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Facebook Chooses To Demote Fake News Instead of Remove It (bbc.co.uk)
Facebook says it will not remove fake news from its platform because it does not violate its community standards. According to the BBC, Facebook said publishers often had "very different points of view" and removing fabricated posts would be "contrary to the basic principles of free speech." Instead, it is choosing to demote posts in the news feed that it deems to be fake news. From the report: Facebook has been scrutinized for its role in spreading fake news after evidence emerged that Russia tried to influence U.S. voters using the social network. On Wednesday, the company held an event in New York where it sought to convince journalists it was tackling the problem. The company said it would not remove fake news that did not break its rules but would down-rank content that had been marked as false. "We allow people to post it as a form of expression, but we're not going to show it at the top of News Feed," a spokeswoman told CNN.
The entire point of Facebook is engagement. A bunch of people discussing whether the earth is round or not or whether vaccines cause autism really helps keep users checking Facebook as often as possible. Each button is carefully calibrated to express a reptilian emotion whose purpose is impossible to determine. Are you angered by the person's inflammatory rhetoric in a post, or is someone posting about something that makes you outraged? Who knows! Who cares! You're engaged!
Facebook is like a shitty version of family/friend therapy where your everyone hates each other more but the therapist is happy because she got to show you some Viagra ads.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
That's really all they can do. Let's face facts - people who get their actual news from Facebook are idiots. People who can't be bothered to fact check or even do the slightest amount of verification are idiots. And the vast vast majority of internet users are.... idiots. They'll grab the first thing they see that they agree with and use it as their evidence to support to their argument. Whether it's from politifact, snopes, or stormfront.
Facebook is an online chat. That's it. People who use it to gather factual data... there's not much we can do about it. *shrug*.
Facebook is *not* the New York Times. People that get their news from Facebook will go around saying "Everybody says that....." or "Nobody really thinks...." so when somebody says that just say "Face News"!
but to knowingly lie should not be protected!
Protecting the right of others to speak when you disagree with them, or even lie to you, is the true test of whether you believe in free speech, or just speech you happen to like or agree with.
The absolute failure of the MSM and various governments to control the narrative of any one issue has already proven the futility of trying to censor dissenting opinions and narratives. The more you try to shape opinion by forcing the more people will chose to find other sources of information. And sadly if often drives people into falling into the trap of buying into narratives that may or may not be accurate at all. See just about any news story from Buzzfeed.
And that's before we actually get into talking about when the media actively and provably lies to the public. I'm looking at you CNN. 'It's illegal to read Wikileaks' my ass...
If you aren't removing things that aren't news from the "news feed" then it's not actually a news feed, it's just stories with a chance of truth.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Wasn't there a report recently that said that the fake news was less fake than the nominally real news?
See that "Preview" button?