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.
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!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Nice trolling. China doesn't do fact checking, they censor. Checking news stories for facts is not censoring but responsible journalism. Whether FB should act as such an editorial filter is another question, but the two things have nothing in common.
No I don't think Donald Rumsfeld works for Snopes.
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.
Concocting stories of pizzeria pedophile rings is not "other serious opinions". It's deliberately fabricated fake news.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
At least AOL wasn't trying to pass Snopes and Polifact off as being unbiased.
Did you even read the article? They're not blocking anything. They're making a "disputed" icon that appears next to the story, and a confirmation popup if you want to share it. You can still post and see whatever nonsense you want. Moon landing fake? Earth flat? Pearl Harbor false flag? Share your heart out.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
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?
I'm sure they'd be amenable to mixing in conservatiive-leaning fact-checking operations as well. Know of any?
Someone had to do it.