dg61 wrote:cphite wrote:elasto wrote:Zohar wrote:You guys keep assuming I'm having good ideas, when I already said I don't. In any case, I never said outlaw these pieces of writing. I said curate, and notify, and provide more information.
Well, they are already offering to do that, but it's very tricky.
On what basis are "they" qualified to do anything of the sort? And frankly, even if Facebook or whoever they entrust with the task are somehow qualified to determine what news is fake versus what is real; what makes you think they're not biased themselves? Facebook is above all else a business, do you really believe for a moment that they're not going to attempt to nudge popular opinion in ways that benefits their business?In this day and age, not only do I see the BBC dismissed as biased, I even see Snopes discredited and condemned.
No news agency is immune from bias; not even the BBC. They all have biases based on their ownership, their major funding sources, their target audience, and so forth; it's inevitable.
Snopes is basically a handful of writers who like doing research. It's frankly a little weird how much faith people place in their conclusions. To be fair, it does seem like they're at least trying to be non biased; but that doesn't give them any sort of magic ability to detect truth above and beyond the rest of the web.The problem is circular: People will only believe sites to be unbiased if they conform to their pre-existing views. If Facebook marks an article they like as 'fake news' they will assume Facebook has been commandeered by 'da man'...
Frankly, the moment that Facebook is deciding what is real or fake news in the first place - even if they get it right - firmly puts them in the category of 'da man'
Bias is a not very useful category outside of outright polemic or extreme slanting of the "birtherist" variety. It might be more useful to say that all news sources and writings have some kind of outlook; for example a conservative news publication will tend to report with somewhat of a conservative bent in terms of what it highlights in its stories and what stories it deems important(and its op-ed) board, likewise a broadly pro-establishment or anti-establishment source. Snopes is I think a special case because it originated as a fact-checking service rather than a news source per se; to be fair the one time I looked it up it did seem relatively fair to the claim I was critiquing(basically saying "it's a misunderstanding or misinterpertation of a correct statistic rather than an outright falsehood). What distinguishes say the BBC is that it's nonpartisan; i.e. it is beholden to not support this or that party line.
As for "Fake news"; it seems like half the problem is that 1) everything's fake news because nothing is and B) people tend to fetishize finding "the one reliable or unbiased source" and not picking apart the sources you have( like "This newspaper is almost certainly not going to report something that's false or outright mendacious, but expect it to put some kind of stories more prominently than others") or better yet looking at two or more
independent sources.
EDIT: I think it's almost better to have a fixed but somewhat biased/slanted(not The_Donald or TYT slanted but something where you can kinda tell how it leans) source that you can spot and is fixed than relying on facebook or social media, where the posting is curated in a way it's hard to tell what's actually what.