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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.
They are threatening to censor half of their customers. I don't think this will end well for them.
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.
Like, "Hillary's gonna win and Trump has no chance," or do you mean like "Bernie lost fair and square"?
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.
Like the anti-Trump protesters in San Jose, Los Angeles, and San Diego, who were assaulting innocent people passing by Trump rallies?
Wait until a war gets started on a tweet that is a lie.
Like, "Assad and Russia are butchering civilians and we need to do something to protect them" kind of Tweets?
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.
I think somewhere along the line sociopolitical positions (which, IMHO, in the broad center are neither good nor bad, true nor false) began to get pushed using selectively chosen "facts" to make the advocated policy seem as if it, too, was factual in nature. It was a kind of rhetorical persuasion, almost like sales techniques -- "Everybody knows that that less housework makes a wife happy, and the Vacuum2000 really reduces housework. If you won't buy one, ask yourself why you want an unhappy wife."
Anyway, I think this began to highlight a conceptual difference between truth and facts. I would argue that nearly every thing that is *true* is made up of a constellation of related facts. Cherry-picking facts allows you to manufacture a truth, but when that truth diverges significantly from reality it causes a cognitive dissonance, and people generally tend to side with the truth most closely aligned with their perceived reality.
I think this has led us to the point where people ignore facts -- too often they're not used to try to accurately describe a perceived truth, but to create a truth.
I think globalism is probably a great example. Lots of people using facts to advocate for it as embodying the ideal outcome, yet for millions of people, despite the facts that seem to support it, see their life undermined by globalism -- jobs moved away, problems with immigrants, and so on. Do you believe the facts or the truth around you?
(And I'm not meaning to take a position on globalism. I'm sure the benefits of trade are great, but they're poorly distributed. Cultural diversity is nice, in a Disney Epcot way, but I think humans generally do poorly when they hold divergent views on many topics, and the results are usually ugly at best or grinding warfare at worst).
Rules are very simple.
I, Big Media, pay you, Big Internet, to flag stories from my competitors in small/indy media as "fake news". You happily oblige, and now your massive audience is automatically redirected via algorithms to my content, and most importantly ads. In effect, Facebook, etc in addition to hosting ads, is now selling wholesaling user eyeballs.
The fact that I, Big Media, may also be pushing agenda about PedoPizzas or Russian super-hackers on behalf of Big Business or Big Government is entirely secondary the the basic economics underlying this "partnership".
The mainstream media has had a terrible year. The dialed propaganda up to eleven and went full on hysterical in an effort to get Hillary Clinton elected, and regardless of your opinion on that candidacy, most of us at least recognize that the MSM should probably not have gone to such lengths as sacrificing its own reputation and credibility for Clinton, or Trump, or indeed anything. That's because most of us, on an abstract level, value the concept of an independent Fourth Estate, speaking truth to power and hopefully the rest of us as well. So we're naturally not too pleased to see traditional public institutions very publicly melting down into wide-eyed tin-foil wearers at the first mention of Russian mind controller, or that disgusting frog, or whatever other absurdest nonsense they've focused on today instead of, oh, public policy, or the deficit, or the economy, or well anything that we used to affectionately refer to as news.
So we turn away. We stop watching. We go somewhere else.
And they Panic.
I thought I had seen it all from the Media this year, really. I genuinely felt that after the election, they'd finally learn a lesson, dial it back, and get back to reporting. Or move in that direction. I couldn't have been more wrong. "Fake news". CNN and the NYT want to talk about "Fake News" now? Is this another Russian plot? Or a Trump fascist takeover? A gambit to get Hillary into the White House? No dear reader, no. This is simply far more base, and simple economics.
Before their (paying) audience implodes -- and it is imploding; the NYT didn't send a mass non-mea-culpa mea-cupla to its entire subscribership without seeing those numbers plummet into the red -- before the readers and viewers migrate on mass to RT, or Info-wars, or (god help us) PBS, Something Must Be Done. A clean up? Better reporting? More, how to put it dignity into the profession? No, too much effort. Just schmooze and/or bribe Google, Facebook, Amazon et al to Lock, Cauterize, Stabilize by any technological means necessary. And all with the blessing of a nervous government and its ever growing, ever more expensive public-private state surveillance partnerships.
This could be worrying of course. But based on past results, future performance is less likely to resemble Orwell' 1984 as it is Gilliam's Brazil, and of course bankruptcy and government bailout long before that. And there will be a Bailout, mark my words on that. Incompetent as they perform, scorned as they are, laughable as they have become, no modern Government yet dares to step into the Undiscovered Country of a Media-less public landscape. So they will bailout, they will refinance, they will shovel yet more millions from the public Exchequer into the pension funds and golden parachutes of their latest Palace Courtier, down on his luck. I mean it's either that, either that or..... use the Rulebook!.
Forbes has a pretty good article covering Politifact's issues related to their truthiness judging.
In 2008, Politifact rated as True Obama's claim that if you like your plan you can keep it. The Forbes article notes that the author of that truth-o-meter article didn't check with any health-care skeptics.
In 2009, Politifact changed their rating for the claim to 1/2 true.
In 2013, Politifact labeled it the "lie of the year."
Politifact's 2008 rating was "widely repeated by pro-Obama reporters and pundits, and had a meaningful impact on the outcome of the election."
So, was Politifact's wrong analysis of Obama's 2008 claims "fake news?"
Were they lying or just being too lazy.
When they judge Trump's claim that Obama was the founder of ISIS in the literal sense but don't rate Hillary's comment that Trump is a recruiting sergeant for ISIS at all, either literally or metaphorically, then yes, I'll claim that Politifact is lying or at least intentionally distorting the truth.
Facebook absolutely has the right to determine what gets posted on their site and people have the right to use their product or not. The government on the other hand has no business promoting censorship of anything, including fake news. Fake news isn't new and people have a personal responsibility to explore the "truthiness" of what they read, hear and see.
Fake news?
"Sniper fire in Bosnia"
"Vast Right wing conspiracy" (monica)
"I did not send or receive any classified emails"
But somehow, we're supposed to believe IT WAS THE RUSSIANS!!!!!!
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.