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Introducing: The Facebook Journalism Project

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Re: Introducing: The Facebook Journalism Project

#51

Post by collias »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #49
threeseed wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mainstream media did a fine job. Your criticism is completely misplaced. The New York Times, CNN, Guardian etc all reported the verified facts. Which is that a report was produced by an ex-MI6 spy looking into allegations that Russia had amongst others compromising video involving prostitutes/golden showers and President Elect Trump. This report was obtained by John McCain and passed to the FBI for verification.…

I don't see why Buzzfeed are being criticised for it either, because they only reported verified facts - that the report was going around, that it was neither verified or falsified, that it contained errors and falsehoods. I imagine the others are just annoyed Buzzfeed jumped first when they all had it so they're criticising them.

Wouldn't pushing a story that was "neither verified or falsified", be considered "fake news", by some definition?

Re: Introducing: The Facebook Journalism Project

#52

Post by wyldfire »

mattlevan wrote: post #8

Is there anything Zuckerberg doesn't want to get his company involved with? It's been said on HN again and again, but I'm really looking forward to a decentralized digital publishing platform that gains momentum and actually gives Facebook a run for its money. Anyone know of any such existing platforms up and running now? Last I looked into this, I discovered "Steemit", but it doesn't seem very promising.

> It's been said on HN again and again, but I'm really looking forward to a decentralized digital publishing platform that gains momentum and actually gives Facebook a run for its money.

I don't think one has a chance of succeeding in the short term IMO. Diaspora, GNU social are attempts. They all are on the wrong side of the network effect / Metcalfe's law. There would need to be a significant downside to using facebook or a significant upside to using the competition to get people to move. I don't think there are much incentives to be had there.

Re: Introducing: The Facebook Journalism Project

#53

Post by NoGravitas »

oculusthrift wrote: post #29
wfo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could ask how you draw the line between "mainstream media" and "lies" just as easily and just as poignantly. The answer is easy in both cases. When they lie, it's a lie. When they don't, it's not.

because "mainstream media" like nyt and wapo have well respected, educated journalists working around the clock to research stories and find evidence whereas "alternative media" is a guy in his moms basement making up stories. just as with science, people only dispute it when it goes against their own interests.

That's quite an oversimplification. Your characterization of the alternative media is sometimes right (except that they're usually not making up stories -- they're usually summarizing stories produced by regular journalists, often with an editorial overlay). But there are also alternative media sources doing real research and investigative journalism, like Democracy Now! and the Intercept.

On the other hand, the biggest, most respected of the mainstream publications, the NYT and the WaPo, have permanently tainted themselves by acting as stenographers for US government disinformation campaigns -- most notably in the run-up to the Iraq war, when they consistently promoted the fake WMD story.

Re: Introducing: The Facebook Journalism Project

#54

Post by collias »

threeseed wrote: post #46
gspetr wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CNN is so corrupt it looks like a parody network. Their most egregious breach of ethics to date: On October 31, 2016, the New York Times reported: "CNN has severed ties with the Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, after hacked emails from WikiLeaks showed that she shared questions for CNN-sponsored candidate events in advance with friends on Hillary Clinton's campaign." CNN said it had accepted her formal resignatio…

Donna Brazile shared questions with the candidates and CNN promptly terminated her position. What exactly did CNN do wrong here ? By your definition every company that has a employee who makes an egregious mistake is corrupt.

To be fair, it wasn't just Brazile. CNN is caught multiple times in the leaked emails collaborating directly with the DNC. Examples include asking for questions from the DNC to ask during the Republican debate, vetting Wolf Blizter's questions for Trump through the DNC. Brazile was just setup to take the fall since she had feet in both CNN and the DNC.

Re: Introducing: The Facebook Journalism Project

#55

Post by mcintyre1994 »

ihsw wrote: post #28

It still doesn't change the fact that news orgs universally lack the time to conduct real journalism -- fake news is a direct result of reducing the time that journalists have to vet and verify content. Frankly I'm quite happy about "fake news" proliferating, it makes obvious how hopeless and useless news orgs are. They peddle claptrap and tripe with reckless abandon. Facebook could throw ten thousand engineers at th…

What do you mean by fake news?

It seems to have started out as actual made up news by organisations/people/websites pretending to be news organisations, but actually just making things up - eg. The pope endorsing Trump story and I'm sure loads more on both sides.

Then some professor published his list of fake news sites, and included a bunch of conservative media sites as well as satire as well as obvious fake news, there's probably some liberal legitimate media sites there too.

Then after Trump won conservatives started saying every liberal media site had been peddling fake news when they reported polls etc had him way down and Hillary was winning.

I've probably missed a load more things but my point is, I have no idea what fake news is at this point - but I do know that at least some of it isn't a result of a lack of time by legitimate journalists, some of it is just people making stuff up.

Re: Introducing: The Facebook Journalism Project

#56

Post by threeseed »

collias wrote: post #51
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why Buzzfeed are being criticised for it either, because they only reported verified facts - that the report was going around, that it was neither verified or falsified, that it contained errors and falsehoods. I imagine the others are just annoyed Buzzfeed jumped first when they all had it so they're criticising them.

Wouldn't pushing a story that was "neither verified or falsified", be considered "fake news", by some definition?

Fake news means that the story was deliberately made up. Nobody did that in this case.

The report was verified to be written by the ex-MI6 spy. The claims in the report are what are yet to be verified.

Re: Introducing: The Facebook Journalism Project

#57

Post by Vaskivo »

komali2 wrote: post #22
Vaskivo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You shouldn't censor lies. You should prove that they are lies. [EDIT] (just to add something to my post) If you delete/ommit/censor lies youd end up with: a) If every lie is removed, maybe everything that was removed is a lie. Which is not true. b) You end up with a "cry wolf situation", which may blow up hardly on facebook. You don't "cry wolf". You show that the wolf is there. Otherwise, the first time you screw u…

But people don't believe proof that a lie is a lie - see the entire Trump phenomena. All he has to do is Tweet "fake news," and people won't believe any attempts to rationalize.

Just because it doesn't work perfectly it doesn't mean we shouldn't do the right thing.

To me, the ends don't justify the means.

Re: Introducing: The Facebook Journalism Project

#58

Post by imh »

6stringmerc wrote: post #25

Notably absent: Any mention of compensating the "participants" that Facebook is, I'd wager, pitching behind-the-scenes as a gigantic pool of free talent / labor ripe for monetization both as advertising targets and content generators! Disclosure: I'm on Medium and don't get paid diddly for my writings on there, nor spend much of any time investing in the Facebook ecosystem because it reminds me too much of AOL.

I'd imagine that in a pay-per-whatever, traditional news orgs aren't going to beat clickbait trash orgs. They talked about trying to help the news orgs subscription funnel, which seems a better solution.

Re: Introducing: The Facebook Journalism Project

#59

Post by threeseed »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #55
ihsw wrote: post #28

It still doesn't change the fact that news orgs universally lack the time to conduct real journalism -- fake news is a direct result of reducing the time that journalists have to vet and verify content. Frankly I'm quite happy about "fake news" proliferating, it makes obvious how hopeless and useless news orgs are. They peddle claptrap and tripe with reckless abandon. Facebook could throw ten thousand engineers at th…

What do you mean by fake news? It seems to have started out as actual made up news by organisations/people/websites pretending to be news organisations, but actually just making things up - eg. The pope endorsing Trump story and I'm sure loads more on both sides. Then some professor published his list of fake news sites, and included a bunch of conservative media sites as well as satire as well as obvious fake news,…

Fake news should only really refer to the type of news that was generated from the kids in Eastern Europe i.e. completely made up with zero truth behind it.

Unfortunately fake news has come to mean "news that I disagree with".

Like today when Trump tweeted that the BuzzFeed story was fake news even though there was nothing fake about it. Just that the claims were as yet unverified.

Re: Introducing: The Facebook Journalism Project

#60

Post by jawns »

ihsw wrote: post #28

It still doesn't change the fact that news orgs universally lack the time to conduct real journalism -- fake news is a direct result of reducing the time that journalists have to vet and verify content. Frankly I'm quite happy about "fake news" proliferating, it makes obvious how hopeless and useless news orgs are. They peddle claptrap and tripe with reckless abandon. Facebook could throw ten thousand engineers at th…

> Conduct real journalism with well-paid staff that have the time to do their job

I can guarantee you that every single editor in the country would like to have well-paid staff who have the time to do their job well.

And if you can come up with a business model to make it happen, well then I am willing to dub you the savior of the news industry.

But absent any suggestions about how news organizations can actually accomplish this, your comment is basically just kicking them while they're down.

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