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.

Comments

And so Facebook can push its own agenda

[Anonymous Coward]

yep, nothing to be abused here!

Re:And so Facebook can push its own agenda

[pete6677]

Exactly right. Liberal Facebook's definition of "fake news" is anything that differs from the official liberal media position on some issue.

Fighting the facts with FB's narrative.

[sethstorm]

Given that the fact-checkers are not exactly neutral themselves, I'd take an entire geologic basin's worth of NaCl before believing their "arbiters".

Re:Fighting the facts with FB's narrative.

[Anonymous Coward]

Given that the fact-checkers are not exactly neutral themselves...

Said everyone who ever tried to rationalize not vaccinating kids.

Yes. It is possible to level criticisms against almost anything. That's both the foundation of legitimate academic debate and a part of how almost every misinformation campaign in the world works.

It's still better to try to provide some moderating influence on blatantly untrue stories than it is to avoid any responsibility for people who use your platform to spread lies, hoaxes, and untruths. Because those things actually cause harm. In the case of anti-vax beliefs, that harm can extend to death.

Re:Fighting the facts with FB's narrative.

[interkin3tic]

Who is exactly neutral?

Give me a neutral source.

On anything.

Seriously, set a baseline for "neutral" and show us what you mean. Someone completely free of any bias.

If you can't find any, then maybe we should admit that it's not inherently bad when news has bias. We should stop looking for that unicorn and instead admit that it's a degree of bias, not the existence of bias, that matters. CNN's bias and Fox news' bias are not equally bad just because they both exist.

Re:Fighting the facts with FB's narrative.

[Whibla]

I think the only way for a baseline neutral is opposing views. I don't think CNN's or Fox's bias are bad. I think they are both equally biased in opposite directions. By regularly paying attention to both of them, you can get a fairly neutral view.

Sounds fine in principle, but this is exactly how we ended up with "teach the controversy" the "global warming debate" and the "vaccination scare".

Opposing views do not always have the same weight or basis in fact. Presenting them as if they do does not make the presentation baseline neutral, it biases it towards the lunatic fringe.

Politicisation of science is just about the worst thing that could have happened both for politics and for science!

Who fact checks the fact checkers?

[El Cubano]

The fact checkers can give the signal of whether a story is true or false"

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

memes?

[roc97007]

Others have already mentioned that Facebook could (and probably will to a certain extent) use this device to push their own agenda, but leave that for now. The interesting thing to me is that downright hoaxes are still ignored, which seems to argue in favor of the "push their own agenda" argument.

As just one example, a repeat offender is the "Don't use 911!!!" hoax that tells the (demonstrably false) story about how an innocent young lady was saved from a horrible fate by remembering how her parents told her to dial 112 instead of 911 from her car when someone was following her. All went well and the perp was arrested and the girl escaped unharmed all because she did what her parents told her and dialed 112.

This is in the US, where 112 may work in some metropolitan areas as a courtesy to visitors from Europe, but isn't an official emergency number. It may happen to get you to emergency services in New York or Miami, but won't get you anywhere in Perrysburg, Ohio. The article is a dangerous hoax, but it keeps getting propagated, because people want to believe that they are privy to some bit of important knowledge that nobody else knows.

The point being, if Facebook was so concerned about their site being used to propagate false news, where the hell are the "alternate articles" calling this a hoax? If you google "call 112 instead of 911" the first 20 or so hits are articles pleading with you to not fall for this.

I mean WTF, Facebook? Is debunking some story about Ivanka's charities more important than calling the wrong emergency services number in an emergency?