Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/02/25/he-has-learned-nothing-zu.html
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This is just slightly more coherent than a Trump tweet. That’s seriously troubling.
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I’m sure the Russian troll factory will be happy to volunteer its staff as crowdsourcerers.
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Zuckerberg isn’t interested in learning any lessons in this regard. As with content moderation, he’s only interested in cutting costs, cutting corners, and in not losing MAUs by offending the delicate sensibilities of various Know-Nothings, fascists, and other creeps and denialists who hate facts.
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Because thousands of uneducated, random nincompoops are just as qualified as a handful of well-educated and vetted experts, right? 
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examples of why you don’t allow crowdsourcing in the modern internet
although this one was pretty good
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Zuckerberg hasn’t figured out that “wisdom of the crowd” only applies to things like guessing the number of gumballs in a jar, and not establishing whether or not the Earth is round.
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I have largely given up trying to correct any of my Facebook contacts when they post something clearly fake, primarily because if I link to a Snopes article, I always get the same reply: “You know it’s been proven that Snopes isn’t reliable don’t you?” Most people, right and left, conservative and progressive, or whatever division you want to include, are only going to believe “news” that fits the narrative they already believe.
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This is especially worrying after the article on content moderators, particularly the bit about their being radicalized by what they’re exposed to at work. But really this is just fundamentally problematic - to the point where he’s essentially describing the process by which fake stories get propagated through Facebook now: a bunch of people who don’t know anything about the subject arbitrarily deciding what’s true.
Wikipedia needs dedicated editors to keep it from being filled with nonsense, and this would be even worse as Facebook self-selects for absolutely the wrong people to be doing this as well.
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Everything with FB is PR. In this case, talking about it substitutes for doing s/t about it. As always, FB is insincere about dealing with critical issues that affect users negatively.
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If history has taught us anything it’s that trolls have a lot more time on their hands than regular people.
That said, community moderation isn’t a totally outrageous model. Major discussion sites like Reddit, Slashdot, Arstechnica, etc… have all employed it to varying levels of success. But, and this is a big but, it tends to fail with political and religious discussion. Anywhere there is a lot of passion you have people willing to put in lots and lots of hours to make their viewpoint prominent. You end up needing meta-moderators for the moderators, but then they start abusing the system and it’s just a mess.
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Crowd sourcing truth crashes economies and causes crusades.
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He hasn’t learned. He’ll never learn. Facebook won’t get better because it’s not lead by anyone with an ounce of compassion for its users or the people who work for it.
Exhibit B:
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I know it probably won’t help for the reasons you have already mentioned, but Media Bias/Fact Check is also useful for pointing out bad sources.
It isn’t perfect (centrist is not the same as unbiased), but it is useful for pointing out sources that lie a lot.
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Aside: the people behind Z in that photo look like images generated from The Is Not A Real Person… more uncanny valley hijinks.
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Mark Zuckerberg is one of the vanishingly few people for whom the Internet Dream – that a lone nerd in his bedroom can magic a business from nothing by having the customers do 100% of the work – has actually come true. That makes him literally the last person on Earth to ask about this. Of course he believes the magical-thinking hype about crowdsourcing.
It’s everyone else who’s in a position to see, by now, how misguided it is. Even wisdom-of-crowds poster child Wikipedia doesn’t really hold up as an example in hindsight. The main problem with the theory is that it only works where there is already a consensus (e.g. because it’s the 1990s, and we still have the consensus handed down by the old-media establishment). If you try to crowdsource the consensus itself, not only does that not work, it corrodes our perception of reality.
I still think the internet is a good thing in many ways. But I now think some aspects of its development (like Facebook) have been huge mistakes, and we will be in trouble if we don’t reckon with that, and Mark Zuckerberg is not going to be a leader on this.
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