How is news marked as disputed on Facebook?

I imagine their hands are kind of tied- if they don't do anything, then people complain. If they do something, it is possibly not perfect, unless they can come up with some amazing spam reducing innovation which probably close to an AGI fake news bouncer.

The only thing to really do is throw some tools up, and adjust them as adversaries (fake news makers) get more tricky, until finally, after a long time, you get the big innovation.

In any case, deciding to take a stand is clearly better than doing nothing at all.

Now we can vote "disputed" if you do not agree with something. Great.

If it is fully democratic: "Any climate change news is fake".

Or if it is Technocratic (only certain scientists and companies are allowed to mark fake news): "Patents are great. Open source is bad. Monsanto never does any bad things."

Or a CIA echo chamber: "Iraq (or Syria or Iran) has Weapons of Mass Destruction." (Not really, but we don't know until we have invaded it).

> The media has not reported that the National Debt in my first month went down by $12 billion vs a $200 billion increase in Obama first mo.

That's a claim: "I have lowered the debt in my first month while Obama raised it". While the facts are true (the debt did go down), the claim is false. Trump has taken no action that would cause the debt to be lowered; it's not unusual for the debt level to fluctuate in the short term.

The real problem we have is that most people aren't interested in this kind of nuance at all. A statement that makes your team look like the winners, or the other team look like the losers, is easy to accept without much thought or analysis.

Since you, yourself, note that Trump is trying to take credit for it, perhaps you should explain why their reasoning is wrong.

"The national debt fluctuates up and down depending on the day. While the debt is "down" after one month, experts say that trend will reverse and the debt will continue to rise.

This factoid is a gross misrepresentation of the state of the debt and the role the new president had in shaping the figure."

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/oct/...

This is an absolutely irrational argument, which is not to say it is incorrect. It is possible to assign levels of truths to information - we do it all the time in infrastructure. OTOH, it matters not if biases exist in media - those biases can be "truths" as well to the groups of entities who share the biases.

Truths don't imply absolute labeling however, as you so well point out. We all knew Fox News was biased toward the Republican's views. In hindsight, Fox looks quaint compared to Breitbart. Supporting Breitbart or Infowars is another thing entirely, given they support continued, or self-referential irrationality. Irrationality that spreads itself, in other words. I consider this harmful to humans.

The only people who don't want truths to exist is people whose intent is to spread their irrationality to gain control over others.

What will happen, and you can mark my words on this, is that AI will be known primarily in assisting humans in their final effort to reduce the amount of damage those-who-speak-for-others cause the larger group, primarily by detecting their intent in FUCKING with the way we all communicate with each other in a trusted manner.

When, not if, this happens, those who played this game will learn the real price of dissonance.

That's where Facebook finds itself already. The utter amount of garbage facts that then color people's perspective -- falsely. Facebook is then left to choose their reality -- do they want to try to fight off this crap even if it means potential controversy, or do they want to endure ongoing controversy over what they could be doing. There's no winning so they have to choose how they lose.

They're also not a government, so, their duty in all of this is pretty minimal. If Facebook takes action and it's seen as less trustful in regards to news, I have to think they'd be okay with that. Who cares. At that point it's not their problem, go somewhere else for unbiased news. At least they don't have the active problem of being a clearinghouse for false facts.

I expect so many stories will be flagged that we'll all just ignore the "disputed" flag.

It helps us stay connected sure (though it feels more like some kind of serfdom where you have to keep a Facebook account), but it also encourages narcissism, envy, and echo chambers. Don't like an opinion (or fact)? Scream, block, or dispute it and get that person out of your life so you've got a nice curated feed which fits all your preconceptions. What has its ecosystem created which is of lasting value?

I've never trusted Facebook from an ethical standpoint but as they exist longer, its hard to trust them from a social engineering standpoint either. They have more data available to them than anyone save god, better machine learning capabilities and stats than anyone else, and it takes them until after the election to recognize fake news is a problem? Of course, conveniently, the result of the election didn't fit Zuckerberg's political views.

You can get downvoted on HN for stating an opinion or fact that someone doesn't like for whatever reason. Some people are very spiteful. This is the solution?

To see why a news story was marked as disputed on Facebook:

Hover and click underneath the disputed story.

Click About Disputed Stories, or go directly to the independent fact-checking website."

> This feature isn't available to everyone yet.

Really refers to the fact that Facebook is partnering with mainstream media in each individual country, and so they need time to roll this out internationally. Most countries don't even have a developed fact-checking infrastructure.

2) When you dispute FAKENEWS_OUTLET, Facebook should decide against the fake news outlet, because it's not The Onion. FAKENEWS_OUTLET should have a means of being notified and disputing the decision.

Further, Facebook should not allow anonymous disputes, track what individuals dispute, and should use something that looks a bit like PageRank to determine complainant credibility (credible complainant are ones that report many fake sites, fake sites are ones reported by good complainants) supplemented by social graph metrics (eg, lots of credible friends, or follower of sites known to be uncredible).

Or was that rhetorical? I'm glad Facebook is doing this.

> Facebook isn’t quite targeting satire sites like The Onion, however, saying “we’ve found from testing that people tend not to report satirical content intended to be humorous, or content that is clearly labeled as satire.”

I also wonder what's going to happen on April Fool's day.

Satire, deceptively (or unwittingly) packaged as reality, is not.

Yes, the systems themselves, and their incentives, are at fault. And must be changed. For the sake of the Liberal Democratic Experiment (referencing liberalism, not the similarly named political party).

I have three feet. <= False

That statement sure isn't purely true. (Therefore, there must at least kind of be something which is either purely true or purely false.) Though perhaps the sentiment behind it might not be totally wrong?

> Forget trying to find the truth.

No.

The problem is people being emotionally invested and biased. Many Trump supporters will look at the Politifact rating posted higher in the thread, and call Politifact "fake news" whereas the reasoning they give is solid. They wouldn't give Politifact a chance, or build counterarguments, but just throw the baby out with the bathwater. This is on both sides, and many people.

No technology can fix that, unless it's really subtle and targeted (in other words, be mindful of your audience).

"The reader decides" is ... problematic in multiple regards. Among them, the fact that it's been shown to work poorly in practice, witness the present situation.

Based on the performance of some sample, you might decide to tweak the feature and release it to a new sample. The buzzwords for this would be "bandit algorithms."