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Facebook's Safety Check Activated For Fake Bangkok Bombing (cnet.com)
Fake news has plagued Facebook over the last year, and now even the social media giant is falling for it. From a report on CNET: The site's Safety Check feature has been crucial during terrorist attacks and natural disasters, helping friends and families find out if their loved ones are safe during emergencies. It's been activated across the world more than 335 times by its users, for events like hurricanes, mass shootings and terrorist attacks. On Tuesday, the automated tool went haywire, pushing out an alert about an explosion in Bangkok, Thailand, citing "media sources" as a confirmation. It was deactivated within an hour after those media sources turned out to be fake news. One of the sites used as a media source was Bangkok Informer, which scraped a video from the 2015 Erawan bombing.
Like Cell 411, which is decentralized: http://getcell411.com/
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Star Wars actress Carrie Fisher was found dead in her LA hospital room this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss her - even if you didn't enjoy her work, there's no denying her contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
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The story is that Facebook's Safety Check feature began to propagate a fake news story but that Facebook figured that out and shut it down.
If you don't know what that feature is, it detects what might be a big event like a terrorist bombing or a natural disaster and tells you how many of your friends are in the affected area. If you are in the affected area it prompts you to confirm that you are OK and relays that information to your friends. It's actually quite a useful feature but of course if activated in response to fake news could easily start a panic.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I think the real problem here is that media sources are turning to automated scrapers instead of using human beings to investigate and report the news. Look at some of the sources that rebroadcast this fake report. The BBC, Telegraph, Mirror, and MSN news. How can anyone take an article they read from a news source seriously knowing that automated scripts likely wrote it. This is a growing trend as well. A growing number of news articles are the result of automated reporting scripts. From my point of view, if news agencies want to increase the speed with which they report and the number of stories they can get out there by using automated scripts they should at least use their existing humans to proof and sanity check stuff before it goes out.
It's because people have realized they can influence people by spreading fake news on social media, even if it is eventually debunked. In this case you have people just waiting for the next terror attack so they can push their isolationist/xenophobic agendas, and then a larger number of useful idiots who will repost and react to it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The only way something like this would work would be to have a human look at this. Think Reddit just for Facebook news. If you push out an article like this you need a disclaimer saying this has not been fully reviewed, please review. You would get tons of people waiting to vote on that when they see that disclaimer.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
I just read this in my hardcopy and found it online for anyone to read on Wired web site.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).