Being less friendly to advertisers insulates Snapchat from viral hoaxes | Hacker News Reader

Being less friendly to advertisers insulates Snapchat from viral hoaxes

bloomberg.com

81 pointslnguyen42 comments

Snapchat is my favorite social network because it is too difficult to spread political opinions or share clickbait articles. The only easy things to do on it are to record a funny video and share it with your friends.

I can comfortably open Snapchat knowing I'm not going to be confronted with low-effort shares of third-party content or lazy copy+pasted political memes. Sharing that content is certainly possible to do in Snapchat, but it is difficult enough to discourage people to do so.

I certainly like to hear other political perspectives --because of my past career I have lots of friends with opposite opinions from the Bay Area prevailing beliefs. I just prefer it to be on my own time and not in the cheap clickbait reductive fashion popular on Facebook and Instagram.

If only Snapchat were profitable. I really hope they pull it off.

Email, regular chat and other low-engagement channels have also the same advantage of being viral-free.

Just don't forget to re-send this email to ten of your contacts or Hotmail will delete your account.

Can I combine it with the one about Bill Gates donating $10 per forwarded email, or does it have to be separate forwards?

Please clarify, happy to do either.

You don’t remember the pre-FB era of fwd’ed email chains? They were Snopes’ original raison d'être.

> Sheryl Sandberg: “The responsibility for an open platform is to let people express themselves. We don’t check the information people put on Facebook before they run it, and I don’t think anyone should want us to do that.”

What a bunch of lies. Try posting a nude pic on Facebook and see what happens.

If they can check for nudity why wouldn't they check for "fake news"? Non-porn nudity is free speech, more than fake news. But fake news are viral and efficient at engaging people, while nudity scares advertisers away.

Everything Facebook does is business-oriented -- which is fine, maybe, and probably inevitable. But them lecturing us about morals makes me incredibly angry.

It's a good point that it's difficult to defend the position of protecting children from seeing boobies, but not fake news.

The trick, of course, is that very little of what is broadly considered fake news by various people is just biased or editorialised. Very little is actually flat out lies and fabrication presented as fact - Facebook could presumably remove this (and aren't they actually?), but few of the people shouting about fake news would notice, because what they actually want gone is on the Breitbart/Fox News/MSNBC/SNL spectrum, and that would indeed be very undesirable.

How does one check for 'fake news'? Its easy to throw around these words but they lack meaning and value. Rumour mongering is as old as society itself, global platforms amplify impact.

This kind of paranoia about 'fake news' ends up in the 'ministry of truth'. There is no other alternative.

>How does one check for 'fake news'? Its easy to throw around these words but they lack meaning and value.

Fake news has a well defined, explicitly understood meaning - the presentation of falsehood as legitimate news, and its virality on the web, particularly in social media.

Merely biased news isn't fake news, nor is news for which the facts are initially misunderstood at the time of reporting fake news.

Agree there are lots of clear cut cases. But, for example, would you consider articles that are talk about climate change (either for or against it's existence) fake or biased news?

Not the perfect solution but I would prefer one like Wikipedia & others use. Allow flagging by users if a news story lacks citations or credible references. Uphold all journalism to a higher standard. For the most popular stories on Facebook have a trained employee from Facebook research it or crowd base it with users you trust. Show users a message that says whether the news article has been marked as false, questionable or verified. Facebook could even charge money for instant review & verification to news outlets. As machine learning gets better & has more use cases to look at, they could possibly offload the work from humans as well.

To me, unless there is outright fabrication or an intent to deceive on the part of the original reporting source, it isn't fake news.

Climate change might not have been the best example as its a closed and shut case from a scientific perspective. Maybe the merits of doing anything about it would be a better example?

"Closed and shut" seems to me to be exactly NOT the point of view of science.

If someone came along with another theory that fit observations better than current theories do, would you want science to reject it because that particular subject is considered "closed and shut?"

You knew what I meant as well as would anyone else that reads HN, no need to be pedantic.

Actually I chose that specifically because I think that it is a "closed and shut case". Yet many right leaning outlets like Fox News or National Review routinely cast doubt on this. Do you think they should be considered Fake News? Who gets to make that call?

"Fake News"ness can have article level granularity. Fox can have perfectly accurate reporting of an event, and then still be considered fake when they incorrectly state that there is "controversy" over global warming

At a hackathon my team wrote an api for aggregating data on publications/journalists. We set it up to collect 'tags' that were descriptive of qualities that individual articles presented such as "no sources", "anonymous sources", "click-bait", "well-sourced", "professional", etc. The idea was that given enough time and submitted entries you could get a picture of how accurate a journalist/publication was over time. We were planning on having this database be curated a la Wikipedia/StackOverflow and allow for people to go back and check the veracity of claims attributed to anonymous sources to get a picture of how good a journalist/publication's anonymous sources tended to be.

My "fake news" alarm goes off when I hear the same phraseology or specific keywords used in multiple sources in the same news cycle. This indicates to me that an agenda is being pushed, rather than news being reported objectively.

I consider "fake news" to be any news being reported with an unstated agenda or bias, not just outright lies. Editorializing is fine, if it's clearly identified as such.

Does Facebook actually monitor anything? I was under the impression that it was 100% user-complaint moderated, at least for discovery.

> Being less friendly to advertisers also insulates the service from viral hoaxes and propaganda

Not being a news platform also helps a lot.

Yeah, I'm not sure companies understand why people liked Snapchat in the first place. It's all about ephemeral interactions. It's not a news platform and it's certainly not a video streaming service or whatever they were trying to do with the stories.

Snapchat has an entire section dedicated to news (with a quite liberal use of that word). I get my sports news from the ESPN and Bleacher Report discover stories. NYT, WashPo, WSJ all do stories in the discover tab as well.

> Not being a news platform also helps a lot.

I'm not sure what you mean. On the Stories screen, in Featured, I can see things from the WSJ, the Washington Post, National Geographic, and the NYT. I ignore this and go to my subscriptions from Tastemade, Tasty, and The Food Network, but news is available on Snapchat if you want it.

Snapchat has also avoided the GMO debate, by not being food.

I guess that also means Snapchat is gluten-free.

I got that mad cow on Snapchat, though.

just unfollow your girlfriend

Doesn't this has something to do with demographics? Most platforms have tried and expanded beyond the core social media demographics.

A lot of people, currently company included, still don't get Snapchat. While it might have younger audience and "engagement numbers" I am not sure if it is the place for fake news yet.

Turn this around to fake celebrity news or hoaxes and let's see how Snapchat fares.

I’m not a snapchat user and I’m tired of using Facebook and WhatsApp.

Something I realized about the difference between these platforms (Instagram being an exception) is that Facebook benefits from the click bait fake news articles on FB and WhatsApp whereas Snapchat benefits from its users sharing the most valuable moments (no matter how quirky or lame they may seem) that wee recorded on the phone.

That’s the reason why Snapchat users don’t talk about Apple Cider Vinegar as a solution to all health problems and many Facebook/WhatsApp users do :)

By not having news at all perhaps?

What a weird setup of an article.

Snapchat is full of "news".

I just opened the app and swiped one panel to the right, here are some of the "news" cards I can view:

  The New York Times
  The Washington Post
  Wall Street Journal
  Daily Mail
  ESPN
  NFL
  NBA
  National Geographic
  Bleacher Report
  Wired
  BuzzFeed
  IGN
  VICE
  Mashable
  Cosmopolitan

It seems you’re partially right. My bad.

Between posts from my contacts, there’s seemingly a “featured” section which I’ve unconsiously have ignored, just like I inadvertently started to ignore banner ads in the 90s.

My mind just don’t see noise like that any more.

I guess that’s not exactly representative though and some people may be using this weird news-feature in what is essentially an IM app.

This webpage is physically painful to read.

Who upvotes this kind of article, btw? You know that fake news means "stories that the current encumbment doesn't like" in contrast to "stories that the current encumbment likes" which is then called news. For you as the reader one is not more helpful or valuable than the other. Having both is what we call free media.

What this says is that Snapchat is a good example of government controlled media. Not something to like.

Actually, outside of Twitter arguments and comment section accusations, I think the real definition of fake news is news that is either partially or totally fabricated and presented as fact. For example, "Obama signs executive order banning the national anthem", or "Trump claims victory after Castro's death! 'I did it!'". These are untrue irrespective of the current incumbent...

In fact, your conflation of true fake news with "politically slanted journalist" is one reason it has such power. People just assume that they are reading real news that caters to their interests and doesn't cloud the truth like the "other guys," when in fact they may be reading and sharing complete nonsense.

"fake news is news that is [...] partially [...] fabricated"

that is ALL news not fake news. All news are written to influence you in one direction or another. There's always stuff that is left unspoken or added and things that are expressed this way or the other.

Example: Pro-Saudi news says "The people fight against Assad terror regime in Syria" and pro-Iran news says "Syrian government fights against terrorists" (that were the stories about 2014 if I remember correctly). Depending on which side you stand articles with your phrasing are the "news" and articles with the other phrasing are the "fake news".

The truth would have been "ongoing battle between Iran and Saudi Arabia for leadership of the Arab/Persian world". I don't remember a single news paper reporting that in US, Europe, Russia, China or local.

Pointless argument, so people can make up completely random stories, and as long as there's a tiny portion of truth, such as say person A being referred to actually existing, it should be considered news?

I'm sure even you don't believe that though, people seem to enjoy making pointless arguments a bit too much, at times.

No the other way around. You interpret my statement as "how to define what should be considered news" while I'm saying "what you consider news is not better than fake news but just as fake".

That people believe the fake news that fake news is the realest news shows the dangerous power of fake news.

also as said in another branch of this discussion: It's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that real news are just as bad as fake news. This is not an improvement of your estimation of fake news, but a decrease in the value of what you consider "real news".

There is not a single real news written down. You can only gather it by understanding that everything you read is mostly meant to influence you. And by understanding how the authors try to influence you you can guess what each party wants.

That's just pointlessly cynical. Some events actually happened while other events didn't. I read that my local high school won a math competition, should I doubt that it happened? What is the journalist trying to influence me with that?

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