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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."
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.'"
No, it doesn't. Nor would it limit the ability to manually spread fake news either.
Just yesterday I shared on WhatsApp a Facebook post with pictures of some wicked-ass PC modding. I shared it with 8 people, by copy/pasting the URL to the Facebook entry. You will be able to do that in the future as well.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
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.
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.
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.