zlacker

>>headal+(OP)
China had an extensive system to delete disinformation. Every IM, UGC website or app are required by law to provide a report button and ICPs are required to response to user complaints immediately. There's also national wide hotline 12377 or website 12377.gov.cn to submit all categories of information you want to disappear. Any bad content esp. those against-govn't ones contained pretty quickly, which means not only the existing ones, but also prevention of future uploads or posts would be blocked. And the original uploader would be backtraced by "cyberpolice", and jailed if found.

I imagine if any technical measures taken to combat disinformation, it would be more or less like what China did here.

>>est+x7
It could be done differently. The social networks already track engagement with posts and ads, and already use that to recommend new content (eg. engage with fluffy cat pictures, get more fluffy cat pictures in the feed).

The only thing they need to do is that if a post that went viral is debunked, they need to show a retraction to users that have engaged with the fake content.

Deleting the content means some people think that it's a conspiracy ("they don't want you to know"), whereas giving corrective information allows people to revisit their beliefs.

>>jfim+xe
> The only thing they need to do is that if a post that went viral is debunked, they need to show a retraction to users that have engaged with the fake content.

The difficulty is the latter part. How to make sure the user see the retraction? CTR is hard man.

And China already do that, on Weibo it's a promoted feature. During its course over the years, authorities and private companies are abusing the feature, they provide half-assed debunks without further explanation, or even debunk with blatant lies. Since the retraction is a small text and often read-only, there is no proper way to debunk the debunk. PR firms use this feature to spread even more propaganda and shutdown rival messages. For example company A says ingredient X is bad for your health, company B shut it down by pointing out a tiny non-relevant loophole in the grammar, then says the research by company A is a lie, please continue to buy our product.

What to do at this point? It's a vicious circle.

>>est+cf
Interesting, I wasn't aware of that already happening on Chinese social media. Thanks for the info.

I'm not sure that I agree with you that it's hard to make users see the retraction, but as you point out there's clearly ways to abuse a retraction system. It would also likely cause all of the metrics that social networks have spent years optimizing to go down.