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posted by janrinok on Friday November 29 2019, @08:56PM   Printer-friendly
from the politicians-lie?-why-wasn't-I-told....? dept.

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Facebook Loses Only Fact-Checking Partner in the Netherlands Over Lies in Political Ads

Facebook has lost its only fact-checking partner in the Netherlands, Dutch digital newspaper NU.nl, over its policy of allowing politicians to openly lie in ads on the platform, according to an article on NPO 3.

NU.nl's decision to bail comes amid widespread blowback over the Facebook policy. Critics, including some of its own employees, have argued it incentivises online disinformation campaigns at an unprecedented level and may have more to do with building influence among politicians. (In the U.S., Facebook is struggling to placate conservative critics who think the company is biased towards liberals, while Donald Trump's re-election campaign has reacted angrily to proposed changes to ad policies it believes could limit its reach on Facebook.) Conversely, Facebook insists that it simply believes that it's not an "appropriate role for us to referee political debates and prevent a politician's speech from reaching its audience and being subject to public debate and scrutiny."

According to NPO 3, NU.nl was the only third party partner working with Facebook's beleaguered fact-checking program in the Netherlands. NU.nl said the latest spat came after it ruled that an ad by Dutch politician Esther de Lange stating that 10 percent of Romanian farmland was owned by non-Europeans was unsubstantiated; Facebook then intervened, saying that politicians were off-limits. The Verge noted that Facebook's other fact-checker in the region, Leiden University, stopped participating in the program in 2018.

"What is the point of fighting fake news if you are not allowed to tackle politicians?" NU.nl editor-in-chief Gert-Jaap Hoekman wrote in NPO 3. "Let one thing be clear: we stand behind the content of our fact checks."


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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 29 2019, @09:01PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 29 2019, @09:01PM (#926149)

    Zuckerberg will own the entire world and the sooner the better.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by qzm on Saturday November 30 2019, @11:12AM (1 child)

      by qzm (3260) on Saturday November 30 2019, @11:12AM (#926357)

      What is the option, having Facebook decide what is Truth in political advertising? Is that what we really want?

      'We wont run your ads because you claim you care about the environment, but we decided that is false'
      'We wont run your ads because that state that you support schools, but we can think of exceptions, so that must be false'

      The rabbit hole is deep and bad... are people REALLY trying to promote jumping down it as a GOOD thing? Really?

      I can only assume that they think Facebook would be using it to the advantage of their own personal politics, because other than that, it is pure insanity.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday November 30 2019, @04:08PM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday November 30 2019, @04:08PM (#926424) Journal
        The premise was dumb. Facebook shouldn't be fact checking in the first place. But this is just the latest in a long series of bad ideas from Facebook.
  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 30 2019, @01:05AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 30 2019, @01:05AM (#926208)

    Bunch o gay cock smokers.

  • (Score: 2, Troll) by GlennC on Saturday November 30 2019, @01:07AM (2 children)

    by GlennC (3656) on Saturday November 30 2019, @01:07AM (#926209)

    It doesn't matter what nation, what political party, or even what political system you live under.

    There's a group of people who have taken control of enough of some combination of business, media, and government to ensure that they and their buddies remain in power.

    You and I are powerless to stop it. All we can do is ride the tiger.

    Reference: https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/ride+a+tiger [thefreedictionary.com]

    --
    Sorry folks...the world is bigger and more varied than you want it to be. Deal with it.
    • (Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 30 2019, @01:24AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 30 2019, @01:24AM (#926216)

      But there is something we can do about it. We can start public interest corporations that claim to run news aggregation sites about science and technology but with the ulterior motive of running nothing but biased political news.

      SoylentNews is politics! Vote Republican. Give me Medicare. Kill the Poor.

      • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 30 2019, @03:13AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 30 2019, @03:13AM (#926254)

        You think those groups would not be usurped for power? Think again. Some people get off in 'being the boss' and telling others what is going on.

        SoylentNews is politics! Vote Republican. Give me Medicare. Kill the Poor Ah you are a troll. Nevermind you would not get it.

  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 30 2019, @08:05AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 30 2019, @08:05AM (#926326)

    Fact-checking Soylent Runaway1956 was stabbed with truth, after submitting too many alt-right dog-whistle under-cover Faux News stories, from Brietbarf, who is dead, and the mother-rucking Washington Ex-miner, wholy owned subsidery of Philip Anschutz, from the Anschluss that invaded Austria, and started the Second World War. So I truly expect some greater discretion by Soylent Eds, about what billionaire fueled propaganda they accept for the front page.

  • (Score: 1, Troll) by FatPhil on Saturday November 30 2019, @08:40AM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Saturday November 30 2019, @08:40AM (#926341) Homepage
    Facebook didn't lose anything - that implies facebook had agency.
    The fact-checking site dropped its connections with facebook because of facebook's wrongdoing, it was the one that had the agency.

    What does it matter, nobody understands agency nowadays, and I blame you lot for that.
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 30 2019, @10:59AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 30 2019, @10:59AM (#926356)

    1. It's Facebook related, so why should I care if sheeple get their daily diet of lies and BS from there as opposed to TV, Newspapers, etc. etc. ?
    2. Anyway, who 'fact checks' the 'fact checkers' i.e. Is it 'fact checkers' all the way down?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 30 2019, @01:24PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 30 2019, @01:24PM (#926373)

      It is fact once the backers of the MSM approve.

  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 30 2019, @04:09PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 30 2019, @04:09PM (#926425)

    of fighting fake news if you are not allowed to tackle politicians?"

    "Fake news" is a propaganda meme unto itself. Propaganda didn't stop being propaganda because of this term. The purpose of this term was to create a namespace where journalists could call somebody else's propaganda something different from than their own propaganda.

    Almost all high level discussions contain more exceptions than truths. That is the nature of being a high level discussion. Which is to say that neither politicians or journalists can reliably say that they tell the truth in anything resembling a reliable way. The assumption that this is not so, derives from a lack of self-awareness and ego. In other words, hypocrisy.

    Paper journalism in the political sphere has always been subject to its own corruption, in that access to persons has been used to control narrative. Since this is less the case in the digital sphere, there is a interest (mostly a state interest) to find a way to create a parallel control mechanism. Hence "fake news", and the sudden realization of a millennia old fact: that states interfere with each others elections.

    If you want to stop the above, the place to start is to prevent politicians from taking money from multinational fiduciary interests. Which is to say all publicly traded corporations. If you listen to the arguments in Citizens v. FEC. You will see that the FEC and apparently SCOTUS both endorse foreign interference in U.S. elections by supporting the role of multinational fiduciary interests in politics. Although there is something to be said for foreign interference... It may actually have a stabilizing effect in terms of international relations. I don't know that anybody has ever done the math on that, so I couldn't say. But the U.S. certainly believes so, since we interfere with EVERYBODY.

    There is a reason why we give speech such leeway. It is because it is highly prone to irrational trends, and the more area there is the less likely we are to find ourselves near the edge of the envelope. This predilection to over-correction is amplified by failing to respect common carrier responsibilities when you have media/carrier conglomerates.

    In the U.S. both the left and the right want the corporations involved with constraining speech on the behalf of the state. Both the left and the right want foreign fiduciary interests involved in internal politics. Both the left and the right support media consolidation, and a reduction in market transparency for carrier/media conglomerates. This is demonstrable through their actions, rather than their rhetoric.

    That is how you know that they are the same party.

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