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Facebook Begins Asking Users To Rate Articles' Use of 'Misleading Language' (techcrunch.com)
Facebook is finally cracking down on the fake news stories that run rampant on its site and many other social media sites across the web. The company is rolling out a new feature in the form of a survey that asks users to rate articles' use of "misleading language." The feedback received will likely help Facebook train its algorithms to better detect misleading headlines. TechCrunch reports: The "Facebook Survey," noticed by Chris Krewson of Philadelphia's Billy Penn, accompanied (for him) a Philadelphia Inquirer article about the firing of a well-known nut vendor for publicly espousing white nationalist views. "To what extent do you think that this link's title uses misleading language?" asks the "survey," which appears directly below the article. Response choices range from "Not at all" to "Completely," though users can also choose to dismiss it or just scroll past. Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch that this is an official effort, though it did not answer several probing questions about how it works, how the data is used and retained, and so on. The company uses surveys somewhat like this to test the general quality of the news feed, and it has used other metrics to attempt to define rules for finding clickbait and fake stories. This appears to be the first direct coupling of those two practices: old parts doing a new job.
How many days we can go without a Facebook story.
I'm sure this will work perfectly, and everybody will respond honestly and accurately based on whether the story is factual, rather than whether or not it follows the correct political opinion.
If only FB could figure out how to charge users for it.
Slashdot routinely has awful headlines such as the story about only one majot tech company saying they wouldn't partake in Trump's Muslim registry. In reality, most of the companies just didn't comment, but the headline implied that most tech companies would go along with the plan. I've seen a fair amount of misleading journalism from Slashdot lately, and it seems like that blue checkmark should be revoked again.
And... they're off!
Hillary campaign bus involved in deadly crash.
And of course, CNN falsly admits it aired pornography for 30 minutes on thanksgiving.
Synopsis of previous link:
1) A Twitter user in the Boston area reported that CNN was airing hardcore pornography for 30 minutes through local provider RCN.
2) Picked up by The Independent, a leading left-of-center newspaper based in the United Kingdom.
3) Subsequently many other media outlets including Variety magazine, the U.K. Daily Mail, the New York Post, Esquire magazine and Mashable, &c.
4) Eventually, CNN actually confirmed that it did air “inappropriate content” and was seeking an “explanation” from RCN.
Of course, nothing of the sort happened.
Mainstream media has a bit of a credibility problem, yah?
???
I enjoy this trend of assuming that crowdsourcing will solve it, because people know what "misleading language" is. I don't think it can actually solve it, but the optimism is interesting. Whatever happened to assuming the universe would build a better idiot, and the user is always wrong?
Times seem to have changed.
This forum Sig is licensed under the LGPL.
Ah yes, I see -for now they'll try to correct only "misleading language", not informative features or flamebaits etc. ;-) :-D
They still have, let's say politely, a large growth potential
CowboyNeal should have patented metamod
Herve S.
The following Party-approved Fake News stories need not be flagged — indeed, tagging them as anything other than deeply concerning may cause your account to be suspended:
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
... independent ones, and independent journalists.
So this was a headline neglecting to mention her white nationalism. If Facebook asks a black person whether the headline is misleading, they're generally going to get a very different answer from a white person. Also, does Facebook actually know if it's asking a black person?
Here's the Philly article:
http://www.philly.com/philly/b...
Here's the version from bleeding heart liberal progressive magazine, Sports Illustrated:
http://www.si.com/mlb/2016/12/...
It's notable that Google has hired/funded Full Fact, a facts-only organisation in the UK I can personally vouch for.
http://www.wired.co.uk/article...
Uh oh.... ...and 1984 was supposed to be a work of ficiton.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
... alt-right and Trump Trolls out in force to mess up the training of Facebook's fake news detection AI.
This is Mark Zuckerberg in the glasses.
I am sick and tired of the misleading GARBAGE on that site. Misleading? GO AHEAD AND MOD ME DOWN, i-d-i-o-t.
Most posts get published/read inside a likeminded network of contacts. These are not very likely to judge an article objectively, and only very few people from outside of the network, with a different point of view, will get an opportunity to present their opinion (or will care to do so). On the other hand, this may be a good way to quickly judge the crazyness of a community, to discover its particular bias and use that to feed into the community more attractive fake news which will get clicks. Hooray, more $$$ for Macedonia :)
I am wondering if one could make a machine learning algorithm that predicts, given a news story text, whether it is likely fake.
Train it with news from two months ago, with the current information, fact-checking and investigation by journalists and organisations as you point out.
We could also keep track of what fraction of news stories a site publishes turn out to be fake, and force sites that claim to be journalistic to show that number.
Such quality control might decrease the number of stories published quickly, because sites don't want to get it wrong.
Facebook still seem to be bent on co-opting the labors of the unwashed masses for free. This has some major drawbacks:
* The Dunning-Kruger-effect (people thinking they are knowledgeable about something when they are actually the opposite).
* Grass-roots campaigns to get some particular POV propagated - because people have difficulty in separating their particular political or religious view from objective reality; for them that is the reality and "the right thing".
In short, FB get the quality that they pay (nothing) for.
My personal anecdote: I have been involved in the translation efforts of FB into one of the local languages in my country (way back when FB was still new and shiny and more useful to keep in touch than an annoying drain on productivity). To this day I still get the occasional notification that a translation has (FINALLY!!) been accepted. I don't really care, and I've switched the interface back to the standard English anyhow - the local language one is simply a joke.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
So Facebook's brilliant plan to solve "fake news articles" tricking idiots into believing things is to ask those same idiots who couldn't tell it was fake news to tell them that it was fake news? Yeah, that checks out. Go right ahead Facebook. I don't see any flaws in that logic, at all.
Obviously, they should learn from older forums on the internet and use moderation and meta moderation. The use of "Agree" and "Disagree" buttons along those that add or subtract karma points is also a good step, but of course, Facebook wanted everyone to just have a positive outlook on life, hence the Like button being the only one they had for years.
We should have this on /. too. "Use of misleading language" Is Something I encounter here a bit too often to my liking, even if not straight up fake news.
To all media goodthinkers:
We need the sheep to stop deviating from the orthodoxy. Repeat "fake news" until the citizens cry for non-conforming news to be censored.
Sincerely, the Inner Party.
Alternative Right.
Does this qualify as misleading?: Facebook Terms, Section 9.3 - "You understand that we may not always identify paid services and communications as such"
Everyone needs to mark this as "Completely"!
Remember the Snowden leaks and the legions of fake social media accounts controlled by national intelligence agencies on these networks? It will take them all of 5 minutes to plug-in to this new Facebook feature, in order to bomb/'downvote' any articles/sources they don't like.
They will under guise filter out ..
Seems to me a social site does not need to be censoring content from people. It would be like going into a bar and telling people you can't say certain things or you will be thrown out. Social sites are about expressing opinions, personal stories, and viewpoints. If something is offensive to you just ignore it, I think we need to stop becoming a nation of policing people for what they say. But we should also point out that a social site filled with opinions, viewpoints and agenda's has no business claiming its a good place for accurate and factual news.
None of that makes alternate media any better. There's nothing wrong with pointing out the problems media has. Indeed it is healthy and necessary as the only way we can hope to improve it is to point out the problems and demand that they be improved upon.
The issue is that is not what many of the people who call themselves skeptical of the media are doing. Rather they seem to be taking the view that MSM is bad so that means whatever alternate media site they read is good and accurate all the time. They'll be critical of CNN or the New York Times often to an unreasonable degree, but then accept without question or analysis things from Brietbart or Infowars.
That is completely silly, of course. The idea that because a site is not "mainstream" they must do a good job reporting is bunk. Being "alternate" is no guarantee of any sort of journalistic standards, or any process to try and combat bias. On the contrary, many explicitly have a viewpoint they are pushing, to try and capture a certain part of the market.
That really is why most people like them, and dislike more mainstream sites. It isn't that they are actually critically evaluating the news's failures, rather it is they disagree with what they are saying. So they find another site that says things they agree with, and they decide that means they must be telling the truth. They aren't actually doing any critical analysis, just trying to find places that say things they agree with.
It is like a person who is skeptical of a diagnosis from a doctor, but will unquestioningly accept the diagnosis of a homeopath.
IMHO, the problem isn't just fake news but a broader, and longer term problem of general dishonesty in society that's been going on for decades.
* Government dishonesty since at least Viet Nam and/or Nixon. Two examples where the government actively lied and/or stretched the truth, and there are many others. This has long been internalized by many people about the honesty of government.
* General misleading nature of advertisements. We're constantly bombarded with misleading messages about every day items and we've all had experience where the product doesn't align with its promises.
* Corporate dishonesty -- outright lying. Karen Silkwood, Thalidomide, Corvair, Pinto, corporations relentlessly covering up and lying about bad products, corporate misdeeds and so forth. And these are all very old examples just to demonstrate how it has been going on for decades.
* Employer dishonesty -- The relentless messaging from management about business goals and plans for employees. How often is it true or does it end up improving employee work lives? Almost never. Most people impulsively parse and disbelieve what management tells them because it's so often the opposite of what they're told.
* The near-legal practical status of scams and cons -- We're constantly assaulted by outright dishonest people. Spam email, "card services", "free cruises". Yes, it's illegal and few people believe it at face value but there's so little effort to stop it that it seems to be legitimized as a means of doing business.
* Ideological dishonesty -- across the political spectrum all ideological advocates both embrace untruths necessary to advance their cause and discount their critics when it seems patently obvious they're not being honest.
It's not just fake news -- belief in fake news is just a symptom of the relentless, never ending crisis of honesty in our culture. Lying and misleading is so ingrained in our culture that doubting is our first impulse. So why not buy into fake news and conspiracy? Lies and conspiracies have quite often been shown to be true, why should I have any faith that person/institution X is telling the truth and not lying to me and that the conspiracy is false?
Until the Internet, the news media was actually one of the last institutions to *mostly* tell the truth -- libel laws, the business nature of actually printing news, journalism as an actual profession with a sense of ethics and some mission to tell the truth -- mostly worked against fake news, which was (in the US anyway) generally marginalized into corners of celebrity gossip or supermarket tabloids. It just wasn't practical to create fake news when you needed a press run of a million copies on a regular basis and a distribution network.
The real problem with hate based politics is that otherwise intelligent people become so stupid that they assume, like you, and then soon truly believe that anything the opposition reads must be deliberately false and manipulative. The truth is that there isn't much difference between Fox News and CNN. The bias is in what they don't cover, and both end up being center-left by that metric.
ANYONE use FaceBook as a news-provider anyway???
Because they are always wrong, shocked, surprised, amazed, and just plain wrong.
The fake news was all in the mainstream media which failed to report on Hillary's crimes, colluded with her campaign team and kept on publishing fake polls. IT companies like Facebook and Google censored conservative news. Facebook routinely censor news in China. Facebook is part of the problem.
If you are getting your news from Facebook you have already lost the battle.
A dude holding a cell phone asking leading questions to someone at some protest isn't "news", it's usually a biased asshole looking for their 2 minutes. Some article about Obama getting impeached or Trump punching a Mexican posted by my dumb ass cousin isn't "news", it's an "article" they picked up off one of their dumb ass friends feeds and shared without reading it.
It's way easier once you realize that pretty much everything news-like on Facebook is at best horrendously biased, and at worst 100% contrived. A BS filter is pretty easy to set up to flag everything as crap.
The problem is political zealots posting unsolicited political crap that all their "friends" are forced to endure. Whether that crap is true or false or misleading is irrelevant. The goal should to to get people back to talking about their lives like people used to do when they got together in meatspace and before it was so easy to hide behind the keyboard.
What on earth makes them think people are going to read the articles before responding?
Why make just one common blacklist when we could have hundreds, maintained by groups of people. Some will have republican bias, some democrat, some Chinese, some will agree with programmers, or Turks and so on. Basically you could subscribe to a bunch of them and if the score is above a threshold, then remove the article from the feed. If you change your mind you can always subscribe to other blacklists.
...until they realize that public opinion does not correspond to their agenda.
All the sheep will happily report any story they don't like, burying lots of good stories to preserve their news bubble.
Are you kidding me? You want the SAME PEOPLE who get taken in by 'Fake News' to also POLICE it?
Fucking funniest thing I've read this year. Facebook is the Wal-Mart of the internet. Useless ass clowns in bad clothes buying useless crap.
LMFAO.
Pax Vobiscum
Part of the reason this "story" got play is that it contained a partial truth. CNN did actually inadvertently air a very short segment having mild nudity, or at least "ambiguous" nudity, not "30 minutes" as the fake story claimed.
A lot of dodgy news stories are like that: they contain enough truth to give it some legitimacy and to make it hard to outright refute. Disputes are nuanced, and nuanced doesn't sell and spread in the age of sound-bites.
Another common example was Hillary's alleged "illegal server". It had not been found illegal in the court of law, but some legal experts claim they can make the case it would be determined illegal if a full trial happened. (The State Dept. policy manual is not considered official Federal law by itself.)
But generally if you go by "innocent until proven guilty", then it's premature to call it "illegal". But being "possibly" illegal is enough to make it difficult to summarily say such phrasing is outright wrong.
Table-ized A.I.
Facebook users are flagging THIS as misleading, and you won't believe WHY!
what happens when a dumb jew marries a chink?
What does 'misleading' mean? That readers are driven to outrage and punishing the villain of the story: That's 'Fox News'. It's not fake because it contains biased opinions, convenient villains and informs the reader, he is the victim. It's fake because so many events reported in an article are improbable, just like a 'The Onion' parody article; and because the news attacks a celebrity's character and reputation, which his critics enjoy and want to believe.
Remember the crowd-sourced vigilantism around the Boston marathon bombing? The crowd blamed undercover police and anonymous law-abiding brown people for the terrorism. This cohort of strangers created problems by annoying police with fake suspects and news. Crowd-sourcing suffers the very problem it pretends to solve; a lack of people with experience in filtering the important or true evidence from the trivial or fake data.
Facebook has realized they need censors to check stories but don't want to employ people: Crowd-sourcing is free but results in both 'echo chamber' and 'herd immunity' outcomes. As twitter has proven, if there isn't a top-down enforcement of community principles, the outcome is an echo chamber for a vocal minority: At least Facebook has no problem goose-stepping over their subscribers' freedom; their willingness to ban subscribers may benefit the herd in this case.
I don't get how this will work. What's to stop all the nuts who believe he fake stuff from rating the stories "great"?