Facebook Pages Spreading Fake News Won't Be Able To Buy Ads (techcrunch.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Facebook says it's taking another step against Pages that share fabricated news stories. The company has already been working with outside fact-checkers like Snopes and the AP to flag inaccurate news stories. (These aren't supposed to be stories that are disputed for reasons of opinion or partisanship, but rather outright hoaxes and lies.) It also says that when a story is marked as disputed, the link can can no longer be promoted through Facebook ads. The next step, which the company is announcing today, involves stopping Pages that regularly share these stories from buying any Facebook ads at all, regardless of whether or not the ad includes a disputed link. In this case, Leathern said blocking ad-buying is meant to change the economic incentives. Facebook is concerned that "there are Pages posting this information that are using Facebook Ads to build audiences" to spread false news. By changing the ad policy, Facebook makes it harder for companies to attract that audience.

Comments

Re:They're neither "outside" nor "fact-checkers"

[PopeRatzo]

Clearly, some sources are particularly bad, and filtering out that noise is a laudable effort, but without a quality source of news to replace it, I fear that the void will just be filled by more noise.

Ah, and this is the big lie: "There are no trustworthy sources of news." This is a fabrication of the right-wing since Nixon. If you can just convince enough people that there are no facts, there is no truth, and that they should just believe what makes them feel good, you can get them to do just about anything. Convince enough people that scientists are doing fake science and journalists are doing fake news and educators are just brainwashing kids, then you've got them to the point where their only choice left is to "Listen and Believe" whatever their great leader tells them. This is how the Right has gotten Christian Conservatives to reject the teachings of the Bible in order to promote Trumpism.

There are very trustworthy news sources. None of them have existed without a single fault, but dismissing them as "fake news" is promoting the Big Lie.

Like the famous asshole in the room, if you believe that all the news is fake, then you just might be the fake. (I don't mean you, dgatwood, I'm using "you" generally).