Facebook blocks links to B.S. Detector, fake news warning plugin

Re:Facebook blocks links to B.S. Detector, fake news warning... by ska on Friday December 02, 2016 @03:18PM (#13091928)

Fake news is propaganda, full stop. While it is often more concerning when done by a state actor, there is no fundamental difference.

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Re:Facebook blocks links to B.S. Detector, fake news warning... by mtgx on Friday December 02, 2016 @03:40PM (#13092092)

Yes. The problem is most of these companies that want to fight "fake news" would probably almost completely focus on "new sites" that have fake news, and perhaps a couple of other "more obvious" big sites like Breitbart.

But what happens when the fake news comes from CNN? Will Facebook block CNN or WSJ articles that spout lies and are blatantly incorrect?

The problem with this is that these days, you often also get the "real news" from smaller sites, like DemocracyNow, or others even smaller, that report on NoDAPL protests when none of the big news sites do. What if Facebook gets used to censoring these sites, though, even though they report the real news out there? And would we even know? After all, they are small sites, that few people would know about in the beginning.

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Re:Facebook blocks links to B.S. Detector, fake news warning... by zzalpha on Friday December 02, 2016 @05:19PM (#13092835)

Fake news is propaganda, full stop

The Onion might disagree with that. The line between one man's satire and another man's propaganda is a pretty thin one.

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Re:Facebook blocks links to B.S. Detector, fake news warning... by ska on Saturday December 03, 2016 @12:34PM (#13096547)

Not so thin at all. I think there is a pretty clean delineation between satirical sites like the onion (i.e. Social commentary) and the sort of "fake news" we are talking about here. These fake news posts are presented as factual, with the purpose of supporting a political or social goal - in other words propaganda.

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