Facebook Begins Marking 'Fake News' As 'Disputed' (wdrb.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Facebook is now marking fake news as "disputed," several sites reported today. "According to Facebook's Help Center, news stories that are reported as fake by people on Facebook may be reviewed by independent, third-party fact-checkers," writes WDRB Media. "The fact-checkers will be signatories of the non-partisan Poynter Code of Principles. A story will be marked as disputed if fact-checkers find the story to be fake."

Mashable reports that the feature was rolled out quietly, and didn't gain much attention until it was noticed Friday by a reporter from Gizmodo, who tweeted a screenshot showing Facebook's new "disputed" icon. Further investigation revealed Facebook's help center now includes a page explaining how news gets marked as disputed, and another page informing users how to mark a news story as fake (which points out this feature "isn't available to everyone yet.")

Comments

Re:Why not mark it what it really is, fake.

[Anonymous Coward]

It should just be under the page header. "Warning. All information presented in any linked articles is subject to extreme bias, and cannot be trusted."

Otherwise, Facebook's labeling of "disputed" will render Facebook itself legitimately biased.

Re:Oh, well, as long as they SIGNED something.

[Kjella]

It's the lesser of two evils. There are too many gullible idiots out there. Look at how many people on Slashdot fell for pizzagate.

The question is, does a disputed tag actually meaningfully help? I mean pretty much everyone knows that pizzagate is "disputed", that is some claim it happened and some claim it never did. The "truthers" of all colors will never care that the mainstream refute their story, it's the conspiracy/establishment/illuminati trying to censor the truth. Unless you have the balls to label it as "fake" this is pretty much meaningless.

Re:Why not mark it what it really is, fake.

[Mr D from 63]

If someone marks a news item as disputed which turns out to be true, they should be eliminated from being able to mark items in the future.

Living language

[Okian Warrior]

Total race-baiting, dog-whistle propaganda is labeled 'Disputed'?

Cowardly.

English has always been a "living" language: new words come into being, old words suffer from disuse, and meanings change. The syntax and grammer evolves and changes with the times.

We're seeing this right with many of the words in common usage in the media. "Racist", "sexist", "islamaphobe" and a host of other terms are losing their dictionary meaning.

I'm seeing lots of people on gab.ai who are completely blase' about being called racist. Someone will say "that's racist" or "you're a racist", and people are like "yeah, I'm racist. Whatever". I find it astonishing how quickly this has happened. Not 1 year ago the term "racist" meant that you believed a particular race was inferior. Nowadays you are a racist for having a particular body posture - even when you *don't* think some race is inferior.

This is similar to how past words had a stronger meaning. Terms like "you're a jerk" (person who masterbates a lot) and "you suck" (you perform fellatio) have lost a lot of their power and meaning. The phrase "St Paul’s Cathedral Is Amusing, Awful, and Artificial" was once taken as high praise.

So the words "disputed" and "fake" will be taking on new meaning, and in a year or two will come to have colloquial definitions that match their usage, which is not the usage we assign to them right now. "Disputed" will probably come to mean "politically charged", and "fake" will come to mean "from non-mainstream sources" without any of today's connotations of meaning.

It's just the living language, undergoing change.

Re:Why not mark it what it really is, fake.

[Chris Mattern]

So basically all articles from Faux News will not say fake but will say disputed.

Nope. I predict that the marking will be very quickly subverted and *all* articles will be marked disputed, regardless of source.

Re:Why not mark it what it really is, fake.

[AmiMoJo]

The problem with Fox is that it isn't news, it's opinion. The reporting of factual information is just a small, unimportant aspect of their programming. They are about producing a narrative. For example, they won't just report that Chelsea Manning said something, they will mention it in passing and then spend half an hour talking about what an "ungrateful traitor" she is. The news bit is just a jumping off point for the rant, the rant being the main content.

And then half an hour later the President tweets the same thing. That's what they are about, feeding people the narrative.