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.
You know what this looks like to an averagely sceptical reader? It looks like certain people, mostly on the left, think that "fake news" was the reason people voted Trump instead of Clinton. It's true that Hillary lost due to fake news, but it wasn't fake news from Trump supporters. It was fake news from her own supporters. Headlines from publications like Huffington saying that she had a 98% chance of winning resulted in many liberals staying home. Trump didn't do that much better than Romney last time.
All I'm seeing is an appeal to censor political opponents.
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.