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Ask HN: Is there any accreditation body or credential for online news sites?

9 points by elinear ↗ HN
It seems like much of the fake news controversy that surfaced around the election could have been prevented if there was an organization that gave sites credentials verifying that they are legitimate news sources. This way, Facebook and Google (and any aggregator for that matter) could give higher standing to articles from accredited sites and lower to those from sites not accredited. If it doesn't exist yet, would such a body end up surfacing from one of the big internet players, or should it be an independent body?

13 comments

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AjJi
I think the first question to ask is, what is a "legitimate news source"?
berntb
Exactly.

That said, Facebook could be better with very small updates to catch paid propaganda.

I am Swedish, a country with a small population close to Russia. On public people's open FB accounts you will often find a lot of comments with very unusual opinions in Sweden, writing exactly the same thing as Putin's media.

The way to identify these accounts is to see if they can write anything negative about Putin. I typically write: "Do you condemn Putin for starting wars for territory in Europe again, like Hitler and Stalin in the 30s?". If they can't, it is overwhelmingly likely that is someone working in St Petersburg -- even most Swedish old style communists get upset by that.

Sorry for the rant, this is irritating.

Edit: On second consideration, it was quite a while since I saw these accounts? Maybe FB started doing exactly that.

kolinko
I'd love to have a plugin that for every website visited tells me if they published any rumors that later proved to be incorrect.
FeatureRush
We already had similar discussion here in Poland couple years ago. The thing was: should all on-line news sites be officially registered in similar way as paper newspapers? Then what about blogs, personal webpages and other sites that are not strictly news sites but do happen to publish/spread news? Obviously it went nowhere. It would create a new barrier for a lots of people trying to simply publish something on the Internet and would not really fix much. Not to mention that in Poland there are already mechanisms in place to stop/punish people spreading harmful information, and that laws are not tied to any specific medium - do you not have those in USA? If the news/article/comment/etc is untrue then someone can sue, right?

The real problem here is that people put trust in things they should be skeptic about and the official certification not only doesn't fix it, actually it could make it worse depending on who is in power...

kolinko
Registration and accreditation/verification are two different things. In Poland, the govrnment wanted to register websites, without fact-chekcing afaik
FeatureRush
You are probably right, it was some time ago, but did they also not wanted other things that paper publications are required, like storing copy in some archive?

Anyway, accreditation would make it even more troublesome and still would not solve the root issue and even if we focus on scenario OP described: FB ranking the news by trust, there are still many loopholes here. Like publishing true news with a spin or simply spamming worthless articles "Random Celebrity said good things about President Candidate" - just that alone would still do the trick.

aaronhoffman
Can it be decentralized?

What about a browser extension that allows users to "rate" each story/author?

You could follow other users you trust, and get an aggregate of their ratings so you wouldn't just get the global rating, which could be corrupted.

collyw
That will just end up like Facebook - an echo chamber.
brudgers
It exists in many countries.

Governments license news organizations and journalists. Governments review stories. Governments run the legal print and broadcast media. Governments regulate access to web sites.

Be careful what you ask for...but consider donating to Poynter: http://www.poynter.org/

elinear
My thought is that such a body would act like existing organizations that, for example, certify medical professionals, engineers, accountants, or even colleges. For online news it may look like a journalism credential, requiring sites to follow basic and sound journalistic ethics when publishing. By these standards it should be easy for the large papers (NYT, WSJ, etc) as well as your local news and tv to receive accreditation for their sites. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accreditation
RogueX
In my experience, people simply don't care. If the headline is juicy enough and is something they very much want to be true, they share it and reshare it on social media without bothering to examine the source, much less the content. Worse, a lot of these people have a distrust of "mainstream media" and professional journalists. They seem to have this notion that all journalists are part of some global media conspiracy to just make stuff up (though no one seems to know what the actual motives are for this supposed conspiracy), so they trust some dimwit blogging from his mom's basement who claims he has "inside sources" that no major media organization has. That's what we're dealing with here in the U.S.