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...
They are threatening to censor half of their customers. I don't think this will end well for them.
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.
Ye gods, that's hysterical! Or absolutely terrifying, not sure which yet... We've gone completely down the rabbit hole..
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"
This is why we need a decentralized social networking system where no one controls your speech.
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.
This is bad news as these fact checkers have proven to be just as biased as any other news souce such sa MSNBC or Fox News. They are fake authorities to decide what is true and what is not. This will lead to ever more tighter group think in the left leaning segments of the society while the right leaning segments will get alienated even further by what they call "mainstream media" institutions. It only takes one false positive identification of "fake news" to discredit this as cencorship by any right leaning person. (And trust me, the bias is there, so the false positive is something that will annoy right leaning people, not left leaning.)
In short: Don't do it. Please. Instead try to work it so that people get exposed to other points of views.
Would those be the same fact checkers employed by places like Politifact, that have been repeatedly caught lying about what is fact?
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.
We, here at Facebook care deeply about it! ...when an election doesn't go our way...
We'd not be hearing about the problems of fake news from the media or any of these companies had they gotten their way...and that's a fact...
Lately you could say the same about Washington Post and NYT. And don't forget the ones that have been fake forever: USAToday, HuffPost, Salon, MSNBC, etc.
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
Finally maybe we will start to see the decline of Facebook.
I see no way how this could be abused.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
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).
I've been busy flagging the specious content-free claims on my feed, and it's working. I'm no longer seeing many CNN or Snopes links on my feed.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I've been around a while, voted in several elections and have been an avid consumer of news, current events and history since I was in grammar school.
If there is one thing I've noticed down through the years, it is that Conservatives(and especially alt-right/tea party types) really don't like fact checking.
They will use any number of rhetorical ploys, misdirection, hyperbole, etc to "blur" and obfuscate the facts.
In my experience I have noticed that as soon as the word "fact" gets brought up in a conversation, whether on or offline, conservatives start to squirm and almost universally have an instant gut reaction of disdain. They equate "facts" as something that those liberal elite scientist/academia types use to rationally take apart their ill conceived FB memes. This is strange to me, because I would assume that someone with a very passionate opinion about something would want things fact checked and corroborated.
Now this behavior is not universal with conservatives, as I know a guy who is a conservative, is very bright, and we are actually friends, though we disagree on politics. When we are around each other we calmly discuss our differences regarding politics, but it never gets heated or personal. He is all about facts and following an empirical method, etc;
Another Example:
I have a co-worker who has a degree in meteorology, and worked at a climate center at a major university. He is also a conservative Republican that would agree with most statements and opinions put out by Republicans, especially on social issues. One day at work we were discussing the weather as we always do, how it is warmer now than it was 10 or 20 years ago(the discussion was purely anecdotal, we weren't pulling up NOAA data). Someone then asked "what do you think about climate change? Is it real? Is it caused by people?" His answer didn't surprise me, because I know how smart this guy is. He said "climate change is completely backed up by the facts and the scientific evidence, and yes, it is very likely that the carbon put into the atmosphere is the cause". Then he went on to couch all that he had said in apolitical back-peddling sort of self-editing, so as not to offend those in earshot who are of the anti-fact mindset(which I found very humorous!)
Keep in mind this is just an example, but one that shows that not all conservatives are anti-fact, or anti-empirical-method or anti-corroboration.
Just most of them.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
After read the fact checking of Trump debate comments on various websites, all I can say is woah.
So, woah.
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
Wasted effort.
I recently stumbled on this article from 2014 that really nails the source of our recent issues and explains why even if all of our news perfectly matched the facts we'd still have the same disagreements. Just get past your reactions to the title and read the contents.
Humans are poor reasoners. We can talk ourselves into any position, often looking at the same facts as those with an opposite position and especially when identifying with a group that holds positions.
The only way past the bias is education directed toward how to think as opposed to what are the facts. That will never happen because all sides of the system thrive on this human vulnerability.
Nothing says "I'm incapable of critical thought" quite like having the fake news one impulsively forwarded labelled as shown in the accompanying story.
I'm pretty sure there's no stigma for that kind of shaming. Yet.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.
Great, using Snopes. I have caught Snopes in lies myself, having been at something that they declare to be a hoax, when it happened right in front of my eyes.
I doubt Facebook is going to lose much sleep over losing a few angry Nazis.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Worked for records. /sarc.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Facebook has no news. Just BS and trivia posted by members to keep themselves amused and acquire some sort of brownie points from their friends who keep themselves amused by posting BS and trivia.
Facebook needs to realize that they have no role in disseminating news. Their users are not reporters, not even "iReporters" or whatnot. They are just you and me (well, not ME, smart enough not to have Facebook...) giving our opinions and our filtered, inaccurate interpretation of whatever real new sources we may still pay attention to, along with made-up BS and links to made-up BS.
And the occasional accidental link to real news. I suppose for the benefit of those that refuse to pay any attention to real news any more, and prefer to have it filtered and summarized by their so-called friends (all thousands of them!)
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?
It's notable that the currently highest rated comments on here don't seem to like fact checking either. What has happened to the Slashdot moderator base?
Wait for the fun when the SJW hero teams get tasked with reporting blasphemy, cartoons that are a gateway to atheism, deformation of a monarchy or anything that is not part of a US university safe space.
Speech that counters a Communist party who have a funded western social media via investors and front companies?
A theocracy or Kingdom that as a part of a Western social media company wants their faith based or cult's teachings to be fully protected.
As part owners don't they get a say too? The role of the Communist party or countering blasphemy is of national impotence to them.
Will the SJW teams be happy to take down Tank Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and report terms surrounding Tiananmen Square https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., or any mention of 1989 every year?
Remove, ban and report cartoons that are profane, sacrilegious and report anyone who looked at them?
Images of humans? What about the way US university safe spaces issues are trending? Some authors and their books are not allowed to be mentioned due to religious or historical sensitivities?
Freedom supporting sites will be fun and attract users from around the world as they support freedom after speech.
Sites that allow SJW to ban news, art, culture, history, authors, books, movies, cartoons will become boring government and celebrity media release portals.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Yes, it's obvious you're not a mouth breathing idiot, as that would still require a functional hindbrain, and I don't think you have even that much neural capacity.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
When given a random opinion-based question, Snopes will almost without fail fall on the side of D-party policy preferences.
How will they know what is a fake news story and what is breaking news unless they do at least as much research as the author?
You use Facebook.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And yet flagging non-fictional snuff videos does nothing. They promptly reply it's not against Community Standard. AKA, there are No Standards. Except a female human nipple.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
Seemingly lost in the hyperbolic arguments above is that fake news websites phishing for clicks and ad revenue are a very real thing and if you haven't heard then you're just not paying attention... here's Fox News talking about it: http://video.foxnews.com/v/521... The original Slate article focuses heavily on the more controversial 3rd-party fact-checking so many arguing about, but this Wired article on Facebook's policy has a slightly different emphasis. https://www.wired.com/2016/12/... Most noteably Wired gives more details in how Facebook says they will check the source domains of articles to see if they are traceable to fake or spoofed websites and ultimately attempt to deincentivize fake news creators by hitting them in their ad revenue/pocketbooks. Facebook is trying to reduce the effect of fraudsters who are well documented by left and right leaning news sources. Rational people would keep the argument focused there.
It's disheartening to read the hyperbole, misdirection, and insults through this discussion on both sides. I've been less impressed with the contributions to Slashdot over the last year and this discussion is a new low for me.
... is worse than a big chunk of your electorate being misinformed?
If they're removing all the stories about Russia hacking the Election or not.
Seeing as not one bit of evidence has been produced to back the story up, I would have to put it directly into the " Fake News " category until proven otherwise.
Of course, that won't sit well with Team Democrat now will it . . . .
So, essentially arms of the Democratic news machine are being used to determine "fake news".
Never mind that BOTH organizations have been cause in their OWN fake news scandals, and in alarming displays of partisanship.
Yeah. Fuck that noise.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Facebook isn't fact checking, they're narrative checking to make sure it's leftist-approved.
Like Twitter's Ministry of Truth and Safety, its job will only consist of protecting leftism - as they have failed to pick anyone that is anything but a hard leftist.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
People believe what they want to. You can find this on both the left and the right. I'd argue it is a bit more prevent on the right for a whole host of reasons. They tend to be less educated for one. The demographic is much older also (more set in their ways if you will). They tend to be more religious, which has at it's core a strong tendency of belief without proof. Generally speaking the ideology to simple concepts is strong. So as you say "most of them". I'd say another reason is simply blind self interest, which is not so much about not believing, and more about not caring and towing the party line because it aligns more with more less your fiscal situation.
As you also mention, not all fall within this group. Along the same lines as your story, I had a political conversation with an individual who is an engineer, who was young, who I would also consider pretty bright. He was also pretty right of the political spectrum. My argument at the time with him was that he was voting against his best interests, in that he had a well paying unionized job, yet he was voting for someone who was anti-union who had a history of breaking unions. He didn't believe me. Said their was zero proof of that, and that he was very pro-union. I was incredulous, I mean to me it was such a very obvious thing. However I came to the conclusion that it wasn't totally his fault. He just wasn't all *that* interested in politics, hadn't really followed it much in the past, thus was lacking a lot of history to draw upon. Like the thread topic and summary, he bought into the "fake news" being pushed out by the political party, and took at face value what they say as being true, words VS actions so to speak. Anyway I tried to tell him about the various real life examples where the right had actively broke unions, but I'm afraid it probably fell on deaf ears and he likely voted right anyway. At that point he had already bought into the hype.
I certainly had never heard of it, which means it wasn't making the rounds on the liberal fundraising spam. And they will repeat just about every whacko alt-right theory they can find a link for to scare people into giving them money...
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
I wonder how many of the posts on this article were made by paid Russian trolls?
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us