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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.'"
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?
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.
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?
Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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
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.
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?
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"
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.