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In an Attempt To Tackle Spread of Fake News, Facebook's WhatsApp Puts Limit on Message Forwarding (theguardian.com)
WhatsApp users will be blocked from forwarding messages to more than five individuals or groups under new rules the messaging service is rolling out worldwide to fight the spread of misinformation. The company's vice-president for policy and communications, Victoria Grand, announced the policy at an event in Jakarta on Monday. The five-recipient limit was initially put in place in India last July. A larger limit, of 20 recipients, was put in place globally. WhatsApp said at the time the limits would "help keep WhatsApp the way it was designed to be: a private messaging app." Carl Woog, the head of communications at WhatsApp, which recently reportedly surpassed parent company Facebook's app in usage recently, said, "We settled on five because we believe this is a reasonable number to reach close friends while helping prevent abuse."
...this puts a limit also to the spreading of true news!
Does anyone have a messaging system with a web of trust system? That would solve the spam problem too, but without arbitrary limits. Of course, it requires technical competence, so perhaps that rules out Whatsapp from ever doing it...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
lets hope this is the end of people forwarding me stuff that was forwarded out of rote
good job FB
Spread of Fake News is a direct result of death of journalism. If Facebook was serious about tackling this problem they would find a way to revenue share with journalists.
Corporate media getting scared, huh? They can no longer control the message. They can't control the horizontal. They can't control the vertical. Eventually, the narrative they want to feed you will be exposed.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
How will this apply to fake news and not to real ones?
... made by people who don't know shit about programming.
OK, bots now can't just loop over a list of users and send one message. Have to do two loops to send one message for every five users.
In the meanwhile, real people has a worse (even worse) user experience.
Good job, assholes.
Bash Fox News just 3 days out from CNN, MSNBC, CNN, NBC, ABC, Buzz Feed, NYT, WaPo, and on and on all running with a story from BuzzFeed that sounded false, with unnamed sources and no ability to check if story is true. It was Fake News, but if it was true it "might" have lead to Trump being removed from office so that was more important than verifying the story.
Yea, Fox News is the big problem here.
Does anyone have a messaging system with a web of trust system? That would solve the spam problem too, but without arbitrary limits.
Your post advocates a
(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
If news, fake or true, can only be forwarded a fixed number of times, then people will re-describe the news in their own words. Introducing inaccuracies. It's like the game where the first person in a circle whispers a secret to the next person, it is repeated all the way around the circle, and then when the first person is told it, s/he describes how the story changed through being repeated (not retweeted).
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Hasn't everyone seen those youtube vids where 100's of MSM stations are saying the same crap word for word? Even the human interest story stuff? There's little or no journalism among the ones who self-elevate with that title...they're all repeating some "controlled narrative" primarily. Doing real investigative journalism is expensive, and the news is now entertainment. I'm not making that up, they say so themselves when sued for telling lies.
Just search youtube for something like "news all saying same thing" and see some of the examples. Of course, as with everything that can be clickbaited, the current shtick is to blame it all on one outfit - Sinclair, who, while no doubt guilty, isn't enough to account for even most of it.
Get it into some agency feed (AP etc) and they all say it, no checking whatever is done... Reminds one of the contract DARPA let out to learn to "control the narrative". Why they'd do this divisive stuff, if it's not just the old divide and conquer, I have no clue. Just note that they admitted it in public in an article on a science site in 2011 - awhile back, eh?
https://phys.org/news/2011-10-darpa-master-propaganda-narrative-networks.html And a previous president made lying to the public legal via NDAA. Which added to the permission to do so in the Patriot act, which was sitting collecting dust until a crisis too good to waste happened - it was ready to be voted on (to find out what was in it?) inside hours, quite a feat for that long a bill. I note this isn't partisan - it's all of them.
This is nothing more than totalitarian oppression. When Facebook et al firmly create and support fake news as trumpeted from "authoritarian sources"
Here's one that had everybody ready to start impeachment proceedings on Trump until Mueller countermanded them. Now it's been dropped down the memory hole.
https://news.yahoo.com/congressional-democrats-pledge-bottom-article-alleges-trump-directed-193508576.html
How about The Rock claiming SJWs are snowflakes also from a "reputable" source of journalism? Nah - he claimed it was all fake news and the story also disappeared down the memory hole
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/jan/12/the-rock-says-daily-star-interview-criticising-millennials-100-fabricated-dwayne-johnson
Then the story of the protesting kids wearing MAGA hats whom are being called out for racists from one video clip by all the major news sources. Yet the kids deny saying, doing or being anything of the sort - yet no "authoritative source" actually digs in to verify the story but just repeats what the accusers say, then what the activists supporting the accusers want to do to punish the kids. Only independent voices trying to verify the story are pointing out that this is not the truth WITH ACTUAL EVIDENCE are the only ones being objective here.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2019/01/20/more-fake-news-no-these-maga-hate-wearing-high-school-kids-didnt-hound-a-nati-n2539334
Sure - you may not like the sources or agree with the counter opinion. But this is not FAKE NEWS when backed up with actual testimony (kids' twitter statements) and evidence (other video sources of the same incident). When people are tried in the court of public opinion, silencing voices and opinions - as Facebook does here - to promote the official truth is EVIL, WRONG and leads to the truth being buried and destroyed.
This isn't about journalists doing "better" jobs - it's a matter of who watches the watchers to keep them honest and is part and parcel of the First Amendment. If the corporations have bought congress through lobbying then how hard is it to spend LESS money buying media companies to control the narrative altogether?
"...to fight the spread of misinformation." ...and to censor the opposition's real news because we have no ethics nor morals.
to fix the internet we must break the very idea of the internet - free sharing of information!
I wonder why any platform, email, messaging apps, twitter, facebook, whatever, allow you to forward live/clickable links and/or "previews" of links to each other anyway. It's a phishing risk from the outset. And truth is if you could only forward text links that people had to copy/paste into their browser to view, it would take a huge chunk out of the "fake news" industry as a bonus.
Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
It seems restriction of liberties follows the same course regardless of which rights are being suppressed. The next step will be a 5 day waiting period before being allowed to forward a message, or perhaps requiring a permit for every act of forwarding. And stern pronouncements about "no ordinary citizen needs or should have the technology to forward a message to more than 3 people".
Whatsapp=facebook. Telegram is much better. Briar is promising.
It looks that there is deficit of neuroleptics in your country.
I get my news from /.
No, that is exactly what a web of trust is for.
Efforts at web of trust mostly do not work for non-technical users which accounts for the majority of them. Without some central authority controlling things, it requires too much overhead and technical proficiency and cost to reliably build and maintain for a well performing decentralized system, especially at large scale. With a central authority controlling things you have the situation we have now with conflicts of interest on the part of the controlling authority. To date nobody seems to have come up with a workable solution to this problem palatable to the General Public.
Ideally it comes with a scoring system, and you can assign weights to users yourself.
"Ideally"? That doesn't sound ideal at all - it sounds like a huge pain in the ass time sink with some serious social baggage as well. Do you seriously think the General Public is going to want to bother with something like that? Scoring friends sounds like a great way to lose friends and colleagues. You know there is a reason people don't generally rank order their friends like Sheldon Cooper right?
Well, that's why I'm asking if anyone is trying it right now. I've never seen anyone attempt to do this with social networking in a way designed to benefit the users.
That's because there is no money in it when done in ways that accrue benefits to users as a primary motivation. Your motivations are commendable but it's hard to see a viable path to make it work in the real world. I would certainly like to see that change of course.
Nassim Taleb: "...the reliance on 1-sided accounts...which can be controlled by the mandarins, lasted from the mid 20th century until the US elections of 2016...social networks, allowing a 2-way flow of info, put back the mechanism of tidings in its natural format...journos worry considerably more about the opinion of other journalists than that of the general public. Compare to a healthy system, say that of restaurants...owners worry about the opinion of their customers, not those of other restaurant owners..." http://bit.ly/2W15vAG
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
It's pretty amazing to see Liberal leaning companies clamp down on all news they dont like.
When FB, etc, go after fake news the big focus is always conservative groups - never liberal fake news.
TBH I never thought the Thought Control would get like this. You have a few mega-companies controlling all of the internet - social media, search results, what you can share, what you can find, what is "real" and what is "fake".
Want to research fake news? Dont worry - Google will tell you the truth . . .
Now I love Jews even more!
Considering the bias in MSM:
- excluding pertinent facts
- excluding reporting issues all together
Maybe, more constructively, since NYT and WaPo have been gutted by FB financially, and don't actually report (see Crowder infiltrate ANTIFA) STUFF any more, we the USA, could impose a tax to - wait for it - *redistribute the wealth* of FB to a cross section of reporters and publishers. Considering that FB is a monopoly, we could have a committee consisting of N of out of power and N+1 of in power representatives who could all individually vote how they'd redistribute wealth to perform actual, you know, reporting?
Full disclosure : I micro funded and voted for Obama twice. The liberals, and MSM lost me when the leftists began screeching incoherently about Kavanaugh.
Was listening to a rational liberal (yes, there are some) pod cast. A "liberal reporter" (just as ironic as a conservative one) said "Elizabeth Warren failed in her announcement to give us something to REPORT" damn it. "She needed to say": "she'd run against whomever the repubs picked in 2020." The light bulb went on for me: the reporter was influencing the news. As Warren didn't give him anything that'd get clicks, and that's how he was getting paid (no clicks no $), her historic announcement as a handful of women ever in the USA *didn't get his coverage * as she didn't say anything controversial. OC-A OTOH, savvily ensures all tweets need re tweeting.
Paraphrasing Howard stern, folks were tuning in to hear what he said next. Those who hated him more than those who didn't.
So until FB is regulated to not get paid, or pay for clicks, this is a joke.
Then why would you downmoderate that post to hide it by your submission by anonymous coward so you could downmod vs. using your registered user account? Do you think fool anyone??
I only in the last few years realized just how biased the different news organizations are. At this point I pretty much just assume any mainstream news has some small element of fact in it with a massive spin factor for whoever their corporate/political sponsors are. It is REALLY hard to try to discern the actual events, causes and impacts.
I find it somewhat scary that the only method we have to combat this (ie posting what we think is going-on) is being limited under the guise of "stopping the spread of fake news" when in my mind, all the news we get has some element of fake in it.
Not surprised to see the entire discussion on Slashdot is wrongheaded. The REAL victim is the REAL news and the FAKE news is more like the gun that murdered it. The people who propagate the FAKE news are the REAL perps here, but I sure couldn't find any trace of understanding in this discussion.
It's the reputation of the perps that matters. In other words, if no one paid any attention to people who propagate FAKE news, then the problem would be solved. Right now the best approach I can imagine to doing this would involve MEPR (Multidimensional Earned Public Reputation). If you're a free-speech extremist, you could turn off the filters, but the default would be slightly positive and the trolls would start out invisible to most people and become less visible as they earned negative reputation on the honesty dimension.
Times up, so I bid you ADAuPR, atAJG.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
It looks that there is a deficit in your ability to validly disprove facts extolled here https://tech.slashdot.org/comm... only your downmods hiding it.
The "war on fake news" from what'sapp is very stupid.
Firstly they don't actually give a shit in the slightest, they just need to pretend they do.
Secondly it impacts normal people not forwarding fucking "news"
Example: I tell a friend a story of some kind, who knows? Maybe a big 3 paragraph job about what happened with my car crash or my crazy incident at the supermarket.
If I wrote such a thing in a particular way, I could forward to others without it being obvious. Saving me time. Then they added a "forwarded" flag to messages. Making me look rude. Or detached. By simply saving myself needing to re-type something.
Now they're going to limit how much I can forward? Not good at Xmas or new years, when you need to send those token messages that everyone does. (Insert Larry David moment here)
It just seems such a bizarre angle to tackle "fake news" in this way. Inconveniencing everyone?
Khazar Talmudic Jews believe this of all they call goyim/gentiles (any non-jew): Jews = biggest racists of all for which they "jew guilt" you for no less! They're hypocrites known as thieves all thru history or were Argentines in the 1940 under Peron, Spanish inquistion, France (1306), Egypt (despoiled/robbed by jews), Arabs (pre & post 1948), England (1330 Edward longshanks), Romans under titus, Russia pogroms and Germany who got rid of them from their nations nazi german's too? No. Driven into DESERTS ages ago! Don't wonder why after all those exilings above.
Should anyone doubt any of this see Jacob Javits' crony Rosenthal spill the beans on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4zMVZ8HnFI/ where he called all Christianity fools for helping Israel and the biggest scam of all time per their beliefs below from their Talmud.
This is the province of the synagogue of Satan (Pharisees whom Jesus Christ himself kicked to the curb out of the temple & they killed him for it. Jeremiah did the same to them also + the Essenes could not stand them either breaking away from the pharisee corruption):
Jew Talmud excerpts (the book that calls Christ's mother a whore & a bastard of a roman soldier):
1. Sanhedrin 59a: "Murdering Goyim is like killing a wild animal."
2. Abodah Zara 26b: "Even the best of the Gentiles should be killed."
3. Sanhedrin 59a: "A goy (Gentile) who pries into The Law (Talmud) is guilty of death."
4. Yebhamoth 11b: "Sexual intercourse with a little girl is permitted if she is three years of age."
5. Schabouth Hag. 6d: "Jews may swear falsely by use of subterfuge wording."
6. Hilkkoth Akum X1: "Do not save Goyim in danger of death."
7. Hilkkoth Akum X1: "Show no mercy to the Goyim."
8. Choschen Hamm 388, 15: "If it can be proven that someone has given the money of Israelites to the Goyim, a way must be found after prudent consideration to wipe him off the face of the earth."
9. Choschen Hamm 266,1: "A Jew may keep anything he finds which belongs to the Akum (Gentile). For he who returns lost property (to Gentiles) sins against the Law by increasing the power of the transgressors of the Law. It is praiseworthy, however, to return lost property if it is done to honor the name of God, namely, if by so doing, Christians will praise the Jews and look upon them as honorable people."
10. Szaaloth-Utszabot, The Book of Jore Dia 17: "A Jew should and must make a false oath when the Goyim asks if our books contain anything against them."
11. Baba Necia 114, 6: "The Jews are human beings, but the nations of the world are not human beings but beasts."
12. Simeon Haddarsen, fol. 56-D: "When the Messiah comes every Jew will have 2800 slaves."
13. Nidrasch Talpioth, p. 225-L: "Jehovah created the non-Jew in human form so that the Jew would not have to be served by beasts. The non-Jew is consequently an animal in human form, and condemned to serve the Jew day and night."
14. Aboda Sarah 37a: "A Gentile girl who is three years old can be violated."
15. Gad. Shas. 2:2: "A Jew may violate but not marry a non-Jewish girl."
16. Tosefta. Aboda Zara B, 5: "If a goy kills a goy or a Jew, he is responsible; but if a Jew kills a goy, he is NOT responsible."
17. Schulchan Aruch, Choszen Hamiszpat 388: "It is permitted to kill a Jewish denunciator everywhere. It is permitted to kill him even before he denounces."
18. Schulchan Aruch, Choszen Hamiszpat 348: "All property of other nations belongs to the Jewish nation, which, consequently, is entitled to seize upon it without any scruples."
19. Tosefta, Abda Zara VIII, 5: "How to interpret the word 'robbery.' A goy is forbidden to steal, rob, or take women slaves, etc., from a goy or from a Jew. But a Jew is NOT forbidden to do all this to a goy."
20. Seph. Jp., 92, 1: "God has given the Jews power over the possessions and blood of all nations."
21. Schulchan Aruch, Choszen H
Let everyone who receives a forwarded message see who was the originator of the story.
Keep the entire forwarding history and do not let anyone be hidden. This will also expose all the forwarding bots out there in short order.
Will make readers return to traditional media and newspaper bands?
A GUI layer over a website that has shows a web site is trusted by a think tank, NGO, NATO/EU govs and past US gov/mil workers?
Not been able to talk to more than 5 people about the news?
Someone really wants the USA only reading a few news and newspaper brands.
Thats your right to publish, be the press and be secure in your own papers getting reduced.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
They have just been caught again printing lies about Covington Catholic School Boys.. they saw some MAGA hats, and printed "Racists" in response.. and its so far from the truth of what happened its not funny. For those interested here is a full video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3EC1_gcr34
This is mostly a direct response to incidents that happened in India. People would start rumors of someone being a pedophile, which would then propagate like wildfire via WA forwarding. As a result, some people were killed by mobs. These were malicious rumors that led to people being killed! I was actually visiting India while some of this was going on. I didn't see any mobs, but it was all over the news.
It's SCARY that something like that could happen anywhere. It's a little more extreme than what we have seen in the US, but we've had our fair share of those types of incidents. Like the clown who went to the pizza place with weapons. I am sure there is more of it going on, every day, but that is why I avoid the news. Everyone seems to have lost their minds and information/misinformation is so NOW NOW NOW, REACT REACT REACT.
Will this limit be effective in slowing that kind of thing? I don't know.. but it may help without much harm.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Oh fucking wahhh! I bet you're the first fucker pestering the steward when you don't get your way. I know plenty of asshats like you. You want the Union services but don't want to pay for them. And you're also the first person to be whining that $HatedGroup is leeching off the system. I don't even have to guess or wonder; we have your posting history. Fuck. OFF.