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Facebook to Prioritize 'Trustworthy' News Sources
Facebook Inc will begin to prioritize "trustworthy" news outlets on its stream of social media posts as it works to combat "sensationalism" and "misinformation," Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said on Friday.
The company, which has more than 2 billion monthly users, said it will use surveys to determine rankings on how trustworthy news outlets are.
Zuckerberg outlined the shakeup in a post on Facebook, saying that starting next week the News Feed, the company's centerpiece product, would prioritize "high quality news" over less trusted sources.
"There's too much sensationalism, misinformation and polarization in the world today," Zuckerberg wrote.
"Social media enables people to spread information faster than ever before, and if we don't specifically tackle these problems, then we end up amplifying them," he wrote.
At the same time, Zuckerberg said the amount of news overall on Facebook would shrink to roughly 4 percent of the content on the News Feed from 5 percent currently.
Source: Reuters
The new Facebook echochamber where users decide what is trustworthy
https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/01/trusted-sources/
Facebook is going to let its user rate what is a trustworthy news source. Could be great (One would think they assume the pure number of people will try and do a good and honest job), or it will undoubtedly enforce the echo chamber / bubble mentality (where people think that their news source are all trustworthy and the opposing sources are all fake news) or it will end hilariously (like when Microsoft let the public train its AI chatbot Tay and it went all Hitler on them in record time).
(Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Monday January 22 2018, @06:42PM (1 child)
What's really in order: Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit applies to news as much as any other claim of a nugget of objective truth. Sagan's rules in bold, my commentary on how it applies in regular type:
1. Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the "facts." If a bunch of different news outlets not connected with each other or ideally not even in the same country report that the same thing happened, yeah, it probably happened.
2. Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view. In this case, it's likely that those knowledgeable proponents of all points of view won't be on the same media outlet and certainly not in a debate (where it will simply degenerate into people talking over each other). So you'll want to read multiple outlets that disagree with each other, regularly.
3. Arguments from authority carry little weight. Just because somebody wrote it down in a newspaper or said it on TV or the radio does not make it true.
4. Spin more than one hypothesis. This comes up mostly when trying to interpret what happened, rather than describe what happened. For instance, when a Syrian passport was found at the scene of a mass shooting in France, a lot of people immediately jumped to the conclusion that a Syrian refugee was responsible for the attack, when in fact the people responsible for the attack were from Belgium.
5. Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. The news-related corollary usually is "Don't assume that the representative of the party you usually vote for in this debate is correct and/or honest."
6. Quantify. Demand statistics and number-crunching for articles claiming to describe some kind of social or economic pattern. Ideally with publicly accessible sources for those stats so you can do the number-crunching yourself or look at those same numbers in a different way if you so choose. Without quantifying, what you may be dealing with is argument from anecdote.
7. If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise). Glenn Beck, Rachel Maddow, and other public figures prone to putting partial observable facts together into conspiratorial garbage tend to really fail on this point. If you're going to claim some sort of grander point or effort, you need to show how the events you're describing are connected, and how they serve the purpose you claim they serve.
8. Occam’s Razor. Choosing the simpler explanation usually leads to truth. I'm also a big fan of Hanlon's Razor, which basically argues that when in doubt assume incompetence, because that's often the only explanation required.
9. Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified. Non-falsifiable claims in news stories should always be suspect. For instance, an anonymous source told a reporter something that's supposed to be a closely guarded secret. Which might be true, but might not be. Even the famous reporting from Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward regarding the Watergate scandal, which was on the whole accurate, managed to libel several people due to screwing this one up.
Because of the power of statistics and a much larger group of people able to observe, we actually have a better chance of accurately learning about important larger trends or major events than knowing for sure which of your kids stole a cookie.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by therainingmonkey on Thursday January 25 2018, @11:34AM
While these points are great, independent confirmation of the facts is not so easy when all outlets get their stories from news agencies.
If a bunch of different news outlets not connected with each other ... report that the same thing happened then maybe it happened, or maybe they all subscribe to the same Reuters feed.
Independent investigative journalism is expensive, and less likely to earn ad revenue than clickbait and Reuters reposts.