Facebook Shows Related Articles and Fact Checkers Before You Open Links (techcrunch.com) 119
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Facebook wants you to think about whether a headline is true and see other perspectives on the topic before you even read the article. In its next step against fake news, Facebook today begins testing a different version of its Related Articles widget that normally appears when you return to the News Feed after opening a link. Now Facebook will also show Related Articles including third-party fact checkers before you read an article about a topic that many people are discussing. If you saw a link saying "Chocolate cures cancer!" from a little-known blog, the Related Article box might appear before you click to show links from the New York Times or a medical journal noting that while chocolate has antioxidants that can lower your risk for cancer, it's not a cure. If an outside fact checker like Snopes had debunked the original post, that could appear in Related Articles too. Facebook says this is just a test, so it won't necessarily roll out to everyone unless it proves useful. It notes that Facebook Pages should not see a significant change in the reach of their News Feed posts. There will be no ads surfaced in Related Articles.
MSNBC verified (Score:1)
Re:MSNBC verified (Score:4, Insightful)
Could they just kill clickbait articles while they're at it? Click here to find out.
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+1. Where's my mod points?!
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What Related Articles looks like today will shock you!
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We leave Microsoft NBC on the TV in our break room which is just annoying, because it seems like every single time I repeat something they report, I get proven wrong. How do they stay on the air?
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Yep, the people who kept telling you there was no way Trump could get elected are now telling you what news is fake.
The Ministry of Truth (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: The Ministry of Truth (Score:1, Insightful)
I see they are hooked into fact checkers with a liberal bias. If facts are facts, surely adding a conservative source wouldn't hurt, and would generate identical results.
Unless the carefully selected fact checkers are partisan hacks. Perish the thought!
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Roughly 1/3rd of the entire world used Marxist power structures to analyze reality 30 years ago. It was taken as a literal science and mandated by governments that were fascist authoritarian states despite calling themselves communist.
Your other complaints reflect your personal bias more than anything else. Get over whoever or whatever insulted you in primary school, and move on with your life.
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Snopes went a bit crazy during the last election cycle and has pretty obvious liberal bias at this point.
Stymied by "reality's well-known liberal bias," you've adopted the tactic of claiming that anybody who cares about reality is biased. That's horseshit and it only fools people who want to be fooled.
In the case of snopes, guys like you convinced me to start bookmarking every snopes article that generally confirmed an (american) conservative worldview. After a while I got tired of reading snopes so my list only covers a couple of months. Nevertheless, the amount of actual evidence that counters your claim
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Not hard to find out about Snopes political bias:
http://dailycaller.com/2016/07... [dailycaller.com]
http://dailycaller.com/2016/06... [dailycaller.com]
https://ethicsalarms.com/2016/... [ethicsalarms.com]
Go google more yourself.
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So you found a couple of cherry-picked cases where it can be argued that snopes wasn't perfect.
That's not proof that snopes is liberally biased. That's proof that imperfect humans work for snopes.
The denial runs strong in you.
If someone were so inclined they could find examples where Snopes erred in the other direction.
Please, cite three such examples where Snopes had an obvious conservative bias.
For example their reporting on the Clinton uranium non-scandal. [snopes.com]
For months their article left out the key fact that the russian company never even had an export license. It wasn't until the April 5th update that the author finally added that major part to the story.
So, the one example you cite exonerates Clinton from a charge of corruption and 'pay to play'. And their error is not mentioning an export restriction.
Regardless, the handful of supposedly biased articles doesn't even come close to the absolute mountain of examples where they were 'perfect.'
You come so close in your wisdom, to veer into the mountainside at the last moment.
The entire argument of "Snopes has a liberal bias in its political articles" is that they are very trustworthy in their non-political articles. They don't shade the trut
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Sources claiming Snopes is liberal are all right leaning.
You spend all day thinking up something that obvious? (Checks timestamps) No, just two hours.
Of course the liberal sites that agree with Snopes' liberal political leanings are not going to say Snopes is liberal-biased. The liberal sites will claim Snopes is non-partisan, therefor they can be trusted when they don't find any lies or deceit in Hillary's comments.
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I see they are hooked into fact checkers with a liberal bias. If facts are facts, surely adding a conservative source wouldn't hurt, and would generate identical results.
The problem with that is that what is called "conservative" too often means "in denial". As you say, facts are facts, but the facts tend to drown in the overload of disingenious "conservatism" - as the (only half joking) saying goes: Reality has a strong, liberal bias.
We have for several years now seen the same problem with creationists trying to introduce religious doctrine into the teaching of science in school, under the slogan "Teach the controversy". I think every teacher and scientist would be fine wi
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In point of fact, if you want the conservative choice, there is only one source that is applicable, a court of law where the facts are tested. All else is only opinion, until something has been proved and tested, it has no real value beyond that of an opinion. It is the height of hypocrisy to claim one news source as valid and another invalid simply because it is contrary to the other news source, when neither has been tested and proved.
The solution is easy. Create a licensed news profession, a licensed pu
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Riiiiiiiiiiight
The Thought Police have entered the building.
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God bless the unbiased media! I'm so glad that they didn't try to influence the presidential elections last year by presenting faulty data and a neverending fount of slanted stories that showed Hillary Clinton would easily win the election.
Don't worry about being fooled or feeling like a fool. It seems even people (or perhaps, especially people) who graduate from America's most elite institutions cannot detect bias in the material they read.
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Oh look, another liberal who lets comedians do his thinking for him.
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Hahaha, not a one of you on this thread willing to use your "name".
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Re:The Ministry of Truth (Score:5, Insightful)
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To assume, because they have different editorials, that one of them should be correct is a mistake. They both lie in different instances, with different agendas.
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Bingo. This post-truth nonsense has at its core the idea that all media is corrupt and heavily biased, but that you as an individual can somehow determine what is true despite that. In theory you read dozens of media outlets from across the political spectrum and compare them, in practice you believe any old shit posted on reddit with a few links to alt-media blogs.
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Fact checking is something every thinking person should do; a fact checker is only ever a tool that makes it easier for people to do so. What you are saying is that making it easier for people to follow up on facts is somehow "censorship". I hope everybody can see how absurd that position is.
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Dear Facebook,
I'm going to start a Newspaper.
What paperwork do I fill out to become, "verified"?
Who do I need to bribe?
What government agency "verifies" news outlets?
Juswondern
Crowdsourced alternative (Score:1)
KotakuInAction savages everybody's bullshit and gained most of its users after exposing a huge fake news scandal. For $ome rea$on these fake "fake news" stories never mention it.
Guess which articles will get the "helpful" links? (Score:1)
Trump made it up (Score:1, Interesting)
Trump made up the fake news narrative. Granted Fox news was doing it and he saw that he could use it to his advantage in the presidential race and everyone in the US that has a college education knows how full of shit he is. Meanwhile the Walmart rednecks are cheering going "That there is going to make American a great island agaeein !!" despite the fact that he cheated on his taxes, Colluded with the Russians to discredit Hillary and has had his hands in several shady business dealings and has forced him
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Actually, Democrats tried to attack Trump and conservatives with it, and it backfired.
Don't give a fuck. The "fact checkers" are biased. (Score:3)
I'll do my OWN fact checking thank you very much.
I don't need some partisan jackass deigning to shovel their "right-think" at me.
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I'll do my OWN fact checking thank you very much.
I don't need some partisan jackass deigning to shovel their "right-think" at me.
Donald Trump winning the election surprised me, not on election day, I knew the polls were close enough, but I expected him to implode fairly early on.
I note that because I don't get surprised a lot when it comes to politics.
I wasn't surprised when the ACA didn't destroy the healthcare system and result in some sort of NAZI or Socialist dystopia. Nor was I surprised when the proposed GOP alternative failed spectacularly because they'd been making contradictory promised for years.
I wasn't surprised when Obam
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I'll do my OWN fact checking thank you very much.
And you can continue to do so. All it does is display links to popular fact checking sites that you'll likely to go to anyway.
unless....
wait you don't do all your fact checking on infowars.com do you?
The Related Articles crap is evil anyway (Score:1)
The same goes for the associated "featured for you" widget, along with "people also shared" and "popular from ", and all other related garbage.
I threw together a modded version of the Facebook app, which tries to get rid of as much of this garbage as possible.
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Fantastic Shift of Responsibility (Score:2)
Re:Fantastic Shift of Responsibility (Score:4, Interesting)
Now bias journalism gets checker by bias fact checkers. We'll need fact checkers to fact check the fact checkers and fact checkers to fact check those fact checkers and round and round it goes.
The scientific enterprise has been doing this pretty well for over 100 years.
You're not going to build an algorithm that says X is a true story and Y is false. But as humans we have the ability to build institutions and use our judgment to figure out which ones are reliable. Does the NYTimes have a liberal bias? Sure. But it also has very reliable facts. The HuffPo generally agrees with my bias, but it also spent years peddling medical nonsense and it still hasn't reestablished its credibility for me.
If FB starts using nonsense fact checkers I'll call them on their BS and be a lot more likely to drop them, and I suspect many others would do the same.
I'm sure some conservative groups are trying to build fact checking websites, but I suspect they'll have a lot of trouble due to the extent to which mainstream American conservatism has embraced a lot of nonsense. They're either going to end up taking a lot of shots at their own side and get called liberal, or they'll descend into self-satire like conservapedia [conservapedia.com].
Re: Fantastic Shift of Responsibility (Score:3)
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Anyone can duplicate an experiment to find the truth.
Apparently not even scientific peers can duplicate experiments: https://science.slashdot.org/story/17/02/23/1431249/most-scientists-cant-replicate-studies-by-their-peers
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The problem is like you said when the fact checkers start being wrong you'll stop listening to them, the people who have a different viewpoint than you have the same idea which means everyone will only use these fact checkers with confirmation bias and having fact checkers is utterly useless.
When you're really dealing with interpretation, fact checking is more like a good critic reviewing a movie. Sure, you can just look for the Rotten Tomatoes score and see what the "average" is. But when I read a Roger Ebert review, even when he doesn't like the movie he describes it well enough that I can usually tell whether I would.
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A great example of this (From the 1950s) was when residents in the Northwest started noticing micro-craters on their windshields. The pitting was widespread and many people are interviewed, and it turned out that everyone in the ar
bona fide (Score:2)
Alex Jones is the real deal. Do not believe the fake news coming out of his own testimony.
Perception is reality.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-g... [breitbart.com]
Fox not harmful to sheep, verified by fox. (Score:2)
The "fact checkers" are just narrative checkers that rubberstamp their own articles while questioning anything not fitting their narrative.
Partisan positions (Score:2)
It seems pretty clear to me at this point that those with a right/conservative perspective generally consider "fact-checkers" like Politifact to be leftist partisans, while those with a left/liberal perspective overwhelmingly consider them objective and unbiased.
If only there were some way to tell who was right.
Facebook wants to tell me what they think is true (Score:3)
I just want Facebook to show me stuff, not tell me what they think is true.
I already fight the FB Android app:
- Most Recent is always, ALWAYS populated with hundreds of items, despite my reading every damned one of them 2 hours ago.
- I can Like item after item, and 15 minutes later scroll back through the list and MOST are actually NOT marked 'Like' by me. Huh?
- I can read Most Recent and refresh, and the order changes. Every damned time.
- I can delete all the app data, reinstall, and get the same crap. Hundreds of items unread, when I did in fact read them.
- Recommended For Me includes crap I've been rejecting for a few years now.
The Facebook Android app royally stinks. Facebook has been manipulating my feed for years. I should trust them to fact-check? No, on several counts. Never.
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I just want Facebook to show me stuff, not tell me what they think is true.
They aren't telling you anything. They are showing you stuff. Stuff in this case is a link to others who you may or may not want to click through to in order to check if the original stuff is true.
Most Recent is always, ALWAYS populated with hundreds of items, despite my reading every damned one of them 2 hours ago.
And is it any less "most recent"? Maybe either have more friends, subscribe to more pages, like more content, etc. Lack of content is your own fault. Most recent is just that.
I can Like item after item, and 15 minutes later scroll back through the list and MOST are actually NOT marked 'Like' by me. Huh?
At some point it helps refreshing the feed.
- I can read Most Recent and refresh, and the order changes. Every damned time.
Most recent includes what your friends are doing. If someone likes something on your feed or post
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'. Did you download the app from Facebook or from some Chinese sideload store?'
really. you think so?
i'm not anywhere that stupid.
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I'm just at a loss. Everything else in your post is explainable.
Re: Facebook wants to tell me what they think is t (Score:2)
There's also the utter inability to read every Most Recent post - and the remarkable, uncanny consistency of the number of unread posts, which usually stays at the very same number. For days. No matter how many I read.
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Re:Is anyone falling for this? (Score:4, Insightful)
You are making up an alternative meaning for the phrase fake news.
Nah. It's well understood at this point to mean, "People using widely consumed platforms to spread information they know is incorrect, and doing so while presenting those lies as facts." So, when someone on CNN says there is a "Muslim ban," they know they're lying and that they're producing and spreading fake news. You know they are, their informed audience knows it's fake, and some small number of non-critical-thinking dolts take it as fact. But it's fake news. Click-bait factories in Eastern Europe are NOT the only or even a predominant source of this. Most of it comes right out of mainstream media habitats right in the US.
It is the easiest way to make money there.
It's true. When an operation like MSNBC spends an entire news cycle hyping the fact that their head fake-news-talking-head is going to "release Trump's taxes," when they know perfectly well they have no such thing and will do no such thing (except a readily available snipped that - even by itself - undermines their own narrative) ... when that happens, and they get a big ratings boost from that lie, yeah - easy money if they don't care about the fact they have to lie to do it.
Efforts to identify and remove fake news have no political intent
Hilarious.
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It's well understood at this point to mean ...
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean- neither more nor less."
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Oh please, no one really gives a shit about sites like realcnn.ru or honesttruenewsreutersnoseriouslythisisgoodjournalism.kz; certainly not enough to justify the sudden immense effort to combat them. As Wapo overzealously laid bare [washingtonpost.com] in the early days of the faux outrage, the end goal is to create a vague, amorphous category that they can easily lump "bad" news outlets into in order to censor them. Breitbart runs a story you don't like? Get your Trusted Non-Partisan Fact Checkers to call them liars based o
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This is simply another fail policy; fact checking of late has be shown to to be biased.
Of course it has. And Hilary Clinton is a Reptoid from the Hollow Earth and Donald Trump has been negotiating with gray aliens for the cure to cancer. Do not believe the people who tell you these are not facts. They're biased.