I imagine the news sidebar drives a lot of traffic.

(I agree, though.)

Facebook fixes misinformation with this one weird trick! Publishers hate it.

(I couldn't resist)

Yes. Remember that Facebook itself is essentially becoming what AOL used to be. AOL News was huge and it's still probably one of their most popular sites to this day.

No. The solution is to continue to provide news, to curate it, to shut down professional liars, and to tell the critics that if they don't like it, they are free to encourage their followers to use other social media.

> shut down professional liars

Would they really boot CNN?

CNN told us this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_X16_KzX1vE

They were laughably wrong: https://popehat.com/2016/10/17/no-it-is-not-illegal-to-read-...

Maybe one can claim it wasn't an intentional lie, but this guy is someone who really should have known better. So if it wasn't an intentional lie, they were negligent. Not sure where that leaves us.

>Maybe one can claim it wasn't an intentional lie, but this guy is someone who really should have known better.

It would be great if an algorithm could fight this type of content, but it probably can't.

But we can probably start with sites that publish stories like "Rudy Giuliani SLAPPED A REPORTER WITH HIS DICK last Tuesday" and that might solve enough of this problem to call it a decent win.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Yes, you can completely filter them out figuring it's not worth the effort, but the problem is that's how you form bubbles to begin with.

Might have more luck boiling them down to verifiable facts and stripping all opinions (especially every explanation of "why X did Y" or "what X means").

I just don't know where the cutoff is for professional or habitual liars. There are many ways to mislead, cherry picking data, methodological errors, straight up confusion and overwhelming technical data. Do we need to model the frequency of offense or severity?

I'm not really going for the whole slippery slope aspect, more I feel like I'm miscategorizing the problem.

Maybe the metadata on misinformation looks different from the real deal. How quickly does it spread, and through which people? No need to actually judge the content.

Agreed! They just need a panel of curators from a diverse background (men, women, race, religion, education...) who can provide different perspectives and reduce bias (I say reduce...human decisions will always have bias). Hell maybe an indepndent company does the creation so there's no bias for anti FB postings.

If there's no consensus on the "truthiness" then the default is benefit of the doubt that it's true.

I know we are all in IT, but not all problems are best solved by algorithms.

Would your definition of professional liars include Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama?

The news sidebar to me now is only a "Click to see if this random celebrity died or not" bar