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.

[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.

[Chris Mattern]

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

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?

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.