Facebook is rating users based on their 'trustworthiness'

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Facebook is rating users based on their 'trustworthiness'

Facebook hasn't been shy about rating the trustworthiness of news outlets, but it's now applying that thinking to users as well. The company's Tessa Lyons has revealed to the Washington Post that it's starting to assign users reputation scores on a zero-to-one scale. The system is meant to...
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The company’s Tessa Lyons has revealed to the Washington Post that it’s starting to assign users reputation scores on a zero-to-one scale. The system is meant to help Facebook’s fight against fake news by flagging people who routinely make false claims against news outlets, whether it’s due to an ideological disagreement or a personal grudge. This isn’t the only way Facebook gauges credibility, according to Lyons – it’s just one of thousands of behavior markers Facebook is using.

The problem: much of how this works is a mystery. Facebook wouldn’t say exactly how it calculates scores, who gets these scores and how other factors contributed to a person’s trustworthiness. Lyons declined to go in-depth on these factors, arguing that they might tip off “bad actors” who could use this knowledge to game the system. There’s certainly a degree of truth to that, but it could still leave users wondering whether or not Facebook’s reputation scoring is influencing both their own posts and what they see from others.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/tech...ero-one/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.9a0fd7455a2c

Facebook developed its reputation assessments as part of its effort against fake news, Tessa Lyons, the product manager who is in charge of fighting misinformation, said in an interview. The company, like others in tech, has long relied on its users to report problematic content — but as Facebook has given people more options, some users began falsely reporting items as untrue, a new twist on information warfare for which it had to account.

It’s “not uncommon for people to tell us something is false simply because they disagree with the premise of a story or they’re intentionally trying to target a particular publisher,” Lyons said.

Users’ trustworthiness score between zero and 1 isn’t meant to be an absolute indicator of a person’s credibility, Lyons said, nor is there is a single unified reputation score that users are assigned. Rather, the score is one measurement among thousands of new behavioral clues that Facebook now takes into account as it seeks to understand risk. Facebook is also monitoring which users have a propensity to flag content published by others as problematic and which publishers are considered trustworthy by users.
 
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The system is meant to help Facebook’s fight against fake news by flagging people who routinely make false claims against news outlets . . .
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Now if Facebook would just do that when the news outlets themselves make false claims too!
 
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Isnt what they are fighting claims against actual news and not fighting against fake news?

In essence, they are fighting bogus users and commenters. Makes no sense to me.
 
Dr_Meinheimer said:
Isnt what they are fighting claims against actual news and not fighting against fake news?
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I’m not quite sure what you mean by that. But with respect to traditional news broadcasting stations Facebook is going to be showing content from ABC, CNN, Fox, Univision, and a few other broadcasters.
 
But how does rating users amount to fighting fake news outlets?

They seem to want to counterprogram with outlets they seem reputable, which is their business, but I don’t read this as fighting against fake news per se.
 
I hope someday Facebook will be gone forever!
 
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ThinkingSapien . . .
Facebook is going to be showing content from ABC, CNN, Fox, Univision, and a few other broadcasters.
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I think you should be more transparent here and tell
Dr_Meinheimer, by “Fox” you mean liberal Shepard Smith.

Unless things have changed (I didn’t bother to re-look it up because I think you KNOW this already if I recall correctly) Smith is the Fox “conservative” token.

.
 
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Dr_Meinheimer said:
But how does rating users amount to fighting fake news outlets?
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Full details of how this isn’t used isn’t published. I can only speculate.

my speculation

Search engines give sites rankings based on some factors such how many sites link to site X, the rating of those sites that link to site X, and the ratings of sites that X links too. This (and other factors) affect where a site appears in search results.

Given that what shows up in the feed isn’t chronological but are instead posts selected by some algorithm such a ranking could have an effect on the frequency at which a post appears in the timelines of others.

Once again, let me qualify this is my speculation. I don’t know how the trustworthiness will factor in to user’s experiences on the site.
 
i love Facebook. its such an easy way to stay in touch with distant friends and family, and share photos etc.

but we must remember this forum, this host site works on trustworthiness.

thats why we have the basic, member and regular status., and the flags that the community use that remove posts etc.
Read the forum of discourse and you will see so much about the trust status of those chatting.
 
I don’t have a big family so I don’t use Facebook. I have 4 people who have asked me to friend them, but all I do is open it, look and close. I never post and get annoyed if I receive too many Facebook notifications.
 
i turn notifications off. the biggest use we have for Facebook atm is a diary for my critically ill sister. All friends and family are posting on a group. one day, hopefully she will see it and see how our journey was, alongside her journey of healing in hospital. thats a private group though.
 
I am sure Facebook can be used for good, but it almost seems to remind me of the cliques in high school which I also see here on CAF.
 
yep there is most definitely a strong clique on CAF, probably more then one. human nature I guess
 
my tribe is in meltdown tonight and will be attempting a blood letting in the morning and a new leader…
I really wish Betty Windsor could step in and make this stop, if its successful it will be the 6th pm in a very limited number of years.

egos and power!
 
night of the long knives tonight for the differing parties!
 
Roseeurekacross said:
human nature I guess
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If nothing else humans are tribal. If you get collections of large numbers of people they’ll form several groups.

I was thinking about this earlier today observing the various auto-groupings. This week as an exercise to break that up each person has been assigned another person with which they must have a conversation and learn some number of facts that they must share at a meeting later.

One of the auto-grouping lines is by introverts and extroverts though. The introverts have many topics that they enjoy talking about. But they dont tend to like talking about themselves readily. I doubt trying to mix up the groups will have any radical effects on the groupings.
 
I mostly use Fakebook to follow a couple of prayer groups and a lot of animal pages, and post pictures back and forth to my friends.

I really couldn’t care less if Fakebook thinks I am “trustworthy” or not when I’m busy hitting “like” on a picture of my buddy’s cat wearing a baboushka. I’m not selling anything, and anybody who posts about politics or news in a non-jokey way more than 2 times a week gets unfollowed by me ASAP.
 
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Peoples Republic of China does this.

Facebook is merely adopting that system.
 
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