Facebook will now ask users to rank news organizations they trust

> We decided that having the community determine which sources are broadly trusted would be most objective

If the goal is to determine what people trust, sure. [0]

If the goal is to determine what is trustworthy, no.

You can't really fight fake news with the first, since obviously a successful propaganda outlet will be trusted.

[0] Well, if user accounts mapped 1:1 to people, which Facebook liked to pretend they do but, well, they don't, in part as a mechanism to game FB algorithms, and this just adds another incentive to that.

So, ask the users (who are obviously already victimized by fake news) to choose which fake news outlets aren't fake.

That should go well.

The problem is that there is an objective, measurable truth, so the most accurate outlets can be objectively quantified. If honesty/accuracy is really what they're after, then the only option is to measure and favor the best outlets.

But, it seems that they are more interested in not upsetting their users than in dealing in truth, which is really reinforcing the very problem: that non-facts are given truth-status as long as they make enough people feel good.

There are a lot of problems with this.

First, the obvious answer is one Facebook itself would never come up with, which is: STOP USING FACEBOOK so much!

You can never get most people to help rank anyway. The results are going to be skewed for lots of reasons, starting with whatever subset bothers to vote, whatever subset of people even have accounts or bothered to log in, etc. And that subset can be further biased by things like who has the most time on their hands, who is being paid, who set up 100 bot accounts, etc. This couldn’t possibly produce a sensible result except completely by chance.

Sort of like how people vote up or down comments based on how much they agree or disagree? The masses will vote down the news sources with opposing opinions, and vote up the news sources that already support their opinions. Only a minority of people seek integrity of truth, and even then you can never expect a fully unprejudiced outlook.

It smells absurd to me.

(Repeating my comment from the other thread)

What will start fake users from leaving fake ranks? FB has no business being in the news business. FB provides gossip and entertainment.

i don't think this fixes anything.