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

Why not mark it what it really is, fake.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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

[lucm]

What they need is another tag: "biased". Because often news on right or left media outlets are not exactly fake, but they're presented in a way that favors a political view.

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

[epyT-R]

Might as well make that tag automatic for all news posts.

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

[gnick]

...Fox is pure conservative slanted fantasy and [people] believe it to be fact.

Fox may be "conservative slanted" and it's not to my taste - I stick mostly to CNN & BBC - but it is typically factually accurate. O'Reilly having a miscredited guest on talking about Sweden was enough to make headlines and is a rare exception to the rule. Neither CNN nor Fox make a habit out of mis-stating facts and, when they do, they both have reasonable track records of correcting themselves. Both have stellar records compared to our current White House.

All sources are slanted and there are many places you can seek out and find genuinely bogus stories, but neither CNN nor Fox should be labelled blanketly "fake news."

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.

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.

[Chris Mattern]

And who gets to determine that a news item has "turned out to be true"?

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

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Under Obama we saw an escalation of tensions between the US and Russia

Funny, I thought we saw it under Putin.

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.

Everything is disputed

[Doctor Morbius]

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.

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

[lucm]

Yes. Those who sign that should be considered informed and neutral in the context of Facebook employees, given a spectrum that starts with "anti-Trump" and ends with "supporters of violent anti-Trump demonstrations and opposed to democracy if it means Trump can get elected".

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

[AmiMoJo]

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.

You either have a small number of errors marking stuff as fake, or you have a tidal wave of fake news. And I'm sure if it does get abused, we will see hundreds of articles pointing it out.

A fair system

[Kohath]

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...

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

[ScentCone]

"Being "a signatory" to something doesn't mean squat. "

John Hancock would like a word with you.

John Hancock was then willing to take up arms and put his life on the line to back up the liberty proclaimed in the document he risked everything by signing. Do you REALLY think you're making some sort of valid point by comparing that to a Facebook employee sitting in a cubicle clicking "disputed" when something runs against the narratives they're paid to favor?

Re:snopes?

[wisnoskij]

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.

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.

"Disputed" by the left.

[sethstorm]

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.