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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.
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.
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.
It not perfect but perfect is the enemy of good, getting your news from Facebook is not good, but people clearly are. I fail to see how letting some political interest just swamp real fact with misinformation unchallenged is better, in theory people can go to other news sources of different political position to confirm facts but don't.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 problem with both Fox and CNN isn't that they don't present the facts, they do. However, they then spin those same facts during their gossip sessions with "analysts". They also tend to pick out which news stories to present. If they spent less time gossiping with analysts they would have much more time to present all news stories, not just a selection of them. The problem with this is that they found that they get better ratings through talking politics than anything else.
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?