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Facebook Shows Related Articles and Fact Checkers Before You Open Links (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Facebook wants you to think about whether a headline is true and see other perspectives on the topic before you even read the article. In its next step against fake news, Facebook today begins testing a different version of its Related Articles widget that normally appears when you return to the News Feed after opening a link. Now Facebook will also show Related Articles including third-party fact checkers before you read an article about a topic that many people are discussing. If you saw a link saying "Chocolate cures cancer!" from a little-known blog, the Related Article box might appear before you click to show links from the New York Times or a medical journal noting that while chocolate has antioxidants that can lower your risk for cancer, it's not a cure. If an outside fact checker like Snopes had debunked the original post, that could appear in Related Articles too. Facebook says this is just a test, so it won't necessarily roll out to everyone unless it proves useful. It notes that Facebook Pages should not see a significant change in the reach of their News Feed posts. There will be no ads surfaced in Related Articles.
Checking if a claim matches history is dealing with facts. There was no such event as a "Bowling Green Massacre". There was an event called the Holocaust. Reality isn't flexible based on personal preferences, and any experience like that is a symptom of psychosis.
Trump made up the fake news narrative. Granted Fox news was doing it and he saw that he could use it to his advantage in the presidential race and everyone in the US that has a college education knows how full of shit he is. Meanwhile the Walmart rednecks are cheering going "That there is going to make American a great island agaeein !!" despite the fact that he cheated on his taxes, Colluded with the Russians to discredit Hillary and has had his hands in several shady business dealings and has forced himself on many women and not been properly called out on it publicly.
I think that the US is in for a rude awakening if they think that this is the way to run a country. We are pretty screwed until we get a legitimate president and a legitimately elected Senate and Congress (without jerrymandered districts) and the supreme court is appointed by the president in office at the time of the vacancy coming about rather than congress delaying so they get their guy in if and only if someone from there party gets the election. (the right pulled that one out of their ass and it was not constitutional.)
Now bias journalism gets checker by bias fact checkers. We'll need fact checkers to fact check the fact checkers and fact checkers to fact check those fact checkers and round and round it goes.
The scientific enterprise has been doing this pretty well for over 100 years.
You're not going to build an algorithm that says X is a true story and Y is false. But as humans we have the ability to build institutions and use our judgment to figure out which ones are reliable. Does the NYTimes have a liberal bias? Sure. But it also has very reliable facts. The HuffPo generally agrees with my bias, but it also spent years peddling medical nonsense and it still hasn't reestablished its credibility for me.
If FB starts using nonsense fact checkers I'll call them on their BS and be a lot more likely to drop them, and I suspect many others would do the same.
I'm sure some conservative groups are trying to build fact checking websites, but I suspect they'll have a lot of trouble due to the extent to which mainstream American conservatism has embraced a lot of nonsense. They're either going to end up taking a lot of shots at their own side and get called liberal, or they'll descend into self-satire like conservapedia.
I stole this Sig