Facebook Threatens Satire Site Over CNN Story That Snopes Rated 'False' | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Threatens Satire Site Over CNN Story That Snopes Rated 'False'

pjmedia.com

76 pointssharkweek99 comments

Facebook was threatening putative actions against the satire site domain on the basis of the "False" Snopes rating, and Facebook was reducing the reach of the satire article in question and showing warning popups before users could click to the article.

So it was more than just a marking.

As of a few minutes ago, a Facebook spooksperson said "This was a mistake and should not have been rated false in our system. It’s since been corrected and won’t count against the domain in any way"

Snopes, SPLC, and their ilk and become less credible institutions, and more an arm of the culture wars every day.

Pointing out that satire is, in fact, not a correct recounting of events makes them less credible?

Yes? Treating obvious satire as worthy of correction makes you look clueless. The linked Snopes fact-check says that some readers took the idea that CNN literally puts "news" in an industrial washing machine, which I find... difficult to believe.

If there's one thing we've learned in the last two years it's that what's obviously silly to anyone with broad sources of information and critical thinking skills may be considered plausible by a shocking number of people.

I would prefer that Snopes error on the side of stating the obvious.

I would prefer that people stop taking the word of Snopes about anything. They have zero qualifications, credentials, or expertise to pass judgment on any of the subjects they opine upon. It's a real mystery how they managed to get so many people to consider them infallible.

"Snopes said (whatever)" has exactly as much credibility as "Some random guy said (whatever)", i.e., none whatsoever.

Edit: in response to some of the comments below, there's a lengthy discussion of some of the problems with Snopes here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/22/the-dai...

They always explain their sources and reasoning, so you can easily check for yourself.

They didn't exactly source their claim that "some readers took the story seriously."

I think the source for that is the fact that some readers reported the story to Facebook. The whole reason Snopes even fact-checked it is because they were asked to.

I think that's backwards. Facebook is using Snopes as a source for detecting fake news, so once this showed up on Snopes as "False," FB flagged it as fake.

From the article:

> What more likely happened is that some trigger-happy activists who don't appreciate Christian and conservative satire reported The Babylon Bee to Facebook, setting off an investigation by Snopes.

Obviously not a definitive answer as to what happened, but it seems plausible. Surely Snopes doesn't proactively fact-check every single article posted to Facebook, they wouldn't have the manpower to do that. It makes sense that they'd fact-check only after people report the story to Facebook.

Aha, I missed that, thanks. So it looks like it's a two-way street for reporting/flagging. Could've been either one, but I think your explanation makes more sense.

And it'd be my guess that they probably source some of their topics to research based on search results where users abandoned w/o clicking a result.

Though I don't know that to be a fact as I don't work for them/speak with anyone from their team/etc., so I wouldn't try to leverage it in an article I'd write if I were a writer.

Someone else mentioned that along with the true, false, undetermined (or is maybe distinct? I can't remember), and true/false flags, maybe they should just bite the bullet and add a "satire" flag. Essentially you're saying, yes, it is false, however it isn't meant to be taken seriously. Then Facebook can either do nothing or flag it as satire which I don't know the correct path here: for me, most of the fun of satire is not being presented "it is satire" up front and then picking it up pretty early on. Then again, not flagging it as satire would then leave it open for people to assume that it is legitimate as it wasn't flagged as fake.

So unfortunate that fun can't be had anymore because some are generally intent on deceiving.

That isn’t exactly the relevant question when talking about their reliability.

perhaps they're storing search results where a user didn't click on anything (ie they didn't find the answer to what they were looking for) so they then investigated what the query "cnn industrial washer" or whatever was about and then fact checked it? Metrics are a pretty normal thing to capture.

Do you have some examples of Snopes providing bad information? They're certainly not flawless, but it's a useful resource, and most of the people I've seen dismiss them out of hand seem to have a political interest in them being wrong.

In one case they deliberately provided a whole category of false information in an attempt to spread awareness of False Authority Syndrome.[0] They wanted to make the same point that the comment you replied to is making!

[0] https://www.snopes.com/lost/false.asp

Even Snopes themselves have tried to tell people this.[0] They created a category called "The Repository of Lost Legends" composed entirely of false, made-up myths and called them "true", to show people what False Authority Syndrome was. People believed them anyway.

[0] https://www.snopes.com/lost/false.asp

If Snopes didn’t provide references for their fact checks, that Forbes commentary would be alarming. As it is, it reads like a hit piece.

Are they biased? I’m sure. Everyone is.

Not everyone gets to kick somebody off Facebook because they didn't like them, though. Snopes has been awarded this privilege, for some reason.

So now we're going to blame Snopes for Facebook's failings?

No, we're going to blame them both for raising the level of informational entropy - Snopes for producing the noise like "fact check" of satire and Facebook for anointing the noise-machine of Snopes as the ultimate arbiter of truth.

Well, at least they are smart enough to know a satire site when it says "this is a satire site". Apparently, some people are not below admitting they are in desperate need of such service. Not smart enough of course to not confuse factual "true/false" ratings with noting that this is a satire, which can not be true or false since it is not a statement of fact (it's like rating Little Red Riding Hood story "false" because obviously wolves can't talk) - but this may be their premium service offering or something?

Personally, because there are so many sketchy things on Facebook, this is what I tend to do:

1) go to snopes, search for the article 2) read the article, specifically using the links to their sources and reviewing those. 3) if still unsure, do some more searching. 4) if after steps 1 and 2 it can be deemed that, yeah, whatever was posted to Facebook was a crock, then I'll share a link to the Snopes article and in the case where there's a video being sourced, link to said video and pertinent timestamps.

So yeah. Used right, Snopes is a good resource. If you (not you you, you generally) just blindly take the word of anything regardless of the source, well, that's interesting.

Poster on HN says Snopes has exactly as much credibility as some random guy. Got it.

I’m surprised at this notion that nobody would have actually believed the story. Have you met people? A lot of them are really dumb.

This isn't "of course this is implausible," this is "there is not any actual physical way to conceive of this happening."

This is kind of why "fact-checking" this hurts Snopes' credibility. The only reason to fact-check this article is to take a snide shot at putative stupid people who think it's possible somehow to literally wash news in a washing machine.

People believe all sorts of inconceivable things.

Given how many people mistake The Onion for being real, that service is needed.

I've seen worse. PolitiFact managed to fact check an article from military satire site DuffelBlog and just didn't seem to grasp that it was satire, at all. They wrote, in excruciating detail, about all the increasingly silly and implausible claims and at no point did it occur to them that maybe they should take them as a hint that the whole thing was a joke, an incredibly unsubtle humorous reference to actual events: http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2017/nov/16/...

Did you read to the end? They clearly know it’s satire and have a thorough discussion of that.

Yes, I did read to the end, and no they don't. They treated it as though it's one of the many actual fake news sites that builds its business model around tricking people but hides away a disclaimer somewhere claiming to be a satire site in order to dodge complaints, describing it as though that disclaimer was the only thing tipping readers off that the article wasn't true. None of the DuffelBlog articles are exactly subtle, including that one.

They’re just stating the facts. Your claim that it never occurred to them that it’s satire is clearly wrong.

Just because it's technically correct doesn't mean it's not a stupid/dangerous thing to do.

For further reading, my favorite tweet of the election: https://twitter.com/nbcnews/status/785299709342654465?lang=e...

I don’t see why this is so bad. If it was anybody else, it would be obvious that it was a metaphor, but this is the same guy who said Obama literally founded ISIS.

Because they took the truth of statement, i.e. HRC deleted emails from her private email server, and labeled it a falsehood using meaningless semantics as justfication. Acid washed vs. bleachbit has nothing to do with the thesis of the statement.

How is that not bad?

A key part of the statement was that acid washing is very expensive and that proves bad intent or something like that. It was not a casual metaphor. https://www.factcheck.org/2016/09/trump-pence-acid-wash-fact...

Still ignoring the underlying point that the emails were irrecoverably destroyed and summarizing with 'Claims Hillary Clinton "had her emails — 33,000 emails — acid washed ... a very expensive process' and a reductive "FALSE" rubber stamp.

The vast majority of people won't read past the summary (or NBC's tweet). They will see the FALSE rating, and take from that that no emails were destroyed, which the wrong conclusion.

Oh, an even better quote: “In a very expensive fashion, used chemicals so that nobody will ever be able to see them."

He literally said they used chemicals. Are we supposed to call this “true” just because some emails were in fact deleted?

I’m not ignoring your supposed underlying point, I just disagree with it. The statement was clearly false. That there’s some truth to the general idea if you strip away the wrapping of confusion and lies doesn’t make the statement itself true.

If this were Snopes, they'd most likely use their True/False category where they state what is true and what is false:

True: Clinton's team destroyed emails on the server False: the process didn't leverage "acid wash", but something called BleachBit

Or something to that effect. Not a Snopes writer.

To give a recurring example, this is like the debate on gun control and when someone says "automatic weapons" or "assault rifles" and the other party attempts to shut it down there. That is what the tweet effectively attempts to do (countering the intent of the message by discrediting verbiage).

Bleach is alkaline, quite literally the opposite of an acid.

This isn’t a mere semantic quibble. It’s a blatant misrepresentation of what was done, with an attack based on that.

To make an analogy to gun control, imagine if a prominent person said that the Parkland attacker constructed the bomb he used to kill all those kids with a rare explosive that can only be obtained from the government of Ecuador, and implied there was something funny going on. Should we avoid calling this “false” because he did actually kill a bunch of kids?

Yes. They took satire seriously. That's very funny, but they clearly missed some clues.

“Although it should have been obvious that the Babylon Bee piece was just a spoof....”

They didn’t take it seriously. They fact-checked it on the basis that someone else might take it seriously.

You can't be serious. "CNN uses washer machine to spin ..." sounds utterly ridiculous. It is ridiculous. It can only be satire. Who would ever say such a thing and mean it? Answer: only mentally disabled people. And who would take them seriously? Unless you think most people are so disabled, there's no point "debunking" obvious satire, and if so many people were so disabled, then there'd be no point debunking anything anyways.

It’s about as ridiculous as “Obama founded ISIS” and yet our President apparently believed that one.

Only among those who are invested in them being discredited. To everyone else, their work is as accurate and credible as it always has been.

The SPLC? Seriously? Bigotry isn’t a legitimate point of view. You don’t have a right to have that opinion.

Blindly supporting something and crying "Bigot!" if anyone questions it is legitimate? Seriously, no.

This idea that people are blindly just calling "Bigot", as if it isn't based on the actions and words of the people in question, is pretty old.

Ironically, the base definition of “Bigot” is simply intolerance of those who hold different opinions. This describes the social justice Left quite a bit more than it does the Right currently.

So, yes, people are indeed blindly calling folks “Bigot” without thinking through what doing so implies about their own tolerance toward others.

Why should one have tolerance for the intolerant? Why should a gay person have tolerance for someone saying that they basically don't deserve the same rights as other people?

Because otherwise you have to sit here and enumerate which things exactly are intolerable. Do you really think you or anyone possesses the moral authority or wisdom to do that? If a Catholic considers it wrong and immoral to condone Gay Marriage why do you get to claim authority over their conventions?

Because gay marriage quite literally has no effect on their life whatsoever. That's in addition to the whole "denial of fundamental rights" and "second class citizen" thing I mentioned above.

I’m curious to understand how you came to this conclusion, that it has “no effect” on their lives. It so obviously does. Should someone of the Catholic Faith wish to express such an opinion they risk social ostracism and, perhaps, their job. If you meant that two gay people getting married doesn’t have a material effect on someone regardless of their opinion on it, well, there’s a certain pastry chef who would disagree with you.

I don’t really have a dog in that fight one way or the other. What I’m trying to point out to you is that these things are most definitely not “settled” issues if you think about them for more than the fleeting moment it requires to let everyone know how progressive you are. They likely never will be settled - unless you get your way and the “wrong” opinions are banned.

I believe the SPLC has done a lot of good over the course of its history. There have been a few recent occurrences where I think they've lost a bit of perspective and nuance. You may disagree, but if you want to see some examples, you may want to look at their listing of Ayaan Hirsi Ali[0] and Maajid Nawaz[1] as "anti-Muslim extremists"[2] for why people may view the SPLC this way. Please don't read this as a blanket condemnation of the SPLC (nor as agreement with your parent), as that's not my intent; rather, that there's more nuance there than some (not all) rather recent SPLC stances would seem to admit.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayaan_Hirsi_Ali

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maajid_Nawaz

[2]: https://www.splcenter.org/20161025/journalists-manual-field-...

SPLC does an amazing job in identifying hategroups and their supporters, across the political spectrum, and should be a household resource on par with Google. Which doesn't mean they are infallible: I agree about Maajid Nawaz. As for Ayaan Hirsi Ali I for one find the quotes that SPLC attributes to her pretty extreme. Are any of them incorrect, or has she modified her stance more recently?

That Reason interview SLPC links makes her look effing bonkers. ‘Extreme anti-Muslim’ is exactly how I’d characterize her views.

I'm not well-read enough to speak on her behalf, and would hope that the quotes SPLC references are accurate. In interviews I've heard with her, she definitely comes across as strident, and more so than I would prefer, but not uncritically anti-muslim in a bigoted sense, and wouldn't put her in the same category as Richard Spencer, for example. That's one of the problems with lists like these: people will look at the names and not necessarily dig into why each is included. It's to the SPLC's credit that they include supporting material.

As for her changing her stance, the Wikipedia article references a Max Rodenbeck article from the New York Review of Books in 2015 that she has "mellowed".

If this is something you're interested in, I encourage you to look into this deeper yourself, if only because I don't think I can do full justice to the issue. Stuff like this is complicated, and one needs to weigh one's own values and their rankings as a whole, rather than as a single issue, which often gets missed in a lot of discourse today.

And to reiterate, I agree with you that the SPLC has historically been a force for good for the reasons you mention.

Actually, I think in the United States, one does have the absolute right to have bigoted opinions, and even to speak them publicly, as stated in the 1st amendment.

Furthermore, the point of the OP is that the SPLC itself has gone overboard in governing who and what is hate speech or bigotry. Some of their work is obviously legitimate, but not everyone who has a problem with Islam is a bigot anymore than those who have a problem with Christianity or Naturalism or Republicans.

It would help if you could link a resource that shows how SPLC considers everyone who has a problem with Islam a bigot. I'm sure you could find a case or two where they have gone too far, but that's not the same as 'everyone' obviously.

>You don’t have a right to have that opinion.

Which opinions does someone have a “right” to have? Is there a list? SPLC has managed to do a lot of damage to its credibility by adding otherwise nominal conservatives to its lists of bad actors.

GP absolutely has the right to their opinions, whatever they might be. As do you. As do I. "You don't have the right to that opinion" -- you are allowed to hold that disgusting opinion, but it is disgusting.

We judge -- we must judge. Fine. But I would much prefer that we say "that's wrong/dumb/whatever" and never "you do not get to speak [that or at all]".

Attacking Christina Hoff Sommers is an indication of jumping the shark

http://www.weeklystandard.com/splc-targets-feminist-scholar-...

This is pretty dodgy. Snopes also fact-checks articles by The Onion, which has a definite liberal lean. (Here's the tag: https://www.snopes.com/tag/the-onion/)

If you're going to tar them as an "arm of the culture wars" you're going to have to do a little better than this.

Wait, it sounds like you think mentioned that Snopes routinely "fact-checks" satire, as opposed to it being a random one-off miscommunication, is somehow counts towards Snopes being more respectable and not them just forgetting what "fact checking" used to mean one day?

I didn't say Snopes was more or less respectable; my point was that they aren't engaging in "culture war" by doing what this article says that they're doing.

I'm not crazy about them fact-checking satire, but it's incredibly obvious why they have to--because people treat them as a one-stop-shop for finding out whether an article is real or not. For The Onion that might be easy to answer, but there are also a lot of terrible, unfunny wannabe satirical sites, and people do get confused.

> my point was that they aren't engaging in "culture war" by doing what this article says that they're doing.

True, that ("fact-checking" satire) is not an act of culture war. It is a behavior that makes them very questionable candidate as an arbiter of truth, which Facebook seems to have anointed them to be.

> but it's incredibly obvious why they have to-

No it isn't. On the contrary, them confusing "checking" satire and checking real facts blurs the lines between fictional expression - which can't be rated as true or false as it is not a factual statement - and factual claims which can be evaluated as true or false.

> people treat them as a one-stop-shop for finding out whether an article is real or not

That's a bad thing, both from the point of view of robustness - that means that people surrender their agency and critical thinking to some random site on the internet - and from the point of view of choice of that single point of failure - by choosing the site that can't even go as far as distinguishing between factual statement and fictional expression and routinely confuses the two.

If they just said "The Onion is a satire site, the Bablon Bee is a satire site, that's it, move on" - it'd be fine. But the way they do it - to actually evaluate it as a factual statement and assign rating "false" to it - is mixing two concepts, and it's a bad thing. "Fact checkers" regularly commit the same thing by "fact checking" opinions they oppose as "false" - and that is very much a part of the culture war, an attempt to present one opinion as "objective fact" and the opposing one as "objective falsity". Snopes did not do it in this particular case, true - but they did it in other cases, as well as other "fact checker" outlets. That predictably hurt the reputation of the whole business.

Fact-checking satire is... a bit silly, don't you think? (Unless the fact-check of satire is itself satire.)

You can say that it's silly, but if it's applied evenly to either side of the aisle it's a little difficult to say it's culture war.

I said nothing about culture wars.

Articles from The Onion regularly find their way into mainstream news, and not as satire. It's this that Snopes is looking at.

Examples?

https://www.thedailybeast.com/fooled-by-the-onion-9-most-emb...

No, sorry, none of these need Snopes pages. It's too funny.

To you. There are a lot of people that don't understand other cultures all that much, or are missing context. It's easy to make fun of others.

I'm not sure if you are agreeing with me, or if telling you that your statement to me stated my own sentiment on these institutions better than I did and I found it ironic, and get the impression we might agree where the level of discussion should be. I hope that makes sense.

Not sure how I can put it anymore clearly. You claim that Snopes is engaging in "culture war." I point out that Snopes is evenly applying its policies to both conservatives and liberals, giving the lie to your original statement.

TIL the Onion has a liberal lean.

Maybe they make fun of Republicans more than Democrats but that's only because it's like shooting fish in a barrel with the GOP. There's more to mock.

(INB4 buttery males)

I like The Onion; I'm not trying to bash them. I think it's fairly obvious which side of the aisle most of their writers are on, and it's been especially hard to miss since the 2016 election.

If you think snopes is an objective "fact" checker then you are too far down the rabbit hole.

Sounds like your own personal Overton window is drifting further off into the distance of the culture wars instead.

The solution to this is pretty simple - Facebook should work with the sites it uses as fact-checkers to have a new marking of "Satire". Just having values of "True" and "False" aren't good enough if you're trying to use those sites as tools against fake news.

It's hard to believe that they didn't already have something like that in place. Perhaps they didn't, or perhaps it was a bug, or perhaps the human reviewer clicked the wrong button, after reviewing 324 similar notices that morning .. we will probably never know.

Depends on the relationship of Snopes and Facebook.

If Snopes is being actively used by Facebook in some sort of joint venture for this purpose, yes, I agree there needs to be something (perhaps a new flag_item: true/false field for Facebook to actually act against).

If Facebook is just scraping Snopes and looking for the true or false distinction, well, the onus is on Facebook.

Tangentially, I wonder if this is why there was the hostile takeover thing going on with Snopes a while back (not sure if that has been resolved or not). Since "fake news" is all the rage, I bet Snopes has bumped up in usage either as a fact checker or as an API for things of this nature. So the takeover was probably done in the hopes that an acquisition from one of the networks came and they could cash out.

If we already have "may contain peanuts" written on a package of peanuts, sure, why not.

Clearly the best current candidate for a 'Theory of Everything' is Poe's Law.

To be fair, I would not be surprised if people used this satire as evidence for their hatred of CNN. Perhaps even missing the fact it was satire at all.

There's a reason /r/nottheonion exists...

The headline was: "CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine To Spin News Before Publication". Hard to miss.

For you and me sure. Check out Literally Unbelievable, social posts reacting to satire stories as if they are real. Seems like a lot of people fall for this stuff!

http://literallyunbelievable.org

About your reply to my removed comment- I think you missed my sarcasm and the edit. I am 100% for privacy and 101% for solving the root problem if you didn't get the hint. Won't mention here lest I get banned

People are dumb.

Yeah, there are people who believe a lot of weird stuff. For instance, a small but significant group believes that fictional television shows are real, even ones with non-human characters (Sesame Street puppets, or cartoons, say).

Many actors have stories about meeting people who don't understand the difference between the actor and the character the actor plays. It happens all the time.

Nonetheless, we don't usually have "fact checkers" explaining to us that Kermit the Frog doesn't exist, nor do we generally have Facebook threatening a site because they've posted one of those popular "Kermit the Frog drinking tea" memes, and the "fact checkers" have pointed out that Kermit isn't a real frog, and that even real frogs generally don't drink tea.

I'd pay to be in a room of people who think that news is a tangible item that can be placed in a laundry machine.

This whole situation is ludicrous. The shill at snopes who wrote and published that is beyond the outer limit. I can believe that it was a mistake at Facebook, but it's got a lot of agenda looks to it.

Snopes addressing this like a serious story is surreal.

You'd think so, but the last couple of years have truly astonished me in terms of what I thought was common sense.

I am willing to bet a significant percentage of our population is truly incapable of critical thought, and not equipped to deal with the information age.

It would be side-splittingly hilarious if it wasn't so terrifying, given how much ad income for many sites depends on portals like Facebook. And how idiotic and knee-jerk driven decision making seems to be at these sites.

From the most recent fiasco with Google banning substring "gun" in their Google Shopping searches, to Snopes "fact-checking" obvious satire, I am starting to think that we are to get bots to pass Turning test not by bots getting progressively smarter but by human behavior getting progressively dumber and bot-like. I don't know who wrote that Snopes article, but if it were a bot, I wouldn't be even a little bit surprised.

I think it's pretty clear that this was a software oversight, and as soon as a human got involved, the situation was resolved.

Perhaps someone at Snopes was seeing if they had the power to get a site flagged by Facebook, even for clear satire. Not so much 'artificial stupidity' again, but 'gaming artificial stupidity for fun and profit'.

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