Slashdot Mirror
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.
What strikes me is that Facebook is asking the very people that believe the fake news to point out it's fake news.
Doesn't seem very prone to accuracy to me.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Uh oh.... ...and 1984 was supposed to be a work of ficiton.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
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 :)
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.
It'll work just like all online vote systems work, including the slashdot scoring right here. People will down-vote not because they think the story is false or misleading, but because they don't like what it says. Or because they don't like someone it features. Or because they disagree with an opinion given.
And the reverse for things they like what is said, or they'd like to think was true.
Unless you have the time to do your own research on every news story, the best source of news is a source that you trust to be true and accurate. A source that depends on its reputation and cannot afford to lose its readers' trust. Anonymous voting systems involve neither trust or reputation.
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.