Slashdot Mirror
Snopes Quits Fact-Checking Partnership With Facebook (cnbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Snopes, a fact-checking organization, announced on Friday its decision to end its partnership with Facebook, which has been ramping its efforts to curb misinformation on its services since the 2016 U.S. election. Facebook and Snopes had been working together since December 2016 to fact check content on the social network. The company in 2017 paid Snopes as much as $100,000 for the work, according to Snopes. "At this time we are evaluating the ramifications and costs of providing third-party fact-checking services, and we want to determine with certainty that our efforts to aid any particular platform are a net positive for our online community, publication, and staff," Snopes said in a statement.
Snopes said it has not closed the door on working with the company again, but it encouraged Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to meet "with fact-checkers as part of his recently announced series of public discussions" in 2019. The partnership is ending weeks after a report by The Guardian, in which multiple former Snopes employees criticized Facebook's efforts to stop fake content on its services.
Snopes said it has not closed the door on working with the company again, but it encouraged Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to meet "with fact-checkers as part of his recently announced series of public discussions" in 2019. The partnership is ending weeks after a report by The Guardian, in which multiple former Snopes employees criticized Facebook's efforts to stop fake content on its services.
How do you provide crucial public services in a marketplace that works largely by the relative absence of exactly those services that used to be considered crucial? In this case, basic rigor in critical thinking about events of the day.
You can harp on fundraising - like Wikipedia does, and NPR does on the regular - but then your role shifts over time to being an injured bird that sings for crumbs - an injured bird that is supposed to represent an entire set of crucial viewpoints against a market that now thinks that everything else is 'the other side' of a rather stupid division of argument.
But how do you change that equation? Even if you did, how would you change that equation that doesn't just dissolve into the same intentionally muddied negative values that politics is mired in?
These questions are often part of most skeptical minded communities over time - whether 'liberal' or 'conservative' minded - how to you fight that ghettoization of thought that comes with reducing the insanity of a system.
My preference would be to have it just be considered part of basic public education - then Snopes and the like can just be a normal source of continuing general education, which is really the proper role, regardless of your political preferences.
Ryan Fenton
Facebook made over $6 billion in profit this past quarter alone. The fact that the threw $100k to Snopes shows that FB doesn't give a crap about trying to fix their fake news problems. Also shows that the average user (American) also doesn't give a crap.
What I find weird is that it is all advertising. Just money taken from the old print and TV medias, re-routed to Facebook. Does this advertising even work? So while old-school CPG manufacturers are paying tons of advertising to Facebook, and simultaneously being eaten alive by Amazon and non-brand items...at what point do they start cutting back on their advertising budgets?
A quick google search... https://www.realclearpolitics....
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.