[chinese_donald]

What if it's not the news that's false, but memes and public opinion?

A friend's opinion is many more times effective than a random, fake, news article.

Are we going to start silencing opinion, because it's not factual? Almost nothing comes down to just True and False.

It feels like we are stating to go into dangerous territory, where we allow sites like Facebook to determine the truth for us.

[gcatalfamo]

  A friend's opinion is many more times effective than a random, fake, news article.

But chances are, in all honesty, that the friend's opinion came from reading one of those fake news articles.

[acbabis]

I would guess that most image macros containing rhetorical arguments don't come from people who've based their beliefs on bad journalism. They come from people who've already made up their mind and want to reach as many people as possible

[gcatalfamo]

True, and they could've also come from fake news site that leveraged rage-induced clickbaits to earn massively from ads. (which is what happened during this election)

[jakewins]

> What if it's not the news that's false, but memes and public opinion?

Uhm, but it's not. The article is about the objectively false content, as in: An article says something happened that objectively did not occur, or claims someone said something that they did not say.

> Are we going to start silencing opinion, because it's not factual?

And it's not about this either - anyone is free to keep sharing objectively false content on the platform. The change is that FB will no longer pay for content that is made up and does not make it clear that this is the case.

> Almost nothing comes down to just True and False

Indeed. As I said in another thread the other day - this is a hard problem and the answer is not, as I assume you're insinuating, that my ignorance is as good as your knowledge. Ignorance and lies should not be given equal weight and attention as factual statements and informed commentary by the media.

This is a solved problem, the courts make life-or-death decisions on patently subjective issues every hour. Any reputable school of journalism will be happy to give you detailed explanations for how to navigate the real world of truthisms, he-saids and halfway facts, they've been thinking about this for hundreds of years.

[entee]

It's true, this is really hard. That said, there should be some way to counteract things that are explicitly and provably false. Perhaps integrating some sort of fact checking? I don't know, it's dangerous territory, but it's equally dangerous to have explicitly factually false stories running around unchallenged.

[annerajb]

I saw yesterday around 10 post claiming trump won the popular vote and everybody that said otherwise was lying.

Today I saw a news article saying how the website where that fake news originated from is a conspiracy blog less than 2 months old run by one person. That was the "news" organization that said Trump won the popular vote.

[jrnichols]

And sometimes fact checking your own friends is a futile effort. "Oh, well it could have happened" or something equally dismissive is often the response that I get.