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Facebook Fights Fake News With Links To Other Angles (techcrunch.com)
Facebook is rolling out "Related Articles" that appear below news links to stories lots of people are posting about on Facebook, or that are suspected to be false news and have been externally fact checked by Facebook's partners. "Appearing before someone reads, Related Articles will surface links to additional reporting on the same topic to provide different view points, and to truthiness reports from the fact checkers," reports TechCrunch. From the report: If users see drastically different angles when they compare a story to its Related Articles, they might deem it suspicious and skip it, be less likely to believe or share it, or could click through the Related Articles and make up their own mind. That could reduce the spread and impact of false news without Facebook itself having to be the honesty police. Related Articles could also balance out some of the radical invective that can subtly polarize the populace. Pre-click Related Articles are rolling out in the U.S., Germany, France, and Nederlands today. These countries were chosen to get the roll out first because Facebook has established fact checking partnerships there. "We don't want to be and are not the arbiters of the truth. The fact checkers can give the signal of whether a story is true or false" says Facebook News Feed integrity product manager Tessa Lyons. Meanwhile, Facebook's machine learning algorithm has improved its accuracy and speed, so the social network will now have it send more potential hoaxes to fact checkers.
Actually, third parties have reviewed the fact checkers, and overall found that their bias is minimal. What's more, decent fact-checking organizations document supporting evidence directly in their reports - so you can see things for yourselves.
This kind of insistent denial of honest journalism is exactly why fake news is the problem it is. You should set a reasonable and equivalent standard for all information sources - are you as skeptical of conservative publications as your are of these supposedly biased fact-checkers? Don't just give a free pass to people that agree with you - lies that confirm your preconceived notions are the easiest ones to believe.