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.
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.
to the user that downvoted my comment: which of the four bullet points was false?
Didn't downvote (and I don't have CNN), but your complete lack of links to back up any of the things you mentioned makes it very hard to judge if they're actually true or false.
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.
From the article, it weren't independent sources which were punished, but far-left and far-right sources.
> However, in addition to AlterNet and other left-wing news sites, Rosenfeld said right-wing, alternative media outlets have also seen a reduction in viewership due to the change in Google’s algorithm.
So? Independent news sources almost always have a non-mainstream political bent; that's why the writers aren't just writing in the New York Times. I don't think most people understand "weeding out fake news" to mean "only allowing a narrow spectrum of respectable opinion." And these sources do real reporting and break real news.
That's true but that seems like the easiest issue to deal with, considering how much information you have about user's political preferences if you're Facebook.
This matches similar research I saw in the last few days on some other political topic (can’t remember which) were some of the most important and active tweeters were Russian on both sides.
Russia wasn’t trying to get Trump elected (though they HATED Clinton). They were trying to get America to fight with itself and sew division. They did a really good job.
Certainly people on both sides were accused of that but the idea that Black Lives Matter was actually just a Russian plot is frankly pretty repellent, and that paper in the end just defers to Twitter's ideas of who's a Russian troll, and how did they decide? We've seen a lot of really shoddy work in this department.
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."
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.
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.
“I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how.” - Stalin (though the sentiment was not original to him. Variations on the same theme have been recorded as far back as 1880, at least).
Expect mass brigading by The_Donald.