Mark Zuckerberg Announces Facebook Will Fight Fake News -- Next To An Ad With Fake News (facebook.com) 149
An anonymous reader writes:
"We take misinformation seriously," Facebook's CEO announced in a late-night status update Friday. "Our goal is to connect people with the stories they find most meaningful, and we know people want accurate information. We've been working on this problem for a long time and we take this responsibility seriously. We've made significant progress, but there is more work to be done."
But you know what's funny? The ad to the right of Zuck's post is fake news. It has the headline "Hugh Hefner Says 'Goodbye' at 90" and a quote from his wife saying "I can't believe he is actually gone," even though Hugh Hefner isn't dead. And clicking through, it's just another lame ad for erectile dysfunction -- on a site that's been tricked up to look like Fox News.
I saw it too. (Here's my screenshot... And yes, it did link to an advertising site with a fake "Fox News" banner across the top.) Oh, the irony. "The CEO said that Facebook is working to develop stronger fake news detection, a warning system, easier reporting and technical ways to classify misinformation," reports CNN, adding "Zuckerberg did not say how quickly the measures would be in place." They also quote Zuckerberg as saying "Some of these ideas will work well, and some will not." But apparently it's pretty easy to get fake news onto Facebook. You just have to pay them.
But you know what's funny? The ad to the right of Zuck's post is fake news. It has the headline "Hugh Hefner Says 'Goodbye' at 90" and a quote from his wife saying "I can't believe he is actually gone," even though Hugh Hefner isn't dead. And clicking through, it's just another lame ad for erectile dysfunction -- on a site that's been tricked up to look like Fox News.
I saw it too. (Here's my screenshot... And yes, it did link to an advertising site with a fake "Fox News" banner across the top.) Oh, the irony. "The CEO said that Facebook is working to develop stronger fake news detection, a warning system, easier reporting and technical ways to classify misinformation," reports CNN, adding "Zuckerberg did not say how quickly the measures would be in place." They also quote Zuckerberg as saying "Some of these ideas will work well, and some will not." But apparently it's pretty easy to get fake news onto Facebook. You just have to pay them.
evidence? (Score:5, Insightful)
Would have been nice to post a screenshot since the ads change with every page load. As far as I can tell this is completely made up.
Re:evidence? (Score:5, Funny)
So you are saying this is fake news?
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Re:evidence? (Score:4, Insightful)
Would have been nice to post a screenshot since the ads change with every page load. As far as I can tell this is completely made up.
Also, the idea that you can get Facebook to post lies by paying them is their entire business model. OK, OK, the 99% of marketing that is lies give the other 1% a bad name, sure, but really - any advertising-based business is the business of displaying lies for money.
Whipslash really seems to like his "daily story about why you shouldn't use Facebook" though, so I guess we're doomed to repeat this discussion.
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In the last "Facebook sucks" story someone asked whether we could stop having all these "Facebook sucks" stories. Whipslash replied simply "no".
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I would say the announcement itself is an ad containing fake news.
This just in (Score:3)
This is fake news. Or that was. Or will be.
Unless it's an advert - then it's real.
Funny (Score:5, Funny)
But you know what's funny? The ad to the right of Zuck's post is fake news. It has the headline "Hugh Hefner Says 'Goodbye' at 90"
You wanna know what else is funny? Those ads are personalized. You're the only one seeing a Hugh Hefner-related ad, you perv.
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He is a misogynist
Thanks! Now I know he's probably not a misogynist. Do you have anymore knee-jerk epithets so I can know he's probably not any of those things too?
Re: Funny (Score:1)
boohoo, marxist. lets talk about the millions you killed in russia and china !
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Hefner's not a misogynist. He just loves pussy. An unlike a certain urinal cake on his way to the White House, Hefner understands that you're not supposed to grab that pussy unless you're invited to do so.
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People think there is something perverse about anything related to Hugh Hefner.
No, really, if you find Hugh Hefner sexy you're working a fairly bizarre fetish there.
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A great many women find that tolerable, especially if the guy is 102.
ftfy
Facebook is a bad joke (Score:5, Insightful)
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Fake news, ok, but what about lies? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't think anyone is suggesting we can get to 100% fully informed truth, but getting rid of the worst politically motivated lies and clickbait would be a vast improvement.
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Deciding what political statements are true and not cannot help but introduce political bias. That's why the government can't be allowed to play a role. If Facebook wants to, well, it's their site, but I'm betting any such effort leads to a stronger echo chamber, rather than "more truth".
Re: Fake news, ok, but what about lies? (Score:3)
Why do so many people feel compelled to post in Slashdot without knowing anything about the topic?
https://www.google.com/amp/amp... [google.com]
That's just one example.
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Yes, yes, we all get that it starts with good intentions. But give it time. That's why people are skeptical - because we're worried about the inevitable results, not the initial intentions.
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No, if you only block stories that are verifiably fake, there is no bias. Unless you consider reality to be biased.
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Who does the verifying? That person is a censor by job description. Imagine a Christian fundamentalist who is very sure that the Bible is the one source of truth in the role. One person's "verifiably fake" is another's "obviously true".
Oh, sure, you're may be thinking thinking of some special cases, but why would the censor limit themselves to those? Humans don't act that way. Give them power, and they look for reasons to use it.
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You are saying it's impossible to build a system where work is verified, where factual truth cab be established. Thus there can be no objective truth but what you directly observe yourself.
Which is post factual bullshit.
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You are saying it's impossible to build a system where work is verified
I'm saying there's no political (or religious) system where work is verified.
I'm guessing you see that right away for religious "facts". And even scientific facts that run afoul of religious doctrine? The same thing goes for scientific facts that run afoul of political doctrine. In Soviet Russia, facts check you.
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I consider gravity to be a fact. It's verifiable. I have no problem with fact checking someone who claims that gravity isn't real, and concluding that they are wrong.
I also have no problem with fact checking what politicians are on record as having said. For example, Trump said climate change was invented by the Chinese [twitter.com]. These are not things that are open to interpretation or political bias, they are simple facts that can be verified by multiple people and the reader and held to be as true as the theory of
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You seem to be missing my point. I consider evolution to be a fact. But if the person doing the fact checking considered it to be a lie spread by Satan? I remember when such people were in power - this isn't far-fetched at all. Someone gets to be the censor - for all you say "these are not things that are open to interpretation or political bias" some guy gets to make that call. Some guy appointed by Trump. Gets to decide.
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You are missing my point. If the person doing the fact checking considers evolution to be a lie, then someone checking them will flag it up. That's how the media works, or at least is supposed to. Multiple journalists fact checking things so that mistakes come to light.
Sure, we can argue about how prominently corrections should be printed or that the system isn't working, but I reject the notion that there can be no truth because all humans are inherently unreliable.
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It's no about "there can be no truth". It's about why the government can't be trusted to censor political news in the name of "fact checking". But, hey, if private companies want to do that, great, I'll stick with the ones that please me (much like today, really).
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Wait, when did this become about government censorship? I was talking about private companies and individuals.
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Dude, seriously what the fuck, they decide life or death in prison every single work day. Fuck, what the hell are you saying. Lets hand the courts over to the corporations, is that what you are implying. Privatise the legal system because it would be more accurate, let people bid to be judges and the lowest tender wins and I am sure they could sell jury spots pay the most you get to decide, the free market is god. If the court can decide whether or not you can lead a normal life or die in prison, than it ca
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Dude, seriously, smoke less of whatever you're smoking.
If the government had the power to label some political speech as "lies" that's just another way to censor political speech. Not a good plan. If the government had the power to tell Facebook that it must censor certain political speech - that's just the same, just as bad.
Just as a newspaper can legally print whatever political lies it wants too, much as happen in the election we just had, Facebook can do whatever it wants as long as it doesn't step on
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Re: Fake news, ok, but what about lies? (Score:2)
Second try posting this. Here is one example...
https://www.google.com/amp/amp... [google.com]
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Are we just going to conveniently forget the mainstream media's complete loss of credibility over the last election cycle
No, we are going to ignore this form of false news / propoganda, and realize the mainstream media still has more credibility than nearly any large organization other than perhaps the scientific community.
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The endless innuendo and fake stories any the emails certainly harmed her chances. But yeah, I think the bigger problem is that people don't care about lies any more.
The democrats were pointing out Trump's lies, not realising that it wasn't news to most people. Voters didn't think he was more honest or reliable, they just preferred his lies and the feelings he tapped into.
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I don't think anyone is suggesting we can get to 100% fully informed truth, but getting rid of the worst politically motivated lies and clickbait would be a vast improvement.
I disagree with every fiber of my being. I won't pledge allegiance to a flag, but I'll pledge allegiance to the idea that free speech and democracy are best served when bad speech is countered by more speech, not by 'getting rid' of 'clickbait'. As far as the worst politically motivated lies go, I would argue that libel and slander laws matter.
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... The biggest lies I see on news channels these days are lies of omission ...
If those news sites are not carrying the wack-o stories you want to read about, then find some news sites that do. Get outside your filter bubble. It is as simple as that. Just don't expect one news site, or even a few news sites, to cover all the stories you want to read about.
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I'm not really seeing that from Trump (Score:2)
There's nothing being omitted there. Just bold face lies. And it's not just him. Nobody ca
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Agreed. Let's start with the sanitizing of war in the media.
No indication of death and destruction by our drones in foreign countries. No blood and guts (which war is).
Only brief mentions of our "war on terrorism".
Imagine if other countries did to us what we do with drone strikes initiated by people sitting in comfy little bunkers outside of Las Vegas.
This all started out with Bush getting on the media's depiction of war but is being perpetuated by our current President.
If we all saw the atrocity of war,
How about... (Score:1)
...we educate people enough to know better than to go to an entertainment site for news, or to at least be smart enough to know the difference. Naaaa. That sounds like a lot of work. Never mind.
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Re: How about... (Score:2)
I tried that. It doesn't work. I tried to show a family member how to use Snopes to find out if a story was true or not, before forwarding it on to others, and they said they didn't care if it was true.
Clinton Machine (Score:3, Insightful)
The Clinton propaganda machine wasn't happy about losing the election. There were a lot of dirty tricks they tried and still managed to fail. The mainstream news didn't cover all of her corruption and decided to ignore it. As a progressive I had to turn to the "alt right" news sources to inform myself on the truth of various matters. Now the democrats are being sore losers and want to eliminate the first amendment of the Constitution.
If you let the government censor one form of speech don't be surprised when they start coming after other forms of speech.
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Now the democrats are being sore losers and want to eliminate the first amendment of the Constitution.
Preach on. I have never seen such an undignified pathetic show of poor sportsmanship. Look, it's politics. You win some and you lose some. Act like adults and accept it. The less extreme people that can be won over will remember this in 2020 and I seriously doubt they will be sympathetic to a bunch of whiney crybabies.
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I seriously doubt they will be sympathetic to a bunch of whiney crybabies.
Considering people still voted for Republicans after their approach to governing for the past 8 years, voters overwhelmingly reward whiny crybabies.
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Considering people still voted for Republicans after their approach to governing for the past 8 years
Which approach was that? The one where the president promised to veto any legislation to their liking because the didn't have a veto-proof majority? That approach?
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he also has not vetoed much of anything
Of course he hasn't issued many vetos. Why would he? When he plainly states that he will veto a bill he doesn't like, the legislature doesn't generally go to all of the trouble to push it through both houses, reconcile the versions, and then send him a completed one that he would then simply put in the trash with a veto. Why would they? They have no reason to think he's lying when he says he'll veto something. It's not exactly complicated.
And where did I use the word "everything?"
He's frequently said
Re: Clinton Machine (Score:1)
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You don't seem to understand that vetoes can be over ridden.
The Republicans do NOT have a large enough majority in the Senate to produce veto-proof legislation when the Democrats don't want them to. You do understand how that works, don't you? No?
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Obama never said that.
By February of 2015 - just two months into the year - he'd said he'd veto 10 specific Republican pieces of legislation if they actually presented them to him.
In his 2015 State of The Union address, for example, he promised vetos of four different pieces of legislation.
This is typical of right wing lies as of late.
It's always funny when the person doing the lying is trying really hard to be believed by insisting that lies are the truth. But it's so easy to debunk lies like yours - why do you make them? Ah, you're doing it as an anonymous coward, be
Re: Clinton Machine (Score:1)
Any comment which uses the word "ilk" can safely be ignored.
Re: Clinton Machine (Score:2)
Good to know that you are fighting the good fight - the right to defame a person with made up stories.
https://www.google.com/amp/amp... [google.com]
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Thanks to Wikileaks we now know for a fact that she rigged everything against Bernie with the help of her minions in the DNC. This is just one small tidbit of the Clinton corruption. Take a look at her Clinton Foundation scandals for a bigger view of how crooked Hillary does business.
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Thanks to Wikileaks we now know for a fact that she rigged everything against Bernie with the help of her minions in the DNC.
Of course they did. Why is that even news? Bernie is arguably not even a Democrat, so why wouldn't the DNC and Hillary fight against his primary run? People citing polling showing he would have beaten Trump are the deepest type of stupid; not realizing he didn't have to go through months of having his name and face next to Stalin and Mao for six months. Of course he was polling higher than Hillary.
The job of the DNC is to stop populist uprisings from damaging the party. I disagree with their stance, which i
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If the RNC had done their job we wouldn't have a fascist in the White House.
You're kind of foggy on the whole what-words-mean thing, aren't you.
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Then he could have run third party.
Instead they pretended to give him a shot at running as democrat and then tried to use him to get more votes for Clinton,
but Bernie's followers saw through that bullshit and didn't bite.
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If Clinton hadn't been the pre-selected nominee, Democrats other than Bernie would have run, and Bernie would have still lost the primary. Webb, O'Malley, and Chafee weren't serious candidates, they were there just to make it look like Hillary actually "won" the primary, rather than rigging it in her favor. They weren't counting on Sanders actually giving Clinton a run for her money, he wasn't even supposed to be there since they knew damn well he wouldn't roll over just to make Hilllary's selection look
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Thanks to Wikileaks we now know for a fact that she rigged everything against Bernie with the help of her minions in the DNC.
It's a FACT. A FACT, you say. That Clinton's team and others in the DNC began liaising about how to handle her candidacy... after it became mathematically impossible for Sanders to win the nomination. Yes, after, you fact-hungry person, you. Check the dates. Yeah, the fix was in, and the game was rigged... right from the moment the democratic process of voting for a nominee made her selection a certainty.
That, sir, is a fact. And you are welcome to try to prove to me that it's a lie, but only using actual,
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Well that IS fake then.
hashtag trademark law matters
It is going to be like the battle against SPAM (Score:3)
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It's not Facebook's Fault. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's the lack of Internet.
I was curious about these 'fake news' sites and started reading a few. They loaded fast I looked at the source code and it looks like I could have written it by hand. These pages are optimized for people that lack access to broadband. FreeRepublic is a bare bones site. This is what a forum post looks like. I spent a few minutes trying to figure out if an ad blocker had taken out some obnoxious ad or something. [freerepublic.com]
I know it may be difficult to understand for those in cities but we have shit internet out here. Even at 25/3 my wife complains about how slow some shopping sites load. Gone are the days of being able to surf the web on dialup.
Unfortunately that's what some people are stuck with. I moved 2 years ago and started attending the local town hall meetings, 'broadband meetings' and doing what ever I could to improve the internet in my rural part of the US. A lot of townships are on dialup, some have cable, some have DSL. In households earning less than $34k/year that have K-12 kids 50% have internet. I live in what I consider a fairly 'normal' area. I don't even want to guess what internet adoption looks like in more rural parts of the US. [And for those in ivory towers wondering what we mean when we say 'we feel left behind' this is part of it.]
These 'fake' news sites are likely the only 'news' sites that some of these people can access. And when they post material that they agree with it just amplifies the echo chamber. Huffington Post's front page weighed in at 7 MB. Even if there are people that might be on the fence and want to go out research other opinions they often can't. They flat out physically have no way to get other information.
If any hard core liberals really want to get back at Trump supporters run Fiber out to everywhere. It's easy to mock someone as ignorant when they have literally no way of learning any better.
That said, where the hell are the web page benchmarking tools? I've been using https://pageweight.imgix.com/ [imgix.com] but I can't automate that. My interest is piqued and I really want to do a statistical difference between "liberal" and "conservative" (and "real" and "fake") news sites.
Cause and effect (Score:2)
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If any hard core liberals really want to get back at Trump supporters run Fiber out to everywhere. It's easy to mock someone as ignorant when they have literally no way of learning any better.
I do not think this would have helped, rural communities always tend to be more conservative than liberal in the first place. I am sure they would still appreciate the fiber connections though.
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Majority who make 35-75k AND >75,000 vote TRUMP. Educated !=Smart. A Hillary support with a degree in underwater basket weaving working as a barista in NYC is educated, but in no way 'smart' or 'intelligent' as the fake news sites in MSM imply. USC poll http://cesrusc.org/election/ [cesrusc.org] click characteristics of voters.
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I know it may be difficult to understand for those in cities but we have shit internet out here. Even at 25/3 my wife complains about how slow some shopping sites load. Gone are the days of being able to surf the web on dialup.
I pay $100/mo for 6/1. Lick my balls. Nobody wants to here you bitch about 25/3.
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If pages "load slowly" on a 25mbit connection, it's not the 25mbit connection limiting it. It might be because the server-side PHP/MySQL takes a long time to execute - which would be a problem for all visitors regardless of their connection. It might be because the client-side Javascript takes a
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First, double check your math. 7 MB / (25 Mbps) = 2.25s [google.com]
25 megabits per second
This is the technological equivalent of 'let them eat cake'.
How long does it take to load on a 0.9MBps connection?
How long does it take to load on dialup?
satellite connection
Which is expensive and out of the reach of a lot of people.
Like I said once: 50% of households earning less than $34k/year don't have internet. Period. Not 56k, not 0.9 Mbps, not 25 Mbps. None. How long does 7 MB to load at 0.00 Mbps? It's not like with the Rural Electrification Act that forced someon
tr (Score:2)
"We take misinformation seriously,"
We take bad PR seriously
"Our goal is to connect people with the stories they find most meaningful,
Out goal is to connect people with advertisers
we know people want accurate information.
Dumb fucks
We've been working on this problem for a long time and we take this responsibility seriously. We've made significant progress, but there is more work to be done."
We might start working on it if the media won't stop whining soon
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awkward traffic accident ads (Score:2)
Nothing to do with real fake news (Score:2)
Zuckerberg is just angry that all that money he threw at the Hillary campaign was a failed investment and now Trump can easily retaliate with a reduction of the H1B crowd. When he says "no fake news" he means "no nes that puts my suppirted candidate in a bad light".
Facebook? (Score:2)
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Am I the only one that doesn't even know that Facebook had news?
I still do not know that Facebook has news.
Then what will remains? (Score:1)
Almost nothing ;)
Founding Fathers & Literacy (Score:1)
William Penn believed that the democratic framework he was proposing for Pennsylvania, instituted 105 years before the US Constitution, would only work if there was a literate and informed society. This is one of the reasons that the early Quakers emphasized education in the new colony. A century later Ben Franklin and others in the city of Philadelphia had the same concerns which led them to widen the educational opportunities beyond the just the wealthy. Other framers of the constitution were also concern
Except... (Score:2)
Except that the definition of fake news has gotten exceptionally broad post-election.
The LA Times, for example, listed Red State, the Blaze, and Breitbart but didn't mention Electronic Intifada, Salon, or Addicting Info, which have the same level of credibility (or lack thereof). If you're going to make lists, or throw these sites into a category with the Onion, then it's important to be even-handed about it. Define the offenders by class.
It's not fake simply because the site has a bias you disagree with. O