Or simply Facebook is showing the fake news providers the door.
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Well so much was clear from the start. It is clearly within their legal right to do so, still it doesn’t mean it’s not a terrible idea.
That and I’m sure prefiltered Mormon and Scientology-targeted ISPs still exist.
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Filtering out glorified hoax-sites isn’t a bad idea, but they’re not going to do it well or with these meaningless gestures.
You have little slippery slope to worry about. This is a weak attempt and they will go no further.
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And…
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Something something about a horse, a barn, and a stopped clock?
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A stopped clock would suggest that they’re making the right decision going forward rather than picking a few worst-offenders and continuing to encourage an environment where they curate towards a “content that gets shared and interacted with at a large scale is self-justifying” environment.
They can’t do nothing. They have an algorithm that feeds you things to your screen, there is no neutral setting for it. How that algorithm works will favour one group or another in any election, and depending on the influence of Facebook, the amount of the influence, and the closeness of the election, you could argue it was the deciding factor (though in an election like this one, you can point to virtually anything as the deciding factor).
They filter stuff out. Everything is either in or out, 1 or 0, there is no third option of “unconsidered.” There is no such thing as a neutral algorithm feeding us neutral information. If filtering story A made candidate X more likely to win then not filtering story A makes candidate Y more likely to win.
I think that faced with this saying, “We filter out overt politically driven lies” is a more neutral position than “It’s a free for all on overt politically driven lies.” Maybe that’s just because the former reminds me of responsible journalism - that thing we rely on to keep politicians honest (or used to, anyway).
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For sure filtering as it is now is a problem. I fail to see how more filtering is going to help. I have a pretty bleak view of responsible journalism as it is. Also how can we be sure that this sudden drive is not a result of a deliberate manipulation, as it is. I mean is there any verifiable fact in the whole story? It all started in last 48h from a handful of news outlets. No actual analysis in any single one of them except vague guesswork.
Palmer’s not on the board of directors, and I’m confident that he’s not a Nazi, just an asshole.
I wonder if this ban on fake news will also cover the comments.
it’s funny that you point this out because FB allowing actual pornographic material and insisting that it was not pornographic was the exact reason I destroyed my account.
Morbid curiosity: context?
I never really understood the point of the image, and I didn’t know the person who posted it that well so I didn’t want to ask for further explanation.
It was kind of a crude drawing.
So uh, sub-Deviantart sketches?
Seems the least worst terribleness that Facebook has to offer.
I just shut mine off when the racist masses were emboldened by recent events and I saw it leaking all over.
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I’m so glad I got out before that. I wasn’t even on there to make friends, I just wanted to receive notifications about events, and everyone, especially everyone over 25 I think, uses Facebook for that. It wasn’t that big of a deal for me and I just thought it wasn’t worth it anymore. I had already felt obligated to accept too many friend requests.
I have seen some weird shit on Deviantart, but that’s because my friends and I specifically go looking for it in the name of sport.
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I don’t think that FB is necessarily talking about filtering new sites with a propaganda slant. They may just be thinking of cutting down on a relatively new kind of site (to me, anyway) that doesn’t even make the pretense of being real journalism; a surprising number of them are run by Macedonian teenagers as a kind of cottage industry. There’ve been several recent articles on these sites recently; this one in New York Magazine seems to get the idea across.
I think I get the worry about the judgment that it would take to go after Fox News or even RT, however, I’m going to hazard a guess that only low-level judgment will be needed to sort out the ones that are just shock headline factories.
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Same. I used it to connect with artists and musicians but I could never tune it to draw them out and I ended up getting too much garbage from friends of friends and shit from dilettantes who wanted to sniff knobs and act like sexist car forum jocks.
I will miss events but the lack of filtering tools will kill Facebook just as they fear the filtering will kill their growth.
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The whole Macedonian teenagers story is preposterous. No one has even heard about this thing ever befor. This has not been the problem for months through out the campaign. The story is not verifiable in any meaningful way. Yet it has been repeated endlessly last 48h, mostely verbatim word by word. Somehow this has been of all things pinpointed as a reason for election results and call for action has been made. This is silly.
The statement is pretty blunt. We don’t like the outcome of election. We blame it on stuff people shared on FB, we are going to alter what gets shared. This is downright dangerous! Double more so because normal rational people that would otherwise be in arms about such shananingans are somehow all of a sudden cool with it.
Mark Zuckerberg: We can’t determine or filter fake news stories. That’s impossible.
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We blame it on many, many things, and one of those things is the increasing spread of falsified information spread on social media and repeated as truth. This has been a problem for a very long time (FB’s first stab at this came a year or so ago when they started trying to flag Onion, Daily Currant, and Borowitz Report stories as ‘satire’ for people who kept thinking they were real news), but as more and more sites devoted to creating and propagating literally fake, non-satirical news have cropped up on the fringe of both political sides, it’s so bad that it’s definitely altering election results. And when the head of one of the major websites identified as a fake-news generator & propagator is named Chief Strategist to the White House… yes, it’s downright dangerous.
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