www.amazon.com/author/paulbabicki
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Happy Holidays and Peace for all throughout the world!
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Facebook Is Finally Taking
Action Against Fake News
Better
late than never.
12/15/2016 01:00 pm ET | Updated 6 hours ago
Emily Peck Executive Editor, Business and Technology,
The Huffington Post
After an election season infused with hoax stories, more
than a month of global outcry and at least one real-world incident of gun
violence in the U.S., Facebook is finally stepping up to combat
the spread of fake news.
The social network announced Thursday that it will work with fact-checking outlets
to label fake stories, flagged by users, as “disputed.” Adam Mosseri, a vice
president in charge of the news feed, shared the changes in a press
release.
Now before sharing a fake story on the site, you’ll get a
warning that its accuracy has been “disputed.” To find out why, you’ll be able
to click a link for a fact-check of the article.
The updates are rolling out Thursday, so you won’t see
the disputed flags right away, but expect them shortly.
Facebook will flag some stories as “disputed”
for users.
Facebook also announced several other steps that chief
executive Mark Zuckerberg had hinted at in a post last month.
The moves come after some full-throated denials from
Zuckerberg ― in the wake of Donald Trump’s Election Day victory ― that fake news was
even a serious issue.
It’s too early to know whether these efforts will be
effective in combating the problem, which is perhaps larger in scope than many
initially realized.
“The company is finally coming to terms with the fake news
problem,” Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the International Fact-Checking Network
at Poynter, told The Huffington Post. Mantzarlis, who has been writing about
this issue for months, says that in recent weeks Facebook told him of its
intention to partner with members of Poynter’s network who adhere to a clear
fact-checking code of principles. For now, Facebook
will be working only with Snopes, FactCheck.org, Politifact, ABC News and the
Associated Press, but hopes to add more from the Poynter network as the site
figures out what works.
That code of principles includes a commitment to
nonpartisanship, fairness and transparency of sources. The Poynter group is a
nonprofit that receives funding from the Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, the National Endowment for Democracy and
others.
The Thursday announcement comes after a rash of hoax stories
shared by pro-Trump websites were widely read in the run-up to the presidential
election. Indeed, a BuzzFeed analysis found that in the three
months before the U.S. voted, election-related fake news stories generated
higher rates of Facebook engagement (likes and shares) than the top election
stories from 19 major news sites. Other reporting from BuzzFeed showed that it
was the anti-Hillary Clinton, pro-Trump fake stories
(she’s a murderer, she runs a child sex-trafficking ring out of a pizza
shop) that grabbed the most attention.
And Facebook attention means a massive audience.
While other sites, including Reddit and Twitter, have made some moves recently
to combat fake news and vile trolling, Facebook is the juggernaut.
With its 1.8 billion monthly users, Facebook is a critical
platform for news distribution. News websites now get a majority of their
traffic from Facebook, as internet users switch from visiting home pages on
desktops to using apps on their mobile devices. In the U.S., 44 percent of
American adults get news on Facebook, according to Pew data.
Facebook is making it easier to report stories you think are
fake.
“A fake story claiming Pope Francis — actually a refugee
advocate — endorsed Mr. Trump was shared almost a million times, likely visible
to tens of millions,” Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor at the University
of North Carolina, told The New York Times. “Its
correction was barely heard. Of course Facebook had significant influence in
this last election’s outcome.”
Reporters have found that fake stories propagated by
pro-Trump websites went increasingly viral in the months leading to the U.S.
presidential election, possibly influencing voters ― and widely shared posts
have incited violence around the world, even leading to the beating death of
one woman in Brazil, according to
the Poynter group.
Initially, Zuckerberg dismissed the notion out-of-hand
that fake news influenced the election, calling it a “pretty crazy idea.” While
it’s impossible to fully measure fake news’ impact on voters, Zuckerberg barely
acknowledged that it was a problem at all.
However, Facebook employees themselves were taking the idea
very seriously, The New York Times
reported.
Later in November, Zuckerberg, under pressure from a rising
public outcry, seemed to sort of reverse himself, writing in a post that the company would start looking
at ways to fight fake news.
The changes announced Thursday ― previewed in that post
― signal how far the company has evolved on this issue.
This would mark the first time Facebook’s worked with
outside organizations on its content stream.
It’s interesting that Facebook’s pop-up notification will
label stories as “disputed” instead of “fake.” In the press release, the two
terms seem to be synonymous. Mosseri says that only stories deemed fake by
third-party outlets will be labeled disputed.
A gunman went to Comet Ping Pong in Washington, D.C.,
after the pizzeria was falsely reported to house a pedophile ring.
It’s also worth emphasizing that the social network is
deliberately not making itself the arbiter of what’s real or fake news. The company
has repeatedly insisted it’s not a media outlet ― and is not responsible for
the content of the stories and statuses that appear in the feed.
Instead, Facebook considers itself an agnostic platform for
sharing news. “We do not want to be arbiters of truth ourselves, but
instead rely on our community and trusted third parties,” Zuckerberg said in
his November post.
Previously, users could flag stories that they didn’t like ―
but couldn’t explicitly offer “fake” as the reason why. The options were “It’s
annoying,” “I think it shouldn’t be on Facebook” and “It’s spam.”
A spokesperson did acknowledge on Thursday that the company
bears some responsibility for stories that spread through Facebook. However,
the announcement makes clear just how hesitant the company is to judge content
or be seen as restricting speech.
“We believe in giving people a voice and that we cannot
become arbiters of truth ourselves,” Mosseri writes. “We’re approaching this
problem carefully.”
While Facebook is being careful about making judgments about
items on its feed, it has in the past blocked content from the network. Most
notoriously, it censored the iconic photo of a young girl
running from a napalm attack during the Vietnam War.
The site will not ban links. “That’s not an area we want to
get into,” the spokesperson said.
Members of Poynter’s fact-checking network will review
articles that have been most frequently flagged by users as fake. This method
would hopefully quash stories that are getting the most viewers and traffic.
The fact-checking group wrote an open letter to Facebook last month urging
it to take the problem of fake news seriously.
Last month, following Google’s lead, Facebook took the
very minor step of restricting ads from dubious sources. However, ads aren’t
the real problem on Facebook. It’s the stories people share freely, driving up
huge amounts of traffic to bogus websites profiting from the volume of readers.
Facebook said it’s primarily concerned with the flat-out
made-up articles (like the pizza-place pedophile story) and pieces
produced by hoax sites (think abcnews.com.co), rather than articles from
outlets that may take a progressive or conservative angle on the news.
The company will block disputed stories from getting paid
promotion ― a practice that allows websites to buy increased circulation,
placing promoted stories in your news feed along with items shared by friends.
The site will also lower the rank of content that is clicked
on but not shared ― a likely sign of poor quality. Think of it like trying a
sample at Costco, but not buying the food, the spokesperson said.
Finally, Facebook said it will further crack down on dubious
websites that try to advertise on the social network. Some of the changes
are first being tested with a segment of users, and then, if successful, will
roll out more widely.
The fake news issue has roiled the internet and the real
world.
President Barack Obama took time to assail fake news in speeches
and in a late November interview with Rolling Stone’s Jann
Wenner. It’s a problem when an article on climate change by a Nobel Prize
winner looks as credible as something written by a guy “in his underwear in the
basement,” Obama said. “In an internet era where we still value a free press
and we don’t want censorship of the internet, that’s a hard problem to solve.”
The problem of hoax news seemed to reach a crisis point two
weeks ago when a gunman walked into a Washington, D.C., pizza shop looking to
bust up a (nonexistent) pedophile sex ring, supposedly run by
the Clintons, that had been written about on hoax websites.
“This is not about politics or partisanship. Lives are at
risk, lives of ordinary people just trying to go about their days to do their
jobs, contribute to their communities,” Hillary Clinton said in a speech at the Capitol
last week. “It is a danger that must be addressed and addressed quickly.”
Trump and his circle have not been vocal on this
issue. The son of Trump’s incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn
himself tweeted the pizza-place conspiracy story.
=============================================================For a great satire on email, please see the following:
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Good Netiquette And A Green Internet To All!
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In addition to this blog, Netiquette IQ has a website with great assets which are being added to on a regular basis. I have authored the premiere book on Netiquette, “Netiquette IQ - A Comprehensive Guide to Improve, Enhance and Add Power to Your Email". My new book, “You’re Hired! Super Charge Your Email Skills in 60 Minutes. . . And Get That Job!” has just been published and will be followed by a trilogy of books on Netiquette for young people. You can view my profile, reviews of the book and content excerpts at:
www.amazon.com/author/paulbabicki
Anyone who would like to review the book and have it posted on my blog or website, please contact me paul@netiquetteiq.com.
In addition to this blog, I maintain a radio show on BlogtalkRadio and an online newsletter via paper.li.I have established Netiquette discussion groups with Linkedin and Yahoo. I am also a member of the International Business Etiquette and Protocol Group and Minding Manners among others. I regularly consult for the Gerson Lehrman Group, a worldwide network of subject matter experts and I have been contributing to the blogs Everything Email and emailmonday . My work has appeared in numerous publications and I have presented to groups such as The Breakfast Club of NJ and PSG of Mercer County, NJ.
Additionally, I am the president of Tabula Rosa Systems,
a “best of breed” reseller of products for communications, email,
network management software, security products and professional
services. Also, I am the president of Netiquette IQ. We are currently developing an email IQ rating system, Netiquette IQ, which promotes the fundamentals outlined in my book.
Over the past twenty-five years, I have enjoyed a dynamic and successful career and have attained an extensive background in IT and electronic communications by selling and marketing within the information technology marketplace.
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