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Facebook Doesn't Care About Fixing Fake News Problem On Its Platform (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Journalists working as factcheckers for Facebook have pushed to end a controversial media partnership with the social network, saying the company has ignored their concerns and failed to use their expertise to combat misinformation. Current and former Facebook factcheckers told the Guardian that the tech platform's collaboration with outside reporters has produced minimal results and that they've lost trust in Facebook, which has repeatedly refused to release meaningful data about the impacts of their work. Some said Facebook's hiring of a PR firm that used an antisemitic narrative to discredit critics -- fueling the same kind of propaganda factcheckers regularly debunk -- should be a deal-breaker.
Facebook now has more than 40 media partners across the globe, including the Associated Press, PolitiFact and the Weekly Standard, and has said false news on the platform is "trending downward." While some newsroom leaders said the relationship was positive, other partners said the results were unclear and that they had grown increasingly resentful of Facebook. Facebook has said that third-party factchecking is one part of its strategy to fight misinformation, and has claimed that a "false" rating leads an article to be ranked lower in news feed, reducing future views by 80% on average. The company has refused, however, to publicly release any data to support these claims. Facebook said in a statement that it had "heard feedback from our partners that they'd like more data on the impact of their efforts," adding that it has started sending "quarterly reports" with "customized statistics" to partners and would be"looking for more statistics to share externally in early 2019." Facebook declined to share the reports with the Guardian.
Facebook now has more than 40 media partners across the globe, including the Associated Press, PolitiFact and the Weekly Standard, and has said false news on the platform is "trending downward." While some newsroom leaders said the relationship was positive, other partners said the results were unclear and that they had grown increasingly resentful of Facebook. Facebook has said that third-party factchecking is one part of its strategy to fight misinformation, and has claimed that a "false" rating leads an article to be ranked lower in news feed, reducing future views by 80% on average. The company has refused, however, to publicly release any data to support these claims. Facebook said in a statement that it had "heard feedback from our partners that they'd like more data on the impact of their efforts," adding that it has started sending "quarterly reports" with "customized statistics" to partners and would be"looking for more statistics to share externally in early 2019." Facebook declined to share the reports with the Guardian.
Seems we got us a fucktard here folks.... Denying their own reality... Here asshat... A Fresh DOSE. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
And YES, they ALL do it... https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
...trust me, we care as much as anyone else in the media and Internet.
I don't take anything I read on Facebook as fact. If I care about it, I double check on some more reputable site. Facebook is like the phone service. They provide the means of communications, but aren't the ones making calls. Don't just believe all the random things your friends or pages you follow post.
Basically if you're partnering with institutions like Politifact, Vox and Snopes then you'll get a very one sided narrative and everything else will be labeled fake news. Perhaps censoring content isn't that great of an idea and these reporters are just mad Facebook isn't listening to their ideas on what should be censored.
News and information should be free, even if it's fake, people can do the fact checking for themselves. The problem here is that these journalists are basically saying "everyone else is dumb, we need to filter the information they get". It's a dangerous proposition.
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As if they both weren't wrong, public lies to get votes, and never really followed anyway. Telling the truth about that - I've watched this crap since Eisenhower - would be news. What we see today, not so much.
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Since when are rules that make sense in a dense city right for farms? And vice versa...I'm sure the land use, pest control, trash burning, and fertilizer requirements are different - or should be. You can't swing your arms in the city without breaking a nose. Does that mean farmers shouldn't be able to swing their arms?
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From what I observe, the whole central statist model has some real serious issues. One size does NOT fit all.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
There are some "New sources" that seem like fully legitimate news sources however if you reads their terms of use " Company furnishes the Company Sites and the Company Services for your personal enjoyment and entertainment." Or in general stating what they say may not be true, as it could be parody. Then there is a wide range of editorial comprehension of the news, where peoples personal feelings of the news gets expressed, often by stating a sentience in a different way, such as "Government Shutdown" vs "Government Slowdown" vs "Placing a hold on paying most bills until a budget is signed"
We also have incomplete and often inaccurate "Breaking News" which is stating what it known at the time, and normal mistakes do happen in the news as well.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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the morons who believe the 'fake news' are more likely to also click on ads.
Why anyone trusts FB for more than posting videos of your pets and vacation photos is beyond me. Even those might be heavily plagiarized or from third parties, but at least they are relatively harmless.
I noticed something the other day when an actual Paper (the dead tree kind) was in front of me (McDonald's of all places) I actually read it cover to cover skipped the parts that were not interesting and it was not as stressful to read as an online version with its blaring video ads etc and crap the news and articles were fairly current and I wasn't presented with clickbait headlines which lead to pages full of ads and an article which is nothing like the headline. On the real paper I even read a few ads that were of interest instead of trying to close them quickly to uncover the article. to me it almost seemed as if the best articles were in the actual paper and the internet version was for some less discriminating and facebook from what I have seen is one big Advert.
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
AP, LA Times, and that's about it when I get news off of Facebook. Otherwise, I go to the main websites. I can't believe anyone would get their news off Facebook unless they follow the major media there and use Facebook to catch current stories.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
https://www.businessinsider.nl...
"Two former employees for the fact-checking site Snopes said Facebook threw fact-checkers under the bus when their work prompted a backlash."
Current and former Facebook factcheckers told the Guardian that the tech platform's collaboration with outside reporters has produced minimal results and that they've lost trust in Facebook...
They had trust in Facebook?
LOL
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Hey BeauHD, you need to change your name to Captain Obvious. Does anyone not already know this?
Just another day in Paradise
Facebook Doesn't Care About Fixing Conservative Views Problem On Its Platform
If you had looked into the matter at all, you would know that the Russian Internet Research Agency was posting both conservative and liberal material in order to sow discord among the American public. They were wildly successful. So successful in fact, that they started actively supporting Trump because Putin hates Hillary Clinton. But you are more concerned with being butthurt over some perceived censorship than you are with a rival nation interfering with our democratic process. Get your priorities straight.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Facebook doesn't care.
It's not news and there's no reason to bother expanding the point into anything more than those three words. Next article, please.
Of course facebook doesn't care. Sensationalist crap brings in more participation on their site. Both from the camp spreading the fake news and those coming on to argue that it is in fact fake.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
"Facebook Doesn't Care" works just as well.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
It was a platform for kids to play around and search for a hookup on campus. It shouldâ(TM)ve never been more than that.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Do you realize you just effectively agreed with me? My point was that anything not agreed with is now called fake, regardless of facts, and that media has a pretty lousy track record with facts going pretty far back into the past. The hyperpartisanship evident has reduced the value of actual facts due to many true things also being called fake because someone with a megaphone says so.
Which again, was my point. As long as we allow facts to be called fake, we can't get rid of the crap.
And that's where we sit - factually, right now.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
People who trust "news" they see on Facebook are about as dumb as the people who trust they're getting an "authentic Rolex" for $15 from a guy on the street.
Here's a tip: any news from *any* source should be (a) weighed for bias based on the source, (b) cross-referenced with a diverse selection of other sources to check validity, and (c) checked against *opposing* sources to see what -- if anything -- is being left out, exaggerated, etc.
Yes, I know that's actual *work* which people are loathe to do these days. However, if you're not going to put any effort into making sure your news isn't actually propaganda, you deserve what you get.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The very last thing on Earth I want from a social media company is for them to require a panel of censors to approve my posts before they're visible to anyone else. There is no universe where that increases my confidence in the accuracy of information I receive through that platform. In fact, it will have quite the opposite effect.
What's really pissing people off isn't "fake news," because lies have been an issue since humans could communicate. The problem is the breakdown of trust in our society. There is no longer any trust in our institutions or our press, and we're reaping the consequences. When you can't trust anyone, you tend to trust things that agree with your own biases and opinions. Everyone is living in an information bubble, which means everyone is living in their own reality. What's true for a feminist is patently absurd to a conservative, and both of them are certain that their information is "the facts" and the other is clearly insane. Pretty soon society is fragmented with each "tribe" convinced the rest of the world has gone mad and something has to be done to show them how insane they are.
This isn't an easy problem to solve because trust is incredibly difficult to cultivate, especially when delivering information that is not favorable to someone's opinions. The establishment press have largely destroyed their own credibility by trading in whatever trust they had for the chance to get some shots in on Trump. Now they are completely unable to comprehend the situation in which they have placed themselves, where half of the country wouldn't trust them if they reported that the Earth was round. Ironically (for people who fear a "dictator") their knee-jerk reaction to this predicament is to propose censorship and centralized control of information, AKA a dictatorship.
When you were younger, were you like "I'm going to grow up and become like one of those ranting homeless person on street corners screaming about CIA coverups"? Or did you always have these weird thoughts?
They're like a person who's not sorry for the thing they did, they're sorry that you were offended by what they did. It's not so much that they intentionally offended you, they just don't personally see the problem, and so aren't willing to pay any consequences to fix it. Keep in mind that they likely have immediate metrics to hand for how many reduced views and shares they'll receive. Even though they likely have no metric for "does that even matter?", it's still harder to argue for doing the right thing when you can see the specific benefit you're giving up. And their entire business is geared towards improving those engagement metrics.
Think of a corporation as a giant artificial intelligence running the business using machine learning. It has tried a bunch of different actions, and has a good idea of which actions cause which outcomes. But it has no human-level comprehension or feelings. As corporations increase their scope of activity, even the humans within have troubles identifying with the consequences of their actions. A local banker maybe feels bad about foreclosing on a neighbor, a back-office bank worker in New York feels less bad about foreclosing on 100 random people across the country because it gets routine, and a programmer at a credit bureau likely never even considers that a decision they're implementing will prevent a million people from ever getting a house.
So, yes, keep the heat on Facebook, but don't expect Facebook to make subtle changes quickly. We have to keep training them.
Facebook does not deserve our traffic.
The "Fake News" on Facebook was a real problem - the fix is to educate your ignorant relatives about actually looking at URLs and how to tell what the real URL is, not the deceptive one and how to click around to a site to confirm it's a real one before sharing something that looks too good to be true. Also CHECK THE STUPID DATE of the article. I don't know how many times dead celebrities have died again on my news feed.
That being set aside - yes, Facebook along with the other big media platforms are using the actual fake-news (a.k.a click-bait) articles as an excuse to censor ideas that don't fit the ideas of their sponsors/management. This is a real issue and needs to be addressed not by the government but the users.
I personally have addressed this issue by looking at why I go to Facebook. The fact is for social media having to do with my interest I've mostly moved over to decentralized IPFS/Crypto platforms. The reason I go to Facebook is those dumb assed relatives who share click-bait but I love them anyways who would have their minds blown and eyes glazed by trying to explain decentralized IPFS/Crypto concepts to them.
My solution? I made my own social media site. The tools are out there and they're simple. I experiment with quite a few, I gave Wordpress a good solid try, but the plugins I needed to make it work right were flaky and needed exact versions of one thing or another to work. Libertree looked promising, but required a tool-kit that I just didn't approve of - I'm not going to use anything that requires me to establish an account and connect to a third-party API just to keep it working. I settled on Friendica. I like it, it's got post-previewing (something that's very important to me) and decent support for just about any kind of media you want to link to/embed. It's still a bit shy of what my family/users want.
My plan if I can get anyone else on-board, I'll host my friends and family, and I'm hoping another nerd is a circle that crosses with mine will start their own server. It works fine on it's own, but Friendica is designed to network with a bunch of other nodes. Mine is removed from the public nodes, I just want it to connect to other friends and family, and I'm not posting pictures of my kids, including my seven week old that has never had his picture put on Facebook by me as a bit of a prod to get friends and relatives on-board with deligitimzing Facebook. You're a bunch of nerds here - the rest of you should pick up on this trend. Instead of a decentralized cluster-fuck of each person for themselves of truly decentralized social media like Minds (which is available and source and was considered instead of Friendica - but was ruled too difficult due to the crypto-not social media stuff) or Akasha, we can make social media look like a relational cluster grid. Not decentralized, not centralized, something with a lot of different centers working together with nerds acting as shepherds of their own nerds.
(After I setup Friendica Hubzilla was recommended to me and will be my next attempt should everyone completely give up on my Friendica site.
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As a conservative, let me just state for the record that your number 2 is full of number 2.
I have a redneck cousin who's an extreme conservative and posts multiple times a day, stuff that makes me cringe. FB does nada to block that shit.
Just another day in Paradise
Only in Trump land does 33 indictments and guilty pleas from an investigation equal no evidence.
Indictment just means that those individuals were charged; it says nothing about the actual culpability of the accused. Of the guilty pleas, how many were directly related to candidate Trump colluding with Russians to undermine the election?
But GUILTY until proven innocent!
Ask them who was charged, and what they were charged with, and when the trial starts and you'll start to get a picture that they don't know, don't care. The indicted Russians will never see trial, because the are all in Russia. The indicted Russians have 0 ties to Trump or his campaign. None of the indicted Russians have ties to the actual crimes committed by the FBI and Justice Department either, but that's because they don't really care about fraudulent Russian FSB sponsored "Dossier". They don't care about Russians interfering with our elections, they care that their anointed queen (HRC) lost to the worst possible person in the world. They are making sure it doesn't happen again.
Only under the correct narrative does it all make sense.
“Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.” - Lavrentiy Beria (Stalin's Chief of Secret Police)
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
None of these indictments, and none of the evidence is in any way linked to Trump, nor does any of it suggest collusion.
But you already know that. You're just dishonest and retarded.
It is idiots' swallowing anything you write.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
You are correct that there are two broad political groups that have the opinion you do about fake news. The antifa group on the left, which compromises maybe 0.0001% of those on the left, and the entire set of Trump supporters, which comprise about 83% of the Republican party. Hmm, lets just say there's a few nutjobs on the left, which 99% of the population will agree with, and then there's the Republicans....
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
...a reputable auditor verifies the source of data and process, reviewing evidence directly from the systems involved. This is standard for anything, it's why we have CPAs to ensure companies aren't cheating investors. If it's really true, then a third-party should be able to verify the results.
But it doesn't matter because Facebook obviously isn't interested in stopping any clickbait like fake news since they depend on the revenue it provides. If they were, they would simply create a whitelist of all reputable news sources which all share the same traits regardless of bias accusations: they have qualified editors and journalists (no, random bloggers who copy/paste/scrape news from the AP wire are not editors or journalists), do fact-checking and verify sources per journalism best practices, publish retractions/corrections as needed, and mark opinion pieces clearly as such. They can come up with whatever criteria they want to make the bar high enough to filter out the clickbait crap. It's really not that hard.
On a side note, I don't know why anyone believes anything that has more likes or followers (aka whenever something "goes viral") has more value since it's highly likely it's all being manipulated by paid spambots.