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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.
Also eagerly supported by the WaPo, WSJ and other verified news sources.
Could they just kill clickbait articles while they're at it? Click here to find out.
You are making up an alternative meaning for the phrase fake news.
Nah. It's well understood at this point to mean, "People using widely consumed platforms to spread information they know is incorrect, and doing so while presenting those lies as facts." So, when someone on CNN says there is a "Muslim ban," they know they're lying and that they're producing and spreading fake news. You know they are, their informed audience knows it's fake, and some small number of non-critical-thinking dolts take it as fact. But it's fake news. Click-bait factories in Eastern Europe are NOT the only or even a predominant source of this. Most of it comes right out of mainstream media habitats right in the US.
It is the easiest way to make money there.
It's true. When an operation like MSNBC spends an entire news cycle hyping the fact that their head fake-news-talking-head is going to "release Trump's taxes," when they know perfectly well they have no such thing and will do no such thing (except a readily available snipped that - even by itself - undermines their own narrative) ... when that happens, and they get a big ratings boost from that lie, yeah - easy money if they don't care about the fact they have to lie to do it.
Efforts to identify and remove fake news have no political intent
Hilarious.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Yep, the people who kept telling you there was no way Trump could get elected are now telling you what news is fake.
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