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Snowden: Stop Relying on Facebook for Your News

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Re: Snowden: Stop Relying on Facebook for Your News

#141
post #136
post #119

The last 12 months I have visited Snopes more times than not in order to disprove some of the articles my Facebook friends choose to share. It's slightly alarming that people don't think they need to fact check. You know it's bad when the President-elect opens up about his internet fact checking[0]. It sets a dangerous precedent. There are less intelligent people in this world who read deeply into these "articles" an…

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ~ William Casey, CIA Director

The discussion by the source of the quote is worth a read (in the comment thread): https://www.quora.com/Did-William-Casey-CIA-Director-really-...

> Though not explicitly said at that time, it was made clear in other contexts during my two years in the West Wing in the highest level meetings that the pretext for this mentality was the claim that in a Cold War era when communications were essentially instantaneous, the vast majority of "the enemy's" - then the Soviet Union's - "intelligence" was also based on open press and media sources, so the most efficient way to lie to the Soviets was to lie in the U.S. and allied media, which meant the American public believing the lies was considered a kind of 'collateral damage.' (Barbara Honegger)

Re: Snowden: Stop Relying on Facebook for Your News

#143
post #106

I have interacted with several people on Facebook who rely on fake news sources. I pointed out fake news articles several times on one person's Facebook page. She agreed the articles were not true. However, she added "I don't have time to figure out if they're true. People can read your comments." I asked her what she thought of the fact that this particular article, which was blatantly false, was shared 16,000 times…

For people in China where Facebook is not accessible, however, the same things happen in WeChat, especially in its Moments timeline which more or less resembles the one from Facebook. Fake `news', rumors, (unreliable) hints for health/food and click-baits are just more than popular. WeChat did provide a process to flag inappropriate articles, but people around the age of my parents just won't stop forwarding.

I keep thinking China is right to block Facebook, but you're right they have their own implementation of the problem anyway.

Re: Snowden: Stop Relying on Facebook for Your News

#144
post #119

The last 12 months I have visited Snopes more times than not in order to disprove some of the articles my Facebook friends choose to share. It's slightly alarming that people don't think they need to fact check. You know it's bad when the President-elect opens up about his internet fact checking[0]. It sets a dangerous precedent. There are less intelligent people in this world who read deeply into these "articles" an…

> What can we do? Upvotes/downvotes? Won't work at scale, because likes/shares have a connotation of legitimacy. News verification seems like the perfect application of NLP, AI, and data mining techniques. Can it make any money for anyone? Right now it is much more profitable to make fake news and use data mining to manipulate people: http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/features/2015-11-12/is-the...

I don't think those technologies are well suited to this problem at all. I was just talking to some Swiss journalists last night. You know what Swiss news organizations are using those technologies for? To make their writing more "engaging", i.e. more sensationalist, not for fact-checking.

Re: Snowden: Stop Relying on Facebook for Your News

#145

I have interacted with several people on Facebook who rely on fake news sources. I pointed out fake news articles several times on one person's Facebook page. She agreed the articles were not true. However, she added "I don't have time to figure out if they're true. People can read your comments." I asked her what she thought of the fact that this particular article, which was blatantly false, was shared 16,000 times…

There was a paper published about how being presented with disconfirming evidence causes people to double down on their belief in a lie if it has an emotional connection with them.

Re: Snowden: Stop Relying on Facebook for Your News

#147
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Changing from electoral college to pop vote also means the nature of campaigning will change. California, for example, has a huge population of Republicans and now their vote would matter. I don't think Trump did any non military focused rallies there. I am in Illinois. I didn't vote in 2008 or 2012 because I knew my vote would have no impact. Give me a popular vote and you might have Romney... Be careful what you wi…

Wouldn't Romney in 2012 have been better if it avoided Trump 2016?

Lol. Bill Maher misses W.

Re: Snowden: Stop Relying on Facebook for Your News

#149

Why is social media getting all the flak? What about all the fake news on Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, CNN, Fox News, et al?

All of the organizations you listed employ fact checkers who are responsible for checking articles for accuracy and facts. Sure, they make mistakes from time to time, they're human. Disagreeing with the slant of an article doesn't mean it's fake news.

Re: Snowden: Stop Relying on Facebook for Your News

#150
post #109

Fake news, hoaxes and scams existed long before Facebook. People just use Facebook more, things can spread faster, and all in all it amplifies an existing problem. Email forwards (and in their newer reincarnation, at least in the Middle East, Whatsapp forwards) spread false news for as long as I remember using the internet. A part time job for me was to respond and debunk these emails when they landed in my inbox. I…

I used to subconsciously judge email based on the amount of "fw:re:fw:fw:fw" on it. The more fwd:/re: the less I trusted the data. I wonder if this was ever valid signaling, but I also wonder if people trust articles more on FB because, AFAIR, it's hard to tell how many times an article has been re-shared, or "forwarded".
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