Isn't it pretty simple when a corporation is posting fake news? Shouldn't corporations know better and be held to higher standards than individuals?
By who's definition of "fake news"? Do you want anyone who contradicts the current US administration thrown off the platform? Anyone who contradicts current Facebook leadership?
> Shouldn't corporations know better and be held to higher standards than individuals?
Corporations aren't magic. I have a corporation, its HQ is my home and I pay ~$20 every year to stay registered, it's not like that corporation knows any better than I do. One of my hometown churches publishes a newsletter that's essentially whatever my dad wanted to write. I would expect a lot of niche or local news sources are similar.
News can be defined as genuine if it's truthful, in reporting facts, in reporting uncertainties & limits of current knowledge, in reporting potential conflicts of interests and finally in explicitely outlining when unproven opinions are put forth, whether by the author or by an interviewee.
News is deemed fake when it fails to be truthful. While there can be some grey areas, or perhaps poor journalistic standards, there are plenty of cases where articles fail to disclose conflict of interest, put forth unfounded opinions and intentionally mislead the reader to draw an untruthful conclusion. That is fake news.
"Untruthful" is begging the question. For the rest of it, virtually all news articles fail to disclose the writer's personal biases, put forth unfounded opinions, and intentionally lead the reader to draw particular conclusions. Your proposed standard is hardly any better than "news I don't agree with" in practice.
Second paragraph opens "With just over eight months left until Britain is due to leave the EU, there is little clarity about how trade will flow" - sounds like unfounded opinion to me. Third paragraph talks about "a step that could spook financial markets and dislocate trade flows across Europe and beyond." which is either vacuously true (anything "could" anything else - but then why say so?) or baseless speculation. "few diplomats expect the deal to be struck until months later." is unsubstantiated opinion - even if it were possible to verify who these "diplomats" were, having a news article report an opinion second-hand doesn't make it any less an opinion. Likewise "some investors have said such a chaotic scenario would seriously damage both the economies of Britain and the EU over the short term.", and "they cast as a failing German-dominated experiment in European integration.". I doubt the second half (below "DISORDERLY BREXIT?") will be much different.
I'm not trying to attack Reuters here - they do better than many news sources - but any kind of substantive reporting requires making judgements on questions that are politicised or, often, inherently political. Even the most skilled journalist will make calls that eventually turn out to be laughable in hindsight. I want committed, engaged journalism - reducing reporting to a bloodless "A said this, B said that, readers at home must make up their own minds" would not be an improvement - but the price of that is that journalists must have the freedom to make honest mistakes. And that in turn means tolerating the dishonest kind, unless and until we can come up with some clear bright lines that separate the one from the other.
""" [Facebook] thinks about free speech the way the US govt. thinks about free speech. There is no rule that that has to be the case... A way of avoiding the choice [about who to censor] altogether is to say free speech is protected in the public sphere so we are going to protect it in the private sphere...
We speak about facebook as if it is a democracy, something that has to have a consistent set of values that it applies equally... and there is some principle of fairness and equality that it must apply... facebook is acting as if it is constrained by these American notions... In countries like Germany there are strict hate speech laws. Facebook could be more like Germany...
We are asking Zuckerburg to accept the power he has and use it wisely, and he is reluctant to do that... Zuckerburg has to solve this problem that he has created, and if he cant solve it or isn't willing to solve it, maybe he shouldn't have all this power. """[1]
The NYT is criticizing facebook for having fair and egalitarian values, and all but calling for regulation if facebook doesn't censor views the NYT doesn't like.
The NYT has a HUGE conflict of interest when it comes to facebook. It also has a doubly huge interest in regulating speech, if they can get the government to force companies to de-list NYT's competitors under the guise of fake news that is a huge win for them. Nowhere was that disclosed in this podcast. Under your criteria, that makes this fake news. Should facebook remove links to this podcast now?
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/20/podcasts/the-daily/facebo...
Full disclaimer: I subscribe to the NYT. The paper+online editions. But any newspaper has different sections: dry reporting, rushed breaking news, in-depth analyses, op-ed commentaries, etc. The style of each is different. More importantly, the purpose of each type of article is different.
A lot of us got used to only reading newspaper articles via google or via our social media feed—appearing between a cat video and a political meme. After a while we start to all consider them the same. Context is lost. To me that is the greatest harm of social media. We strive for efficient use of our time but in the process we lost the context of what we're reading.
That's why I'm ok with paying a paper to compile and organize the information for me. Do I agree with every article the NYT puts out? Nope. Do I get irritated at articles written from particular biases? Yes, it happens. But overall the info is of quality and organized in such a way as to be the most efficient use of my time.
As a side-note I picked the NYT because I happen to like their in-depth data visualization group (another disclosure: I happen to like d3.js and its creator used to work there). But there are plenty of other quality papers out there who also do original journalistic work.
Nobody should be in a position where they have to say "that's a podcast" in order to defend the NYT.
We have several agencies that regulate corporations. I would hope that most corporations could follow the laws better than you. That's assuming you aren't a lawyer.
Why is the basic assumption that a corporation whose goal is to connect people should be responsible for what those connected people share with each other?
I'll give you that a corporation with the goal of providing accurate information to people should have a higher standard of publishing information that is correct.
But if, say, Heinz, wanted to say that people in China can't drive or that the Holocaust is a fiction, why is it the company's responsibility to get that right? Their responsibility is baked beans and ketchup.
Like lmm, this article made me more sympathetic to Facebook. And that the NYT is sort of glossing over things. I'd like to hear their policy on "fake news" and all that.
I applaud Facebook for defending InfoWars in this instance even though they disagree with them. I applaud Facebook for defending Holocaust deniers even though they disagree with them. It is the absolute hardest thing in the world to defend the worst when they've done nothing wrong. We glorify people who say things like "I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it". But when it comes time to actually put that sentiment into action, we waffle. Only allowing speech we agree with is not allowing speech to be free. Freedom must include the freedom to be stupid or it is no freedom at all.
Their goal isn't to connect people. That sounds like something Zuckerberg would say. Their goal is to make money from their users data.
Facebook is responsible because they have algorithms which show and hide items in the news feed. If they merely showed what was posted without any sophisticated algorithms I think they could claim some innocence.
Facebook doesn't care about freedom. They care about not pissing off their conservative user base and losing them to other sites, like Gab, or perhaps Chinese clones that Zuckerberg is worried about.