
Facebook Loses Fact-Checking Group Snopes After Two Years - pseudolus
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-01/facebook-loses-fact-checking-group-snopes-after-two-years
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dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19057742](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19057742)

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Sohcahtoa82
Let's cut the bullshit.

Facebook never really had a real interest in removing fake news from their
site. Being a repository for fake news drives a lot of traffic. Eliminating
fake news would cost money in both the costs for finding and removing it _and_
the lost revenue from traffic.

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notacoward
OK, fine. Let's _really_ cut the bullshit, instead of pretending to read other
people's minds. Let's see if we can have the discussion that seems to have
been skipped in all of this.

 __* Is Facebook responsible for content published on its site? __ __

Legally, the answer is clearly no. Like everything from phone companies to
bulletin boards, Facebook is legally considered a medium rather than an agent.
But we all know (I hope) that legal != moral. So, morally, is Verizon
responsible for what is said in phone conversations? Is Comcast responsible
for what is said in conversations over the low-level internet? _Can_ they be,
in any meaningful or useful sense? Again, generally no. For them to act in
that capacity would make them censors, or agents in some other more
significant sense. That's exactly why many people objected to these fact-
checking efforts in the first place. Blamed for doing nothing, blamed for
doing anything. We as a society have defined a "common carrier" role for these
situations. Why does Verizon get this status and Facebook not?

What makes Facebook any different? Sure, there are obvious differences in
terms of the connections are made, but how _exactly_ does that justify
different treatment? I'm not talking about Cambridge Analytica kinds of
private-information stuff here. That's a whole different matter. I'm just
talking about the stuff that people _meant_ to share. Data comes in, data goes
out, according to the senders' and recipients' own expressed preference for
who they should be connected to. How is that _really_ different than what a
phone company does? If you can't answer that question with any level of
coherency, all you're doing is hating.

Personally, I am well aware of how badly these globe-spanning groups spreading
fake news SUCK. But how do we distinguish them from other groups? I see plenty
of groups that consist of real people who know each other in real life,
deriving benefit from communicating and coordinating through Facebook. I see
others that spread humor or support, even though they have many thousands of
members who don't really know each other. Maybe it's not a great idea for
every random idiot to have that big a megaphone, but how do we eliminate the
bad without also eliminating the good? It's all too easy to say "kill them
all" from a distance, when you're not among those who benefit from such
connections, but being easy doesn't make anything right.

The free-speech common-carrier answer to that central question is a valid one.
I'm not convinced it's the best one, but it's _valid_. Just the medium, the
messages are someone else's. There's a mental and legal model for that. If you
think that's the wrong model, _propose another_. One that actually has some
hope of working. Like it or not, Facebook and Twitter and Hacker News and
other social media are part of how people interact. Not every malady is best
solved by picking an organ to remove. Killing the medium is the lazy way out.
Maybe we should try addressing the reasons or mechanisms by which that medium
is being abused. If you succeeded in killing Facebook and the exact same thing
happened on the next social network, and the next, and the next - as it surely
would - what _else_ might you try?

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Sohcahtoa82
The primary difference between social media and a telephone service is ease of
communication and the broadcasting nature of social media.

Without social media, you normally have to go out of your way to consume news.
With social media, it's consolidated with your cousin's vacation photos.
There's a massive difference in the work required to call up all your friends
to tell them that you heard there's a pizza place running a child sex
trafficking ring in its basement versus just quickly hitting a Share button.

Comcast/Verizon don't have a moral obligation to censor fake news because to
do so, they'd have to listen in on your private conversations. Facebook and
Twitter? I'm not sure. It still presents a major feasibility problem with fake
news sites just easily creating new pages.

But back to my original comment...

If Facebook was _really_ interested in curbing the spread of fake news on
their platform, certainly they would have budgeted more than a measly
$100,000. That's pennies to a company that has well over $15B in quarterly
revenue.

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notacoward
> they'd have to listen in on your private conversations. Facebook and
> Twitter? I'm not sure.

So what does "private" mean? If I'm in a group restricted to only people in my
RL ski club (which I am), are our posts there not private as far as FB is
concerned? Is there a numeric cutoff? A lot of groups spreading fake news on
Facebook are nominally private in the exact same way, even though they have
thousands of members and do almost nothing to vet new ones. Even humor groups
are often private, which I just don't get.

I agree that the "broadcast" nature of Facebook posts is probably significant,
but I'm still not sure how to draw a useful line that would distinguish it
from the thousands of forums that came before which weren't assigned this kind
of moral responsibility. The Prison Planet forums on InfoWars still exist.
Stormfront still exists. They do nothing _but_ spew misinformation and hate.
Any Facebook-specific accountability standard would be like endless Christmas
for them.

> certainly they would have budgeted more than a measly $100,000

They most certainly did. Orders of magnitude. That's only the amount for the
external-fact-checker program, which is a tiny (and IMO not all that
effective) slice of what they're doing. It doesn't count the thousands of
people working on the problem internally, or the billions of machine-hours
spent dismantling these "inauthentic content" networks. There are successes on
that front almost every day, but everybody would rather focus of the fifth
editorial about the third re-post of whatever the last bad news was.

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elicash
The contract was only for $100k? I know they got a ton of revenue out of it on
the ad side, but that's still shocking to me given how much work they were
doing for Facebook.

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khawkins
Good. And I hope that Facebook abandons attempts to be the arbiters of truth
and "facts". These initiatives to saddle social media public forums with
automatic "fact-checking" are laying the groundwork for an Orwellian future.
It's disappointing that more people don't see the dangers in allowing a small
number of individuals to decide what is true or false for the rest of us.

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robterrell
I spent a stupid number of hours fighting disinformation on FB during the 2016
election -- responding to batshit crazy links from FB friends who were getting
fed their batshit crazy from what we now know were 100% trolling-for-bucks
fake news sites, or straight-up foreign disinformation efforts.

I don't have a catchy derogative name for a future where truth is determined
by the number of upvotes, but it's clearly not less dangerous than an
"Orwellian" future where truth is established by elites.

Also -- Snopes is hardly Big Brother.

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forgotmypw2
(because the website has acc issues)

Bloomberg

Facebook Loses Fact-Checking Group Snopes After Two Years

By Sarah Frier February 1, 2019, 3:36 PM EST Updated on February 1, 2019, 4:29
PM EST

Snopes Media Group Inc., one of Facebook Inc.’s first fact-checking partners,
said it’s ending the relationship after two years, even though the decision
may cause financial distress.

“We want to determine with certainty that our efforts to aid any particular
platform are a net positive for our online community, publication, and staff,”
the company said.

Snopes’ contract with Facebook was worth $100,000 in 2017, but was far more
valuable than that for Facebook, which frequently touted its fact-checking
partners as helping combat the fake news problem on its site. Snopes said it
hasn’t ruled out working with Facebook, or any other platforms, in the future.

Facebook has been working since the 2016 U.S. election to rein in
misinformation across its platform, though its results have been spotty.
External fact-checking partners have criticized Facebook’s attempts as only
scratching the surface of false content on the social network.

The fact-checking efforts are often understaffed and have only recently begun
to address the explosion of misleading photo and video content. Repeat
offenders have also found workarounds. One site that was frequently flagged by
fact-checkers simply changed the name of its site, Poynter reported this week.

“We value the work that Snopes has done, and respect their decision as an
independent business,” Facebook said, noting that it has 34 other fact-
checking partners.

Fact-checking initiatives may not be as important for the site’s
misinformation problems as other technological improvements, like detecting
fake accounts trying to spread the content, Alex Stamos, Facebook’s former
head of security, said on Twitter.

“The fact checking partnerships were always PR, because it’s the kind of well-
understood, visible intervention that journalists can see and cover,” Stamos
tweeted. “The really effective product changes are often invisible.”

(Updates with Facebook comment in the sixth paragraph.)

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RickJWagner
No loss for Facebook.

I've had vigorous discussions about Snopes with friends. I'm mostly
conservative, I feel Snopes has a liberal bias. My liberal friends feel
otherwise.

After much back-and-forth, what we found is this: \- Snopes seems to be
careful about printing only true things \- But Snopes controls the narrative
and decides which issues to fact-check. They seem to publish a lot more
material that validates left-leaning opinions than right-leaning ones

At the time of last checking, Snopes had a single political fact-checker, she
was a staunch Democrat.

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chrisseaton
It’s like the BBC in the UK - half the population think it’s left biased and
the other half think it’s right biased.

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sn41
I'm Indian, I think the BBC has an anti-India bias, and is heavily politically
conservative, but socially liberal. The one thing I do give the BBC credit
for, is that they did not resort to overt mud-slinging against Jeremy Corbyn,
as opposed to the Guardian.

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yumraj
I'll add most Western media to that list of publications with anti India bias,
such as NYTimes and Washington Post to name a few.

~~~
bobsil1
And The Economist

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Fauntleroy
Wonder if the trolls from the last thread about this will be back?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19057742](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19057742)

