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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.")
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.")
What a poor move by Facebook. So basically all articles from Faux News will not say fake but will say disputed. This does almost nothing for the poor people who don't know Fox is pure conservative slanted fantasy and believe it to be fact. On top of this I see it as more ammunition for the right wingers claiming the left is trying to dispute their claims.
The fact-checkers will be signatories of the non-partisan Poynter Code of Principles.
The very people that I see on social media passing around some of the most egregiously toxic meme "explainers" and the like also won't go a week without citing posts on Poynter about how important it is to show integrity in reporting. Being "a signatory" to something doesn't mean squat. Hillary Clinton, for example, signed all sorts of things recording her promises not to do the very things she then went right and did as secretary of state. People who illegally register to vote do so by signing a document that, among other things, asserts that they're not doing so illegally. A Facebook news moderator sitting in Menlo Park deciding whether or not some HuffPo piece should or shouldn't be considered "disputed" ... should be considered informed and neutral because they signed the thing that they were told they had to sign in order to get that gig?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
There are nuts everywhere that dispute evolution, heliocentrism, The Big bang theory, you name it. What a stupid classification. FB is just trying to have it both ways and not piss off the nut jobs.
If I disagree with you it's because you are wrong.
I find it odd that Facebook is giving people the ability to vote on the trust worthiness of the news. This will give the public a way to basically rate the mainstream media on a per article basis and as we all know most people don't trust the media. This is going to terribly blow back on all of their faces and make the MSM look even worse.
What a time to be alive!
Anyone else seeing shades of deliberate misinformation here? This is like "teaching the controversy" all over. The side that's blatantly lying just has "an opinion equally worth our time", is that it? Anytime El-Presidente Drumpf lies through his teeth, it's merely "some people may dispute this story"?
*FACTS*. AREN'T. OPINIONS.
This is physically revolting. If they're going to pull this crap, Facebook has no legitimate excuse for its continued existence. Burn their HQ to the ground; nothing of value will be lost.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
********************
I object to Intellect without Discipline.
Total race-baiting, dog-whistle propaganda is labeled 'Disputed'?
Cowardly.
All it would take for a fair system is for Facebook to let news viewers vote Real/Misleading/Unknown and show the percentages underneath like "30% real/60% misleading/10% unknown". You see a large percentage of Misleading, you can double check the story.
Why would Facebook choose to hire a group of "fact checkers" instead? Unless they wanted "fact checking" to be biased is a particular way...
Snopes is by far the most unbiased fact checking site. It is clear they attempt to be unbiased. All other fact checking sites in existence were created and are operated simply to disprove people they do not like. I am not saying massive is not correct, but it is still without bounds where it is a useful site. And they do a decent job of collecting and summarizing the data. It is just the Truthiness rating that is sometimes way off. Look at the "Hillary started the Birther movement" article. Sure, it is caped off with a False, but what follows is the single best summary of all the proof that the Hillary campaign did birth the birther movement. They did orders of magnitude better at proving that statement than Breitbart did.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
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.
Who determines what's true? Who will be the final arbiter? All this becomes is tyranny of the majority. This is no fix.
Mark it disputed for disagreeing with itself.
A story will be marked as disputed if fact-checkers find the story to be fake.
Remember when fact-checking was, like, a basic part of writing news stories as a professional journalist? Nice to see Facebook picking up the slack for something "news organizations" don't think is really necessary anymore (because they don't want to pay for the time/resources to do it).
You'll just end up ADDING credibility to false stories when you say it's "disputed". Disputed can be used for things like "dark matter" where there is some evidence one can point to, but nothing concrete can be derived from it.
Fake news is usually based on pure conjecture and hyperbole, in a very fuzzy math / connect the dots kind of thinking. People who believe fake news WANT to believe it and will use ANY wiggle room as validation.
There is so much fake news today that people don't know what to believe. Alternative sources can at least get people who want to look a different source for facts, or often a more complete set of facts. Flagging "disputed" from a biased perspective does not help anyone return a full set of facts.
It's really funny how the anti-Trump people bash Fox, yet ignore their own team (not really, it's quite common). FSN is often just as left leaning as CNN or MSNBC depending on the time of day and show running.
The big problem in the US today is that there are simply no reliable sources of news. Just as rare, are reasonable opinions that argue with a full set of facts.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I can see at least some people saying "See, it's not 'Disputed' on FB, it must be true!"
Or maybe almost everything will be "disputed"
Is there an appellate procedure if you produce a news that is wrongly flagged as "disputed"?
Snopes is by far the most unbiased fact checking site. It is clear they attempt to be unbiased. All other fact checking sites in existence were created and are operated simply to disprove people they do not like. I am not saying massive is not correct, but it is still without bounds where it is a useful site. And they do a decent job of collecting and summarizing the data. It is just the Truthiness rating that is sometimes way off. Look at the "Hillary started the Birther movement" article. Sure, it is caped off with a False, but what follows is the single best summary of all the proof that the Hillary campaign did birth the birther movement. They did orders of magnitude better at proving that statement than Breitbart did.
Not quite.
The theory started with conservatives, though didn't take off. Some Clinton supporters (and possibly some people associated with the campaign) pushed it a bit during the primary battle, but again it didn't take off.
Where the conspiracy theory actually got traction, ie the start of the birther movement, was with Republicans.
Realistically the start of the birther movement was Obama running for president while being a black person who was somewhat exotic and spent some time growing up outside of the US. There's a portion of the population who will view him as not being authentically American, and they look for ways to rationalize that feeling. That demographic leans strongly Republican, and the moment the idea that he might not be American came up they jumped all over it.
I stole this Sig
> Look at how many people on Slashdot fell for pizzagate.
What do you mean 'fell for'? Very few people ever believed there were kids under the pizza parlor. Lots of people thought that Podesta and Alefantis had super creepy taste in "art" (do you have "art" of naked, bound teenagers lying around?) and thought that maybe there would be enough lying around in public for an actual police investigation.
And not many people have ever lost "pizza related handkercheifs" or wondered whether they played dominoes better on pizza or pasta. When people went looking for what kind of code words they might be, funny thing, they turned up to be pedo slang on sites like urban dictionary and well-attested long before this whole thing came to anyone's attention.
But I guess Snopes didn't bother to cover that part in their 1-day investigation.
The problem is the fucking bubble, Facebook, wherein people log in and stay.
Facebook is not a goddam news site.
it's social media where relatives and friends post inane shit.
News is at news sites.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Posted a "new to me" Urban Legend: Scuba Bong, clearly labeled Urban Legend. Next day, a dismissive label, "Disputed!" Er...is the SCUBA Bong disputed, or is the Urban Legend status of the SCUBA Bong disputed? Big Brother Facebook muddies the waters.
How do you actually get news on facebook?
I only get posts of friends, their timelines etc. and: advertisements. I never saw any news on my Facebook visits. Or do people consider "advertisements" as "news"? But perhaps I once checked a box: "no news" or something, no idea.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
This is just another way to cover for their bias, especially when they're as selective on policy enforcement as Twitter.
I guess the new bar of "making it" will be having your story 'disputed' by Facebook's favorites.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I stick mostly to CNN & BBC - but it is typically factually accurate.
Yes, the BBC can be very accurate, especially when they announced the collapse of WTC building 7 even before it had happened yet.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Fake news = A news story made up in whole or substantially with intentionally verifiability untrue information in it.
I think news with deliberate omissions in it, to manipulate the people into accepting 'alternative facts' as truth, also constitutes fake news.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Given Snopes' funding by Clinton interests, I'd be highly suspect of them [effectively] clearing themselves.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Confusion is to be expected during rapidly evolving, large scale events.
Ezekiel 23:20
And now: Earth turns dark every twelve hours - Trump blames N. Korea of new secret weapon. Facebook: This is a "disputed" story.
Everyone is acting as if an opinion of a fact IS a fact. No. Facts are facts period. If one person says something and there's video of them saying it then it's true. Period. Someone else or that same person saying "I didn't say that" or "no, I actually said this ____". Is not an alternate fact or a valid opinion or anything other than a lie. If Trump says his phones were tapped by Obama and there's zero evidence offered as proof that's not a "disputed" story, it's a f****** lie.
quick, someone post a story to facebook that "P == NP" so we can find out if that is true or not.
Agreed. To me, a lie of omission is just as bad when you can be certain the source knew that they had left it out.
Just another day in Paradise
Would that be enough to get someone's statement that denies human-caused global warming/climate change labelled as false?
or does it have to be 9 out of 10 dentists who agree?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
A joint, open-sourced AI project by IBM, Google, and leading universities should be built to serve as an objective, disinterested physical and social world modeller and it can answer truth-likelihood and objectiveness/bias tendency of all statements except those whose answer is 42.
We could call it "Oracle" - no wait, scratch that. Any other suggestions for its name?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Yes, the BBC can be very accurate, especially when they announced the collapse of WTC building 7 even before it had happened yet.
If your prime example of the BBC falsifying information is a moment of confusion while scrambling around in international turmoil more than 15 years ago, I don't think I'll be abandoning them as as a news source just yet. Prematurely announcing the collapse was an understandable mistake, not remotely an attempt at propaganda.
Surely if they were really a problem you could find something a little more persuasive.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
How amusing that someone from Gizmodo talks about "fake news" when they are quite good at writing fake news themselves. That site is a flaming pile of dog shit.
It seems to me that fake, as traditionally used, means that something isn't what it says it is. A fake car can't drive, a fake laptop won't turn on, a piece of fake fruit might be made of wax. There's no element of truth other than the aesthetic. It LOOKS like the thing it is claiming to be but contains none of the content. Why, therefor, are people's extreme opinions being labelled as 'fake'? They might be lacking in truth, but all news outlets have always put their own spin on stories and further a narrative they support, in many cases lying in order to do so. In using 'fake' in such an odd way, we're now getting to a point where entire news organisations are being dismissed for some factual inaccuracies in one or two stories. Can't we go back to calling specific 'journalists' and news outlets liars whenever they produce 'lies'?
I stick mostly to CNN & BBC - but it is typically factually accurate.
Yes, the BBC can be very accurate, especially when they announced the collapse of WTC building 7 even before it had happened yet.
Thanks for putting your other comments into context. I used to be a truther. Then I grew the fuck up.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Bullshit. BBC is an intelligence propaganda outlet, like the rest of the mainstream media. The only confusion was the timing of the scripted news piece stating that WTC7 had collapsed.
We are being had by these phonies. Don't make excuses for them. They know exactly what they are doing. BBC is not your friend.
LOL. The competence you imbue your dastardly enemies with is truly staggering.
I mean you really ought to give up.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
I think it's worse than that when you know it on beforehand. Had nothing to do with confusion.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
There is an example of the national Dutch news service showing an 'attempt' of a BBC reporter to question Putin about the terrible loss of life in Syria.
He asks his question, camera turns away, then off.
Newscaster: 'Putin shunned BBC reporter asking about the terrible humanitarian disaster in Syria.'
The real, complete, version however, shows the camera turning back to the couple, with Putin attending the reporter for about 15 minutes.
Now that is what I call a display of deliberately generated fake news by national television in order to damage somebody's character.
To me it was of the contributions to my trust being totally gone through the window.
I'll never trust any news service again.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
I think it's worse than that when you know it on beforehand. Had nothing to do with confusion.
Oh! Now I see! Once we eliminate the absurd notion that a mistake was made during all of the confusion, we're left with the obvious conclusion that the BBC had prior knowledge of the events. It's so clear now! How did I miss it?
Perhaps because I'm not a paranoid, conspiracy-theorist whack-job.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Two news items bemoaning the lack of internet gatekeepers...
1) http://www.breitbart.com/big-j...
> Three years before Matt Drudge changed the world and how news would be
> consumed, President Bill Clinton's White House feared that the Internet was allowing
> average citizens, especially conservatives, to bypass legacy gatekeepers and
> access information that had previously been denied to them by the mainstream press.
2) http://www.drudgereportarchive...
> Clinton was asked whether she favored curbs on the Internet, after the DRUDGE REPORT ... Without any kind of editing function or gatekeeping
> made headlines with coverage of her husband's affair with a White House intern.
> "We are all going to have to rethink how we deal with this, because there are all
> these competing values
> function, what does it mean to have the right to defend your reputation?" she said.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user