
Facebook will never take responsibility for fake news - Garbage
https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/19/facebook-will-never-take-responsibility-for-fake-news/
======
vezycash
"Fake news" only became a "problem" after the last US election.

If we really want to solve the problem instead of an an outlet to vent
frustration like spiled brats, then we should think deeper.

Why does my mum believe every piece of crap that shows up on Facebook and
WhatsApp? And why do I call bullshit within a few seconds of reading it?

This I believe is the right angle. Why do people believe obvious lies. And why
is it obvious to some and not others?

I suspect the root of the problem is our system of education. The primary goal
these days seems to be obedience and unquestioning believe in authority.

If this isn't solved (I doubt it can). Then asking for fake news control will
bring a bigger problem - loss of free flow of information...

China already has an excellent way of controlling fake news. But is that what
we really want? Those who will benefit from the Chinese news control are those
behind the sudden interest in fake news.

Wake up people!

~~~
skc
>>I suspect the root of the problem is our system of education. The primary
goal these days seems to be obedience and unquestioning believe in
authority.<<

You would think so. But my dad is a varsity Professor with a PhD, my mom has a
Masters in English.

They believe literally every cock and bull story they see on Facebook.

You make an interesting point when you state that "The primary goal these days
seems to be obedience and unquestioning believe in authority." because for me
that is both the problem and, ironically, the very obvious solution.

If there was a trusted (read, authoritative) service that one could use to vet
such stories then the problem would go away.

The devil is in the details though. I've seen people dismiss Snopes as some
sort of leftist agenda pandering website.

~~~
wu-ikkyu
>>I suspect the root of the problem is our system of education. The primary
goal these days seems to be obedience and unquestioning believe in authority

>You would think so. But my dad is a varsity Professor with a PhD, my mom has
a Masters in English. They believe literally every cock and bull story they
see on Facebook.

This is precisely what the parent to your comment is saying. Many (most?)
degrees hold more symbolic value (read, fake) than real practical value
because that is what education has devolved into: favoring symbolism (test
scores, degrees) over real life applicability.

>If there was a trusted (read, authoritative) service that one could use to
vet such stories then the problem would go away.

This is a logical fallacy.

If you already think you lack the ability to find truth, how would you know it
was real when someone else supposedly gave it to you? If you can't trust
yourself how can you trust your trust in others?

------
yAnonymous
And neither should they.

The German government wants to implement insane penalties for not removing
"fake news" fast enough, but what they're really trying to do is make sure
Facebook only tells their side of the story, i.e. establish censorship on the
internet.

Government-critical sites that had millions of followers were already banned
while media supporting the government can happily keep spreading their equally
or even worse fake news.

It's becoming a world-wide trend to call unfavorable things fascist and then
employ fascist methods to fight them. Just like calling oligarchic structures
a democracy, because it sells better.

~~~
synicalx
> It's becoming a world-wide trend to call unfavorable things fascist and then
> employ fascist methods to fight them.

Take all of my upvotes.

I'll never get my head around "Antifa" doxxing and assaulting Trump voters
because they're "facists". When someone stands up against these kids, ie Based
Stick Man, they're the ones that get arrested not the aggressors.

~~~
jungletek
Guess they never learned about Nietzsche...

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster...
for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”

------
mankash666
Why should it? It's a for-profit entity fine tuned to surface the kind of
links YOU want to read. The problem is us humans, we're prone to set rational
thinking aside when presented with "news" to our liking. Every time we click
on a link too good to be true, we're hoping that this one time the universe
has finally rewarded us for our persistent but futile attempts at moulding it
to our fancy.

~~~
Yaggo
I think it's somewhat dangerous mindset that the "fake news problem"
should/could be handled solely by the publishing platform. There will always
be another way to publish false information. People believe fake news because
they want to believe. Introducing any kind of sensoring authority will only
treat the symptoms, not the disease, making the long-term problem worse. Basic
education, equal opportunities etc. are the only sustainable solution.

------
root_axis
This is not a Facebook problem, nor is it a problem that can be fixed
structurally since a fundamental disagreement about what constitutes fake news
exists along partisan lines. When 'fake news' aligns with an individual's
bias, the truth has now become the lie. Any attempt to wrest the non-aligning
view-point from the realm of facts is met with a doubling-down and a recursive
poisoning of every well.

The _only_ viable solution must come from the top-down. People will only
reject fake news when leaders emphasize critical thinking and shoot down false
stories, _especially_ when the fake narrative is favorable to them or their
position.

------
concinds
1\. Everyone is born with the ability to trust, and to distrust. Many people
suck at trusting others (i.e. they trust too much people who aren't
trustworthy, and trust too little people who are), that's how you get abusive
spouses and unavailable spouses. Trusting some news outlets and distrusting
others is no different from dis/trusting people. The problem of people
trusting the wrong things has been a problem throughout history, and the
solution has to be psychological. Mandatory therapy for every citizen? Won't
happen.

2\. Teaching kids to spot "fake news" at school is laughably impotent and
"feel good". People believe fake stories because they're emotionally-invested
in the subject (see PG's "keep your identity small" post). Anyone that thinks
we can solve fake news through "critical thinking skills" is... fake news. The
problem is emotional involvement. If you're emotionally involved in a story,
you won't _want_ to use critical thinking.

3\. You _can_ get people to change their opinions, e.g. from climate-denial to
pro-science (through using their cognitive dissonance against them). That's
how you got Sanders converting Trump supporters at a recent town hall[0]. You
haven't made them more rational, you've just taken their emotions, which
pointed one way, and made them point the other way. So, if you want to make
people trust "the establishment" or the Democrats more, you _don 't_ need to
fix points 1. and 2. (which require fixing people), you just need to learn
about cognitive dissonance and persuasion. But that doesn't solve the core
problem of not having an informed population.

[0]: [http://www.politicususa.com/2017/03/13/bernie-sanders-
storms...](http://www.politicususa.com/2017/03/13/bernie-sanders-storms-deep-
red-west-virginia-convinces-trump-voters-conned.html)

------
meri_dian
If we choose to 'fight' fake news, meaning we try to automate its removal from
social networks, we'll end up censoring a good deal of speculative news which
takes leaps of logic and is controversial but not 'fake' in the sense that
it's trying to pass falsehood as fact. This is obviously problematic if we
want to foster free and open discourse.

The alternative is to not do anything at all, but that leaves our democracies
open to attack from malicious actors.

These both lead to bad outcomes. So let's consider alternative approaches.

I believe 'fake news' is a symptom as well as a cause of political
polarization. The less polarized and divisive our politics is, the less
willing people will be to blindly accept fake news. Basically the potential
receptive audience to fake news will decline. Given that approaches which try
to attack fake news directly both have negative consequences, I think if we
instead try to target other sources of polarization in society the fake news
problem itself will become less serious.

Let's start with getting money out of politics, instituting term limits for
congress, finding an alternative to gerrymandering for the creation of
electoral districts and most importantly growing the economy.

These are challenging and nontrivial approaches but will ultimately attack the
root cause of fake news spread. It is much better to treat a disease at its
source than to just treat its symptoms.

~~~
AckSyn
Intentionally or unintentionally, they have to go. All media is suspect
without sources, secret sources, sources that won't go on record, and all the
rest without proof of what they're saying.

Else we're no better than school yard gossip.

~~~
meri_dian
So you want to ban all opinion and editorial pieces? Articles based on facts
very often speculate and riff on ideas, branching off of initial facts, to
reach conclusions. Who decides what is appropriate speculation and what is
not?

~~~
AckSyn
"Appropriate speculation" isn't spouting off about a pet agenda a particular
news outlet has or shoehorning it into whatever #popularbullshit is trending,
it's about a logical conclusion to new information. Opinion pieces take that
and twist it to their own bias and quite often into an inflammatory way.

Too many outlets use opinion pieces as fact and engage in public outraging by
selecting the most controversial, inflammatory, or biased stories and opinions
to get viewership. Hell, you don't have to look far for them claiming not to
be news but "Entertainment News" and frankly, it's insulting. News used to
have standards. Unfortunately it scrapes the bottom of the barrel.

------
DanCarvajal
Why wont the News Media take responsibility for their content being so poor
that it's increasingly hard to tell between what's "real" and what's "fake"?

~~~
jrnichols
They don't really care anymore as long as that sweet sweet ad revenue keeps
rolling in.

That's one thing I've noticed drives a lot of the fake news sites - they're
loaded with ads. Clearly that's their goal. If only we could get Google to cut
off ad revenue to websites that are spreading made-up news.

Good recent example? This: [http://archive.is/R5Z1J](http://archive.is/R5Z1J)

Fake news about Trump spread like wildfire. Even worse, the fake news sites
were set up by a media company to advertise their new film. I think that's
absolutely reprehensible behavior on their part.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-
mix/wp/2017/02/1...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-
mix/wp/2017/02/17/to-promote-film-20th-century-fox-created-fake-news-sites-
with-fake-anti-trump-stories/?utm_term=.f3280a2625ab)

And it's all about the ad revenue.

------
JamesMcMinn
I'm not sure that they should take responsibility for it, but I do believe
they should make tools available for people to fight it, although I don't
think even that is an easy task. Facebook enables fake news by offering a
platform where fake news can spread, but it spreads because a lot of people
really do believe what is being reported, not because they necessarily want to
spread fake news.

Fake news, or lies as we should really be calling them, is very much a social
problem. We've had "fake news" in the form of parody websites like the Onion
for a long time, and whilst a large number of people fell for their stories,
they often didn't make the same mistake twice. People are looking for new
sources of news, and the combination of this with easily shareable and
difficult to verify stories means that the lies spread quickly.

Part of this has been caused by the attack on mainstream media (MSM) - people
no longer trust the MSM because they're being told not to by politicians, and
the fact that they're often caught misreporting stories doesn't help this. So,
people turn to smaller more focused sources - often ones which they've never
heard of before, and which they haven't been told not to trust. How does
Facebook solve this? I'm not sure. Flagging stories as "this hasn't been
reported elsewhere", or by filtering new sources of news might be a start, but
it wouldn't be a solution. I'm not sure people would trust Facebook to
manually moderate content, and it would simply give fake news and politicians
the ammunition they needed to target Facebook as being against them. The very
nature of news is that its unexpected and mostly unpredictable, so training
algorithms to detect fake news reliably, without hiding real news, is a very
difficult task.

Facebook can't take responsibility for fake news, society needs to do that.

~~~
libertine
I also don't think they should take the responsability for it (pretty much
like Torrent Trackers, or Youtube, when it comes to content distribution).

But I think there could be some mechanisms in place, similar to how Youtube
handles copyright claims - where upon reporting, or a request for a source
from any Facebook user - the publication would get it's Reach capped, or the
publication would be hidden, until further evidence is displayed.

Now, there are a lot of problems with this approach - first it's user based
(which has it's pros and cons), second it may be target for malicious activity
and anti-competitive pratices - but on the other hand if the source was
displayed, it would somehow protect them (at least briefly), without having
the Reach capped, but still flagged if the source is dubious.

~~~
tullianus
Yeah, this sounds prone to malicious abuse, mostly because of the subject
matter. I've heard of occasional malicious use of Youtube copyright claims,
but in the case of fake news on Facebook, the same system seems like it would
devolve to Breitbart readers and Mother Jones readers dogpiling each the other
source's articles to limit their reach in the short term.

Come to think of it, that might not be the worst thing in the world.

~~~
CM30
Until they start dogpiling the media that disagrees with both of their biases.
Which already happens. If you're far enough on any side of a political
spectrum, even reasonable news sounds fake to you.

------
i_feel_great
The entire field of advertising can be classified as "fake news".

~~~
wuch
There is article "Fake News" from 1992 [0], looking at the problem from this
angle, essentially saying that quite a lot of news is fake in a sense that it
is not prepared by journalists, but instead supplied by public relations
agencies and published without any critical analysis by the media.

Take for example recent CIA leaks. Reuters, when reporting it [1], included a
statement from antivirus software manufacturing saying that "We can prevent
attacks in real time if we were given the hooks into the mobile operating
system". Given long history of AV software manufactures not following even
basic security practices, I doubt that security experts would agree that this
is how we should ensure safety of mobile devices.

[0] David Lieberman, "Fake News,", TV Guide 1992, quoted in "Toxic sludge is
good for you".

[1] Eric Auchard, "Wikileaks' CIA hacking dump sends tech firms scrambling for
fixes" [http://www.reuters.com/article/wikileaks-products-
idUSL5N1GL...](http://www.reuters.com/article/wikileaks-products-
idUSL5N1GL2A4)

------
felipeerias
A lot of things fall under the "fake news" definition nowadays, from
alternative points of view all the way to state-sponsored disinformation and
propaganda.

However, the term being loosely defined should not make us lose sight of the
fact that there is an specific kind of "fake news" that is 100% a consequence
of the priorities and incentives that Facebook has put in place: making
outrageous headlines and stories out of thin air, for no other reason than
making money from advertising.

~~~
CM30
You mean the priorities and incentives that advertisers have put in place?
Because while Facebook and other social media sites are often associated with
it, I'd say things like Google search and ad networks have encouraged it just
as much.

------
sweetheart
I didn't think I'd live to see the day people are upset with Facebook for not
having more influence in the content they see. I understand the reasoning, and
know it's not that simple, but still, it just sounds so backwards

------
Mikeb85
Nor should they.

The problem is that, to judge something as 'fake', an authority needs to deem
what is 'real'. And abuse of authority never happens, right? Banning fake news
is akin to state censorship, since ultimately the one making the penalties
(the state) gets to decide what 'fake news' actually is.

------
gerbilly
If you want to avoid fake news, why not pay for real news?

Buy a subscription to the NY Times, or any other of the major newspapers or
newsmagazines.[1]

Did you know the journalism industry is in a tailspin, and many professional
reporters can't find jobs because people feel they can find the same
information for free from blogs and on facebook?

Newspapers aren't perfect, and bias in unavoidable, _but_ I don't see too many
blogs paying copyeditors and fact checkers to double check their work.

The good newspapers also take responsibility for their work and protect their
sources.

I find it sad that as a society we are abandoning the press, which is an
important check and balance on the other institutions in society.

Instead we prefer our dopamine squirts from swiping our facebook feeds on our
phones, and being fed targeted stories that confirm our biases.

I find it a sad irony that a generation who often likes to sneer at older
industries, and disrupt them, thinks they have replaced the free press with
something 'better' just because it is delivered via a cellphone.

They are mistaking the medium for the message. The information quality is
lower, but if it feels new and shiny, it must be better right?...

[1] Yes I know most of these sources offer their content for free online, but
I'm suggesting to pay for it anyway. You know support them before they
disappear completely.

------
jlebrech
One man's fake news is another man's "I knew it."

------
skdotdan
So, Facebook won't censor?

------
_rpd
> “It’s not always clear what is fake and what isn’t,” [Zuckerberg] continued.
> “A lot of what people are calling fake news are just opinions that people
> disagree with.”

> This is just the latest in a long string of recent responses to the issue
> that shirk responsibility for the content that users consume and share on
> Facebook.

It really isn't. This is the core issue.

