Facebook has a secret ‘trust’ rating for every user

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Every new revelation about Facebook makes it even worse. We are seeing an unprecedented erosion in our First Amendment rights, increasingly prohibiting the flow of ideas and free expression in the public square (social media). Run by left-wing self-possessed snowflakes, social media giants are indulging their worst autocratic impulses. And because they can, it is getting worse. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Having been one of the early targets of social media censorship on Facebook, YouTube et al, I have long advocated for anti-trust action against these bullying behemoths.

Facebook has launched many attacks against this site. It labeled my site as “spam” and removed every Geller Report post — thousands upon thousands of them, going back years – from Facebook. It also blocked any Facebook member from sharing links to the Geller Report. The ramping up of the shutting-down of sites like mine is neither random nor personal. The timing is telling. The left is gearing up for the 2018 midterm elections, and they mean to shut down whatever outlet or voice that helped elect President Trump, the greatest upset in left-wing history.

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We can’t let this happen.

“If you don’t really trust Facebook, the feeling might be mutual,” by Sam Keach, News.com.au, August 22, 2018 (thanks to Tom):

FACEBOOK is rating users based on how “trustworthy” it thinks they are.

Users receive a score on a scale from zero to one that determines if they have a good or bad reputation — but it’s completely hidden.

The rating system was revealed in a report by The Washington Post — and later confirmed by Facebook — which says it’s in place to “help identify malicious actors”.

Facebook tracks your behaviour across its site and uses that info to assign you a rating.

Tessa Lyons, who heads up Facebook’s fight against fake news, said: “One of the signals we use is how people interact with articles.

“For example, if someone previously gave us feedback that an article was false and the article was confirmed false by a fact checker, then we might weight that person’s future false news feedback more than someone who indiscriminately provides false news feedback on lots of articles, including ones that end up being rated as true.”

Earlier this year, Facebook admitted it was rolling out trust ratings for media outlets.

This involved ranking news websites based on the quality of the news they were reporting.

This rating would then be used to decide which posts should be promoted higher in users’ news feeds.

User ratings are employed in a similar way — helping Facebook make a judgment about the quality of their post reports.

According to Lyons, a user’s rating “isn’t meant to be an absolute indicator of a person’s credibility”.

Instead, it’s intended as a measurement of working out how risky a user’s actions may be.

A Facebook spokesperson told The Sun: “The idea that we have a centralised ‘reputation’ score for people that use Facebook is just plain wrong and the headline in the Washington Post is misleading.

“What we’re actually doing: We developed a process to protect against people indiscriminately flagging news as fake and attempting to game the system.

“The reason we do this is to make sure that our fight against misinformation is as effective as possible.”

Online commentators are already comparing the system to China’s creepy “social credit” system.

The Chinese Government analyses users’ social media habits and online shopping purchases, assigning citizens a score.

Jaywalking or skipping train fares can result in you getting a lower score.

This score is then used to determine whether people can take loans, and even travel on public transport.

Some citizens with very low ratings become “blacklisted”, making it impossible to book a plane flight, rent or buy a property or stay in a luxury hotel.

The system is currently being piloted, but will become mandatory in China by 2020.

Facebook’s own rating system is the latest drive in its bid to tackle fake news, a growing problem for the social network.

The site, which sees 2.23 billion users log on every single month, has become a hot-bed for falsified news coverage.

Earlier this year, billionaire Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg vowed to fight fake news.

“The world feels anxious and divided, and Facebook has a lot of work to do,” the 34-year-old Harvard dropout explained….

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Liatris Spicata
Liatris Spicata
5 years ago

if someone previously gave us feedback that an article was false and the article was confirmed false by a fact checker,

This is a system that lends itself well to Orwellian abuse. Who are these fact checkers? Impressionable 20-somethings with heads filled by various “studies majors” by gummint-funded universities who are clueless about history or the ideas of the Enlightenment, but who know all about feminist deconstruction theory? (that would be only a slight caricature of my guess of the prevailing mentaliy of such earnest Facebook employees- they are very likely people who don’t want to challenge their orthodoxy.).

Like, I suspect, Pamela, I am no fan of anti-trust, and I suspect there are better ways of addressing Facebook et al’s control over the public square. The regulated utility model (shudder)?

Ziggy46
Ziggy46
5 years ago

Excellent post. LS.

Suresh
Suresh
5 years ago

After facebook, twitter , even Google, youtube joins lslamofascist gang to support illegals and jihadis
suppress conservative free speech http://tinyurl.com/lgp28rs

saudi/qatar/OIC own part of twitter, Fox Network, fund CNN, MSNBC , buy out politicians , bureaucrats in education dept to push islam in schools/ colleges. Easiest way to brainwash and takeover country and shutdown free speech !

Ziggy46
Ziggy46
5 years ago
Reply to  Suresh

Agreed, Suresh, the above mentioned are Islamofascist denying free speech to any conservative base or those of any faith excepting Islam. Good post.

felix1999
felix1999
5 years ago

Wow – FB is sounding more and more like COMMUNIST CHINA!

What’s your citizen ‘trust score’? China moves to rate its 1.3 billion citizens
PRI’s The World
November 09, 2017 · 5:15 PM EST
By Amulya Shankar

Take George Orwell’s “1984.” Now sprinkle in that episode of “Black Mirror” where characters live in a world in which every aspect of their lives is dominated by ratings.

That’s one way to think about the Social Credit System, a plan that the Chinese government will make mandatory for all its citizens by 2020.

It’s like a credit score system, but instead of just financial information, this one will also pull together a person’s political leanings, purchase history and even their social interactions to calculate their “trust score.”

Chinese officials say it’s a way to influence their citizens’ behavior to benefit society and move their country forward, but others think it’s just the latest step in the country’s long history of state surveillance.

Rachel Botsman has written about China’s Social Credit System in her book “Who Can You Trust? How Technology Brought Us Together and Why It Might Drive Us Apart.”

The World spoke to her about what the plan could look like in 2020.

How a person’s rating could be calculated:
The Social Credit System — I guess we would probably call it, like, a “National Trust Score” — will look at different dimensions of a person’s life. So things that you might expect, like whether you pay your bills on time or your mortgage. But also your purchasing patterns, things that you say on social media and whether those things conforms with the government. Where it gets, I think, very 1984, is it will look at the patterns and the behaviors of your friends and your social connections as well.

The kind of behavior that could bring a person’s score down:

Well I think there’s behavior that you’d expect — if you make a fraudulent payment or something like that — but then there are things that are more subtle. For example, if you buy work shoes or [diapers], you could be seen as a responsible citizen and your score might go up. But if you’re buying lots of video games your score will maybe go down, because people would think that you’re lazy. If you happen to post something on Tiananmen Square, that’s likely to negatively impact your score. This goes beyond the way we think about traditional credit scores, and really gets into your character and behaviors in a way that is quite frightening.

The potential perks of having a high “trust score,” and the consequences
of a low “trust score”:
The benefits are really interesting, everything from being fast-tracked to visas, to getting discounts on hotels, or car rentals, or insurance policies. The part that worries me is in fact the penalties, because if your trust score goes below a certain level, it could impact everything from where your children go to school, to what jobs you can apply for, and the type of mortgage that you can get. Your transgressions, they will follow you forever — it is really a permanent record of your so-called trustworthiness. So your behavior could impact your children or your grandchildren for decades to come. There seems to be no limits, there seems to be no boundaries, as to how far this can go.

The Chinese government’s reasons for implementing the Social Credit Score in 2020:
The government’s justification is both economic and social. So the reason why they’re saying they need this is because just doing business in China can be hard. You know, when I interviewed people from China on this, they don’t necessarily see this as a bad thing, because many people in China do not have traditional credit scores, those sort of traditional gold standards of trust. And it’s also so culturally embedded in the way that they live. So they’ll say in their grandparents’ generation, [people] knew that the Communist Party had a file on them, but they had no idea what was in that file. This is actually the same system. Digitized, but it’s more transparent.

The big picture:

This particular chapter, it was one of the hardest pieces of the book to get right, because it’s really easy to take a Western lens. It’s really easy to point our finger at China without stopping and actually saying, “well how far is this culture of surveillance from the West?” It sounds like completely nightmarish territory that the West would never descend into, in terms of using these trust algorithms that are unfairly reductive about people. But then when you really look into the amount of data that companies are collecting, and how they’re using that data to get a complete picture of how we behave, where we are at any given time, what our political views are — we’re not that far off. It’s just the government doesn’t own that data. And this is another point you hear from Chinese people — that it isn’t so far off in the West, it’s just that you have no control, because it’s a black box system. There’s a part of me that accepts that this notion of privacy is dead. And this idea that we’re in control of the data that we post online and where that goes — I just think that’s an ignorant position to take.

You can read an excerpt from Rachel Botsman’s book here.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-credit-score-privacy-invasion

https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-11-09/whats-your-citizen-trust-score-china-moves-rate-its-13-billion-citizens

sodacrackers2
sodacrackers2
5 years ago
Reply to  felix1999

They keep track of you even if you quit. I found on my new phone a google email that I had deleted a few years ago. I deleted it from my phone, and all my contact names disappeared. I also kept getting messages that I had to update google play in order to view the internet on my Samsung phone. I refused to do it, and could still get on the Internet.

santashandler
santashandler
5 years ago

Secret dossier/rating system, eh? Only viewable to those in the know. Kind of like the FBI did forty, or fifty years ago….

sovereign_filipino_people
sovereign_filipino_people
5 years ago
Reply to  santashandler

Facebook is part of CIA!

BarleyEducated
BarleyEducated
5 years ago

Coming soon to a disqus near you. Be prepared. 🙁

sovereign_filipino_people
sovereign_filipino_people
5 years ago

Facebook is promoting human trafficking by Muslim pimps!

Raymond Hietapakka
Raymond Hietapakka
5 years ago

China is doing the same thing…public surveillance. New unregulated mode of interpersonal communication. Perfect. Hitler would be proud, and Orwell would say “I told ya so…”..

RalphB
RalphB
5 years ago

You have a right to free speech, you do not have a right to the platform provided by Facebook. Yes, they should be treated as a publisher if they exercise editorial control over users’ posts, and therefore should lose the protection of the DMCA which frees them of responsibility for defamatory and other legally actionable speech on their platform, but it’s still their platform.

Until the law changes to all-or-nothing, where the online host either takes responsibility for everything (the Closed Platform) or nothing (the Open Platform), your only option is to avoid social media sites that abuse your sensibilities.

Incidentally, the all-or nothing rule need NOT result in the choice between either bland edited online publications or or spam-and obscenity-loaded online free-for-alls. The answer is User-Choice User-Made Filtering.

User-Choice User-Made Filtering would disallow the owner of the Open Platform from deciding which posts would be seen by everyone else and which wouldn’t because a system of Filter Preferences would be established internet-wide through the voluntary value choices of users. It could be set up on any open platform by initiating the Open Platform on day 1 of the change with no editing (‘censorship’) of anything BUT with every user post accompanied by a set of evaluation option that the viewer of the post would be free to use or not. For example: 1. I am unwilling to see more post of this kind. 2. I am NOT willing to see more posts of this kind. Making either choice could offer the option to become more specific as what one would like to pass or fail one’s preferred filtering, which I need not spell out here.

Eventually, User-Choice User-Made Filtering would result in ready-made shorthand names for popular filtering regimes, such as “+AnyThought -Spam -Porn”, “LiberalNewspaperStyle”, “JohnnyT’sLibertarian” and “SmotherTheRight”.

But first the law on digital media must change to “All-Or-Nothing-Editing”.

Meanwhile, don’t support abusive social media.

RalphB
RalphB
5 years ago
Reply to  RalphB

Let me correct that too-hastily-written paragraph on User-Choice:

User-Choice User-Made Filtering would disallow the owner of the Open Platform from deciding which posts would be seen by everyone else and which wouldn’t because a system of Filter Preferences would be established internet-wide through the voluntary value choices of users. It could be set up on any Open Platform by initiating an Open Platform on day 1 of the change with no editing (so-called ‘censorship’) of anything, BUT with every user post accompanied by a set of evaluation options that the viewer of the post would be free to use or not. For example: 1. I am willing to see more posts of this kind. 2. I am NOT willing to see more posts of this kind. Making either choice could offer the option to become more specific as what one would like to pass or fail one’s preferred filtering, which I need not spell out here.

Jimmy Jones
Jimmy Jones
5 years ago

Despite over 1,200 abuse reports Facebook are still allowing 14 FAKE accounts to defame others and myself including posting my home address and personal details. Here are links to the FAKE accounts yet Facebook says fake accounts are not allowed. How can they let such obvious fake names like “Chimpy Chongs” ” De Master Yoda” and “Alan James yoda” be accepted as genuine names as per their policies? https://www.facebook.com/antifraudintl.net/

https://www.facebook.com/diaperfetishist/

https://www.facebook.com/Chandra-Sekhar-Sathyadas-838087863064908/

https://www.facebook.com/csoyl/

https://www.facebook.com/alanjamesyoda/

https://www.facebook.com/alanjamesyoda2/

https://www.facebook.com/Chimpy-Chongs-2043541412642153/

https://www.facebook.com/Chandra-sekhar-1852126058367143/

https://www.facebook.com/scstvm?fref=pb&hc_location=friends_tab

https://www.facebook.com/Western-Suburbs-Bingo-Center-286017948899096/?rc=p

https://www.facebook.com/Jimmy-Jones-1486444838167343/?ref=py_c

The three below are NSFW. They are mainly photos of an Asian woman
vomiting. This shows how sick Chandra is. Why is it necessary for
Facebook to allow such vile things?

https://www.facebook.com/Miyuki-463083100882173/

https://www.facebook.com/Meow-Ki-118301052442185/

https://www.facebook.com/My-Okhi-987334708132260/

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