Facebook announces new push against fake news after Obama comments

[malaise]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/19/facebook-fake-news-mark-zuckerberg
<snip>

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced new steps to counter fake news on the platform on Saturday, marking a departure from his skepticism that online misinformation is, as Barack Obama said this week, a threat to democratic institutions.

“We take misinformation seriously,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post on Saturday. “We know people want accurate information. We’ve been working on this problem for a long time and we take this responsibility seriously.”

Zuckerberg said that the company has “relied on our community to help us understand what is fake and what is not”, citing a tool to report false links and shared material from fact-checking sites. “Similar to clickbait, spam and scams, we penalize [misinformation] in News Feed so it’s much less likely to spread,” he wrote.

This summer Facebook fired the human team of curators who watched its “trending” news items, leaving its algorithm to sort links. Fake and misleading news proliferated further, and Facebook earned scorn for high-profile embarrassments, for instance the deletion of a Vietnam war photo deemed too graphic. On Saturday, Zuckerberg called the problem “complex, both technically and philosophically” and said the company erred “on the side of letting people share what they want whenever possible”.

“We do not want to be arbiters of truth ourselves, but instead rely on our community and trusted third parties.”

Zuckerberg also said Facebook would experiment with warning labels on stories, and try to better screen the quality of links in the “related articles” section, where the site has linked to false conspiracy theories about the September 11 attacks and Michelle Obama, among others.

He also said the company was “looking into disrupting the economics” of fake news, conceding that misinformation was driven, at least in part, by people profiting off of Facebook’s ad mechanics.

[pinboy3niner]

1. Mark Zuckerburg Dead At 32 Denies Facebook Has Problem With Fake News

Posted in GD by Coyotl:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10028291176

Hilarious!

[malaise]

2. Bwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah

That it is - perfect

[spanone]

3. K&R...

[Lucinda]

4. Better late than never I guess

I get where he is coming from...but we set community standards even here....he should have done the same, long ago.

[Blanks]

5. How hard would it be...

Wikipedia has things like 'needs reference' when an article makes an unsupported statement.

They need to have a 'news registry' and if something looks like it's pretending to be news, you alert that it 'looks' like news, and then they can just check it against the lists of fake news sites out there and put a link under the article to a site that says whether they are fake news and why. Obviously, the fake news database will grow on a daily basis, but fake news sites fall by the wayside too.

They need to leave the stories the way the are, but add disclaimers to the links. How hard can that be?

[justgamma]

6. Wasn't too long ago that trending news

excluded Breibart. The right threw a hissy fit and they quickly gave in.