Don’t trust Daily Mail website, Microsoft browser warns users | Hacker News Reader

Don’t trust Daily Mail website, Microsoft browser warns users

theguardian.com

33 pointsrwmj47 comments

Who decides which sites have "real" news and which sites have "fake" news? A big thing missing from these discussions is the history of propaganda. I think a lot of people who are worried about "fake news" need to research that term.

Propaganda is still very prevalent especially as far as war goes. Do people really think that CNN tells them the real reasons for going to war? They will say whatever the Pentagon tells them. Why? Because no one is going to risk their lives and kill other people for some technical, strategic reason or just as part of a larger military campaign. People risk their lives to fight the "bad guys" who are "evil". They need to believe its a moral cause.

Don't let some giant company (or a small one) dictate what source your information comes from. If I used a Microsoft browser I would uninstall that plugin. Assuming that's an option.

Not cool. I can see that browsers want to warn people of (technically) dangerous websites. But websites that are 'wrong'? Slippiest of slopes.

This is an interesting case where the website is wrong by its own admissions. The number of redactions released for Daily Mail after publication is the highest in the UK (compared to other tabloids).

It's a kind of slippery slope, but it would be much worse if they made that judgement against some vaguely reasonable paper.

either way, browser vendors should not be the arbiters of truth. I can't think of a news source that hasn't had at least some falsities published - it's the nature of the industry. Sure, the Daily Mail is notably worse than others. But to single them out for "fake news" labelling is worryingly arbitrary.

I find it’s very interesting, because isn’t this type of thing precisely what lawmakers want Facebook and the likes to do, warn people not to trust certain content? Since they’re both tools instrumental for consuming content, what makes it different when Microsoft does it?

I don't think Facebook should do it either because fundamentally I don't want any given group to have authority over whether something is true or false. I want fact-finding to be a distributed effort where claims and counter-claims can be made by reputable news outlets or individual citizen-journalists holding evidence alike. Otherwise, we allow a single entity to decide the truth by imposition, where said entity may not know all the facts or may even have its own agenda.

> But to single them out for "fake news" labelling is worryingly arbitrary.

Wikipedia did it in 2017 - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/08/wikipedia...

It's not like this is a random bolt from the blue.

But Wikipedia isn't my browser. I don't think anyone is arguing that Daily Mail isn't garbage, just that it isn't the browser's job to decide what is and isn't garbage.

Newsguard already managed to get installed on school and library PCs in some US states. If they succeed, they will soon be the most powerful organization in existence, as they will have total control of information. I don't blame Newsguard - of course they want more power for themselves. But I do blame Microsoft for working with them.

That’s dumb. Nobody is being prevented from reading the content. They’re just being warned—correctly—that the information is unreliable.

the issue at hand is how they determine reliability and where they draw the line at acceptable vs unacceptable. I'd argue the left-leaning equivalent of the Daily Mail would be BuzzFeed, complete with regularly posting skewed or outright false information (see this example from a couple of days ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/19/business/media/buzzfeed-n...). If they want to be consistent you could argue they should place the same warning on BuzzFeed. But then how much falsity constitutes "unreliable"? And how do we warn about places people go for news that aren't news organisations, like twitter or facebook? There's loads of nonsense on those too and plenty of people rely on them as sources.

> see this example from a couple of days ago

“BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the special counsel’s office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony are not accurate.”

That could mean anything from "flat out wrong" to "they got a single word wrong in the reported speech but we don't want to tip anyone's hand whilst we're still working on this". It definitely doesn't warrant being described as "skewed or outright false information" until we know more, does it?

It warrants being called skewed, because I doubt the man in charge of investigating the allegations would make a public statement to call out a "single word wrong". At the very minimum there is something incorrect about the statement itself if "Mr No-Comment" is making a comment. Especially so if no other outlet has yet been able to verify the claims, as stated in the NYT article.

> a public statement to call out a "single word wrong"

I can see many scenarios where they would do exactly that to categorise something as "not accurate" if that information being unchallenged lead to problems building a case or enabled someone like Cohen to back out of a deal etc. But we don't know if it's any of them. Or if Buzzfeed were wrong. At some point, I suppose, we will.

> At the very minimum there is something incorrect about the statement itself

Yes but we don't know where it lies on the "Flat Out Bullshit" to "It's Largely Accurate But We're Not Going To Publically Acknowledge That At The Moment" scale.

I think you're being overly generous here. I would argue the scale is from "bullshit" to "some pertinent information is incorrect". You can spin the latter as meaning the same as "largely accurate" if you want, but it is a spin. I'm hoping that other outlets can dig in and shed more light on the issue in the coming days.

or outright false information

If we're going to be objective and neutral here, we should point out that there is no evidence that the Buzzfeed article you're referencing is "outright false", and the link you provided certainly doesn't claim that it is. Buzzfeed is still standing behind the story and asking for clarification about exactly what parts of it are being disputed.

It's certainly possible that the story is "outright false", but we're not there yet.

I didn't mean this story specifically when I said "outright false" - obviously this one's still up in the air. But they reported on the Covington Catholic High School debacle, which has since been (as I understand it) shown to be false. That's two high-impact stories - one false and one in contention, in a couple of days.

Everyone is all for things like this when it's their side beating down people they don't like. But then when it is used to attack something they agree with they all suddenly get outraged. Very few these days seem to like ideas like freedom of speech or a "market place of ideas". Seems every one needs a nanny as long as the nanny is one of our guys.

yeah, it's a big concern. Fundamentally I'd describe it as partisanship prevailing over principles. However, I don't know if principles have prevailed historically, or if it's always been this way. It does seem to be getting worse though.

I would be more in favour of this if it had a click through with a more-information thingy which would show their reasoning applied to other news similar news sites that hadn't had a warning applied to them so users could have a chance to judge the accuracy.

For example in this situation maybe it is based on how many retractions daily mail has made. So it might show a table of news-sites and the retractions and an indicator showing the cut-off where they would add a site to the warning bin. This also would give the Daily Mail a more clear way to get out of the warning bin. For example if they knew another site was out of the warning bin for X retractions then they would know if they reduced to X retractions and the other site stayed the same then presumably they would get removed from the warning bin or the other site would be added as well.

I feel without any transparency this could be abused either as a way of crushing competition through collusion between people in different industries or used to push a particular ideology.

It does. It's right there in white-on-blue in the picture at the start of the headlined article.

Have an explanation of NewsGuard ... from the Daily Mail.

* https://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/afp/article-5464649/NewsGu...

(Well, really it's from AFP.)

That's a slippery slope though as all publications have redactions when they print stuff that's incorrect / wrong. Arguing that Daily Mail has more redactions than others is very dangerous. New York Times had to print corrections or redactions in the past, would it be acceptable for a browser to warn users that NYT should not be trusted?

I agree that Microsoft in particular cannot be trusted to do this. They will inevitably display the same warning if the user attempts to view, say, the Halloween documents or visit Linux.org.

My understanding is the service itself isn't being provided by Microsoft.

Apparently the third party "NewsGuard" service requires browsing history to be uploaded to them: https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/1085980638405148676

I suppose it might serve as a useful warning for readers from other countries, especially if their country doesn't have tabloids of their own. I would say most people in the UK know to take news from certain publications with a grain of salt, but it can be far from obvious for others.

There are no countries where there are media, but no "tabloids" (also the term can be different). The UK is not that unique as you seem to believe.

I beg to differ. An example is Australia. Plenty of national and regional broadsheets, but no purposefully trashy tabloids that I can think of.

But do you know about Bat boy?

Herald Sun? It's owned by Murdoch too.

UK is somewhat unique. As a football fan, I know way more than I'd like to about extramarital activities of the English Premiere League players. I don't read the Sun, but this knowledge permeates /r/soccer etc. It's probably related to the fact, that almost all the commenters who have a judgement about the family life of the sportsmen they've never met are British or American.

All countries have vulgar media, but generally they print personal stories only after there have been charges pressed, or someone got sued.

The distinction you are talking about is sports being included into pop culture. My remark was about media landscape. The thing Brits call "tabloid" (not referring to paper size) exists everywhere, it's just that football players may be deemed less worthy of gossips in other places.

* I would say most people in the UK know to take news from certain publications with a grain of salt*

Not in my experience, there are people in my own family who lap it up.

So its Snopes for the Web? There would need to be some transparency issues sorted out (i.e, we need to know who's grading the sites and that the service is open to scrutiny) but the concept is good at least.

I suggest reading an actual NewsGuard "nutrition label" before commenting on what's missing from them.

* https://www.newsguardtech.com/ratings/sample-nutrition-label...

Here's someone who has:

* http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/08/newsguard-considers-fox-new...

I think the essential feature is to be able to change databases that determine what is or is not fake news.

My immediate reaction to a browser giving unsolicited advices about quality of the contents is to download another browser. I'm not a kid, thank you.

I'm not a kid, thank you.

Yet your response is very child like.

I don't see it that way. Could it be some sort of culturally narrow stereotyping on you side?

As for the topic I'm interested if you really feel it ok for you to be a subject of a soft form of parental control from a commercial entity?

On the contrary, GP is resisting the continual infantilising of Western countries by their corporates, media and governments.

"to treat someone as if that person were a child, with the result that they start behaving like one" [1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/infantil...

The doctrine of legal paternalism is much less commonly seen now than it was in the past, with a few exceptions.

>...which has received investment from advertising group Publicis...

Any bets on NewsGuard eventually showing ads?

Shit. This is disgraceful. One can disagree with how the DailyMail paints stories but this is simply censorship by the left.

No it’s not, don’t be silly. Nobody is being censored.

>...this is simply censorship by the left.

You keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means.

I was 100% in agreement with you up until "the left" part. Do you have any evidence that this is some sort of coordinated effort by this mysterious political group?

It’s literally the number one thing that those of my associates who identify as right wing universally agree on: there’s some kind of free speech apocalypse unfolding. They view this as censorship.

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