How dare they make a business decision to have standards for accuracy on their platform.
The nerve of giant corporations in our corporatist world!
The nerve!
The nerve of giant corporations in our corporatist world!
The nerve!
It was fairly obvious when the media started talking about "fake news online" that the endgame was censoring the Internet.
Robust freedom of speech doesn't mean that idiots get to have an equal voice. In fact, I think it depends on idiots quickly getting ignored, even in vile, pernicious, institutionalized ways.
Who decides who gets ignored in "vile, pernicious, institutionalized ways"?
Until then, it's whoever makes better news aggregators.
Popular? Then you're deciding truth by popularity.
The alternative is to ban sorting news articles at all.
There's also the fun problem where the sorting and other display choices of a news aggregator are speech. Why should that speech be suppressed?
And how will a system like this handle news or reports about events that challenge our world view?
Not everything takes the form of Trump saying random outrageous stuff that is easily verified/rejected.
Also, you may say that "Fact checked" is just an additional data point to judge whether to trust an information source, but you know as well as I do that lazy people (most people) will start thinking that "Fact checked" means truth and "Not fact checked" means lies. Even more so on Facebook.
I think, in the long run, these systems will be detrimental to peoples' ability to judge any information themselves. This is a problem for democracy.
I remember sitting in a library years ago as two goofballs met each other for the first time and immediately extended each other more credibility than they gave to the institutions they proceeded to ramble about. It was fascinating to watch.
Anyway, the part regarding Facebook still stands, and we are moving in that general direction I believe.
Articles are being tagged with things like
'Fact Check', 'Opinion' and 'In depth'