
Facebook blocks links to B.S. Detector, fake news warning plugin - davidbarker
https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/02/facebook-bsdetector-plugin-blocked/
======
joatmon-snoo
People keep saying that Facebook should be doing more to block fake news, but
here's the part that I don't get: why do you want Facebook to exercise even
_more_ discretion over what kind of news people see?

That's to say nothing of the sheer difficulty of classifying something as
"fake news". What's the threshold? How do you determine if something is fake
news? Should stuff like Clickhole and The Onion - y'know, satire news - be
considered fake news? What about sources like the Huffington Post, which
masquerades as a newspaper but is literally a glorified blogger platform?

~~~
Shendare
That's why you don't block; you flag. Let people make their own choices, but
informed. Allow users to flag a link or post with tags such as Satire,
Misleading, Controversial, Editorialized, Biased, Debunked, etc. Everyone else
can still view the links and posts, but with some small indication of its
trustworthiness. Though I feel like some tags, such as Debunked, should
perhaps require a supporting link attached to a flag.

~~~
cpeterso
Tagging by users can easily be gamed but it would be a useful signal for an
algorithm.

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poorman
I'm not sure why anyone uses Facebook anymore. I think a better plugin would
be to remove any posts that contain remote content.

Then you are simply left with updates about your friends.

~~~
dimfeld
The FBPurity browser plugin might interest you. You can block all sorts of
content based on post type and keyword.
[http://www.fbpurity.com](http://www.fbpurity.com)

~~~
sucrose
I've tried this plugin and it's very useful, however, in my case the chat
stops working when enabled.

~~~
dimfeld
Hmm, interesting. For what it's worth, I haven't had that problem.

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__jal
Ugh. Facebook should quit pretending to be part of the web. Just recreate the
AOL experience and be done with it.

It is beyond embarrassing that they're blocking people from helping each other
in order to fail at saving, er, face.

"Share with your friends in any way our PR department approves!" At least
China isn't weaselly about its control-freakery. Zuck & pals really should own
theirs.

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tmaly
I would like to see a raw unfiltered stream on Facebook with some colored
labels like satire, entertainment, opinon, etc. Rather than label an entire
source, each story should be labeled, perhaps by a community effort.

Deciding what is fake and what is not with an algorithm is a slippery slope.

Mainstream media rushed stories that created their own echo chambers last week
with the Ohio State incident.

Newsweek was just on air the other day saying they published a story that they
did not read or write. If mainstream journalists are not doing their job, how
can we trust an algorithm to get it right?

------
problems
This plugin blocks wikileaks.org as a "rumor" site.

This is what I feared would happen with plugins and concepts like this.

~~~
gohrt
The plugin doesn't block anything, it labels things.

Wikileaks is a "rumor" site. It doesn't provide verified information.

~~~
glitchdout
> Wikileaks is a "rumor" site. It doesn't provide verified information.

This is a blatant lie. But I guess this is the type of propaganda and JTRIG
ops that we have to get used to.

[https://wikileaks.org/About.html](https://wikileaks.org/About.html)

> We are fearless in our efforts to get the unvarnished truth out to the
> public. When information comes in, our journalists analyse the material,
> verify it and write a news piece about it describing its significance to
> society. We then publish both the news story and the original material in
> order to enable readers to analyse the story in the context of the original
> source material themselves.

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nanis
From Hustler Magazine v. Falwell to this ... sad.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hustler_Magazine_v._Falwell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hustler_Magazine_v._Falwell)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hustler_Magazine_v._Falwell#/m...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hustler_Magazine_v._Falwell#/media/File:Falwellhustler.jpg)

~~~
joatmon-snoo
In what way is this relevant at all?

~~~
sschueller
Fake news is protected under free speech. Not on Facebook since it's private
but it's a bad thing if everyone has a walled garden.

People are actively trying to turn the internet into a safe space ignoring
free speech and all the hard work that came before to keep it.

There is no 100% filter for fake news especially with all this propaganda from
governments not excluding the United States.

~~~
oh_sigh
Not sure how that is relevant...Has anyone proposed removing fake news from
the internet entirely?

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
The problem isn't that fake news exists, it's that Facebook's algorithm
promotes it over real news.

~~~
tedunangst
Still not seeing the connection to Hustler.

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artemisyna
I just saw a link to the site on my feed and it was working fine for me --
anyone else seeing it blocked?

~~~
tintor
Just tried to post the link on my FB feed and it works fine. There is no
blocking.

~~~
j_s
TechCrunch is fake news! Or... Facebook changed their tactic after being
called out on it (for at least some users).

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pipio21
Well, you have it, your ministry of Truth.

Now the question is, the fake news detector:

Will detect the lies about weapons of mass destruction?

Will detect about lies in basic statistics like gross product or unemployment
done by Gov agencies?

It is said that the first victim in any war is Truth, as we get nearer a
financial collapse because debt unsustainable path the people in power are
getting more and more worried and want to exert some kind of censure about
news and data they can't control.

It would be great to have fake news and data detector that are not
centralized. Oh wait, they already exist: places like shadowstats.com

But I bet that if you access those places you will become labeled a fake news
subversive that doubts the sacred news that people in power want you to
believe.

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partycoder
Some challenges:

\- it's hard to draw a line between true and false in the presence of
subjective information.

\- it's hard to do a classification without false positives and false
negatives.

\- it's hard to defend yourself from accusations of bias and manipulation in
the presence of false positives/false negatives.

\- it's hard to scale a process involving human reviewers.

So, in short, what they did is to let the community regulate their own
content. If people visit some stupid article about curing cancer by eating
cheetos while twerking then that is what is going to trend. If people want to
read about Brawndo, the thirst mutilator and how awesome it is on plants let
them read it.

~~~
partycoder
Then, just like television is not responsible for TV addicts, Facebook may not
be responsible for the susceptibility of people to believe and share fake
news.

~~~
DefaultUserHN
Why should Facebook be responsible? Do we really need to "protect" people by
preventing them from reading tabloid magazines?

~~~
partycoder
I think the problem to address should be improving education. If you are well
educated it would take a much more elaborate effort to trick you. It's still
possible, e.g: race baiting and conspiracy theories have become a thing
lately.

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Neliquat
Clearly, they are part of the problem. Perhaps even symbolicly the problem(s)
itself.

~~~
convolvatron
exactly. if it comes down to people internalizing information from various
sources without any critical thought, its really too late for democracy.
trying to vet the sources after the fact is pointless. if any random person
can bring down society purely by spewing innuendo, then the whole premise of
the fourth estate is flawed.

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forrestthewoods
The problem with this, of course, is that even Pulitzer winning organizations
are guilty of being fake news. And they're, arguably, far more damaging than
National Enquirer type headlines.

[https://www.google.com/amp/www.newyorker.com/news/news-
desk/...](https://www.google.com/amp/www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-
propaganda-about-russian-propaganda/amp)

~~~
makomk
That got even more ridiculous when Josh Marshall of TPM and Paul Krugman of
the New York Times got pissed off at all the people who didn't buy it because
of course, everyone knows that Russia was influencing the election:
[https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/802192619627540480](https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/802192619627540480)
Just like the most obnoxious fake-news-spreading social media users, the fact
that it confirmed their belief was more important than its obvious fakeness.

And make no mistake, a dodgy anonymous group spreading dubious but terrifying
stats about Russian propaganda whilst redefining that to mean any site posting
politicial views they disagree with is a form of fake news, even if they
eventually managed to find a reputable news organisation that would launder
their claims for them.

~~~
SomeStupidPoint
The problem with the NSA database -- and I assume the Russian equivalent -- is
that it can be used to hide interference in other nations (or domestically),
using social graph information and psychology profiles.

I don't believe that the issues which won Trump the election are because of
Russian influence -- they're generational scale strategic blunders on the part
of the US -- but that several of them became "active" at a critical moment in
US politics is precisely how covert warfare between large nations is enacted
(or, at least, is the obvious extension of Cold War tactics).

It's very likely that Russia executed an operation against the US during the
most recent election cycle. The actual effectiveness of that, and the
culpability we bear in leaving the nation is such a vulnerable state is a
matter of considerable debate.

------
danielam
"The list of domains powering the B.S. Detector was somewhat indiscriminately
compiled from various sources around the web." You don't say. Could that be
why thedailywtf.com is in that list?

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tener
Isn't Facebook blocking _any_ plugins that interfere with the site contents?
Perhaps it just got popular enough for them to notice?

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notadoc
How about a plugin that blocks Facebook completely?

~~~
oh_sigh
Insert

127.0.0.1 facebook.com 127.0.0.1 login.facebook.com 127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com

into your /etc/hosts file.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Even better, use 0.0.0.0 to avoid timing out on localhost.

Or :: for IPv6.

------
fudged71
Remember Facebook before news? It was fantastic.

Newsfeed advertisements lead to rich multimedia posts which lead to news and
then fake news.

From a product standpoint, I think they should not have allowed news
organizations on the platform.

~~~
netsharc
Ah, Facebook nowadays is just idiots writing their friends' names underneath
meme pics, because they think that's how you share stuff with friends: some
content has 100K comments, but most of it is just people's names, such a
tragic UX. The great news is that this 9gag-level junk content is what will
turn away their eyeballs base.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Blame the interface, not the user. This just tells you tagging is more
discoverable than sharing.

------
gunther24
Everyone gets what they want out of Facebook.

------
gunther24
Everyone gets what they want from facebook

------
brilliantcode
what's going under the hood here to reliably tell if an article is fake or
not?

~~~
OJFord
Checking against a PR-curated list: [https://github.com/selfagency/bs-
detector/blob/master/chrome...](https://github.com/selfagency/bs-
detector/blob/master/chrome/data/data.json)

~~~
brilliantcode
that's incredibly simple, I thought some NLP and web crawling was involved.

The bigger challenge are fake news generating disinformation and fake comments
on various social media platforms.

This is especially true in reddit where sockpuppetry and vote manipulation as
well as band wagoning is rampant. Anonymity in social network seems to serve
the voice of those who exploit it's weakness as well as the general naivety
and indifference from it's audiences.

For example, in various cryptocoin subreddits I'm seeing a lot of said
activities, even where it is blatantly obvious, the moderators seem to turn
the other cheeck as it generates long debates.

As I recall, Zuckerberg did the same shit in the early days according the
movie The social network where he would jump in discussion and generate long
debates. Except, now the very technique is being used for political and
manipulations in un-regulated "crypto-anarchist-code-is-law" market exchanges.

It's a matter of time before more tools that help the user cut through the
bullshit appears. There will be tit for tats on both sides but in the long run
it's to make fake information expensive to be disseminated.

------
clifanatic
Which, incidentally, "detects" any non-left-wing news source as "B.S.".

~~~
quadrangle
Didn't check myself, can you just provide any example of that? Poster above
says it blocks Wikileaks as a rumor site which is, um, not even non-left-wing.
Wikileaks is a legitimate source that isn't partisan, but partisan people love
or hate it whenever it reveals something good or bad for their side. :P

------
treebeard901
It's too easy to blame Facebook in this case. Fake news has a market because
people seek it out. Some may want to believe the fake news to confirm a world
view they hold and others may see it as entertainment.

The real problem here is why do people want to believe things that are
obviously not true? Maybe some of it is that the world is increasingly more
complicated. You can't explain most issues without researching current events
and having a firm grasp of history. Perhaps it is comforting for people who do
not have the time or the ability to understand complex problems.

In my opinion, the easiest thing for Facebook to do to fix the problem is to
just bring back the chronological news feed. If a friend of mine shares
something Facebook assumes I don't agree with then I should be the one to make
that decision, not an algorithm. This will break the "bubbles" by forcing
people to talk to each other again.

~~~
sdenton4
Fake news is a problem because the wrong metrics are being targeted. Fake news
vendors are seeking clicks because ctr maps directly to their revenue stream.
So they make outrage click bait, get the money, and compete to make the most
outrageous stuff. There's a mix of human psychology and general platform
failure going on here.

~~~
treebeard901
> Fake news vendors are seeking clicks because ctr maps directly to their
> revenue stream.

This is an absolutely important aspect of the fake news problem. It goes back
to when news started to be run for profit, which has always been the case to
some degree. In recent decades it appears to have accelerated. The internet
during this time started to become commercialized as well. The ad supported
internet and for profit news combine to create this scenario.

Maybe it is a chicken and egg problem... Does supply drive demand in this case
or is it the other way around? I genuinely do not have an answer and suspect
it is somewhere in the middle. It is an unfortunate symbiotic relationship we
have found ourselves in.

