And you think the B.S. detector was blocked quickly. There would be a pure vacuum left in the internet due to the quickness with which a third party remover would disappear.
I expect Facebook is saturated and or declining in the US due to excess BS. A few years ago it was rare that I would find a "fb free" person. Now it is much more common (maybe as much my age group as fb though).
This is funny, because the only reason tinder values a facebook login is if users were robust facebook users pre-tinder (and thus easily verifiable as real people), so it's ultimately all for naught.
No. I had nothing "liked" and it will simply insert things that your friends like, which is typically awful, or things that it thinks are interesting to you based on your advertising profile (eg: like DJ gear? you should like guitar center!)
I ask myself this about everyday I open the app. Unfortunatly, the answer is always: well in between all the BS there are things my family post or members of groups I joined post. So I keep on going even though I find it appalling.
Facebook is an easy way for my friends to call my attention to a piece of external content that I might otherwise have not known about (and vice versa).
For example one FB friend follows whitewater racing closely and is constantly posting articles and videos from local websites throughout Europe. I would never get to see this content otherwise.
Sure a lot of people on HN don't like Facebook or don't use Facebook, but about a billion people do. And they do it for a reason: they like it.
The question is what obligation does Facebook have to those people--and to society in general--to avoid fooling or exploiting them. I'd say it is at least "some".
>> For example one FB friend follows whitewater racing closely and is constantly posting articles and videos from local websites throughout Europe. I would never get to see this content otherwise.
Do you seek out this content now that you've seen it? Has it made you a bigger fan of whitewater racing?
exactly. if it comes down to people internalizing information from various sources without any critical thought, its really too late for democracy. trying to vet the sources after the fact is pointless. if any random person can bring down society purely by spewing innuendo, then the whole premise of the fourth estate is flawed.
People keep saying that Facebook should be doing more to block fake news, but here's the part that I don't get: why do you want Facebook to exercise even _more_ discretion over what kind of news people see?
That's to say nothing of the sheer difficulty of classifying something as "fake news". What's the threshold? How do you determine if something is fake news? Should stuff like Clickhole and The Onion - y'know, satire news - be considered fake news? What about sources like the Huffington Post, which masquerades as a newspaper but is literally a glorified blogger platform?
It's easy to be outraged rather than actually thinking about the problem.
HEADLINE:"FACEBOOK NEWS FEED POPULATED BY BIASED EDITORS"
INTERNET:"MACHINE LEARNING IS UNBIASED WHY ISN"T FB USING ML?"
--
HEADLINE:"FACEBOOK NEWS FEED POPULATED BY FAKE NEWS BECAUSE ML ISN'T DIFFERENTIATING NEWS TYPES"
INTERNET:"FACEBOOK NEEDS TO CONTROL WHAT NEWS GETS ON THE NEWS FEED"
---
HEADLINE:"FACEBOOK CENSORING CONTROVERSIAL NEWS"
INTERNET:"FACEBOOK NEEDS TO HIRE EDITORS THAT WON'T CENSOR THINGS"
Great point; the question then becomes why is this interference necessary? Largely due to ads. Instagram made their feed algorithmic recently for this reason.
Fighting fake news would not increase the degree to which Facebook shapes what people see. It would just adjust the criteria. Facebook already exerts total control over what its users see.
"Discretion" is not the right word, though, because Facebook is algorithmic. The problem is simply that the algorithm is optimizing for the wrong thing, which is causing harm.
It's like if you decided what to eat and drink solely by how sweet things taste. Each individual bite would be pleasurable. But the long-term health effects of eating nothing but sweets would be terrible.
Blocking is not the only answer BTW. Simple labeling would go a long way. The Onion would still be funny with a little "satire" tag.
It would just adjust the criteria from things Facebook thinks they'd want to see to things that powerful people think would tilt the users' political views in the right direction. That's a major change, and one that - by design - transfers a huge amount of power and control from individual Facebook users to the centralized approvers of permitted content.
How does Facebook determine what facts are without politics?
Facebook fact checking materials before displaying them is fundamentally political, if only because the decision of filtering strategy is a political choice.
A news story that the Pope endorsed Trump is fiction and should be labeled as such.
That has political implications because everything does. But evaluating content based on those implications, rather than on the actual facts, is a categorical error.
We label fiction and nonfiction in libraries, book stores, movies, magazines, etc--basically every other medium for accessing content. Why not Facebook too?
"The Pope endorses Trump" would be labeled as fiction. But what about "The Pope endorses [some of] Trump's views"? Or "The Pope is a bigger fan of Trump than you think"?
Facebook is not even addressing the most blatant, obvious fake news.
In fact, they do the opposite: they promote it to millions of people. Or more accurately, they permit their software to do so. And they claim they have no responsibility, even though they built the entire thing.
Facebook does not want to lose revenue from advertisers that submit fake news articles.
I saw the BS News extension it checks each link for citing known fake news sites in their article.
It is not practical as I keep seeing new fake news sites popping up from nowhere. Just register a domain, install Wordpress, write some articles and then pay for advertising on Facebook.
Fake news sites got Trump elected by saying false things like the Pope supports him. It is serious when people only use Facebook as their only news site and read and believe without checking the facts first.
If I were to make a fake news site detector I'd have it search Snopes and Politifact and others to see if it has been already reported as false.
Basically the way it ends up is a new way to censor the news using AI.
Suppose instead of a black list of sites they use a white list of trusted sites? Then block any new sites until they can verify them as trusted?
You didnt answer my question at all: how does Facebook, prior to the political decision of how to determine what facts are, know that the Pope endorsing Trump is fiction?
How does Facebook determine what facts
are without politics?
Perhaps they could determine what facts are by seeing if they're true or not?
For example, if an article states that Colorado pot shops accept food stamps [1] or that Dearborn in Michigan follows Sharia law [2] perhaps Facebook could determine those articles are satirical because they aren't true?
How does Facebook determine if something is true prior to the political choice of the method they'll use to determine truth?
You just moved words around, but my original question is still there: how do you without any political decisions determine what is true?
There is no single method for determining truth, thus which for a collective to use is fundamentally a political choice.
You and a sibling comment seem to be forgetting that we need to decide how we're going to determine truth before we go about doing it. In fact, you assume Facebook knows a fact (that potshops dont accept foodstamps), but how does Facebook know that is a fact or not?
How does Facebook, without making a choice about what method to use, determine that the pope didn't endorse Donald Trump?
If Facebook makes a choice of method, it's fundamentally political, as all group choices are.
Thus, Facebook can't escape the political nature of that task: epistemology requires a philosophical position, and a philosophocal position being adopted is a choice (for an organization), and all group decisions are inherently political.
That applies to everyone in life and you're already doing that by looking at an algorithmically curated feed. I'd much rather it at least tell me what's fake news so I don't waste my time.
Facebook itself is already a bunch of powerful people - the people who make the decisions about how content is served to users.It's already a centralized source of power.
Facebook already exercises this power by deciding how to determine what users "want" to see, i.e., what Facebook thinks users want to see.
I'm not sure how you could claim that individual Facebook users have much power at all. What they see is totally determined by the platform.
Facebook doesn't show people things Facebook thinks they'd want to see. Facebook shows people things that Facebook thinks will get them to spend more time on Facebook. There's a very important distinction between the two.
> The problem is simply that the algorithm is optimizing for the wrong thing, which is causing harm.
It's optimizing for the right thing, if you are Facebook: it's giving you more and more content you feel comfortable with, so you spend more time on the site and they can sell more ad space.
"Facebook already exerts total control over what its users see."
That bothers me a little. I have a page and Facebook somehow decides who and when a post is shown to a user who liked the page. It seems that Facebook shows it to a small group of people over an hours time or so and then depending on whatever metrics and interactions are made to a wider group or not.
I don't know if it is good or bad because some posts that do very well on Reddit and Hacker News do very poorly on Facebook while posts that do very well on Facebook can do very bad on Reddit and Hacker News.
> why do you want Facebook to exercise even _more_ discretion over what kind of news people see?
The argument is that, whether we like it or not, Facebook has become the hub for millions of people and these people share articles with each other. Media has become decentralized, and although the libertarian approach of do-nothing sounds nice, we just found out that in practice it doesn't work very well. You thought the Reddit fiasco with the marathon bomber was bad? The equivalent is happening a thousand times over with fake news spreading faster than the news that debunks it.
What's your metric for communication platform full of user generated content 'working well'?
I'm not trying to be snarky, I don't see how this can possibly be a failing of Facebook unless you really believe that an algorithm that ranks posts can actually fix the human problems that underlie this issue.
When I said that it wasn't "working well", I was referring to the epidemic of fake news. It turns out that, for better or worse, a significant amount of the population is using Facebook for its news source. We can say that they're silly and shouldn't be using Facebook for news, but they are and they're not going to stop until a systemic solution is put into place.
Fake news, and its far more dangerous big brother, propaganda, can have an enormous effect on a society. Providing people with tools to identify real information from fake information seems like a great thing for those who want to use them.
But a lot of folks (whether they realize it or not) want to see fake news because it confirms their personal worldview (or: how everyone loves confirmation bias) and makes them feel good about being part of their in-group.
I suspect folks who push for censorship think that it will somehow ensure these types of folks don't consume fake news or propaganda (probably without realizing that they, too, have consumed fake news from time to time).
But the reality is fake news has existed for a very very long time. Hell, you could tune into MSNBC or Fox News and find stories that border pretty closely on fake news without even trying. And, again, they do it because it increases ratings. And it increases ratings because it makes people in their respective demographics feel good.
So what you're ultimately trying to fight is the human need for a sense of belonging, and the desire to feel good about their personal beliefs. Good luck with that...
Yes. The problem is most of these companies that want to fight "fake news" would probably almost completely focus on "new sites" that have fake news, and perhaps a couple of other "more obvious" big sites like Breitbart.
But what happens when the fake news comes from CNN? Will Facebook block CNN or WSJ articles that spout lies and are blatantly incorrect?
The problem with this is that these days, you often also get the "real news" from smaller sites, like DemocracyNow, or others even smaller, that report on NoDAPL protests when none of the big news sites do. What if Facebook gets used to censoring these sites, though, even though they report the real news out there? And would we even know? After all, they are small sites, that few people would know about in the beginning.
Not so thin at all. I think there is a pretty clean delineation between satirical sites like the onion (i.e. Social commentary) and the sort of "fake news" we are talking about here. These fake news posts are presented as factual, with the purpose of supporting a political or social goal - in other words propaganda.
No one thinks it would be a simple task, but if you consider it a threat to democracy you can understand why many want a solution.
Blatant lies intended to scare people into voting a certain way are a problem. How much of a difference is there really between "vote X or I'll kill your family" and "vote X or someone else will kill your family" if the intent is the same?
The gray zone expands even more with the lesser-known satire sites, which sometimes have a mix of articles that are obviously satire, and some that aren't.
For example, I've seen a few articles shared as truth from "World News Daily Report," which played it so straight that I would have considered it "fake news" if I hadn't seen the satire disclaimer tucked at the bottom of the page. Other articles on that same site are much more obviously satirical though. I tend to blame this on poor writing rather than malice, though you can probably make a decent counterargument.
Some sort of "possibly false" notice attached to links like these, rather than just a "block or not" decision, seems like it would strike a nice balance here.
Also, the people making loud, direct calls for censorship are mostly journalists, writers, and opinion-makers. Seems like great fodder for views and clicks. Perhaps there's much for them to gain by whipping up drama (and potentially alienating competition).
Wouldn't it be reasonable to force facebook and similar social network sites to be transparent about how they rank articles? And in combination with this make reasonable legislation on content responsibility.
Welcome to the original "editorial" question. Read up on "Yellow Journalism" for a history.
The answer to your rhetorical is "some people start from a position of reporting responsibility some start from a position of personal responsibility."
Lets presume there is a conversation between Alice and Bob on what is happening. Eve can hear both conversations and to some extent can ascertain when either Alice or Bob are communicating a falsehood or a misstatement to the other.
In the personal responsibility policy camp Eve doesn't do anything, it is up to Alice and Bob to evaluate the integrity and accuracy of the other's facts. In the reporting responsibility policy camp, if either Alice or Bob is communicating to a group (which is to say the communication is one to many) then Eve must inform the many when Alice states a falsehood or lies, conversely if Bob is the one who is communicating to the many then his falsehoods and/or misleading statements must be called out.
Facebook lands in the middle because both Alice and Bob are in fact communicating to lots of people (everyone on the feed, everyone reading the comments section what ever). As the "market maker" for this meeting of speakers and listeners, either Facebook is 100% responsible for the quality of the facts or 100% not responsible for the quality of the facts.
If you think of the information being exchanged as "product" and people publishing information as "sellers" and people reading that information "buyers" (even though there may be no financial transaction involved), there is quite a bit of experiential guidance around what the market owner must do versus the sellers and buyers in the market. The challenge is that people who might be suspicious being offered a Rolex watch at a flea market for a fraction of the price, seem more willing to believe a "news story" from an unaccredited news source which differs markedly from what the mainstream press is reporting. If they saw such news stories as 'cheap rolexes' it might activate the same sorts of suspicions they would get in a market when the price is too good to be true.
Facebook already exercises a lot of discretion -- they reorder posts on your timeline to drive engagement, they promote related links, they have the Trending bar, etc. People aren't asking them to do more. They're asking them to do what they're doing now more responsibly.
I couldn't agree more. I don't think Facebook should necessarily block fake news (however you want to define it) but it might be nice to let me know before I share a story that they think it's satirical because of reason A and reason B or that it's inaccurate for other reasons.
This is good for me because I don't look dumb for sharing something that's incorrect and it's good for Facebook because now they know even more about me (that I love satire but hate fake news, for example).
It's easy to verify that a plugin modifies the Facebook site and block links to it. It's much harder to tell whether the list of fake news sites it uses is itself fake or the plugin is a security issue, let alone whether particular articles are truthful.
Well, actually, perhaps not. That's the point. Past a certain size, if you're sleazy and manipulative we're going to control your actions.
But even if, how is that "sure, but you can't legally stop them" a defense? How is it one you feel compelled to make?
Especially because I can technologically stop them. They can block one plugin, and detect one set of blocks, but it's a game we've played many times before and the defense always loses.
As long as it is public as to what they are blocking or flagging, then it's better than not doing it at all. The bigger problem is people may not either care or believe something is fake news, just because someone highlights it as such. It would be nice if there were questionnaires with people's voting, so post-election we could see how much understanding or knowledge different groups have; you couldn't, at least initially, put any weight on what someone's vote is worth based on this of course.
That's why you don't block; you flag. Let people make their own choices, but informed. Allow users to flag a link or post with tags such as Satire, Misleading, Controversial, Editorialized, Biased, Debunked, etc. Everyone else can still view the links and posts, but with some small indication of its trustworthiness. Though I feel like some tags, such as Debunked, should perhaps require a supporting link attached to a flag.
Are the ads also getting a "biased"-tag? It also stifles media competency. I think a better approach would be to give a daily or weekly summary of questionable Articles that where opened by the user.
>but here's the part that I don't get: why do you want Facebook to exercise even _more_ discretion over what kind of news people see?
This one is easy: people in these parts think that the fake news is one-sided, and that it got a president they don't like elected. So now fake news is a major issue.
No. The solution is to setup a Ministry of Truth like what Facebook is trying to do. People are too stupid and must be protected from reading #FakeNews because they can not think for themselves. Let the corporations and the government think for them.
I suggest Facebook block all types of content… they can start by blocking all personally-identifiable information. Short of that, they should be responsible and shut down their irresponsible service.
The problem with this, of course, is that even Pulitzer winning organizations are guilty of being fake news. And they're, arguably, far more damaging than National Enquirer type headlines.
That got even more ridiculous when Josh Marshall of TPM and Paul Krugman of the New York Times got pissed off at all the people who didn't buy it because of course, everyone knows that Russia was influencing the election: https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/802192619627540480 Just like the most obnoxious fake-news-spreading social media users, the fact that it confirmed their belief was more important than its obvious fakeness.
And make no mistake, a dodgy anonymous group spreading dubious but terrifying stats about Russian propaganda whilst redefining that to mean any site posting politicial views they disagree with is a form of fake news, even if they eventually managed to find a reputable news organisation that would launder their claims for them.
The problem with the NSA database -- and I assume the Russian equivalent -- is that it can be used to hide interference in other nations (or domestically), using social graph information and psychology profiles.
I don't believe that the issues which won Trump the election are because of Russian influence -- they're generational scale strategic blunders on the part of the US -- but that several of them became "active" at a critical moment in US politics is precisely how covert warfare between large nations is enacted (or, at least, is the obvious extension of Cold War tactics).
It's very likely that Russia executed an operation against the US during the most recent election cycle. The actual effectiveness of that, and the culpability we bear in leaving the nation is such a vulnerable state is a matter of considerable debate.
Didn't check myself, can you just provide any example of that? Poster above says it blocks Wikileaks as a rumor site which is, um, not even non-left-wing. Wikileaks is a legitimate source that isn't partisan, but partisan people love or hate it whenever it reveals something good or bad for their side. :P
Ah, Facebook nowadays is just idiots writing their friends' names underneath meme pics, because they think that's how you share stuff with friends: some content has 100K comments, but most of it is just people's names, such a tragic UX. The great news is that this 9gag-level junk content is what will turn away their eyeballs base.
It's too easy to blame Facebook in this case. Fake news has a market because people seek it out. Some may want to believe the fake news to confirm a world view they hold and others may see it as entertainment.
The real problem here is why do people want to believe things that are obviously not true? Maybe some of it is that the world is increasingly more complicated. You can't explain most issues without researching current events and having a firm grasp of history. Perhaps it is comforting for people who do not have the time or the ability to understand complex problems.
In my opinion, the easiest thing for Facebook to do to fix the problem is to just bring back the chronological news feed. If a friend of mine shares something Facebook assumes I don't agree with then I should be the one to make that decision, not an algorithm.
This will break the "bubbles" by forcing people to talk to each other again.
Fake news is a problem because the wrong metrics are being targeted. Fake news vendors are seeking clicks because ctr maps directly to their revenue stream. So they make outrage click bait, get the money, and compete to make the most outrageous stuff. There's a mix of human psychology and general platform failure going on here.
> Fake news vendors are seeking clicks because ctr maps directly to their revenue stream.
This is an absolutely important aspect of the fake news problem. It goes back to when news started to be run for profit, which has always been the case to some degree. In recent decades it appears to have accelerated.
The internet during this time started to become commercialized as well. The ad supported internet and for profit news combine to create this scenario.
Maybe it is a chicken and egg problem... Does supply drive demand in this case or is it the other way around? I genuinely do not have an answer and suspect it is somewhere in the middle. It is an unfortunate symbiotic relationship we have found ourselves in.
Ugh. Facebook should quit pretending to be part of the web. Just recreate the AOL experience and be done with it.
It is beyond embarrassing that they're blocking people from helping each other in order to fail at saving, er, face.
"Share with your friends in any way our PR department approves!" At least China isn't weaselly about its control-freakery. Zuck & pals really should own theirs.
- it's hard to draw a line between true and false in the presence of subjective information.
- it's hard to do a classification without false positives and false negatives.
- it's hard to defend yourself from accusations of bias and manipulation in the presence of false positives/false negatives.
- it's hard to scale a process involving human reviewers.
So, in short, what they did is to let the community regulate their own content. If people visit some stupid article about curing cancer by eating cheetos while twerking then that is what is going to trend. If people want to read about Brawndo, the thirst mutilator and how awesome it is on plants let them read it.
Then, just like television is not responsible for TV addicts, Facebook may not be responsible for the susceptibility of people to believe and share fake news.
I think the problem to address should be improving education. If you are well educated it would take a much more elaborate effort to trick you. It's still possible, e.g: race baiting and conspiracy theories have become a thing lately.
I would like to see a raw unfiltered stream on Facebook with some colored labels like satire, entertainment, opinon, etc. Rather than label an entire source, each story should be labeled, perhaps by a community effort.
Deciding what is fake and what is not with an algorithm is a slippery slope.
Mainstream media rushed stories that created their own echo chambers last week with the Ohio State incident.
Newsweek was just on air the other day saying they published a story that they did not read or write. If mainstream journalists are not doing their job, how can we trust an algorithm to get it right?
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"The list of domains powering the B.S. Detector was somewhat indiscriminately compiled from various sources around the web." You don't say. Could that be why thedailywtf.com is in that list?
Facebook policing fake news haha let me laugh, is facebook serious? Facebook is having trust issues left and right, but still they want block and controll and play judge of fake news.. this is hilarious indeed!
Facebook, go home please. Your business is censorship and thats not what I'm after. Freedom of speech, thanks!
> We are fearless in our efforts to get the unvarnished truth out to the public. When information comes in, our journalists analyse the material, verify it and write a news piece about it describing its significance to society. We then publish both the news story and the original material in order to enable readers to analyse the story in the context of the original source material themselves.
that's incredibly simple, I thought some NLP and web crawling was involved.
The bigger challenge are fake news generating disinformation and fake comments on various social media platforms.
This is especially true in reddit where sockpuppetry and vote manipulation as well as band wagoning is rampant. Anonymity in social network seems to serve the voice of those who exploit it's weakness as well as the general naivety and indifference from it's audiences.
For example, in various cryptocoin subreddits I'm seeing a lot of said activities, even where it is blatantly obvious, the moderators seem to turn the other cheeck as it generates long debates.
As I recall, Zuckerberg did the same shit in the early days according the movie The social network where he would jump in discussion and generate long debates. Except, now the very technique is being used for political and manipulations in un-regulated "crypto-anarchist-code-is-law" market exchanges.
It's a matter of time before more tools that help the user cut through the bullshit appears. There will be tit for tats on both sides but in the long run it's to make fake information expensive to be disseminated.
Will detect the lies about weapons of mass destruction?
Will detect about lies in basic statistics like gross product or unemployment done by Gov agencies?
It is said that the first victim in any war is Truth, as we get nearer a financial collapse because debt unsustainable path the people in power are getting more and more worried and want to exert some kind of censure about news and data they can't control.
It would be great to have fake news and data detector that are not centralized. Oh wait, they already exist: places like shadowstats.com
But I bet that if you access those places you will become labeled a fake news subversive that doubts the sacred news that people in power want you to believe.
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People are actively trying to turn the internet into a safe space ignoring free speech and all the hard work that came before to keep it.
There is no 100% filter for fake news especially with all this propaganda from governments not excluding the United States.
Then you are simply left with updates about your friends.
I expect Facebook is saturated and or declining in the US due to excess BS. A few years ago it was rare that I would find a "fb free" person. Now it is much more common (maybe as much my age group as fb though).
I can't stand using Facebook on my phone due to lack of ad-blocking (Sponsored stories) and other tweaks FBP gives...
For example one FB friend follows whitewater racing closely and is constantly posting articles and videos from local websites throughout Europe. I would never get to see this content otherwise.
Sure a lot of people on HN don't like Facebook or don't use Facebook, but about a billion people do. And they do it for a reason: they like it.
The question is what obligation does Facebook have to those people--and to society in general--to avoid fooling or exploiting them. I'd say it is at least "some".
Do you seek out this content now that you've seen it? Has it made you a bigger fan of whitewater racing?
127.0.0.1 facebook.com 127.0.0.1 login.facebook.com 127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com
into your /etc/hosts file.
Or :: for IPv6.
That's to say nothing of the sheer difficulty of classifying something as "fake news". What's the threshold? How do you determine if something is fake news? Should stuff like Clickhole and The Onion - y'know, satire news - be considered fake news? What about sources like the Huffington Post, which masquerades as a newspaper but is literally a glorified blogger platform?
HEADLINE:"FACEBOOK NEWS FEED POPULATED BY BIASED EDITORS"
INTERNET:"MACHINE LEARNING IS UNBIASED WHY ISN"T FB USING ML?" -- HEADLINE:"FACEBOOK NEWS FEED POPULATED BY FAKE NEWS BECAUSE ML ISN'T DIFFERENTIATING NEWS TYPES"
INTERNET:"FACEBOOK NEEDS TO CONTROL WHAT NEWS GETS ON THE NEWS FEED" --- HEADLINE:"FACEBOOK CENSORING CONTROVERSIAL NEWS" INTERNET:"FACEBOOK NEEDS TO HIRE EDITORS THAT WON'T CENSOR THINGS"
GOTO 1
All they need to do is nothing. Don't favor some news, don't block fact-checkers. Just let me see everything my friends post.
"Discretion" is not the right word, though, because Facebook is algorithmic. The problem is simply that the algorithm is optimizing for the wrong thing, which is causing harm.
It's like if you decided what to eat and drink solely by how sweet things taste. Each individual bite would be pleasurable. But the long-term health effects of eating nothing but sweets would be terrible.
Blocking is not the only answer BTW. Simple labeling would go a long way. The Onion would still be funny with a little "satire" tag.
We need to know the truth about facts. Only then can we make useful political decisions about those facts.
Facebook fact checking materials before displaying them is fundamentally political, if only because the decision of filtering strategy is a political choice.
That has political implications because everything does. But evaluating content based on those implications, rather than on the actual facts, is a categorical error.
We label fiction and nonfiction in libraries, book stores, movies, magazines, etc--basically every other medium for accessing content. Why not Facebook too?
"The Pope endorses Trump" would be labeled as fiction. But what about "The Pope endorses [some of] Trump's views"? Or "The Pope is a bigger fan of Trump than you think"?
In fact, they do the opposite: they promote it to millions of people. Or more accurately, they permit their software to do so. And they claim they have no responsibility, even though they built the entire thing.
I saw the BS News extension it checks each link for citing known fake news sites in their article.
It is not practical as I keep seeing new fake news sites popping up from nowhere. Just register a domain, install Wordpress, write some articles and then pay for advertising on Facebook.
Fake news sites got Trump elected by saying false things like the Pope supports him. It is serious when people only use Facebook as their only news site and read and believe without checking the facts first.
If I were to make a fake news site detector I'd have it search Snopes and Politifact and others to see if it has been already reported as false.
Basically the way it ends up is a new way to censor the news using AI.
Suppose instead of a black list of sites they use a white list of trusted sites? Then block any new sites until they can verify them as trusted?
Decisions with political implications are not the same thing as political decisions. Huge categorical difference, in fact.
For example, if an article states that Colorado pot shops accept food stamps [1] or that Dearborn in Michigan follows Sharia law [2] perhaps Facebook could determine those articles are satirical because they aren't true?
[1] http://www.denverpost.com/2014/01/14/fake-report-about-color... [2] http://nationalreport.net/city-michigan-first-fully-implemen...
They may need to make things more obvious.
You just moved words around, but my original question is still there: how do you without any political decisions determine what is true?
There is no single method for determining truth, thus which for a collective to use is fundamentally a political choice.
You and a sibling comment seem to be forgetting that we need to decide how we're going to determine truth before we go about doing it. In fact, you assume Facebook knows a fact (that potshops dont accept foodstamps), but how does Facebook know that is a fact or not?
Facts are facts. The pope did not endorse Donald Trump. That is a fact.
If Facebook makes a choice of method, it's fundamentally political, as all group choices are.
Thus, Facebook can't escape the political nature of that task: epistemology requires a philosophical position, and a philosophocal position being adopted is a choice (for an organization), and all group decisions are inherently political.
Facebook already exercises this power by deciding how to determine what users "want" to see, i.e., what Facebook thinks users want to see.
I'm not sure how you could claim that individual Facebook users have much power at all. What they see is totally determined by the platform.
It's optimizing for the right thing, if you are Facebook: it's giving you more and more content you feel comfortable with, so you spend more time on the site and they can sell more ad space.
That bothers me a little. I have a page and Facebook somehow decides who and when a post is shown to a user who liked the page. It seems that Facebook shows it to a small group of people over an hours time or so and then depending on whatever metrics and interactions are made to a wider group or not.
I don't know if it is good or bad because some posts that do very well on Reddit and Hacker News do very poorly on Facebook while posts that do very well on Facebook can do very bad on Reddit and Hacker News.
The argument is that, whether we like it or not, Facebook has become the hub for millions of people and these people share articles with each other. Media has become decentralized, and although the libertarian approach of do-nothing sounds nice, we just found out that in practice it doesn't work very well. You thought the Reddit fiasco with the marathon bomber was bad? The equivalent is happening a thousand times over with fake news spreading faster than the news that debunks it.
I'm not trying to be snarky, I don't see how this can possibly be a failing of Facebook unless you really believe that an algorithm that ranks posts can actually fix the human problems that underlie this issue.
Fake news, and its far more dangerous big brother, propaganda, can have an enormous effect on a society. Providing people with tools to identify real information from fake information seems like a great thing for those who want to use them.
But a lot of folks (whether they realize it or not) want to see fake news because it confirms their personal worldview (or: how everyone loves confirmation bias) and makes them feel good about being part of their in-group.
I suspect folks who push for censorship think that it will somehow ensure these types of folks don't consume fake news or propaganda (probably without realizing that they, too, have consumed fake news from time to time).
But the reality is fake news has existed for a very very long time. Hell, you could tune into MSNBC or Fox News and find stories that border pretty closely on fake news without even trying. And, again, they do it because it increases ratings. And it increases ratings because it makes people in their respective demographics feel good.
So what you're ultimately trying to fight is the human need for a sense of belonging, and the desire to feel good about their personal beliefs. Good luck with that...
But what happens when the fake news comes from CNN? Will Facebook block CNN or WSJ articles that spout lies and are blatantly incorrect?
The problem with this is that these days, you often also get the "real news" from smaller sites, like DemocracyNow, or others even smaller, that report on NoDAPL protests when none of the big news sites do. What if Facebook gets used to censoring these sites, though, even though they report the real news out there? And would we even know? After all, they are small sites, that few people would know about in the beginning.
The Onion might disagree with that. The line between one man's satire and another man's propaganda is a pretty thin one.
Blatant lies intended to scare people into voting a certain way are a problem. How much of a difference is there really between "vote X or I'll kill your family" and "vote X or someone else will kill your family" if the intent is the same?
... a pretty damn big difference there. Not the best analogy you could have used.
For example, I've seen a few articles shared as truth from "World News Daily Report," which played it so straight that I would have considered it "fake news" if I hadn't seen the satire disclaimer tucked at the bottom of the page. Other articles on that same site are much more obviously satirical though. I tend to blame this on poor writing rather than malice, though you can probably make a decent counterargument.
Some sort of "possibly false" notice attached to links like these, rather than just a "block or not" decision, seems like it would strike a nice balance here.
The answer to your rhetorical is "some people start from a position of reporting responsibility some start from a position of personal responsibility."
Lets presume there is a conversation between Alice and Bob on what is happening. Eve can hear both conversations and to some extent can ascertain when either Alice or Bob are communicating a falsehood or a misstatement to the other.
In the personal responsibility policy camp Eve doesn't do anything, it is up to Alice and Bob to evaluate the integrity and accuracy of the other's facts. In the reporting responsibility policy camp, if either Alice or Bob is communicating to a group (which is to say the communication is one to many) then Eve must inform the many when Alice states a falsehood or lies, conversely if Bob is the one who is communicating to the many then his falsehoods and/or misleading statements must be called out.
Facebook lands in the middle because both Alice and Bob are in fact communicating to lots of people (everyone on the feed, everyone reading the comments section what ever). As the "market maker" for this meeting of speakers and listeners, either Facebook is 100% responsible for the quality of the facts or 100% not responsible for the quality of the facts.
If you think of the information being exchanged as "product" and people publishing information as "sellers" and people reading that information "buyers" (even though there may be no financial transaction involved), there is quite a bit of experiential guidance around what the market owner must do versus the sellers and buyers in the market. The challenge is that people who might be suspicious being offered a Rolex watch at a flea market for a fraction of the price, seem more willing to believe a "news story" from an unaccredited news source which differs markedly from what the mainstream press is reporting. If they saw such news stories as 'cheap rolexes' it might activate the same sorts of suspicions they would get in a market when the price is too good to be true.
This is good for me because I don't look dumb for sharing something that's incorrect and it's good for Facebook because now they know even more about me (that I love satire but hate fake news, for example).
I'd be happy if they did nothing, and simply let me read what I want. But this is the worst situation.
No, it doesn't. That's a serious abuse of the language. What you describe would be hacking into Facebook.
What the plugin does is help me not load content I don't want.
The browser is my user-agent and I'm instructing it how to display the content delivered to me.
> It's much harder to tell whether the list of fake news sites it uses is itself fake
Exactly, and yet they're trying harder to block a fact checker than to block the bad news.
If they just backed off on both I could see the bad news and have my plugin flag it.
> or the plugin is a security issue,
Not even close. It's not like Facebook is cleaning up malware plugins.
They're only targeting this one because it threatens their editorial control of my feed.
But even if, how is that "sure, but you can't legally stop them" a defense? How is it one you feel compelled to make?
Especially because I can technologically stop them. They can block one plugin, and detect one set of blocks, but it's a game we've played many times before and the defense always loses.
The entire problem is that most people don't know or realize when articles qualify for any of these criteria.
THIS IS SATIRE: at the top of ONION articles. THIS IS FAKE: on top of us-political-truth-grabber-buzz.com
maybe OPINION gets added to HUFFPO
I think that would likely be enough to satisfy most of the needs.
... Although while we're talking blue sky / greenfield ... maybe we add something like:
to all that shitty clickbait out there :)God that sounds amazing. I'd want to see the dog video, but I refuse to click on principle.
Can crowdsource summaries and make a chrome plugin?
For the same reasons why I want my email provider to block spam or for my search engineer provider to block shady viagra ads.
This one is easy: people in these parts think that the fake news is one-sided, and that it got a president they don't like elected. So now fake news is a major issue.
https://www.google.com/amp/www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/...
And make no mistake, a dodgy anonymous group spreading dubious but terrifying stats about Russian propaganda whilst redefining that to mean any site posting politicial views they disagree with is a form of fake news, even if they eventually managed to find a reputable news organisation that would launder their claims for them.
I don't believe that the issues which won Trump the election are because of Russian influence -- they're generational scale strategic blunders on the part of the US -- but that several of them became "active" at a critical moment in US politics is precisely how covert warfare between large nations is enacted (or, at least, is the obvious extension of Cold War tactics).
It's very likely that Russia executed an operation against the US during the most recent election cycle. The actual effectiveness of that, and the culpability we bear in leaving the nation is such a vulnerable state is a matter of considerable debate.
Newsfeed advertisements lead to rich multimedia posts which lead to news and then fake news.
From a product standpoint, I think they should not have allowed news organizations on the platform.
The real problem here is why do people want to believe things that are obviously not true? Maybe some of it is that the world is increasingly more complicated. You can't explain most issues without researching current events and having a firm grasp of history. Perhaps it is comforting for people who do not have the time or the ability to understand complex problems.
In my opinion, the easiest thing for Facebook to do to fix the problem is to just bring back the chronological news feed. If a friend of mine shares something Facebook assumes I don't agree with then I should be the one to make that decision, not an algorithm. This will break the "bubbles" by forcing people to talk to each other again.
This is an absolutely important aspect of the fake news problem. It goes back to when news started to be run for profit, which has always been the case to some degree. In recent decades it appears to have accelerated. The internet during this time started to become commercialized as well. The ad supported internet and for profit news combine to create this scenario.
Maybe it is a chicken and egg problem... Does supply drive demand in this case or is it the other way around? I genuinely do not have an answer and suspect it is somewhere in the middle. It is an unfortunate symbiotic relationship we have found ourselves in.
It is beyond embarrassing that they're blocking people from helping each other in order to fail at saving, er, face.
"Share with your friends in any way our PR department approves!" At least China isn't weaselly about its control-freakery. Zuck & pals really should own theirs.
- it's hard to draw a line between true and false in the presence of subjective information.
- it's hard to do a classification without false positives and false negatives.
- it's hard to defend yourself from accusations of bias and manipulation in the presence of false positives/false negatives.
- it's hard to scale a process involving human reviewers.
So, in short, what they did is to let the community regulate their own content. If people visit some stupid article about curing cancer by eating cheetos while twerking then that is what is going to trend. If people want to read about Brawndo, the thirst mutilator and how awesome it is on plants let them read it.
Deciding what is fake and what is not with an algorithm is a slippery slope.
Mainstream media rushed stories that created their own echo chambers last week with the Ohio State incident.
Newsweek was just on air the other day saying they published a story that they did not read or write. If mainstream journalists are not doing their job, how can we trust an algorithm to get it right?
http://www.pradhanmantriyojana.org/2016/08/02/digilocker/
Facebook, go home please. Your business is censorship and thats not what I'm after. Freedom of speech, thanks!
This is what I feared would happen with plugins and concepts like this.
Wikileaks is a "rumor" site. It doesn't provide verified information.
This is a blatant lie. But I guess this is the type of propaganda and JTRIG ops that we have to get used to.
https://wikileaks.org/About.html
> We are fearless in our efforts to get the unvarnished truth out to the public. When information comes in, our journalists analyse the material, verify it and write a news piece about it describing its significance to society. We then publish both the news story and the original material in order to enable readers to analyse the story in the context of the original source material themselves.
The bigger challenge are fake news generating disinformation and fake comments on various social media platforms.
This is especially true in reddit where sockpuppetry and vote manipulation as well as band wagoning is rampant. Anonymity in social network seems to serve the voice of those who exploit it's weakness as well as the general naivety and indifference from it's audiences.
For example, in various cryptocoin subreddits I'm seeing a lot of said activities, even where it is blatantly obvious, the moderators seem to turn the other cheeck as it generates long debates.
As I recall, Zuckerberg did the same shit in the early days according the movie The social network where he would jump in discussion and generate long debates. Except, now the very technique is being used for political and manipulations in un-regulated "crypto-anarchist-code-is-law" market exchanges.
It's a matter of time before more tools that help the user cut through the bullshit appears. There will be tit for tats on both sides but in the long run it's to make fake information expensive to be disseminated.
Now the question is, the fake news detector:
Will detect the lies about weapons of mass destruction?
Will detect about lies in basic statistics like gross product or unemployment done by Gov agencies?
It is said that the first victim in any war is Truth, as we get nearer a financial collapse because debt unsustainable path the people in power are getting more and more worried and want to exert some kind of censure about news and data they can't control.
It would be great to have fake news and data detector that are not centralized. Oh wait, they already exist: places like shadowstats.com
But I bet that if you access those places you will become labeled a fake news subversive that doubts the sacred news that people in power want you to believe.