Slashdot Mirror
Mark Zuckerberg Announces Facebook Will Fight Fake News -- Next To An Ad With Fake News (facebook.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
"We take misinformation seriously," Facebook's CEO announced in a late-night status update Friday. "Our goal is to connect people with the stories they find most meaningful, and we know people want accurate information. We've been working on this problem for a long time and we take this responsibility seriously. We've made significant progress, but there is more work to be done."
But you know what's funny? The ad to the right of Zuck's post is fake news. It has the headline "Hugh Hefner Says 'Goodbye' at 90" and a quote from his wife saying "I can't believe he is actually gone," even though Hugh Hefner isn't dead. And clicking through, it's just another lame ad for erectile dysfunction -- on a site that's been tricked up to look like Fox News.
I saw it too. (Here's my screenshot... And yes, it did link to an advertising site with a fake "Fox News" banner across the top.) Oh, the irony. "The CEO said that Facebook is working to develop stronger fake news detection, a warning system, easier reporting and technical ways to classify misinformation," reports CNN, adding "Zuckerberg did not say how quickly the measures would be in place." They also quote Zuckerberg as saying "Some of these ideas will work well, and some will not." But apparently it's pretty easy to get fake news onto Facebook. You just have to pay them.
But you know what's funny? The ad to the right of Zuck's post is fake news. It has the headline "Hugh Hefner Says 'Goodbye' at 90" and a quote from his wife saying "I can't believe he is actually gone," even though Hugh Hefner isn't dead. And clicking through, it's just another lame ad for erectile dysfunction -- on a site that's been tricked up to look like Fox News.
I saw it too. (Here's my screenshot... And yes, it did link to an advertising site with a fake "Fox News" banner across the top.) Oh, the irony. "The CEO said that Facebook is working to develop stronger fake news detection, a warning system, easier reporting and technical ways to classify misinformation," reports CNN, adding "Zuckerberg did not say how quickly the measures would be in place." They also quote Zuckerberg as saying "Some of these ideas will work well, and some will not." But apparently it's pretty easy to get fake news onto Facebook. You just have to pay them.
That yesterday's bullshit will remain tomorrow's bullshit
Would have been nice to post a screenshot since the ads change with every page load. As far as I can tell this is completely made up.
This is fake news. Or that was. Or will be.
Unless it's an advert - then it's real.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
But you know what's funny? The ad to the right of Zuck's post is fake news. It has the headline "Hugh Hefner Says 'Goodbye' at 90"
You wanna know what else is funny? Those ads are personalized. You're the only one seeing a Hugh Hefner-related ad, you perv.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I'll be glad when this 'social media' fad blows over finally and people go back to valuing privacy.
The biggest lies I see on news channels these days are lies of omission. It's not really what they are telling you that's important, it's what they aren't telling you.
...we educate people enough to know better than to go to an entertainment site for news, or to at least be smart enough to know the difference. Naaaa. That sounds like a lot of work. Never mind.
The Clinton propaganda machine wasn't happy about losing the election. There were a lot of dirty tricks they tried and still managed to fail. The mainstream news didn't cover all of her corruption and decided to ignore it. As a progressive I had to turn to the "alt right" news sources to inform myself on the truth of various matters. Now the democrats are being sore losers and want to eliminate the first amendment of the Constitution.
If you let the government censor one form of speech don't be surprised when they start coming after other forms of speech.
You and the guy above you are both drooling idiots. "Lefties" and "righties" are groups made up of many people with differing viewpoints. It is a fallacy much like "Scientists say..." or "History shows..." to group different perspectives together as one voice. The next time you are tempted, please just kill yourself.
Well that IS fake then.
Continuous and ongoing. With the big unanswered question: what is fake news? Before Zuck can screen it out, he needs to define it.
It's the lack of Internet.
I was curious about these 'fake news' sites and started reading a few. They loaded fast I looked at the source code and it looks like I could have written it by hand. These pages are optimized for people that lack access to broadband. FreeRepublic is a bare bones site. This is what a forum post looks like. I spent a few minutes trying to figure out if an ad blocker had taken out some obnoxious ad or something.
I know it may be difficult to understand for those in cities but we have shit internet out here. Even at 25/3 my wife complains about how slow some shopping sites load. Gone are the days of being able to surf the web on dialup.
Unfortunately that's what some people are stuck with. I moved 2 years ago and started attending the local town hall meetings, 'broadband meetings' and doing what ever I could to improve the internet in my rural part of the US. A lot of townships are on dialup, some have cable, some have DSL. In households earning less than $34k/year that have K-12 kids 50% have internet. I live in what I consider a fairly 'normal' area. I don't even want to guess what internet adoption looks like in more rural parts of the US. [And for those in ivory towers wondering what we mean when we say 'we feel left behind' this is part of it.]
These 'fake' news sites are likely the only 'news' sites that some of these people can access. And when they post material that they agree with it just amplifies the echo chamber. Huffington Post's front page weighed in at 7 MB. Even if there are people that might be on the fence and want to go out research other opinions they often can't. They flat out physically have no way to get other information.
If any hard core liberals really want to get back at Trump supporters run Fiber out to everywhere. It's easy to mock someone as ignorant when they have literally no way of learning any better.
That said, where the hell are the web page benchmarking tools? I've been using https://pageweight.imgix.com/ but I can't automate that. My interest is piqued and I really want to do a statistical difference between "liberal" and "conservative" (and "real" and "fake") news sites.
"We take misinformation seriously,"
We take bad PR seriously
"Our goal is to connect people with the stories they find most meaningful,
Out goal is to connect people with advertisers
we know people want accurate information.
Dumb fucks
We've been working on this problem for a long time and we take this responsibility seriously. We've made significant progress, but there is more work to be done."
We might start working on it if the media won't stop whining soon
still don't get it that those ads are personalized. on facebook - which is based on extracting personal information from it's members and selling this information to advertising partners.
and then posting this on slashdot, where you'd expext that people have at least a basic understanding of how the online-world around them works. sure, it might be a not very funny joke - but if this is genuine, there's a bridge built by donald trump, i'd like to sell to you.
Ive seen a number of traffic accident articles where the vehicle brand in the accident also appears in the ad. Like when a Jeep ran over a sunbather.
Zuckerberg is just angry that all that money he threw at the Hillary campaign was a failed investment and now Trump can easily retaliate with a reduction of the H1B crowd. When he says "no fake news" he means "no nes that puts my suppirted candidate in a bad light".
Vapid fake news? You mean like this entire article?
Most people LIKE their bubble. They don't want to hear the facts or the truth: they just want to hear what agrees with their World view.
And the other thing is that it seems like issue is just so politicized and polarized that it's nearly impossible to have a rational discussion with anyone - even with folks on the same side.
Slashdot is a perfect example - this is yet another echo chamber.
Am I the only one that doesn't even know that Facebook had news? I assume everything on FB is just Ads. It's every single damn "news" paper out there that seems to be doing fake news or lets face it 99% opinions and 1% reports. You can't even read news.google.com anymore (now I'm guessing it is probably safe to assume you couldn't before either without heavy customization). Sigh. I almost think Facebook is a fall guy from the real fake news places so they could pin everything on anyone but them.
Like righties can't accept the reality of Evolution, climate change or the U.S. not being a Christian nation.
Go ahead and move to the middle east. See how they treat you there and you'll thank your lucky stars Christians are the forgiving ones, unlike your family who probably disowned you and with good cause because you enjoy packing fudge.
"Fake" news AI is easy: if (democrat lie) print("real news\n"); else printf("fake news\n");. The simplest implementation of the "democrat lie" subroutine simply performs a lookup against a hash set provided by George Soros.
Now, fake news, that's a much harder problem.
Instead of trying to stop fake news, why not educate users that Facebook is just a bunch of garbage?
The issue of fake news on social media goes beyond the US presidential election as the same thing occurred in the recent Scottish independence Referendum and the British EU referendum, both negative campaigns nicknamed Project Fear and Project Fear Mk II. Does that mean that all fake news regardless of where it came from will be removed?
Just thinking about two of his most recent lies that take the cake. He claimed he saved a car factory in Kentucky that wasn't going anywhere (while not lifting a finger for one that is). He also claimed he was going to keep the Obamacare pre-existing provision while his running mate and Paul Ryan go around saying you'll only be protected if there's no gap in coverage (you know, exactly how it was before Obamacare).
There's nothing being omitted there. Just bold face lies. And it's not just him. Nobody calls the American right wing on their lies except an itty bitty left wing press (think Mother Jones) that nobody pays any attention to. Lies by Omission don't even register in the face of falsehood of this magnitude.
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are the pages small because rural voters lack high speed internet or because the message resonates with rural votes and so the message size is tailored for them?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
That's right, I am saying you chumps who willingly submit minute details
of your pathetic worthless lives so a greedy scumbag can milk you like
a cow for his personal enrichment deserve to be MILKED LIKE A COW
and then sheared like the sheep you are !
Considering that as much of the fake news came from the "real" news sites...I don't see him 'fighting" them...
Almost nothing ;)
Will $CURRENT_YEAR be the year of the Linux Desktop?
Well that IS fake then.
hashtag trademark law matters
At least they admit what they are doing wrong.
I like the freerepublic and craigslist site design. Both websites are nice barebones text. freerepublic looks like it could be run by not many servers on a small budget. Hell, it could probably be browsed with a text only website on a classic Pentium PC. Ironic that AOL bought the Huffington Post, and innovated on improved user tracking, for increased money per user.
Maybe the dailykos should switch to all text?
I strongly suspect the real value of fake news to political networks isn't propaganda, but using likes and comments as fodder for outfits like Cambridge Analytica.
This is just another liberal attempt to censor speech. Who are they to decide what is news and what isn't??? Are we living in China?
ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, PBS and the New York Times????
Those fake news sites spent an entire year telling me that (a) Trump would not enter the race, (b) he could never win the GOP nomination, then told me that (c)Trump was never in the lead in the polls and (d) was going to lose in a blow-out. They told me lots of women had been abused by him (even though those accusers never sued him or filed reports against him for many years as he was rich and famous and they scurried away after accusing him in the campaign). They keep screaming that Trump has a bromance with Putin, that Putin interfered with the election, that Bannon is a "white nationalist supremacist" while they never asked Hillary a single tough question. Now, these fake news sites are telling me Trump's transition team is in chaos and faltering in selecting people to serve in his administration (He's currently WAY ahead of the average for incoming administrations, including where Obama was at this point 8 years ago).
Yup, it's time to give those fake news sites the toss.
.. 2050 Suckerborg wins election ! LOL.
The reviews section on FaceBook is something they have control over and yet when you reach out to support to try to get the contact info of the legal department support says they can't give you that information. So when a user of the system (Steven Binko) posts a video with sound coming from a blackberry which was not only out of frame but is out of frame via editing cuts you can not actually DO anything about a person who's income stream comes from running a PR business dedicated to creating online reviews.
http://www.ronpaullibertyrepor...
Is it too difficult for facebook? When I see a post from a friend - I ignore it / or take it seriously based on what I know about my friend. Facebook trying to recommend all these fake news assuming I care about them - is the root cause of the fake news problem.
William Penn believed that the democratic framework he was proposing for Pennsylvania, instituted 105 years before the US Constitution, would only work if there was a literate and informed society. This is one of the reasons that the early Quakers emphasized education in the new colony. A century later Ben Franklin and others in the city of Philadelphia had the same concerns which led them to widen the educational opportunities beyond the just the wealthy. Other framers of the constitution were also concerned about what would happen if an uneducated, uninformed public dominated the electoral process (which didn't prevent many of them from using lies and slander to their own ends).
Now we have a society that has an apparent 99% literacy rate (I got that number from a website, so it must be accurate). Sadly, for the most part, Americans are not taught how to think about what they have read. We have a president-elect that spends his time on Twitter denouncing those who disagree with him (or with his VP-elect). There is doubt about such things as Climate Change in spite of overwhelming evidence. We may have a 99% literacy rate, but we have only an 11% critical thinking rate (I made that number up, but, if you doubt the figure, I'm sure I could come up with some fake data to support it). In many ways, Penn's worst fears have been realized.
We will never be about to stop fake news, misinformation, lies, slander, and propaganda. Beside the fact that attempts to silence free speech (even silly or dangerous free speech) is a perilous precedence, attacking the supply side of the problem will likely have negligible effect.
Focusing on the demand side by teaching our children how to think about what they read will not be easy, especially as we have to deal with so much literacy disparity in our country as it is, but it is the only effective solution. If we are unwilling or unable to do this, then it is best be prepared for the worst.
A fake news site designed to look like another fake news site?
Except that the definition of fake news has gotten exceptionally broad post-election.
The LA Times, for example, listed Red State, the Blaze, and Breitbart but didn't mention Electronic Intifada, Salon, or Addicting Info, which have the same level of credibility (or lack thereof). If you're going to make lists, or throw these sites into a category with the Onion, then it's important to be even-handed about it. Define the offenders by class.
It's not fake simply because the site has a bias you disagree with. Otherwise, it looks like censorship, which is clearly what's happening here.
Also, you'll remember that it wasn't so long ago that the Daily Show referred to itself as fake news, and that many of these same sites were hailed as the "future of media" and referred to as the "blog-o-sphere" just a couple of years ago.
Having an issue with clickbate ads is one thing. Attempting to shut down websites that that pose dissenting opinion pieces or shed light on points of view other than your own is yet another a fascist hate tactic from the side that smugly considers itself "the tolerant."
If the industry is willing to set aside a uniform code of conduct that could be understood and followed by everyone, I'm all for it. Ban, block, and ex-communicate anyone who violates the terms. Go for it.
Short of that, what we're seeing is a witch hunt, reminiscent of nazi germany or the soviet union. We might as well be burning books.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
And Fox News went to court to defend their right to disseminate as TRUTH data they knew was FALSE because, wait for it, the law doesn't say they can't.
And they WON.
Hellluva position for "news" organization to take.