of mod ratings, and if someone scores consistently low, take them out of rotation.
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the mod system is routinely ... broken and used to suppress unpopular opinions regardless of quality.
Some people like to down mod unpopular and/or inconvenient *truth* too ...
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Slashdot does have meta-moderation, but it seems like moderation by mood affiliation is quite popular here, so meta-moderation doesn't serve the intended purpose. It's really frustrating.
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As I understand the theory, it reduces the frequency/likelihood that "bad" moderators get mod points, and increases the rate for "good" moderators -- but because of that, you won't ever see a direct effect.
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Maybe if it was harder to down-vote a post than to up-vote it that would help. It's too easy now to just get a bunch of like-minded mods to sweep through all top-level comments and mod them Troll, instantly sending them -- and all their associated threads -- past the visibility level of most readers.
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The solution is web of trust moderation. You let everyone moderate, and you let people rank other moderators to affect their weights, or some other thing which works similarly. There's lots of variation in how this could be managed, but transparency (you have to be able to see how others modded) and weighting of moderation based on your choices are the important parts.
Nobody does this, AFAICT, but it's not particularly difficult. I worked for a web company (design and management) called Media X where we dev
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I love this idea. Just in general I think the answer to all of these "moderation" concerns is to let the users decide for themselves. Give the user the tools needed to curate the content, not some clericy.
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grow up. no ones opinion matters
Yeah, but the person who said that was an anonymous coward, whose opinion matters even less than average. They don't believe in what they're saying enough to stand behind it with even a throwaway email address.
Re: I am a Community Noter on X and a Slashdot Mod (Score:2)
Your use of the hard R when it's not even applicable is pathetic.
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I haven't had mod points since Obama was in office. Wonder if an admin has meddled with it?
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The Twitter Community Notes system is broken. Because so many people left the platform, the remaining ones often act in bad faith, and then support each other so that the system thinks their notes are valid. And if any note annoys Musk, he deletes it.
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I have seen very few "bad" community notes on X. Because the default is to not have notes, I have seen many more instances where a note might be useful but hasn't been added yet, than an incorrect or unneeded note. I have seen a very large number of notes that were written but unpublished. In fact, this is the vast majority of notes. My explanation for this is because a significant number of note submissions are trying to "correct" a post instead of trying to prevent them from being misleading. As a result,
Zuck is a cuck (Score:3)
even if he hasn't had any gender-affirming surgery, unlike Elon
Community notes fails (Score:2)
There is a short window in which to put the community note, if you add it late (because you usually see the offending post late, because the posting idiot's own followers usually see it first and then it rapidly spreads without fact check). By the time you have a fact check or context written out with proper sources, most community note voters have already seen the post and therefore your note will not get enough eyeballs. I've noticed this effect myself. Whenever I put a community note early it gets shown
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That's an interesting observation, I'll keep an eye open for this. As I noted above, I think the reason there's such a large number of "unpublished" notes is because the raters aren't sticking to the goal, which is to suppress misleading information, not "incorrect" information.
Why can't advertisers figure out I'm vegetarian? (Score:2)
Do they make enough money from murder to laugh off mistargeted ads?
Regression (Score:4, Insightful)
I thought we were done with Meta pretending they give a flying fuck about fact checking, but here we go again. Good Lord, Zuck. Own the evil. Why are you hanging on to that last shred of pretend decency? Nobody buys it.
Dumb Idea: Apply Nazi/Confederate/Bigot Morality (Score:2)