If enough people believe it it must be true, right? Right?
Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News
221–230 of 239 posts
Re: Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News
#222If enough people believe something it must be true, right?
Re: Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I agree, but it's impossible to educate everyone on any subject. Critical thinking is universal though. It's not a necessity to have a solid judgment of a piece. "Critical abstention" is a possibility, and primarily formal analysis is another (eg. search for common communication red flags). I don't think that the parent idea of removing likes and counts is realistic (in any imaginary scenario I can think of).
> Critical thinking is universal I'm assuming you don't spend a lot of time on Facebook?
I'm assuming you do. Otherwise you would have understood the comment.
Re: Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
An educated person can judge the trustworthiness of a source well enough.
No they cant. See, I can make things up too. Furthermore the amount of education necessary to judge the trustworthiness of all potential subjects is not obtainable by an individual, meaning they have to hope the experts they choose to listen to aren't making it up.
Yes, they can.
If all you do to measure trustworthiness is check if the person has an expert tag, I can see your problem.
Re: Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe Facebook has a responsibility to not show Alex Jones videos even to those that would agree with them.
Well, on the one hand, sure. I think Alex Jones is a conspiracy-theory charlatan, a good representative of "fake news" as a matter of a fact (see: Pizzagate). The fact that his site also pushes dubious supplements (like "super advanced vitamin B-12" and "survival shield", which is a "proprietary nascent iodine" formula) says it all to me. On the other hand, no. I'm not comfortable with a social media network that det…
> On the other hand, no. I'm not comfortable with a social media network that determine your news feed "appropriateness", via an opaque Brazil-esque (the movie, not the country) bureaucratic process that says "yay" or "nay"
Completely agree. But I'm actually less comfortable with the status quo of state controlled botnets spreading a goo of fake news, and people living in those fake media bubbles it creates. Wikipedia is definitely a role model here. Unsure if twitter and facebook could achieve the same level of control, if they could it would be great.
Re: Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure what's obtuse about the second bit. If the goal is just weakening the US Russia is not the only actor with the motive.
The point is only reasonable when divorced from all context of Trump's Russian contacts, Russia's interest in getting sanctions overturned, Russia's known past disinformation campaigns, DNC hacking, wikileaks, etc. Within the proper context it is entirely unreasonable to even posit some other actor working to influence the election.
The DNC/WikiLeaks stuff is thinly sourced and the rest of it not that compelling.
Re: Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe it makes sense, but Vladimir Putin has superpowers if everything people blame on him is true. And Mr. Hearn's article nicely illustrates how shaky the foundation is for a lot of claims of Russian influence.
This is one of the most absurd talking points of this whole thing. It doesn't take "superpowers" to zero in on existing rifts in a society and magnify them. It has been well documented that Putin has a well-oiled disinformation machine that is adept at exploiting existing social issues.
Who doesn't? The US has those too and they don't just operate internationally.
But more to the point, there is a moral panic going on where the bar is drastically lowered for what information is considered credible of it involves "Russian collision," and it seems to mostly serve domestic political purposes. How else can you explain a raving crank like Louise Mensch appearing in mainstream news sources?
Re: Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News
#228A fraction of revenue from popular pages should fund a manual fact checking process that either temporarily grants or denies that page a trusted status.
People don't care about "fact checking". The NYT, or the Wall Street Journal's newsrooms simply don't make factual errors, except occasionally spelling someone's name wrong, Nobody cares.
Your counter example uses a trusted source of info. The people who actively read those sources likely DO trust them. Facebook lets anyone post anything (to the extent that fake news is a huge problem), and reaches a much larger audience.
Re: Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News
#229This is the opposite of what they should have done. Shows just how much of an echo-chamber Facebook has become. This is just adding another metric by which garbage can be made legitimate and vice versa. Facebook would be a much better platform if they removed the like and comment count from every post. It’s those numbers that lead people to believe that garbage is legitimate in the first place. By hiding these number…
> This is the opposite of what they should have done. Shows just how much of an echo-chamber Facebook has become.
News itself is an echo chamber. Don't see how that is facebook's fault.
The reason news is toxic isn't facebook. It's foxnews, nytimes, wapo and the entire media industry.
Not sure why you think "like" buttons would change that.
The news echo chamber existed before facebook. It existed for zuckerburg was born. It'll exist long after facebook is gone.
The only solution is for facebook to ban news entirely from facebook. But then the news industry would get very upset.
Re: Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe with your quotes, you may be referring to the phrase "fake news" but fake news has been around as long as humans & probably even longer. I'm glad people are giving this a discussion though.
No, "fake news" refers to a very specific phenomenon. It's not just any kind of misleading or incorrect reporting. Trump was the one to start saying "not fake news, YOU'RE fake news", but the phenomenon as initially encountered was about shoddy and small fraudulent websites, often trying to deceive their audience to believe that they were a different website, pushing the most anger-inducing news. It's a far cry from…
Interesting that "Before it was news" is on the list of fake news sites, its a page aggregator like Reddit and hacker news, fake articles can be posted, but doesn't make the entire site fake.
Community news/comments can be wrong, but that's a far far different than a site intentionally promoting fake propaganda, which is the true meaning of a fake news site.
And even then, propaganda can blur into a political view, then even farther into down right lies.