What happens when I dispute The Onion? What happens when FAKENEWS_OUTLET gets disputed and claims it's The Onion? It feels like Facebook is taking us for a ride here...
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.
I'm not really sure what the Pareto principle has to do with this.
Also, you cannot use network effects as an accurate proxy for critical thinking. Humans inherently defer a ton of thought to crowd consensus; this crowd consensus becomes less reliable as the subjects involved become more complex. The increasing complexity of modern society only further necessitates the need to train our critical thinking skills. Codifying network effects as a proxy for critical thinking, as FB is doing here, only accelerates the unreliability of groupthink.
Anyway, let me also note I find it strange that you are approaching this the way you are. FB is a proprietary, private platform. They will take actions that are best of the long term growth and profitability of the corporation on behalf of the owners (the shareholders). This whole epistemological/political element perplexes me, I think it entirely misses the mark of why FB is doing this.
edit: I should also mention, your comment about groupthink makes me think you misunderstand me. Gaming a PageRank like algorithm is certainly possible, but the eigenvalues of the Markov process on the adjacency matrix of complainants/news sources would take a away a large part of the human bias element. And counter-counter-measures are pretty well researched.
edit: I don't understand your stance on satire outfits. Was the Onion a satire publication in 1988? If so, how do you square that with your claim?
edit2: You refer to "malicious newsfeed entries." It's interesting that the only large scale activity that can even begin to consistently be considered such is the creation of "dark posts," which FB's censorship program does zilch to combat.
One of my favourite humour sites is Waterford Whispers News. (Among their classics is "North Korea Lands Man on the Sun".) I share their links on occasion, and often get one or two people exasperatedly saying how ridiculous so and so is for whatever position. Usually, they've based this purely on the headline.
Satire, deceptively (or unwittingly) packaged as reality, is not.
> 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.