Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/19/technology/facebook-news-feed.html

by peterkshultz • 9 years ago

107 226 9 years 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.

ryan-allen• 9 years ago

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

emodendroket22• 9 years 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.

excalibur2• 9 years ago

BuzzFeed. The most trusted name in news.

askvictor• 9 years ago

Actually BuzzFeed has recently been doing some excellent investigative and long-form journalism. Surprising turnaround; kind of like Vice.

mcintyre1994• 9 years ago

The BBC article (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• 9 years 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-...

goalieca• 9 years 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?

excalibur2• 9 years 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.

threeseed6• 9 years 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.

dundercoder• 9 years ago

This can only end badly.

emodendroket22• 9 years 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• 9 years 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• 9 years 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.

emodendroket22• 9 years ago

I suppose that's possible, but I expect that, like Google's attempts to address the same issue[0], the biggest loser in this change is going to be independent news sources.

[0] https://medium.com/@evanpopp/google-changes-its-algorithm-to...

ppbutt3• 9 years ago

You think CNN is 100% honest and credible? The same could be said of liberals or any arbitrary group of people.

threeseed6• 9 years ago

Please read the article. This isn't how any of this works.

It is a randomised sample of their user base. It will not be possible for any group to gain an advantage.

paulie_a3• 9 years ago

To be fair, nothing on CNN is credible. They are not partisan, they are simply the "off" cousin your family ignores

fortythirteen3• 9 years ago

The problem isn't that simple. Most mainstream news, including CNN, have traded in objective reporting for idealogical dissemination. You can very often, legitimately call CNN "not credible". Just in the last couple years they have:

1. Told their viewers that it was illegal to read the DNC emails leaked to Wikileaks themselves, and to just listen to what CNN has to say about them.

2. Got caught posing one of their cameramen as a protester/rioter for an interview about why he was "in the streets".

3. Deceptively edited a video of Trump dumping fish food into a koi pond to omit the fact that he was following the Japanese PM's lead, then spent a whole day talking about how disrespectful it was.

4. Spent a whole morning talking about how Trump drinks diet coke, while there was an active terrorist attack in NY.

That's just what I pulled off the top of my head, too.

Edit: to the user that downvoted my comment: which of the four bullet points was false? It's easy to protect the liars who benefit our goals. It takes intellectual honesty to criticize one's allies.

topspin• 9 years ago

Aren't they being forced into this role? Facebook is routinely cited as a vector for supposedly democracy wrecking Russian propaganda. There has been a stream of threats and deadlines imposed by European governments demanding that Facebook et al "stop" "hate speech."

Forgive me but if the Powers That Be were breathing down my neck 24/7 I think I might start to believe I'm expected to "do something."

emodendroket22• 9 years ago

Do you think the Trump administration's regulatory apparatus is going to go after them for that? That seems unlikely. Certainly some people have called for them to get involved but I'd say those people are also making a serious misjudgment.

threeseed6• 9 years ago

I do not want Facebook acting as some sort of arbiter of what information is truthful

Facebook isn't the arbiter. Their users are.

And if a substantial percentage deem a website to be untrustworthy then Facebook simply won't display it as often.

emodendroket22• 9 years ago

Well, sort of. The votes give them raw material but interpreting the results and then demoting content is Facebook's job (and almost certainly nobody will be able to see how they do it). And getting demoted by Facebook, Twitter, and Google (all of which are involved in similar initiatives that mostly serve to demote independent news sources) makes a huge difference in our increasingly monopolistic media landscape where those platforms are how many people get their news.

themagician8• 9 years 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.

emodendroket22• 9 years ago

I can't see why that would help.

themagician8• 9 years 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.

ppbutt3• 9 years ago

So nix free speech (and rely on unknown propietary algorithms)? I don't think that's a good idea either. Much of the time, there's more value in the comments than you could gain from an article, video, etc - as is the case here.

themagician8• 9 years ago

Nothing to do with limiting free speech. Quite the opposite.

Instead of showing people only content that they agree with, with counts that reinforce the legitimacy of that content, you would show people everything that is popular and let them determine for themselves what they think about it.

I’m not talking about removing the comments. I’m saying don’t show the count. If people want to read the comments they can.

MaxBarraclough3• 9 years ago

So nix free speech

1. It's Facebook, not the government 2. They aren't banning anything

How is this a free speech issue?

jakecopp2• 9 years ago

I agree with you, but I'm sure they will never remove those metrics.

You might like the extension Facebook Demetricator: http://bengrosser.com/projects/facebook-demetricator/

Personally I block the entire news feed with uBlock Origin which has made my experience of Facebook tolerable.

themagician8• 9 years ago

They will never do it because it’s those little numbers that give you your dopamine fix, and thus central to their revenue.

Social media is a game and the score is whatever metric is shown. You want to most points for yourself and you only want to participate in popular content in the hopes it will earn you more points.

paulie_a3• 9 years ago

How do you disable or block the "suggested" crap

I am seriously considering a year without adblock and going out of my way to click as many ads as possible. Blocking is ineffective, it's time to fuck over the metrics

threeseed6• 9 years ago

This makes absolutely no sense to me.

For almost all stories you can work out its popularity just by the number of comments. And you can determine the comment count (-/+ an order of magnitude) just by scrolling through the comments. The accurate number isn't important for most people.

None of this will prevent the dissemination of fake news. What will do is (a) not prioritising it and (b) detecting whether it's fake. Facebook just added solutions to do both.

themagician8• 9 years ago

Remove the number of comments.

People comment on stories with the most comments and usually reply to the first set of posts because they want their post to be seen, accelerating commenting in that thread.

If you want to count comments fine. Most people won’t. FB actually makes this hard to do.

Would be fascinating to even try it here on HN. If you hit all the integer counters it would dramatically change the way people use the site.

DrScump• 9 years ago

   you can work out its popularity just by the number of comments

Popularity, yes. Accuracy, no.

babuskov• 9 years ago

work out its popularity

Or controversy.

yAnonymous6• 9 years ago

If you really want to fight the root of the problem, it's not likes and comments, but education.

Should we censor social media, because people are too stupid to deal with it? I don't think so and if you do, you're playing in the hands of corporations who want a cheap work force.

Your "solution" isn't a solution, but a hot fix that will cause more damage in the future. It's exactly the shortsighted crap politics are trying to do right now to get immediate results.

y0ghur7_xxx• 9 years ago

If you really want to fight the root of the problem, it's not likes and comments, but education.

I agree, but it's impossible to educate everyone on any subject. I think in this case, people who are experts in the matter, should give a reputation rating on the article. That would be really great. For example, I am no expert in theoretical physics, but I may enjoy an article about it, but how do I know it's not a bunch of bullshit I am reading? If I see that Stephen Hawking gave it a 5 star reputable source rating, I "know" I can believe it.

belorn• 9 years ago

The experience from a few months ago during a conference showed me that education won't fix echo chambers.

It was a conference that was organized by a organization that holds one of the major initiative against false news, and where one of the main tracks was about addressing the issue of false news. Last year they had a massive booth at the middle of the conference hall about false news. This year they brought in a key note speaker which brought several political slides while making misleading conclusions that was later proven to be false, but the whole thing echoed with the audience. It seemed to not matter a bit that it also just happened to be false.

When facts get in the way of a political message, even the most educated seems to let the facts go if its align with their own views. I wish education would work, but I don't see it as a proven method to solve echo chambers or political news.

hrktb2• 9 years ago

If you really want to fight the root of the problem, it's not likes and comments, but education.

But how do educate yourself though ?

The same argument was already made about books or newspapers: depending of the subject a lot of them are trash. Same for TV news. Wikipedia is also not a defacto trustable source.

Except for first hand experience on a subject, you will never be able to find a source that is inherently trustable (and you might even interpret your experience the wrong way, so you should doubt yourself too...).

To educate yourself, there's a point where you have to try to trust some of the information you get. Having that info come from a trusted source or with a high level of peer review is a useful first level of filtering. From there you can (and surely should) invest in more time to double check or cross check if you want, but IMO quick filtering is necessary, and can't be brushed away saying "people should know better".

wongarsu2• 9 years ago

If you really want to fight the root of the problem, it's not likes and comments, but education.

I believe this is a design issue (systems design, not UI design). Filter bubbles and confirmation bias can reinforce each other in a vicious circle. Financial incentives for "news outlets" to mislead people make it worse. That's the heart of facebooks issue.

With a herculan effort we might be able to overcome that with education, but improving Facebook's design to lessen the impact of echo chambers and social confirmation would be much easier and faster. Removing all interaction is one way to do that, though I agree that that's a bit heavy handed and goes against Facebook's incentives.

dionidium• 9 years ago

"Should we censor social media, because people are too stupid to deal with it? I don't think so and if you do, you're playing in the hands of corporations who want a cheap work force."

Just as a sort of general, broad response to this sentiment: yes absolutely. I envy your optimism, but the belief amongst the Hacker News set that humans are universally capable of educating their way out from under deeply-rooted biological faults is misguided. You're not going to educate people out of conferring status on the most popular people/stories/posts/etc. You're competing against at least a few hundred thousand years of evolution (and many of these processes go back much, much further than that.) You won't win.

So, yes, absolutely we should be working on ways to acknowledge and route around human foibles, not pretending we can eliminate them.

frogpelt• 9 years ago

Maybe the problem is education. Education is the solution for most problems. It's also the hardest, most expensive solution.

You will never educate the masses and even if you did, some of what you taught them would be wrong.

asr• 9 years ago

It's sort of ironic that a proposal not to show "likes" comes in for strident criticism on HN. After all, this very site has vacillated a few times on whether or not to show the karma score for each post, and seems to have decided it's better for the community not to do so.

sjg007• 9 years ago

It won't work. I know a lot of educated folks who believe the fake news. Politics has for a long time lied by omission in the national press. Now they just blatantly lie. The stuff we see today is propaganda dressed up in identity politics. In addition, there are plenty of fake Facebook accounts and other avatars on comments sites that may also be Russian trolls pushing disinformation.

quadrangle• 9 years ago

I'm a strong civil liberties anti-censorship person overall…

But https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/08/25/546127444/epis... convinced me that this is a case where education is NOT enough and there's a time where the only solution is plain censorship, unfortunately.

The censorship doesn't have to be confidential. It can be auditable and publicly recorded. But in that case in Ukraine, they did all the education stuff and let the fake news through, and that wasn't enough to stop the country from being ripped apart.

RealGeek• 9 years ago

There is no likes and views count on Whatsapp, but the fake news problem is much worse on Whatsapp than Facebook and YouTube.

lawlessone• 9 years ago

Can you explain this? maybe it's because of the filter bubble i live in but i almost never see this on whatsapp (then again, maybe i wouldn't know if i had.)

gt_• 9 years ago

As someone who hasn’t used WhatsApp, I am surprised and curious about this. Any other experiences or information would be much appreciated.

7granddad• 9 years ago

I think an interesting way Facebook could approach determining credibility would be by having users bet (betting with some made up points instead of real money). Since this forces readers to speculate, it would encourage critically reading the articles. I think a betting system would push Facebook less in the direction of an echo-chamber. The difficulty with applying a betting system is that it still doesn't tell you whether the information is true, thus bets can't be evaluated.

0x445442• 9 years ago

I like the idea in principle but betting, real money or not, relies on agreed upon, objective results/outcomes. There in lies the problem; who's going to be the arbiter of truth?

However, it seems possible to get further along than we are now by creating betting pools/markets where the participants do agree on a set of sources for information.

Actually, I've thought along these lines before rather indirectly by theorizing that the WSJ was probably the most non-partisan source of "news" because most of it's clientele demanded such due to their participation in the markets. But I realize that's highly speculative.

paulsutter3• 9 years ago

Are you talking about yourself or other people?

My Facebook feed is mostly personal updates about hundreds of people I have met, and it feels like the most democratic media I’ve ever seen. It improved a lot when I unfollowed the handful of people who post junk like sportsball.

Are you assuming the faceless masses are exposed to some unimaginable horror that you aren’t seeing? Or tell us more about the horrors you do see.

tbirrell2• 9 years ago

It's more like, letting users "legitimize" news is how you get bots screwing with everything. It may not be a problem for some, including myself since my feed is similar to how you describe yours, but network waide, it will pose an issue.

wu-ikkyu2• 9 years ago

feels like the most democratic media I’ve ever seen.

The Democrats thought the same thing too, before Trump won the election. Perhaps you are falling victim to a filter bubble confirmation bias?

A democracy implies independent national sovereignty. When anyone (govt, corp, or rogue hackers) across the world can effectively manipulate your elections at scale, sovereign democracy is no longer a thing.

kristiandupont• 9 years ago

They already stopped the first "fake news" label experiment because it simply caused people to click on it more. I think that's the core problem: people don't really want to know if something is legitimate or not, they want controversial stuff and if it's labeled as fake, they simply want to see it and decide for themselves anyway. And, I'm sure, when something goes against your beliefs, you will take that fake label as proof that people don't want to believe/the system is trying to brainwash you.

deadfish• 9 years ago

Surely the problem is the lack of a dislike button?

I wonder if Reddit has as much fake news as Facebook?

Erik816• 9 years ago

Probably less completely ridiculous stories, but it does tend towards groupthink. Popularity is not a great gauge for truth.

zeveb• 9 years ago

I wonder if Reddit has as much fake news as Facebook?

I think that /r/politics, /r/shitredditsays & /r/The_Donald might count.

CandidlyFake• 9 years ago

This is the opposite of what they should have done. Shows just how much of an echo-chamber Facebook has become.

News itself is an echo chamber. Don't see how that is facebook's fault.

The reason news is toxic isn't facebook. It's foxnews, nytimes, wapo and the entire media industry.

Not sure why you think "like" buttons would change that.

The news echo chamber existed before facebook. It existed for zuckerburg was born. It'll exist long after facebook is gone.

The only solution is for facebook to ban news entirely from facebook. But then the news industry would get very upset.

nazz• 9 years ago

What will be done in response to a bot storm?

ppbutt3• 9 years ago

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

alexgandy• 9 years 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."

dagw3• 9 years ago

...because we sure as shit can't."

...because we sure as shit don't want to get into that mess.

ikeyany• 9 years 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.

carwyn• 9 years 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."

emodendroket22• 9 years 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.

themagician8• 9 years 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• 9 years 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.

darkstar9994• 9 years 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• 9 years ago

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

dvt3• 9 years 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.

emodendroket22• 9 years 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.

dvt3• 9 years 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.

MaxBarraclough3• 9 years ago

Sounds like you should try Hacker News.

romanovcode2• 9 years ago

I'm sorry if my question seems stupid but I have to ask: Why do you even need a social network?

yesenadam• 9 years ago

Well, my FB isn't polluted by news. I don't know why people talk as if they're forced to look at their news feeds, I hardly ever do. I use it for chatting with friends around the world, looking at their pics sometimes, making friends.

darkstar9994• 9 years ago

In my experience, Instagram is the closest. But the downside is that it's only images.

NoGravitas2• 9 years ago

Mastodon has a norm that news/current events are hidden behind a content warning/subject line. So if you want a news-free timeline, you can have it. You're still responsible for who you follow, but the timeline is straight reverse-chronological with no algorithmic fiddling, and numbers aren't shown for favs and boosts unless you zoom in on a post's details. There's less incentive for clickbait and outrage.

It could get worse in the future, as it's relatively small (1 million known active users) and has a positive founder effect, but for now it's very good.

https://joinmastodon.org/

rdtsc• 9 years 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• 9 years 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.

threeseed6• 9 years 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• 9 years ago

What a horrible idea.

WillReplyfFood2• 9 years ago

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

cocktailpeanuts• 9 years 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.

jackaroe78• 9 years ago

Welcome to the machine!

marenkay4• 9 years 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• 9 years ago

That is the real answer. Facebook and news are two separate phenomenon. Or at least they should be.

marenkay4• 9 years 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.

darkstar9994• 9 years ago

Because they'd be giving up a big chunk of traffic and "engagement".

http://fortune.com/2017/09/08/facebook-twitter-snap-news/

marenkay4• 9 years 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"

WillReplyfFood2• 9 years 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"

romanovcode2• 9 years 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.

InternetUser4• 9 years 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/

skate222• 9 years 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.

matt40773• 9 years 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.

skate222• 9 years 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• 9 years 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.

matt40773• 9 years 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.

pixl974• 9 years 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.

fortythirteen3• 9 years 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• 9 years 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• 9 years 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• 9 years 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_• 9 years ago

Its also a lot cheaper then hiring people.

ghostbrainalpha• 9 years 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.

matt40773• 9 years 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,

peoplewindow2• 9 years 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 ...

gervase• 9 years ago

I think this is spot on, but it misses the core reasoning: this approach permits them to look like they're doing something, without actually changing the status quo. In other words, this lets them have their cake and eat it too, because users (and news orgs) can't blame Facebook for the rankings - they're "from the users"!

At least, that's how this news reads from my admittedly-cynical perspective.

Reedx• 9 years ago

How would that work with people who think the New York Times is fake news to begin with? They're not going to suddenly change their mind because fb says they're real. It'll simply reinforce people's mind or they'll say fb is biased or paid off or whatever. Even if fb had a perfect system it wouldn't solve the problem. People didn't use logic when coming to the idea that NYT is fake and Breitbart is real, so you can't use logic to get them out of it.

It's a no win situation at this point. I'm not sure there's any solution short of removing news from the platform.

ben_jones• 9 years ago

It's also a huge amount of hubris. You either punt this problem to the users in which case you have massive, incurable, vote brigadding, or you pretend to be opening it up "democratically" but in reality you use heavy handed algorithms to curb all outliers in whatever bias the algorithm deems fit.

nerfhammer• 9 years ago

because then people will accuse the fact checkers of being biased and carrying out agendas and conspiracies.

if there's no particular overlord that people can point to then they can't be as outraged at it.

tantalor• 9 years 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

philipodonnell• 9 years 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.

paulddraper2• 9 years 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."

1024core• 9 years 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• 9 years ago

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

AlexC04• 9 years 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.

oliwarner2• 9 years 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• 9 years 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.

oliwarner2• 9 years 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• 9 years ago

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

ntrepid8• 9 years ago

What could possibly go wrong?

alkonaut4• 9 years 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.

InternetUser4• 9 years 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

https://www.youtube.com/user/TheAlexJonesChannel/videos

soundwave1062• 9 years 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. :) )

alkonaut4• 9 years ago

A lot of people would strongly disagree with Jones’ videos, while some would share and like them. So they are clearly controversial and “bubbly” (as those liking them and those disliking them will belong to connected groups, socially and locally) - so Facebook should simply try to limit their spread as they are likely not objective and certainly divisive. That was exactly my point.

But I still believe that Facebook could whitelist news sources too - but obviously if they do there will be a massive cry from those that thought breitbart or drudge was going to pass that cut.

wyck• 9 years 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.

jsjohnst• 9 years 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.

booleandilemma2• 9 years 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.

FloNeu2• 9 years ago

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

FloNeu2• 9 years 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• 9 years 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• 9 years ago

What could possibly go wrong. coughthatshowyougottrumpcough.

transitionnel• 9 years 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.

xster3• 9 years 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• 9 years 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.

menckenjr2• 9 years ago

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

menckenjr2• 9 years ago

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

Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News

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