Comment by ideonexus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ideonexus | Hacker News Reader

Coincidentally, I was on FB today and started seeing a red flag on two friends' posts reading, "This website is not a reliable news source. Reason: [REASON]" with reasons like state-sponsored news and unclassified. The flag appeared on an article about Pokemon Go that was clearly sensationalist speculation and a conspiracy website about George Soros. The div tag in the post had a class "bsAlert" and, my favorite part, a poop icon beside it. None of my other friends are seeing the flag, so I suspect I'm one of the lucky A/B testers.

This article notes that consumers want fake news, but I want to see more of these flags. I realize it's a huge risk for FB, as the article notes, but I've unfollowed (not unfriended) so many friends for posting this nonsense that it's really hurting my own end-user experience in the network. When you're dealing with people for whom snopes and wikipedia are "part of the MSM," you are dealing with people who are living in a consensual hallucination. It's simultaneously infuriating and frightening to be exposed to that on a daily basis.

"State-sponsored news" - will I see that tag next to NPR articles? What about wikileaks?

I have very mixed feelings about this. I know that Facebook is a company and can censor or allow whatever they want to. They censor obscene and offensive stuff, sure. But deciding what is "true" and "false" is a whole new ball game. Do we want to get used to having a central authority telling us what's true and false? If I want to say something stupid on Facebook, I should be allowed to say it.

Remember that you can have an authority run by a trusted leader one day, and someone else the next.

Well, firstly, this isn't "censoring" as such.

I know that, living in 2016, the concept of "objective truth" and "objective falsehood" is a hard one to really wrap our brains around. But lets try:

Some things are true, and some things are false.

You're very welcome to say "something stupid on Facebook" as an individual because you haven't presented yourself as a news source. But Facebook shouldn't play willing participant in giving conspiracy sites a platform to present made up stories as truths.

Better to use the "hide all from [source]" under the dropdown on the article card. I see very few articles now, since the vast majority come from similar sources like Buzzfeed, OMG Facts, etc.

I save "unfollow" for friends who are serial sharers of article, after article.

That's an option? Facebook really needs to make things like that more clear, it'd probably help these problems solve themselves.

It's a "make my bubble smaller" button. I don't think it would solve any problems.

um bro, that's my chrome plugin http://bsdetector.tech

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