Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Is Clamping Down On Fake News, Partners With Fact Checkers To Flag Stories (slate.com)
After weeks of criticism over its role in spreading fake news during and after the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, Facebook said today it is taking concrete steps to halt the sharing of hoaxes on its platform. From a report on Slate: The company announced on Thursday several new features designed to identify, flag, and slow the spread of false news stories on its platform, including a partnership with third-party fact-checkers such as Snopes and PolitiFact. It is also taking steps to prevent spammers and publishers from profiting from fake news. The new features are relatively cautious and somewhat experimental, which means they may not immediately have the intended effects. But they signal a new direction for a company that has been extremely reticent to take on any editorial oversight of the content posted on its platform. And they are likely to evolve over time as the company tests and refines them. First, it's trying to make it easier for users to report fake news stories. The drop-down menu at the top right of each post in your feed will now include an explicit option to report it as a "fake news story," after which you'll be prompted to choose among multiple options, which include notifying Facebook and messaging the person who shared it.
Just with different rules about what needs to be banned?
https://yro.slashdot.org/story...
Looking at the Alexa ranking [alexa.com] of Slashdot over the past couple of months shows that readership has dropped precipitously. It started to slide around March, levelled out at a low pace throughout the summer, and took a nosedive right around the election.
During those months, many long-term readers took the trouble to post messages complaining about the political nature of the posts, and many of those also said "that's it - I'm leaving!".
It was clear during those months that many of the articles were partisan - mostly in favour of Clinton, but there were some that were pro Trump as well. The forum became nothing more than an anchor point for digs against Trump or Clinton.
This article is another example of this: it's a forum for people to wail about how awful Trump will be, because they can see the future with perfect clarity.
It's clear from context and evidence that people simply don't like this partisan bullshit, and are leaving the site in droves to avoid it. Whichever side you happen to be on, when you trash talk or support Trump you're alienating fully half the readership.
I would *think* that the editors should have a fiducial responsibility to see slashdot succeed, and looking at the Alexa history I would *think* that whiplash would step in and enforce a leadership vision that better navigates the shoals of politics.
I guess not.
The NYT showed a 96% drop in quarterly profits [dailycaller.com] over the election season, very probably because of continuous partisan trash talking.
That's a huge drop in the profitability of a company, and should be a cloister bell for media in general: people simply don't like all this partisan bickering.
At the very least you're driving away half your readership.
Slashdot should focus on the technical and avoid emotionalism for the time being, at least until the election soreness has had a chance to calm down.
If Slashdot wants to succeed, that would seem to be the prudent move.
Snopes is run by two liberals.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
If Facebook labels some small time news site as "fake news" would there be a case to be made for defamation if the stories in question were actually factual? For example What about "facts" that are in dispute? Did the Russians hack the DNC or was it an internal leaker who handed the stuff to Wikileaks? One could write an article siting very reputable sources on both sides of that story so which side of that story would be "fake news"
There is nothing in this that says that they are getting rid of all fake news, just the fake news (and not so fake news) that Politifact and Snopes do not like.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Are these the same "fact checkers" who told us that Iraq had nuclear weapons?
Fake news or, in other words, a narrative not supported by the State.
In the USA a rather significant chunk of their users are pretty hard core Republican Party supporters. And a large number of these people live for false news. Fact checking means nothing to them. One of the ways the right has been able to get false news to spread is by rebuking fact checkers. For example, one person I know simply refuses to believe anything Snopes posts. Why?
1) Snopes got fooled on something that was a parody which it didn't understand and labeled a hoax. I don't remember exactly what it was. But it was a really bad miss on their part because it was pretty obvious to everybody not at Snopes that it wasn't serious. This made Snopes look untrustworthy or possibly dishonest themselves.
2) Certain right wing groups have labeled Snopes as an agent of the Democratic Party. Since they are debunking a lot more nonsense attacking Democrats than Republicans, those who don't look beyond the surface can be rather easily convinced that this is the case.
3) Some people have figured out that by saying that Snopes is lying that there's basically no other well known reputable source to fact check anything, so people don't bother to check stuff because they don't think they can trust anybody.
4) The right also has an excuse, used recently by one of Trump's cabinet nominees, of "I'm not an official news source, so it's not my job to fact check what I pass on."
I have come to the sad conclusion that in the USA at least we're living in a "post-fact, post-truth" world where it no longer matters if anything is truthful or accurate if enough people believe it. Too many people I know just don't care anymore about whether anything is accurate if it matches up with their political beliefs or attacks those they disagree with. This is going to have disastrous consequences for the world in general. Russia has been living in this kind of world for a very long time and China is well on its way to it too. China is whipping up nationalistic sentiments to support the Communist Party dictatorship that it won't be able to control. My biggest fear is that a war with China is going to start because some Chinese general took it on himself to start an attack based on some kind of lie he believed after years of being whipped into a frenzy that the USA is out to get China. You guys think it was bad when the whole Iraq War was started by the USA on lies about WMD? Wait until a war gets started on a tweet that is a lie. We're not that far off.
See, the Right (and the Middle, for that matter...) has grown up, for generations, knowing there are Other Serious Opinions Out There. They had no choice, the Leftist slant to the media guaranteed that they knew of, would hear, opinions different than their own. The Righties had their favorite Hollywood actors and musicians -- how could they not? -- and they inevitably were interested in what their opinions were on the news of the day. And with very few exceptions, they learned their celluloid idols thought about politics and the world very differently than they did. And for the most part, the Righties said, "well, okay, then."
But the Lefties have lived in a bubble. Their newsfeeds and pop stars and college professors all had the same slanted worldview. "Who could think otherwise?" they wondered, amused at the very notion. They breathed life into a homunculus, some Midwestern Hyuck-Hyuck'ing Cousin-Marrying Religious Zealot who lived in that central two-thirds of the nation that they had never visited and likely never would, and their pop culture machine turned that dorky strawman into a recurring punchline, a mustache-twirling villain, a sad refrain, a sinister scarecrow.
With the Trump victory, and the extension of their lives into online, "virtual" neighborhoods, the Lefties are slowly -- very slowly, maybe so slowly that some of their media enterprises will in fact go under -- realizing that not only are the Righties not as few in number as they thought, they are just as well educated (not necessarily "schooled," but educated) as they are, and most importantly, they are right there, next to them.
And once again, Facebook is a private organization, and has the right to remove any content they want to. Don't like it, go use some other social networking platform.
Of course, that does mean the fake news purveyors are likely to start losing the large audience they had relied on, but is that such a bad thing? There's always Breitbart and Stormfront!
On that note, a Twitter replacement called Gab.ai has sprung up that claims to enforce free speech.
It's currently in beta so signups are put on a waiting list, but I managed to get in pretty quick (the wait was less than a week). It's not as sophisticated as Twitter is *currently*, but I really like the free speech aspect of it.
Speech they don't tolerate are things that are patently illegal in the US, plus doxing: Illegal pornography, threats and terrorism, and private information.
If you're bothered by someone, you can set a personal filter to remove their posts from your feed. If you're bothered by certain words, you can set another filter to remove posts with those words.
Beyond that, they claim that they will make no restrictions on free speech.
In the 2 months since it started it's become reasonably popular. According to Alexa rankings, it's currently about the same as Slashdot (after 2 months!).
ATM gab seems to be under-represented by the left. People are mostly civil, and...
wonder of wonders... the humour channel is actually funny.
that our issues with factual discourse have little to do with the quality of the news and everything to do with the ability to synthesize information into emotional & cognitive context.
That is to say, it doesn't matter if you tell someone who is pro-war that their country is murdering children. This hypothetical individual is effectively immune from this fact through a combination of propaganda and cognitive biases. It doesn't matter that in all other circumstances this hypothetical individual screams, "Won't someone think about the children", you will not be able to break through to them. At least not directly.
What we are seeing in the US. What we have been experiencing for about 30 years now, is a confluence of certain philosophical positions coming together. In the last couple of days I had it pointed out to me something that should have been far more obvious. There are a lot of my fellow citizens that live by the Just World Hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis/. Combine this with our friend the Prosperity Gospel, and I think you can contextualize so much of the past year.
Given this, we cannot attack the problem directly. Because the problem isn't fake news. The problem is an inability to connect one's actions to the world at large. And I feel that this disconnection is due to a massive amount of wishful thinking. The wishful thought that everything will work itself out. The wishful thought that you get what you deserve. The wishful thought that your one vote doesn't make a difference.
To get around this, we need people to understand that the world doesn't just exist in their household, their neighborhood, or just their town. That we are acting and operating on a global level these days. The world is simultaneously larger and smaller than it has been ever before. It does matter if you choose to get a fuel-efficient three or four cylinder car vs the monstrous SUV because within your lifetime people will be displaced because of that choice. How fast that happens depends on what you choose. You are a part of that chain, whether or not you want to be. And it is up to you to stay current with how you impact things. Even in the smallest, out of the way place in the middle of no-where. This choice makes a difference. And each day, going forward has to be a learn-unlearn-relearn process.
1) any system allowing people to flag things as false news will be bias driven. "Oh, it says X is a liar, that's not true, so (flag)"!
2) Snopes? http://dailycaller.com/2016/06...
-Styopa
Snopes? Politifact? Facebook? .... REALLY? ..... these are all Democrat-aligned entities staffed primarily by Democrats/Socialists whose political contributions and editorials are all favorable to Democrats, so much so that about a year ago Facebook realized that they, as a corporation, were having trouble even communicating with conservatives. Even now, Google is trying to hire people who know some Republicans/Conserrvatives/Libertarians because they have few contacts with such people and need to figure out how to relate to them with Democrats out of power in DC starting in late January.
The people who were all cuddly with Team Hillary, and eagerly parroted all the fake news her campaign and supporters shoveled..... the people who spent the past year providing fake polls showing Trump could not win, and fake news about how "open" Hillary was while she never held a single actual press conference through an entire presidential cycle, and fake news about the greatness of the economy and employment (as Obama became the first US President in history to never manage to create a single quarter of growth of at least 3% and pushed the labor participation rate down to levels only matched by Jimmy Carter in the 1970s) .... THOSE HYPER-DISHONEST and HYPER-PARTISAN freaks are going to censor your news?????????
They are just doubling-down n their Democrat activism. They are going to become unabashed propagandists who will make the communications of the 3rd Reich look amateurish. Anything that is critical of Democrats or of these Democrat-aligned internet entities will be labelled "fake news" and their users will be encouraged to ignore any of this contrary communication. This is a continuation of the 8-year long Obama rants against Fox News and the left-wing meme that the only news outlet not kissing Obama's posterior was "Faux News" and is unprecedented in our history (previous presidents complained about their coverage, but they did not label particular news outlets as "fake" from the white house podium).
By "black supremacist" you mean an African-American who is concerned they are far more likely to be unarmed and yet still shot to death by a police officer than a white American.
I'd give him the benefit of the doubt and say he means the actual black supremacists, and not whatever strawman you're thinking of. Or are you under the impression that only white people are capable of being racists?
I think there are a great many conservatives who are not fact-free lunatics and morons, but the tribalism that is taking over politics in the Westerns world means that they, like their counterparts on the left who might hold some fiscally conservative views, have to sublimate that to retain their membership in the club.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
This is the worst kind if post-truth bullshit. There is no "personal truth", just because you don't like the facts doesn't mean you can simply pick some that better suit you.
Obviously no one is perfect, but Snopes and PolitiFact do a more than adequate job of basic fact checking. The kind of stuff that would have prevented some idiot going to a pizza restaurant with an automatic rifle. The kind of easily debunked bullshit that the far right lives for.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Whilst no fact-checking service is perfect. ... why is having them annotate what is 99.9% likely to be fake news worse than freely allowing bullshit to pervert democracy?