Thursday, April 23, 2020

Facebook bans pseudoscience from advertisement

Facebook removed pseudoscience as a category for advertizement.

Reuters: Facebook gets rid of 'pseudoscience' ad-targeting category

This solution was a reaction to recent situation that many incorrect information about prevention from COVID-19 emerged as the WHO declared "infordemic." Similar to events occurred previously, we are often confused among massive information in a life-threatening situation. Meanwhile, not a few evil people are willing to trick citizens with introducing wrong, or even harmful solutions.

In this sense, Facebook's decision is rational and admirable. But, I am doubtful that it will contribute to get rid of incorrect information from the internet. Most providers of pseudoscience are not aware of the fact that they do not adhere to the principle of science. Objective judgment of the validity for each information is necessary to clean up the internet. Of course, however, it is extremely difficult to distinguish true things from others.

Google and other companies are eager to check the factfulness of each website. Some AI algorithms have been developed to judge them automatically. But their sensitivity and specificity are not satisfactory.

For a while, or decades, we have to be keen to develop our eye to find the truth on our own.

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