Nothing surprising from a company that notoriously fumbles removal of content (minor nudity gets removed while violence, abuse, fake pages and graphical gore (not in a journalistic sense) remains)
Facebook Has Repeatedly Trended Fake News Since Firing Its Human Editors
101–110 of 335 posts
Re: Facebook Has Repeatedly Trended Fake News Since Firing Its Human Editors
#102Thank god someone is writing about this. Recently I've been on the Yahoo's homepage a lot, because of Fantasy Football, and I noticed that a lot of the content is exactly like the article says, fake news from right-wing propaganda sites. And no, this is not me expressing my liberal bias. It's one thing to have opinionated headlines like the Huffington Post, it's another thing to have a completely fictional headline c…
Some people say it's impossible to have unbiased news. Of course this is true in a trivial sense, in that anything written by a human with intent to be interesting to read is likely to have some bias. And of course one can bias the news simply by choosing what to report and not report (eg if all you report are all the things fmr Pres. Bush did wrong, then the audience will get a bad impression). However, there is abs…
>> When you read 3 different versions of the same news story by BBC, NPR, and NYT (for example), then hopefully the biases sort of cancel out and you get something closer to the truth.
You list three left-leaning news organisations, and expect their biases to cancel out? Wouldn't they reinforce each other?
Re: Facebook Has Repeatedly Trended Fake News Since Firing Its Human Editors
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You're going to have to break the Turing Test before you get good automated content curation. There will always be error. Yes, but even a competent AI curation system is going to make mistakes. The only relevant question is "what is an acceptable rate of error?". (Hint: 0% is not an acceptable answer.) We may be able to get to an acceptable rate (or may already be there) with or without AI-complete. > People are wo…
> The only relevant question is "what is an acceptable rate of error?". (Hint: 0% is not an acceptable answer.) Certainly it is. That just means you're admitting that the problem cannot be satisfactorily solved by current AI and must be left to humans for now.
I doubt the error rate was 0% with human curators. In fact, the article itself does not compare the error rate of the human curators to algorithm, just examines that it was above zero after the humans were removed.
I think an acceptable statement to make would be that the human curators probably reduced the number of "fake stories", but that's not why they were removed. It's a different judgement call whether the trending feed is "better" or "worse" in some holistic sense.
Furthermore, there seems to be an implicit assumption that Facebook's Trending stories should not contain "fake stories", but is that the intended goal of the service? I actually have no idea, since I've never used it.
Re: Facebook Has Repeatedly Trended Fake News Since Firing Its Human Editors
#104Thank god someone is writing about this. Recently I've been on the Yahoo's homepage a lot, because of Fantasy Football, and I noticed that a lot of the content is exactly like the article says, fake news from right-wing propaganda sites. And no, this is not me expressing my liberal bias. It's one thing to have opinionated headlines like the Huffington Post, it's another thing to have a completely fictional headline c…
For someone outside of U.S, both right (breitbart etc.) and left (huff etc.) are propaganda all the way down . It is your left bias. And the people on other political spectrum feel the same but other way around.
Watching American elections is like seeing a freak show. I don't understand who are those people who can support any of the candidates or the media.
Re: Facebook Has Repeatedly Trended Fake News Since Firing Its Human Editors
#105What is the error rate of fake news over verified (real) news? A 5% margin of error could be acceptable. A 50% error rate would indicate a serious problem. > As part of a larger audit of Facebook’s Trending topics, the Intersect logged every news story that trended across four accounts during the workdays from Aug. 31 to Sept. 22. During that time, we uncovered five trending stories that were indisputably fake and th…
This raises the really interesting point that news doesn't have a post mortem process. It would be a very interesting experiment to, say, revisit a sampling of top stories at some interval (say 3-6 months) and compare the reported facts ( and omissions ) with the actual reality. From such elements as "did names and places get accurately reported?" to "was the underlying narrative correct?". Quotes and attributions mi…
>This raises the really interesting point that news doesn't have a post mortem process.
Great idea, and what higher education should be doing for research. Generally there's no process.
But personal experience is that whenever I have been involved in a situation about which news has been made, the outcome has always been that the reporting is somewhat sloppy, inaccurate, and agenda-driven.
This is with so-called reputable journalism; "fake news" is then even worse.
So, even if I do a non-professional post-mortem on my own, I see that the news was not completely healthy. And pointing this out to journalists generally makes them just angry. Even if you are completely polite, they block you on Twitter, etc. If you comment a news article in reputable newspapers' web sites to correct errors with good sources, it's not unusual that the comment is moderated away.
Re: Facebook Has Repeatedly Trended Fake News Since Firing Its Human Editors
#106Thank god someone is writing about this. Recently I've been on the Yahoo's homepage a lot, because of Fantasy Football, and I noticed that a lot of the content is exactly like the article says, fake news from right-wing propaganda sites. And no, this is not me expressing my liberal bias. It's one thing to have opinionated headlines like the Huffington Post, it's another thing to have a completely fictional headline c…
For someone outside of U.S, both right (breitbart etc.) and left (huff etc.) are propaganda all the way down . It is your left bias. And the people on other political spectrum feel the same but other way around. Watching American elections is like seeing a freak show. I don't understand who are those people who can support any of the candidates or the media.
I disagree. Not well versed in Huff Po but the left-leaning likes of NYT publish stories based in fact and backed up with reporting. Breitbart report whatever they wish without ever confirming if anything in a story is true.
Re: Facebook Has Repeatedly Trended Fake News Since Firing Its Human Editors
#107There's a peculiar detail in this story. It refers to "the 'Association of American Physicians and Surgeons' — a discredited libertarian medical organization." 1. First, why the quotes around the name of the organization? Is this not its actual name? 2. Discredited? By whom? Isn't "discredited" an objective judgement -- and thus, one the author should support with a rationale? 3. Further, it's odd that of all the exa…
Because they promote objective untruth: HIV doesn't cause AIDS, abortions cause breast cancer, vaccines cause autism, and so on. They're a low-quality organisation who use a fancy name to impress the impressionable.
Re: Facebook Has Repeatedly Trended Fake News Since Firing Its Human Editors
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
For someone outside of U.S, both right (breitbart etc.) and left (huff etc.) are propaganda all the way down . It is your left bias. And the people on other political spectrum feel the same but other way around. Watching American elections is like seeing a freak show. I don't understand who are those people who can support any of the candidates or the media.
I disagree. Not well versed in Huff Po but the left-leaning likes of NYT publish stories based in fact and backed up with reporting. Breitbart report whatever they wish without ever confirming if anything in a story is true.
Can you link to a story that reports a 'fact' that is proven false? Because yes, I see the political-right spin on the facts on Breitbart but I've never seen them report something that is flat-out wrong.
Re: Facebook Has Repeatedly Trended Fake News Since Firing Its Human Editors
#109Fake news are better than biased news.
In what way? Explain and justify, please.
Re: Facebook Has Repeatedly Trended Fake News Since Firing Its Human Editors
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
For someone outside of U.S, both right (breitbart etc.) and left (huff etc.) are propaganda all the way down . It is your left bias. And the people on other political spectrum feel the same but other way around. Watching American elections is like seeing a freak show. I don't understand who are those people who can support any of the candidates or the media.
I disagree. Not well versed in Huff Po but the left-leaning likes of NYT publish stories based in fact and backed up with reporting. Breitbart report whatever they wish without ever confirming if anything in a story is true.
NYT published a news article about car fires in Denmark, where they blamed the "right wing lower class" for the fires. No evidence given for this at all. Infact all evidence points in a different direction: Arab Ghetto kids (I live in one of the places, where there was car fires, I can tell you that the right-wing thing is complete BS)