
Facebook Threatens Satire Site Over CNN Story That Snopes Rated 'False' - sharkweek
https://pjmedia.com/faith/facebook-threatens-babylon-bee-cnn-satire-report-snopes-fact-checkers/
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danielvf
Facebook was threatening putative actions against the satire site domain on
the basis of the "False" Snopes rating, and Facebook was reducing the reach of
the satire article in question and showing warning popups before users could
click to the article.

So it was more than just a marking.

As of a few minutes ago, a Facebook spooksperson said "This was a mistake and
should not have been rated false in our system. It’s since been corrected and
won’t count against the domain in any way"

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GCU-Empiricist
Snopes, SPLC, and their ilk and become less credible institutions, and more an
arm of the culture wars every day.

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gnu8
The SPLC? Seriously? Bigotry isn’t a legitimate point of view. You don’t have
a right to have that opinion.

~~~
grzm
I believe the SPLC has done a lot of good over the course of its history.
There have been a few recent occurrences where I think they've lost a bit of
perspective and nuance. You may disagree, but if you want to see some
examples, you may want to look at their listing of Ayaan Hirsi Ali[0] and
Maajid Nawaz[1] as "anti-Muslim extremists"[2] for why people may view the
SPLC this way. Please don't read this as a blanket condemnation of the SPLC
(nor as agreement with your parent), as that's not my intent; rather, that
there's more nuance there than some (not all) rather recent SPLC stances would
seem to admit.

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayaan_Hirsi_Ali](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayaan_Hirsi_Ali)

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maajid_Nawaz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maajid_Nawaz)

[2]: [https://www.splcenter.org/20161025/journalists-manual-
field-...](https://www.splcenter.org/20161025/journalists-manual-field-guide-
anti-muslim-extremists)

~~~
stareatgoats
SPLC does an amazing job in identifying hategroups and their supporters,
across the political spectrum, and should be a household resource on par with
Google. Which doesn't mean they are infallible: I agree about Maajid Nawaz. As
for Ayaan Hirsi Ali I for one find the quotes that SPLC attributes to her
pretty extreme. Are any of them incorrect, or has she modified her stance more
recently?

~~~
grzm
I'm not well-read enough to speak on her behalf, and would hope that the
quotes SPLC references are accurate. In interviews I've heard with her, she
definitely comes across as strident, and more so than I would prefer, but not
uncritically anti-muslim in a bigoted sense, and wouldn't put her in the same
category as Richard Spencer, for example. That's one of the problems with
lists like these: people will look at the names and not necessarily dig into
why each is included. It's to the SPLC's credit that they include supporting
material.

As for her changing her stance, the Wikipedia article references a Max
Rodenbeck article from the New York Review of Books in 2015 that she has
"mellowed".

If this is something you're interested in, I encourage you to look into this
deeper yourself, if only because I don't think I can do full justice to the
issue. Stuff like this is complicated, and one needs to weigh one's own values
and their rankings as a whole, rather than as a single issue, which often gets
missed in a lot of discourse today.

And to reiterate, I agree with you that the SPLC has historically been a force
for good for the reasons you mention.

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russelluresti
The solution to this is pretty simple - Facebook should work with the sites it
uses as fact-checkers to have a new marking of "Satire". Just having values of
"True" and "False" aren't good enough if you're trying to use those sites as
tools against fake news.

~~~
jsgo
Depends on the relationship of Snopes and Facebook.

If Snopes is being actively used by Facebook in some sort of joint venture for
this purpose, yes, I agree there needs to be something (perhaps a new
flag_item: true/false field for Facebook to actually act against).

If Facebook is just scraping Snopes and looking for the true or false
distinction, well, the onus is on Facebook.

Tangentially, I wonder if this is why there was the hostile takeover thing
going on with Snopes a while back (not sure if that has been resolved or not).
Since "fake news" is all the rage, I bet Snopes has bumped up in usage either
as a fact checker or as an API for things of this nature. So the takeover was
probably done in the hopes that an acquisition from one of the networks came
and they could cash out.

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ajarmst
Clearly the best current candidate for a 'Theory of Everything' is Poe's Law.

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iamcasen
To be fair, I would not be surprised if people used this satire as evidence
for their hatred of CNN. Perhaps even missing the fact it was satire at all.

There's a reason /r/nottheonion exists...

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danielvf
The headline was: "CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine To Spin News
Before Publication". Hard to miss.

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s73v3r_
People are dumb.

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ibejoeb
I'd pay to be in a room of people who think that news is a tangible item that
can be placed in a laundry machine.

This whole situation is ludicrous. The shill at snopes who wrote and published
that is beyond the outer limit. I can believe that it was a mistake at
Facebook, but it's got a lot of agenda looks to it.

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smsm42
It would be side-splittingly hilarious if it wasn't so terrifying, given how
much ad income for many sites depends on portals like Facebook. And how
idiotic and knee-jerk driven decision making seems to be at these sites.

From the most recent fiasco with Google banning substring "gun" in their
Google Shopping searches, to Snopes "fact-checking" obvious satire, I am
starting to think that we are to get bots to pass Turning test not by bots
getting progressively smarter but by human behavior getting progressively
dumber and bot-like. I don't know who wrote that Snopes article, but if it
were a bot, I wouldn't be even a little bit surprised.

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Spoom
I think it's pretty clear that this was a software oversight, and as soon as a
human got involved, the situation was resolved.

~~~
_rpd
Perhaps someone at Snopes was seeing if they had the power to get a site
flagged by Facebook, even for clear satire. Not so much 'artificial stupidity'
again, but 'gaming artificial stupidity for fun and profit'.

