55 ms·

Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News

107 points by peterkshultz 9y ago

severian1778 9y ago
ban certain users from voting on certain topics of even seeing them and game the system to always lean unfairly to your political leanings. no watchdogs, no transparency.
- RodericDay 9y ago
  news.ycombinator.com does this exact same thing :)
ryan-allen 9y ago
I would expect people will downvote things they don't agree with, I'm not sure how I see this working?
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Well, easy, only "mainstream" sources end up being considered trustworthy, and any alternative news source that challenges the world view of NPR, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, et al (sources that are frankly more alike than different) just gets shut out. Look how quickly places like the Washington Post ate up that "PropOrNot" stuff.
excalibur 9y ago
BuzzFeed. The most trusted name in news.
- askvictor 9y ago
  Actually BuzzFeed has recently been doing some excellent investigative and long-form journalism. Surprising turnaround; kind of like Vice.
  - mcintyre1994 9y ago
    The BBC article (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-42755832 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-42755832) made the point that this system would have stopped Buzzfeed being able to make that change (to the extent they'd still rely on FB traffic): > For instance, Buzzfeed's initial beginnings as a viral site would have almost certainly hindered its growth into a serious news organisation had it been subject to the ideas about to be put in place by Mr Zuckerberg's team. I'm not really sure what the answer to this is - but they are really good now and would definitely have been perma-black-holed before now by many measures I can think of.
  - gnicholas 9y ago
    True; but as of 2014, they had the dubious honor of being untrusted by both Dems and Repubs. http://www.journalism.org/2014/10/21/political-polarization-media-habits/pj_14-10-21_mediapolarization-01/ http://www.journalism.org/2014/10/21/political-polarization-...
goalieca 9y ago
> “There’s too much sensationalism, misinformation and polarization in the world today,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, wrote in a post on Friday. “We decided that having the community determine which sources are broadly trusted would be most objective.” Is this truly ignorance or is it malice?
- excalibur 9y ago
  It's arrogance. Zuck wants to be in control of which sources are seen as trustworthy and which are not, but he doesn't want to actually be on the hook for making these decisions. So he implements a faux-democratic facade, and gets to make the actual calls behind the scenes by tweaking algorithms. He wants to have his cake and eat it too.
  - threeseed 9y ago
    Let's be clear here. Facebook is a private website. They legally, morally and ethically have the right to determine what content their users see. Especially given that we have demonstrated evidence of fake news being disseminated. The idea that this was supposed to be a democratic process was never claimed nor should it have been expected.
    - te_chris 9y ago
      They are, for now, as most monopoly industries were before their negative effects caught the attention of govts and they suddenly found themselves regulated.
    - 0xfeba 9y ago
      > They legally, morally and ethically have the right to determine what content their users see. Um, legally, sure. Morally and ethically is not up to them.
dundercoder 9y ago
This can only end badly.
emodendroket 9y ago
This is a frankly awful idea. I do not want Facebook acting as some sort of arbiter of what information is truthful. The cure is worse than the disease.
- 0x7f800000 9y ago
  This is worse than that. Imagine your Trump-supporting extended family voting down CNN news stories as "not credible." Expect mass brigading by The_Donald.
  - sergiotapia 9y ago
    This is worse than that. Imagine your Bernie-supporting extended family voting down Fox news stories as "not credible." Expect mass brigading by /r/politics.
    - oculusthrift 9y ago
      yeah only one side routinely falls for russian propaganda, downright lies and breitbart.
      - emodendroket 9y ago
        Charges of being Russian tools have been hurled at everyone left and right of the DNC (for instance they were going after Jill Stein).
      - irori929 9y ago
        Why the generic labels? If they mention specifics, Bernie or a particular forum, there’s usually plenty of real arguments that can separate those specific things When the discourse devolves left/right and liberal/conservative tags you’ve landed in nonsense-land Tear down nonsense directly and call a person out for THEIR own BS.
      - MBCook 9y ago
        Really? Here’s a paper (PDF) showing some of the most active & influential #BlackLivesMatter tweeters were linked to Russia. On BOTH SIDES. http://faculty.washington.edu/kstarbi/examining-trolls-polarization.pdf http://faculty.washington.edu/kstarbi/examining-trolls-polar... This matches similar research I saw in the last few days on some other political topic (can’t remember which) were some of the most important and active tweeters were Russian on both sides. Russia wasn’t trying to get Trump elected (though they HATED Clinton). They were trying to get America to fight with itself and sew division. They did a really good job.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
themagician 9y ago
This is the opposite of what they should have done. Shows just how much of an echo-chamber Facebook has become. This is just adding another metric by which garbage can be made legitimate and vice versa. Facebook would be a much better platform if they removed the like and comment count from every post. It’s those numbers that lead people to believe that garbage is legitimate in the first place. By hiding these numbers it would force people to think for themselves. Same thing with YouTube. Fake News becomes real news when it had enough views, likes, upvotes, comments, etc.. These counts don’t really need to be shown to the end user.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  I can't see why that would help.
  - themagician 9y ago
    Those counts are the rating by which people determine legitimacy of content. Popular content must be correct by virtue of that fact that so many people can’t be wrong. And when you only show people content that they all ready agree with it further reinforces its legitimacy. Remove the counts and people have no external validation for the legitimacy of a piece of content. They actually have to read it. What we have now is a system where someone sees a headline, “Proof Obama birth certificate fake!” With 100k like and 10k comments and they don’t even read it and just comment, “I knew it!” When you pick up a newspaper you have to actually read it. You can’t just look at the headline and see how many people agree with it before you can form any kind of opinion.
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      What seems likely to me is that people share obviously fake news not because they see it has a lot of likes but because it confirms things they already believe.
      - themagician 9y ago
        What they see is often determined by those counts in the first place, and what people decide to read/comment/share is more often than not because a post has a lot of likes/comments. Then they share it to get likes for them self. If the only incentive to read/share/comment was a genuine understanding or willingness to share and participate the entire space would be different.
nazz 9y ago
What will be done in response to a bot storm?
ppbutt 9y ago
"Facebook to let Users Rank Credibility of (pre-filtered) News"
alexgandy 9y ago
Bad or good, this is an admission of failure. Facebook just flat out said "screw it, you all decide what's real...because we sure as shit can't."
- dagw 9y ago
  ...because we sure as shit can't." ...because we sure as shit don't want to get into that mess.
- ikeyany 9y ago
  They sure as shit can, but they sure as shit don't want to. They could have tackled this 10 years ago but instead they optimized for likes, clicks, traffic, and revenue.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
carwyn 9y ago
They would be better off auto-blending articles at the other end of users' opinion spectrum into their news feeds (or comment threads) to try and burst the echo chambers. "Here are some articles at the polar opposite to your norms."
- emodendroket 9y ago
  I think this is a much less effective way of changing minds than the genteel David Brookses of the world would like to admit.
- themagician 9y ago
  You could bust the echo chambers by not tailoring content and showing popular content to everyone without telling them why it’s popular. If you saw two popular pieces of content next to each other, one from Fox News and one from CNN but with no indicators (likes, comments, etc.) it would force you to actually read the content and come to your own conclusion. Instead we show people what they want to see with a number next to it that reinforces the popularity and legitimizes whatever it is. Part of how birtherism became a thing. You only see articles from a source you trust and you see that 100k people also approve of ever post on the topic. “Hmmm. Well, those 100,000 people must be into something!”
- asgioiobuio 9y ago
  I don't think that would work well at all. "The polar opposite to my norms" is stuff like Alex Jones and Breitbart. I won't learn anything from exposing myself to such idiocy. Dishonest clickbait is worthless, even if it comes from a diversity of viewpoints. No algorithm is (yet) smart enough to judge the quality of journalism. Facebook shouldn't try.
  - darkstar999 9y ago
    This is exactly why we need to be broken from echo chambers. If you think the polar opposite of whatever you believe is conspiracy and idiocy, you are in an echo chamber. There is rational journalism for whatever is the opposite of your beliefs.
willart4food 9y ago
I can't wait till 4chan gets wind of this one!
dvt 9y ago
Slightly off-topic: are there any social networks out there not polluted by news -- fake or otherwise? Is there room for a new social network that's for, you know, people? Snapchat's a tabloid, Facebook is basically a news RSS feed, and I'm even starting to get news "stories" when browsing hashtags on Instagram. I just want to discover people and talk to people. Apart from dating apps (Tinder/Bumble/etc.), it seems that all social networks have become news networks.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  That might be because "the news" isn't some abstract thing that has no effect on people's lives, so people want to talk to people about the news and politics.
  - dvt 9y ago
    Not saying you're wrong, but I don't know, I was perfectly happy chatting with friends on AIM messenger a decade ago. Myspace was also super spammy, but never became a (literal) news feed. I don't mind stupid pro/anti-Trump memes or whatnot, but giving news distribution companies (from Breitbart to the Economist) a platform on your social network seems like an anti-pattern.
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      I'd much rather see a news article someone thought was trenchant or interesting than a meme image that serves no purpose but to try and rile people up. Which one is a better basis for conversation?
      - dvt 9y ago
        Let me rephrase: I think it's perfectly fine to share news articles and talk about them, etc. But the distribution of news has become fundamental to FB and Snapchat (and to a lesser extent Twitter and IG) -- see FB's trending stories, or Snapchat's "Discover" tab. It's not at all like "oh Bob thought this Fox News article was interesting" -- although to be honest, I would actively discourage that, too.
rdtsc 9y ago
> The same criticism has also engulfed other social media companies such as Twitter, which on Friday said it was emailing notifications to 677,775 people in the United States that they had interacted with Russian propaganda accounts around the time of the 2016 election. Wonder if they included the part where they (Twitter) went to RT, which is pretty much Moscow's propaganda arm, and offered to sell them $200k worth of adds geared specifically for US elections crowd.
srcmap 9y ago
Perfect for collecting more user attributes and use them as future "targeted" advertising. Future Republican candidates can put out FB ads only target Orange County Voters who dislike CNN's news article on Trump. Democrat party can put FB ads asking for campaign contributions only from folks in SF that like CNN's news article on Trump.
- threeseed 9y ago
  That's not how this works. It's more like an electoral poll. From the article: "It declined to say how many people were polled or which news outlets they were asked about."
diogenescynic 9y ago
What a horrible idea.
eclectic 9y ago
Hey Facebook! Leave our brains alone!
WillReplyfFood 9y ago
Automerging similar comments would at least reduce the ilusion of a crowd.
cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
Before I go in, I must say this comment is not about politics , and I am not a Donald Trump supporter (I can't believe I have to always prefix this before saying anything sane nowadays otherwise I get stoned to death online) That said, here's a story. One day during the presidential campaign I saw a person who normally really despised Donald Trump say "Hey I hate him but I think he kinda made sense on his speech today". Remember she watched the speech because she hated him and was looking for every chance to make fun of him but instead came off rethinking things for just that speech. Then the next day she watched a mainstream TV news anchors go through the speech, one by one line and criticizing, using Trump's past history and etc. Then she said "I knew it he's an evil, he almost made me listen to him, so devious". I normally never watch TV so observing someone else reacting completely opposite ways based on just a 30 minute TV show is when I realized how mainstream TV is shaping people's minds and propaganda in 2018 is stronger than ever. Most people won't want to believe that they are under heavy influence of political propaganda because their identity is connected to it, but that is the truth. Just to be clear, this is not even about politics. This phenomenon is increasingly common across every aspect of the society. For example, if you look at what's happening in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, it's full of propaganda by people who have more knowledge manipulating people with less. The only way to overcome this is to: 1. Try to be as emotionally detached from the events as possible 2. Actually try to learn what is going on, instead of listening to what everyone else is saying, because even your most trustworthy friend, family, or even a very reputable nobel prize winner is under this influence unless they followed this principle, which most people don't have time to engage in. 3. If you ARE that reputable person, be careful what you tell your followers. If you haven't gone through step 1 and 2 and just saying "This is who I am, I'm just expressing myself, take it or leave it, just unfollow me if you don't want to hear what I say", you are being extremely irresponsible. You are basically taking your own gullibility and amplifying it to hundreds of thousands or millions of other people who are probably in less fortunate position that you are (which means they will suffer exponentially more from this misinformation than yourself) Facebook doing this won't help fake news, it will only accelerate what they are already guilty of, because most people aren't even aware they are misinformed and furthermore don't want to believe they are wrong. So it will only result in larger and larger filter bubble which separates people even more. It's like religion, when was the last time you were able to convince a religious person into believing that God doesn't exist? Imagine telling people on Facebook to vote whether God exists or not on Facebook. Personally I think there's a huge opportunity hiding in this madness somewhere if you're an entrepreneur.
marenkay 9y ago
Why not remove anything except from social interaction from FB instead of this? IMHO anything on FB beyond connecting with people is worthless anyway and mostly driven by bots and not people these days.
- mythrwy 9y ago
  That is the real answer. Facebook and news are two separate phenomenon. Or at least they should be.
  - marenkay 9y ago
    I would very much say: any form of social media and news should not be mixed. Social media is basically attention whoring for everyone these days, truth or value does not matter much in that regard.
    - darkstar999 9y ago
      News is attention whoring. Ever heard of sensational headlines and clickbait?
      - marenkay 9y ago
        I'd say that is not news or journalism.
- darkstar999 9y ago
  Because they'd be giving up a big chunk of traffic and "engagement". http://fortune.com/2017/09/08/facebook-twitter-snap-news/ http://fortune.com/2017/09/08/facebook-twitter-snap-news/
  - marenkay 9y ago
    ^ using social media as trustworthy news source is troubling IMHO. That could only work if social media was under the same legal regulation as press is. But user ranking is basically FB saying "no, no. We don't do news, that's not our business. Sign waiver here"
WillReplyfFood 9y ago
A good way to prevent false stories, would be to reward users who take the time to find evidence to the contrary, with some gamified rank system. "Mamothhunter of Lies"
romanovcode 9y ago
This is a horrible idea in general, but very good for facebook. Facebook users will be in even greater echo-chamber re-assuring their world-views therefore they will be more engaged with the website, and this is all FB cares about.
- InternetUser 9y ago
  Here's my theory, and I think it's quite obvious: Zuckerberg, as someone with a reported $74B in net worth[0], is actually a Republican, and strongly supports Trump and is pushing for his reelection. All the apologizes and damage control is just virtue-signalling to appease the entertainment industry (by which I include the news industry), which relies on and trusts Facebook for their very existence. [0] https://www.forbes.com/profile/mark-zuckerberg/ https://www.forbes.com/profile/mark-zuckerberg/
skate22 9y ago
A fraction of revenue from popular pages should fund a manual fact checking process that either temporarily grants or denies that page a trusted status.
- matt4077 9y ago
  People don't care about "fact checking". The NYT, or the Wall Street Journal's newsrooms simply don't make factual errors, except occasionally spelling someone's name wrong, Nobody cares.
  - skate22 9y ago
    Your counter example uses a trusted source of info. The people who actively read those sources likely DO trust them. Facebook lets anyone post anything (to the extent that fake news is a huge problem), and reaches a much larger audience.
elorant 9y ago
This is so stupid. For one, people tend to have herd mentality. An article seen the wrong way could trigger an immense backfire where a medium's credibility tanks in a matter of days. And then it would take years to reverse the damage. Furthermore, it opens the way for anyone with a botnet of infected machines to rig the credibility of any news outlet to his liking.
- matt4077 9y ago
  It would seem that Facebook is rather well-positioned to identify such problems in the data. They could, for example, only count votes by long-term users. They also have almost complete knowledge of their users' political leanings, making it possible to counteract any attempts at manipulation.
  - pixl97 9y ago
    Eh, if FB doesn't release those algorithms to an independent 3rd party, one I'd to assume that the manipulation is on FB's part.
- fortythirteen 9y ago
  It's only stupid if you believe Facebook wants to solve their echo chamber problem. Facebook draws its revenue from personality profiling its users for targeted advertising. How much more profit do they make when they can actively push people towards binary thinking, and make them easy to categorize?
elcapitan 9y ago
This of course just shifts the problem to Facebook then ranking the credibility of users, on which they will base the raking of credibility of news.
- banderman 9y ago
  Or they already have a good idea about the credibility of the news sources and this will let them determine which users are credible.
imgabe 9y ago
This seems very lazy on Facebook's part. Rather than employing people who will research and fact-check, they're punting the problem to the users. This whole situation arose because users are very bad at determining which sources are credible. People will believe anything that confirms their biases, and disbelieve anything that doesn't.
- swarnie_ 9y ago
  Its also a lot cheaper then hiring people.
  - ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
    It's not the cost of hiring people they really need to avoid. They don't want to alienate the conservative crowd who basically check in to Facebook ONLY to see the day's new anti-Hillary meme. I don't know about you guys, but my Grandma clicks on ads at an almost bot like rate.
- matt4077 9y ago
  I'm sure Facebook wouldn't care about a few million spent on a panel of the world's greatest connoisseurs of real news. This feature is in fact guaranteed to cost far more than a few experts ever would. But Facebook knows that any expert panel will without a sliver of doubt quickly converge to a ranking that has the Economist and the New York Times in top positions, and Breitbart somewhere behind a random word generator. Any working statistical method will lead to the same result, obviously. But it gives Facebook the option to invoke HN's favourite argument: "it can't be political because it's the algorithm. See: here are numbers."[0]. [0]: Compare, for example, the libertarian love for bitcoin, and how it's free from the politics that undermine Central Banks,
  - peoplewindow 9y ago
    Any working statistical method will lead to the same result? What do you mean by that? I read articles in the New York Times, the Economist and also Breitbart (UK edition) fairly regularly. Whilst they cover very different stories as you'd expect given their political biases, I have not noticed any major difference in accuracy when dealing with objective facts. This is partly because "mainstream" media is quite unreliable, rather than any awesome quality of reliability inherent to Breitbart, but the idea that it's unreliable seems to be to be coming from people who simply dislike conservative worldviews ... and desperately want to stop people from reading them. Same reason they try and smear anyone who goes looking as nazis, bigots etc. They fear that if someone reads things from the "other side" they might find it's not so unreasonable after all ...
tantalor 9y ago
You have been able to do this on Google News for a long time: See more stories from preferred sources, and block news sources you don’t like. - Under "Preferred," list publications you want to see more news from. - Under "Blocked," list publications you don’t want to see any news from. https://support.google.com/news/answer/1146405 https://support.google.com/news/answer/1146405
philipodonnell 9y ago
> “There’s too much sensationalism, misinformation and polarization in the world today [ed: because we rely on users to decide what can be trusted],” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, wrote in a post on Friday. “We decided that having the community determine which sources are broadly trusted would be most objective.” Its a bit tone-deaf, Mark. Remember the "we had no effect on the election" line that everyone laughed at? This year its "user curation is the answer to fake news". Everyone is laughing at you again. If you want to determine credibility, hire people to judge credibility. Hire a mix of viewpoints. Its not that hard, it just costs money, which you have more than enough of. Maybe give some of that money back to the users who turn over their online lives to you and actually improve their lives, instead of just monetizing them by feeding users garbage that gets them to click and consume while at the same time you go around complaining that users aren't discriminating enough with those clicks and consumption.
- paulddraper 9y ago
  Zuckerberg said no such thing. He said fake news articles on Facebook did not affect the election. Also, that people were using some sleazy disinformation on Facebook as a convenient excuse. > "I think there is a certain profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is because they saw fake news,” Zuckerberg said. “If you believe that, then I don’t think you internalized the message that Trump voters are trying to send in this election."
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
1024core 9y ago
This is a genius move by FB. Now it becomes a battle of which side can marshall more FB users to flag stories of the other side as fake. Which, in turn, results in more views and clicks for FB.
- FilterSweep 9y ago
  This also precludes malicious actors are more incentivized to continue flagging posts while other users move on.
alexc05 9y ago
So they're going to ask general accounts to rank things for reliability in the era Russian "bot-armies" able to up-rank en-masse? Suddenly they're going to be able to buy credibility the way they buy likes? I'm not sure I'm a fan of this. I hope they've gamed that out.
oliwarner 9y ago
Holy hell, Facebook! For a cash-rich company employing some of the cleverest people on the planet, you're managing to be incredulously stupid here. People who aren't qualified to rate sources should not be asked their opinion. If you want peer review, do peer review... But ask-the-audience isn't that. That all said, there is a redeeming possibility here. You could also do an in-house monitored, qualified peer review of select articles from popular sources and use those results to audit users. If somebody keeps hating on WaPo and pushing Fox you could make assumptions about the quality of their judgement.
- thedoops 9y ago
  What if Facebook is weighting the votes based on content consumption and interests of users? If that's the case, then it's possible to get some interesting results. We need to be doing experiments like this.
  - oliwarner 9y ago
    Just remember that divisive interests —where "fake news" lives— cut two ways. Inferring too much from consumption might confuse "can't stop watching this trash-fire of a government" and "MAGA". Or "aren't these right-wingers a bunch of nutbags" and "lock her up". There's significant overlap in consumption. Worthy of experimentation, but not to decide what's shown on my wall. You probably can get there in the end, but it's probably easier to pay somebody to objectively rank to the political position, and journalistic integrity of major publications.
HughG 9y ago
Will Facebook allow users to rate the credulity of other users? That might make this feature more useful ...
ntrepid8 9y ago
What could possibly go wrong?
alkonaut 9y ago
What they should do isn’t show me news that I’m likely to agree with, but news that nearly noone disagrees with. It should be very easy to notice what has both large numbers of people disagreeing and agreeing with, and people within the same social networks agree with eachother. That type of news could just be supressed. If all that’s left is news with kittens then that’s a glorious success. I can get actual news elsewhere, and Facebook can select a few publications of good quality and replace anyone that shares a breitbart article with a corresponding one from the guardian.
- InternetUser 9y ago
  > news that nearly noone disagrees with Well, in a country where 30 states voted for Trump, 20 states voted for Hillary, and 100 million people chose not to vote (and that's 42% of the eligible electorate[0]), who shall be arbiter of what news, at least U.S. political news, "nearly noone disagrees with"? I mean, given that a majority of politically active people in a large majority of states voted for Trump, I expect that you'll agree with me that Alex Jones' endlessly pro-Trump daily videos should be featured right at the top of everyone's News Feed. I know I'd love that. [0] http://archive.is/NDUkb http://archive.is/NDUkb https://www.youtube.com/user/TheAlexJonesChannel/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/TheAlexJonesChannel/videos
  - soundwave106 9y ago
    Not all news is political news. I don't use my Facebook much except to occasionally share vacation photos these days. Checking recently seems to show no news of any sort. Just some silly memes, weather phenomenon (supermoons!), pop-geek-culture stuff, and daily status updates. Since it's the season, there's some American football discussion, which people obviously have disagreements on, of course, but in that "sport" sort of way. :) I'm sure major news (like major weather events) will still make my feed, but there seems to be a noticeable decrease in political stuff. My cynical take on this announcement is that, for those that post and share a lot of news, there is a high probability that your news bubble will be more heavily reinforced. Not all Trump voters are Alex Jones heads, of course, but if you are one, maybe Alex Jones will still be at the top of your news feed, and you will get all of the Alex Jones-y shares you want. It just won't be on the feed of the friend who prefers is apolitical merely sharing silly cat videos, or the person who is sharing Rachel Maddow clips. Facebook, in other words, will strive to bring you the best news feed that you will never disagree with, all the better for dopamine-inducing clicks and likes. (I don't really know, of course, if my cynicism is off the mark, but these sort of opaque-algorithm news feed games Facebook plays are a large reason why I rarely use my Facebook feed. :) )
wyck 9y ago
I enjoy seeing FB sabotage thier brand into the ground, not because of it's service, but rather because of it's sess pool leadership. My feed is basically a bullshit mill of news instead of actual "freinds" experiences. Even given the bullshit, a good % of the experience stuff is basically just selfie show-offs. It's almost become a mirror of the self, with very little socially valuable interaction. oh you're on a beach ...like oh you want to signal your virtue ..share Facebook is starting to become the anti-social platform in the sense that it has an overall negative social effect.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jsjohnst 9y ago
I just wish they would implement a "Snopes.com filter" which marked things as proven false. I would say something like 1/5 posts some of my relatives make is easily disproved by Snopes.
- booleandilemma 9y ago
  I liked snopes.com more when they were a site that debunked urban legends and not a place people went to for political info.
FloNeu 9y ago
Wow - that's such a high-tech solution... No way someone can manipulate that...
FloNeu 9y ago
This is really the best they can come up with... So much wow - no way someone can manipulate that... Glad the world is save again tadatam
ryandrake 9y ago
When you let users contribute to any kind of measurement, it turns into a measure of popularity. It's now a game of "get enough users to do X". By relying on end-users to rate and rank things, we're letting popularity stand in for all kinds of quality measurements. Lots of 5 stars on Amazon = must be a good product. Lots of Yelp reviews = must be a good restaurant. Lots of upvotes = must be a good comment. Talk about doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results!
drderidder 9y ago
What could possibly go wrong. coughthatshowyougottrumpcough.
gimmeayrwlt 9y ago
Who would rank facebook's censure ? Who would be person who listen ex bosses advice to logout inmidiatly from facebook??
transitionnel 9y ago
I think Facebook's main benefit from this is that they will now have users clicking a button essentially to say, "yes, I believe this." Now they have a direct metric for what type of manipulation works for that user. Because really, no user can actually verify the truth of a media outlet's claims without heroic efforts.
xster 9y ago
And Rome lets the mob run the Comitia Tributa via popularity contests, including dismissing opposition Tribunes. I'd argue Rome died not in 476 but in -121 when the Senate killed Gaius Gracchus and didn't realize they needed reform and create an actual political process that doesn't lead to smooth talkers and thus tyranny. I believe Plato's and the Founding Fathers' preferred solution here would be for each individual to find the smartest willing person they know and let them offer their analysis for consideration.
davesque 9y ago
So they're now going to rank news stories based on the reported (i.e. subjective, not objective as they claim) familiarity and credibility of the source. It's hard to know how this would help without more details. Does anyone have any more information on precisely how this heuristic is defined? I have my doubts that this could even work at all. It seems the whole lesson of recent events is that the average person is not qualified to judge the credibility of hardly anything.
menckenjr 9y ago
If enough people believe it it must be true, right? Right?
menckenjr 9y ago
If enough people believe something it must be true, right?

107 points by peterkshultz 9y ago

ban certain users from voting on certain topics of even seeing them and game the system to always lean unfairly to your political leanings. no watchdogs, no transparency.

RodericDay 9y ago
news.ycombinator.com does this exact same thing :)

ryan-allen 9y ago

I would expect people will downvote things they don't agree with, I'm not sure how I see this working?

emodendroket 9y ago
Well, easy, only "mainstream" sources end up being considered trustworthy, and any alternative news source that challenges the world view of NPR, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, et al (sources that are frankly more alike than different) just gets shut out. Look how quickly places like the Washington Post ate up that "PropOrNot" stuff.

excalibur 9y ago

BuzzFeed. The most trusted name in news.

askvictor 9y ago
Actually BuzzFeed has recently been doing some excellent investigative and long-form journalism. Surprising turnaround; kind of like Vice.
- mcintyre1994 9y ago
  The BBC article (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-42755832 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-42755832) made the point that this system would have stopped Buzzfeed being able to make that change (to the extent they'd still rely on FB traffic): > For instance, Buzzfeed's initial beginnings as a viral site would have almost certainly hindered its growth into a serious news organisation had it been subject to the ideas about to be put in place by Mr Zuckerberg's team. I'm not really sure what the answer to this is - but they are really good now and would definitely have been perma-black-holed before now by many measures I can think of.
- gnicholas 9y ago
  True; but as of 2014, they had the dubious honor of being untrusted by both Dems and Repubs. http://www.journalism.org/2014/10/21/political-polarization-media-habits/pj_14-10-21_mediapolarization-01/ http://www.journalism.org/2014/10/21/political-polarization-...

goalieca 9y ago

> “There’s too much sensationalism, misinformation and polarization in the world today,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, wrote in a post on Friday. “We decided that having the community determine which sources are broadly trusted would be most objective.” Is this truly ignorance or is it malice?

excalibur 9y ago
It's arrogance. Zuck wants to be in control of which sources are seen as trustworthy and which are not, but he doesn't want to actually be on the hook for making these decisions. So he implements a faux-democratic facade, and gets to make the actual calls behind the scenes by tweaking algorithms. He wants to have his cake and eat it too.
- threeseed 9y ago
  Let's be clear here. Facebook is a private website. They legally, morally and ethically have the right to determine what content their users see. Especially given that we have demonstrated evidence of fake news being disseminated. The idea that this was supposed to be a democratic process was never claimed nor should it have been expected.
  - te_chris 9y ago
    They are, for now, as most monopoly industries were before their negative effects caught the attention of govts and they suddenly found themselves regulated.
  - 0xfeba 9y ago
    > They legally, morally and ethically have the right to determine what content their users see. Um, legally, sure. Morally and ethically is not up to them.

dundercoder 9y ago

This can only end badly.

emodendroket 9y ago

This is a frankly awful idea. I do not want Facebook acting as some sort of arbiter of what information is truthful. The cure is worse than the disease.

0x7f800000 9y ago
This is worse than that. Imagine your Trump-supporting extended family voting down CNN news stories as "not credible." Expect mass brigading by The_Donald.
- sergiotapia 9y ago
  This is worse than that. Imagine your Bernie-supporting extended family voting down Fox news stories as "not credible." Expect mass brigading by /r/politics.
  - oculusthrift 9y ago
    yeah only one side routinely falls for russian propaganda, downright lies and breitbart.
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      Charges of being Russian tools have been hurled at everyone left and right of the DNC (for instance they were going after Jill Stein).
    - irori929 9y ago
      Why the generic labels? If they mention specifics, Bernie or a particular forum, there’s usually plenty of real arguments that can separate those specific things When the discourse devolves left/right and liberal/conservative tags you’ve landed in nonsense-land Tear down nonsense directly and call a person out for THEIR own BS.
    - MBCook 9y ago
      Really? Here’s a paper (PDF) showing some of the most active & influential #BlackLivesMatter tweeters were linked to Russia. On BOTH SIDES. http://faculty.washington.edu/kstarbi/examining-trolls-polarization.pdf http://faculty.washington.edu/kstarbi/examining-trolls-polar... This matches similar research I saw in the last few days on some other political topic (can’t remember which) were some of the most important and active tweeters were Russian on both sides. Russia wasn’t trying to get Trump elected (though they HATED Clinton). They were trying to get America to fight with itself and sew division. They did a really good job.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

themagician 9y ago

This is the opposite of what they should have done. Shows just how much of an echo-chamber Facebook has become. This is just adding another metric by which garbage can be made legitimate and vice versa. Facebook would be a much better platform if they removed the like and comment count from every post. It’s those numbers that lead people to believe that garbage is legitimate in the first place. By hiding these numbers it would force people to think for themselves. Same thing with YouTube. Fake News becomes real news when it had enough views, likes, upvotes, comments, etc.. These counts don’t really need to be shown to the end user.

emodendroket 9y ago
I can't see why that would help.
- themagician 9y ago
  Those counts are the rating by which people determine legitimacy of content. Popular content must be correct by virtue of that fact that so many people can’t be wrong. And when you only show people content that they all ready agree with it further reinforces its legitimacy. Remove the counts and people have no external validation for the legitimacy of a piece of content. They actually have to read it. What we have now is a system where someone sees a headline, “Proof Obama birth certificate fake!” With 100k like and 10k comments and they don’t even read it and just comment, “I knew it!” When you pick up a newspaper you have to actually read it. You can’t just look at the headline and see how many people agree with it before you can form any kind of opinion.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    What seems likely to me is that people share obviously fake news not because they see it has a lot of likes but because it confirms things they already believe.
    - themagician 9y ago
      What they see is often determined by those counts in the first place, and what people decide to read/comment/share is more often than not because a post has a lot of likes/comments. Then they share it to get likes for them self. If the only incentive to read/share/comment was a genuine understanding or willingness to share and participate the entire space would be different.

nazz 9y ago

What will be done in response to a bot storm?

ppbutt 9y ago

"Facebook to let Users Rank Credibility of (pre-filtered) News"

alexgandy 9y ago

Bad or good, this is an admission of failure. Facebook just flat out said "screw it, you all decide what's real...because we sure as shit can't."

dagw 9y ago
...because we sure as shit can't." ...because we sure as shit don't want to get into that mess.
ikeyany 9y ago
They sure as shit can, but they sure as shit don't want to. They could have tackled this 10 years ago but instead they optimized for likes, clicks, traffic, and revenue.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

carwyn 9y ago

They would be better off auto-blending articles at the other end of users' opinion spectrum into their news feeds (or comment threads) to try and burst the echo chambers. "Here are some articles at the polar opposite to your norms."

emodendroket 9y ago
I think this is a much less effective way of changing minds than the genteel David Brookses of the world would like to admit.
themagician 9y ago
You could bust the echo chambers by not tailoring content and showing popular content to everyone without telling them why it’s popular. If you saw two popular pieces of content next to each other, one from Fox News and one from CNN but with no indicators (likes, comments, etc.) it would force you to actually read the content and come to your own conclusion. Instead we show people what they want to see with a number next to it that reinforces the popularity and legitimizes whatever it is. Part of how birtherism became a thing. You only see articles from a source you trust and you see that 100k people also approve of ever post on the topic. “Hmmm. Well, those 100,000 people must be into something!”
asgioiobuio 9y ago
I don't think that would work well at all. "The polar opposite to my norms" is stuff like Alex Jones and Breitbart. I won't learn anything from exposing myself to such idiocy. Dishonest clickbait is worthless, even if it comes from a diversity of viewpoints. No algorithm is (yet) smart enough to judge the quality of journalism. Facebook shouldn't try.
- darkstar999 9y ago
  This is exactly why we need to be broken from echo chambers. If you think the polar opposite of whatever you believe is conspiracy and idiocy, you are in an echo chamber. There is rational journalism for whatever is the opposite of your beliefs.

willart4food 9y ago

I can't wait till 4chan gets wind of this one!

dvt 9y ago

Slightly off-topic: are there any social networks out there not polluted by news -- fake or otherwise? Is there room for a new social network that's for, you know, people? Snapchat's a tabloid, Facebook is basically a news RSS feed, and I'm even starting to get news "stories" when browsing hashtags on Instagram. I just want to discover people and talk to people. Apart from dating apps (Tinder/Bumble/etc.), it seems that all social networks have become news networks.

emodendroket 9y ago
That might be because "the news" isn't some abstract thing that has no effect on people's lives, so people want to talk to people about the news and politics.
- dvt 9y ago
  Not saying you're wrong, but I don't know, I was perfectly happy chatting with friends on AIM messenger a decade ago. Myspace was also super spammy, but never became a (literal) news feed. I don't mind stupid pro/anti-Trump memes or whatnot, but giving news distribution companies (from Breitbart to the Economist) a platform on your social network seems like an anti-pattern.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    I'd much rather see a news article someone thought was trenchant or interesting than a meme image that serves no purpose but to try and rile people up. Which one is a better basis for conversation?
    - dvt 9y ago
      Let me rephrase: I think it's perfectly fine to share news articles and talk about them, etc. But the distribution of news has become fundamental to FB and Snapchat (and to a lesser extent Twitter and IG) -- see FB's trending stories, or Snapchat's "Discover" tab. It's not at all like "oh Bob thought this Fox News article was interesting" -- although to be honest, I would actively discourage that, too.

rdtsc 9y ago

> The same criticism has also engulfed other social media companies such as Twitter, which on Friday said it was emailing notifications to 677,775 people in the United States that they had interacted with Russian propaganda accounts around the time of the 2016 election. Wonder if they included the part where they (Twitter) went to RT, which is pretty much Moscow's propaganda arm, and offered to sell them $200k worth of adds geared specifically for US elections crowd.

srcmap 9y ago

Perfect for collecting more user attributes and use them as future "targeted" advertising. Future Republican candidates can put out FB ads only target Orange County Voters who dislike CNN's news article on Trump. Democrat party can put FB ads asking for campaign contributions only from folks in SF that like CNN's news article on Trump.

threeseed 9y ago
That's not how this works. It's more like an electoral poll. From the article: "It declined to say how many people were polled or which news outlets they were asked about."

diogenescynic 9y ago

What a horrible idea.

eclectic 9y ago

Hey Facebook! Leave our brains alone!

WillReplyfFood 9y ago

Automerging similar comments would at least reduce the ilusion of a crowd.

cocktailpeanuts 9y ago

Before I go in, I must say this comment is not about politics , and I am not a Donald Trump supporter (I can't believe I have to always prefix this before saying anything sane nowadays otherwise I get stoned to death online) That said, here's a story. One day during the presidential campaign I saw a person who normally really despised Donald Trump say "Hey I hate him but I think he kinda made sense on his speech today". Remember she watched the speech because she hated him and was looking for every chance to make fun of him but instead came off rethinking things for just that speech. Then the next day she watched a mainstream TV news anchors go through the speech, one by one line and criticizing, using Trump's past history and etc. Then she said "I knew it he's an evil, he almost made me listen to him, so devious". I normally never watch TV so observing someone else reacting completely opposite ways based on just a 30 minute TV show is when I realized how mainstream TV is shaping people's minds and propaganda in 2018 is stronger than ever. Most people won't want to believe that they are under heavy influence of political propaganda because their identity is connected to it, but that is the truth. Just to be clear, this is not even about politics. This phenomenon is increasingly common across every aspect of the society. For example, if you look at what's happening in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, it's full of propaganda by people who have more knowledge manipulating people with less. The only way to overcome this is to: 1. Try to be as emotionally detached from the events as possible 2. Actually try to learn what is going on, instead of listening to what everyone else is saying, because even your most trustworthy friend, family, or even a very reputable nobel prize winner is under this influence unless they followed this principle, which most people don't have time to engage in. 3. If you ARE that reputable person, be careful what you tell your followers. If you haven't gone through step 1 and 2 and just saying "This is who I am, I'm just expressing myself, take it or leave it, just unfollow me if you don't want to hear what I say", you are being extremely irresponsible. You are basically taking your own gullibility and amplifying it to hundreds of thousands or millions of other people who are probably in less fortunate position that you are (which means they will suffer exponentially more from this misinformation than yourself) Facebook doing this won't help fake news, it will only accelerate what they are already guilty of, because most people aren't even aware they are misinformed and furthermore don't want to believe they are wrong. So it will only result in larger and larger filter bubble which separates people even more. It's like religion, when was the last time you were able to convince a religious person into believing that God doesn't exist? Imagine telling people on Facebook to vote whether God exists or not on Facebook. Personally I think there's a huge opportunity hiding in this madness somewhere if you're an entrepreneur.

marenkay 9y ago

Why not remove anything except from social interaction from FB instead of this? IMHO anything on FB beyond connecting with people is worthless anyway and mostly driven by bots and not people these days.

mythrwy 9y ago
That is the real answer. Facebook and news are two separate phenomenon. Or at least they should be.
- marenkay 9y ago
  I would very much say: any form of social media and news should not be mixed. Social media is basically attention whoring for everyone these days, truth or value does not matter much in that regard.
  - darkstar999 9y ago
    News is attention whoring. Ever heard of sensational headlines and clickbait?
    - marenkay 9y ago
      I'd say that is not news or journalism.
darkstar999 9y ago
Because they'd be giving up a big chunk of traffic and "engagement". http://fortune.com/2017/09/08/facebook-twitter-snap-news/ http://fortune.com/2017/09/08/facebook-twitter-snap-news/
- marenkay 9y ago
  ^ using social media as trustworthy news source is troubling IMHO. That could only work if social media was under the same legal regulation as press is. But user ranking is basically FB saying "no, no. We don't do news, that's not our business. Sign waiver here"

WillReplyfFood 9y ago

A good way to prevent false stories, would be to reward users who take the time to find evidence to the contrary, with some gamified rank system. "Mamothhunter of Lies"

romanovcode 9y ago

This is a horrible idea in general, but very good for facebook. Facebook users will be in even greater echo-chamber re-assuring their world-views therefore they will be more engaged with the website, and this is all FB cares about.

InternetUser 9y ago
Here's my theory, and I think it's quite obvious: Zuckerberg, as someone with a reported $74B in net worth[0], is actually a Republican, and strongly supports Trump and is pushing for his reelection. All the apologizes and damage control is just virtue-signalling to appease the entertainment industry (by which I include the news industry), which relies on and trusts Facebook for their very existence. [0] https://www.forbes.com/profile/mark-zuckerberg/ https://www.forbes.com/profile/mark-zuckerberg/

skate22 9y ago

A fraction of revenue from popular pages should fund a manual fact checking process that either temporarily grants or denies that page a trusted status.

matt4077 9y ago
People don't care about "fact checking". The NYT, or the Wall Street Journal's newsrooms simply don't make factual errors, except occasionally spelling someone's name wrong, Nobody cares.
- skate22 9y ago
  Your counter example uses a trusted source of info. The people who actively read those sources likely DO trust them. Facebook lets anyone post anything (to the extent that fake news is a huge problem), and reaches a much larger audience.

elorant 9y ago

This is so stupid. For one, people tend to have herd mentality. An article seen the wrong way could trigger an immense backfire where a medium's credibility tanks in a matter of days. And then it would take years to reverse the damage. Furthermore, it opens the way for anyone with a botnet of infected machines to rig the credibility of any news outlet to his liking.

matt4077 9y ago
It would seem that Facebook is rather well-positioned to identify such problems in the data. They could, for example, only count votes by long-term users. They also have almost complete knowledge of their users' political leanings, making it possible to counteract any attempts at manipulation.
- pixl97 9y ago
  Eh, if FB doesn't release those algorithms to an independent 3rd party, one I'd to assume that the manipulation is on FB's part.
fortythirteen 9y ago
It's only stupid if you believe Facebook wants to solve their echo chamber problem. Facebook draws its revenue from personality profiling its users for targeted advertising. How much more profit do they make when they can actively push people towards binary thinking, and make them easy to categorize?

elcapitan 9y ago

This of course just shifts the problem to Facebook then ranking the credibility of users, on which they will base the raking of credibility of news.

banderman 9y ago
Or they already have a good idea about the credibility of the news sources and this will let them determine which users are credible.

imgabe 9y ago

This seems very lazy on Facebook's part. Rather than employing people who will research and fact-check, they're punting the problem to the users. This whole situation arose because users are very bad at determining which sources are credible. People will believe anything that confirms their biases, and disbelieve anything that doesn't.

swarnie_ 9y ago
Its also a lot cheaper then hiring people.
- ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
  It's not the cost of hiring people they really need to avoid. They don't want to alienate the conservative crowd who basically check in to Facebook ONLY to see the day's new anti-Hillary meme. I don't know about you guys, but my Grandma clicks on ads at an almost bot like rate.
matt4077 9y ago
I'm sure Facebook wouldn't care about a few million spent on a panel of the world's greatest connoisseurs of real news. This feature is in fact guaranteed to cost far more than a few experts ever would. But Facebook knows that any expert panel will without a sliver of doubt quickly converge to a ranking that has the Economist and the New York Times in top positions, and Breitbart somewhere behind a random word generator. Any working statistical method will lead to the same result, obviously. But it gives Facebook the option to invoke HN's favourite argument: "it can't be political because it's the algorithm. See: here are numbers."[0]. [0]: Compare, for example, the libertarian love for bitcoin, and how it's free from the politics that undermine Central Banks,
- peoplewindow 9y ago
  Any working statistical method will lead to the same result? What do you mean by that? I read articles in the New York Times, the Economist and also Breitbart (UK edition) fairly regularly. Whilst they cover very different stories as you'd expect given their political biases, I have not noticed any major difference in accuracy when dealing with objective facts. This is partly because "mainstream" media is quite unreliable, rather than any awesome quality of reliability inherent to Breitbart, but the idea that it's unreliable seems to be to be coming from people who simply dislike conservative worldviews ... and desperately want to stop people from reading them. Same reason they try and smear anyone who goes looking as nazis, bigots etc. They fear that if someone reads things from the "other side" they might find it's not so unreasonable after all ...

tantalor 9y ago

You have been able to do this on Google News for a long time: See more stories from preferred sources, and block news sources you don’t like. - Under "Preferred," list publications you want to see more news from. - Under "Blocked," list publications you don’t want to see any news from. https://support.google.com/news/answer/1146405 https://support.google.com/news/answer/1146405

philipodonnell 9y ago

> “There’s too much sensationalism, misinformation and polarization in the world today [ed: because we rely on users to decide what can be trusted],” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, wrote in a post on Friday. “We decided that having the community determine which sources are broadly trusted would be most objective.” Its a bit tone-deaf, Mark. Remember the "we had no effect on the election" line that everyone laughed at? This year its "user curation is the answer to fake news". Everyone is laughing at you again. If you want to determine credibility, hire people to judge credibility. Hire a mix of viewpoints. Its not that hard, it just costs money, which you have more than enough of. Maybe give some of that money back to the users who turn over their online lives to you and actually improve their lives, instead of just monetizing them by feeding users garbage that gets them to click and consume while at the same time you go around complaining that users aren't discriminating enough with those clicks and consumption.

paulddraper 9y ago
Zuckerberg said no such thing. He said fake news articles on Facebook did not affect the election. Also, that people were using some sleazy disinformation on Facebook as a convenient excuse. > "I think there is a certain profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is because they saw fake news,” Zuckerberg said. “If you believe that, then I don’t think you internalized the message that Trump voters are trying to send in this election."

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

1024core 9y ago

This is a genius move by FB. Now it becomes a battle of which side can marshall more FB users to flag stories of the other side as fake. Which, in turn, results in more views and clicks for FB.

FilterSweep 9y ago
This also precludes malicious actors are more incentivized to continue flagging posts while other users move on.

alexc05 9y ago

So they're going to ask general accounts to rank things for reliability in the era Russian "bot-armies" able to up-rank en-masse? Suddenly they're going to be able to buy credibility the way they buy likes? I'm not sure I'm a fan of this. I hope they've gamed that out.

oliwarner 9y ago

Holy hell, Facebook! For a cash-rich company employing some of the cleverest people on the planet, you're managing to be incredulously stupid here. People who aren't qualified to rate sources should not be asked their opinion. If you want peer review, do peer review... But ask-the-audience isn't that. That all said, there is a redeeming possibility here. You could also do an in-house monitored, qualified peer review of select articles from popular sources and use those results to audit users. If somebody keeps hating on WaPo and pushing Fox you could make assumptions about the quality of their judgement.

thedoops 9y ago
What if Facebook is weighting the votes based on content consumption and interests of users? If that's the case, then it's possible to get some interesting results. We need to be doing experiments like this.
- oliwarner 9y ago
  Just remember that divisive interests —where "fake news" lives— cut two ways. Inferring too much from consumption might confuse "can't stop watching this trash-fire of a government" and "MAGA". Or "aren't these right-wingers a bunch of nutbags" and "lock her up". There's significant overlap in consumption. Worthy of experimentation, but not to decide what's shown on my wall. You probably can get there in the end, but it's probably easier to pay somebody to objectively rank to the political position, and journalistic integrity of major publications.

HughG 9y ago

Will Facebook allow users to rate the credulity of other users? That might make this feature more useful ...

ntrepid8 9y ago

What could possibly go wrong?

alkonaut 9y ago

What they should do isn’t show me news that I’m likely to agree with, but news that nearly noone disagrees with. It should be very easy to notice what has both large numbers of people disagreeing and agreeing with, and people within the same social networks agree with eachother. That type of news could just be supressed. If all that’s left is news with kittens then that’s a glorious success. I can get actual news elsewhere, and Facebook can select a few publications of good quality and replace anyone that shares a breitbart article with a corresponding one from the guardian.

InternetUser 9y ago
> news that nearly noone disagrees with Well, in a country where 30 states voted for Trump, 20 states voted for Hillary, and 100 million people chose not to vote (and that's 42% of the eligible electorate[0]), who shall be arbiter of what news, at least U.S. political news, "nearly noone disagrees with"? I mean, given that a majority of politically active people in a large majority of states voted for Trump, I expect that you'll agree with me that Alex Jones' endlessly pro-Trump daily videos should be featured right at the top of everyone's News Feed. I know I'd love that. [0] http://archive.is/NDUkb http://archive.is/NDUkb https://www.youtube.com/user/TheAlexJonesChannel/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/TheAlexJonesChannel/videos
- soundwave106 9y ago
  Not all news is political news. I don't use my Facebook much except to occasionally share vacation photos these days. Checking recently seems to show no news of any sort. Just some silly memes, weather phenomenon (supermoons!), pop-geek-culture stuff, and daily status updates. Since it's the season, there's some American football discussion, which people obviously have disagreements on, of course, but in that "sport" sort of way. :) I'm sure major news (like major weather events) will still make my feed, but there seems to be a noticeable decrease in political stuff. My cynical take on this announcement is that, for those that post and share a lot of news, there is a high probability that your news bubble will be more heavily reinforced. Not all Trump voters are Alex Jones heads, of course, but if you are one, maybe Alex Jones will still be at the top of your news feed, and you will get all of the Alex Jones-y shares you want. It just won't be on the feed of the friend who prefers is apolitical merely sharing silly cat videos, or the person who is sharing Rachel Maddow clips. Facebook, in other words, will strive to bring you the best news feed that you will never disagree with, all the better for dopamine-inducing clicks and likes. (I don't really know, of course, if my cynicism is off the mark, but these sort of opaque-algorithm news feed games Facebook plays are a large reason why I rarely use my Facebook feed. :) )

wyck 9y ago

I enjoy seeing FB sabotage thier brand into the ground, not because of it's service, but rather because of it's sess pool leadership. My feed is basically a bullshit mill of news instead of actual "freinds" experiences. Even given the bullshit, a good % of the experience stuff is basically just selfie show-offs. It's almost become a mirror of the self, with very little socially valuable interaction. oh you're on a beach ...like oh you want to signal your virtue ..share Facebook is starting to become the anti-social platform in the sense that it has an overall negative social effect.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

jsjohnst 9y ago

I just wish they would implement a "Snopes.com filter" which marked things as proven false. I would say something like 1/5 posts some of my relatives make is easily disproved by Snopes.

booleandilemma 9y ago
I liked snopes.com more when they were a site that debunked urban legends and not a place people went to for political info.

FloNeu 9y ago

Wow - that's such a high-tech solution... No way someone can manipulate that...

FloNeu 9y ago

This is really the best they can come up with... So much wow - no way someone can manipulate that... Glad the world is save again tadatam

ryandrake 9y ago

When you let users contribute to any kind of measurement, it turns into a measure of popularity. It's now a game of "get enough users to do X". By relying on end-users to rate and rank things, we're letting popularity stand in for all kinds of quality measurements. Lots of 5 stars on Amazon = must be a good product. Lots of Yelp reviews = must be a good restaurant. Lots of upvotes = must be a good comment. Talk about doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results!

drderidder 9y ago

What could possibly go wrong. coughthatshowyougottrumpcough.

gimmeayrwlt 9y ago

Who would rank facebook's censure ? Who would be person who listen ex bosses advice to logout inmidiatly from facebook??

transitionnel 9y ago

I think Facebook's main benefit from this is that they will now have users clicking a button essentially to say, "yes, I believe this." Now they have a direct metric for what type of manipulation works for that user. Because really, no user can actually verify the truth of a media outlet's claims without heroic efforts.

xster 9y ago

And Rome lets the mob run the Comitia Tributa via popularity contests, including dismissing opposition Tribunes. I'd argue Rome died not in 476 but in -121 when the Senate killed Gaius Gracchus and didn't realize they needed reform and create an actual political process that doesn't lead to smooth talkers and thus tyranny. I believe Plato's and the Founding Fathers' preferred solution here would be for each individual to find the smartest willing person they know and let them offer their analysis for consideration.

davesque 9y ago

So they're now going to rank news stories based on the reported (i.e. subjective, not objective as they claim) familiarity and credibility of the source. It's hard to know how this would help without more details. Does anyone have any more information on precisely how this heuristic is defined? I have my doubts that this could even work at all. It seems the whole lesson of recent events is that the average person is not qualified to judge the credibility of hardly anything.

menckenjr 9y ago

If enough people believe it it must be true, right? Right?

menckenjr 9y ago

If enough people believe something it must be true, right?