Facebook Loses Fact-Checking Group Snopes After Two Years
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Facebook never really had a real interest in removing fake news from their site. Being a repository for fake news drives a lot of traffic. Eliminating fake news would cost money in both the costs for finding and removing it and the lost revenue from traffic.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/30/facebook-earnings-q4-2018.ht...
My favourite was the school shooter at Parkland being called part of a "white supremacist militia group" which got 15k+ upvotes, quickly hitting the #1 spot - which means also hitting /r/all.
The story (later the same day) completely discrediting his connection to the militia (despite police already saying during the timeframe of the previous submission that they found zero connection to the militia), got about ~250-500 upvotes and barely made it to the top, while having 1% of the comments. I'd bet the 250,000-500,000 people who saw the original article never saw the second (the sub has 2.5M subs).
I completely stay away from the overtly political subreddits but I wouldn't be surprised if 25%+ of the top stories on those are partially or entirely incorrect.
If removing fake news was just about censoring lies, it would be easy. But fake news is about obscuring the truth, which is something else entirely. Censoring fake news makes you the arbiter of truth, not the arbiter of lies. It's like the difference between not being evil vs being good. That's why the weaponization of fake news is so devious.
The only way to win is to not play the game. Facebook's mistake was pretending they could do actually something about it. But they had to say that because to admit that it was infeasible would be an admission that their advertising platform was less powerful and effective than their sales pitches claimed.
* Is Facebook responsible for content published on its site?
Legally, the answer is clearly no. Like everything from phone companies to bulletin boards, Facebook is legally considered a medium rather than an agent. But we all know (I hope) that legal != moral. So, morally, is Verizon responsible for what is said in phone conversations? Is Comcast responsible for what is said in conversations over the low-level internet? Can they be, in any meaningful or useful sense? Again, generally no. For them to act in that capacity would make them censors, or agents in some other more significant sense. That's exactly why many people objected to these fact-checking efforts in the first place. Blamed for doing nothing, blamed for doing anything. We as a society have defined a "common carrier" role for these situations. Why does Verizon get this status and Facebook not?
What makes Facebook any different? Sure, there are obvious differences in terms of the connections are made, but how exactly does that justify different treatment? I'm not talking about Cambridge Analytica kinds of private-information stuff here. That's a whole different matter. I'm just talking about the stuff that people meant to share. Data comes in, data goes out, according to the senders' and recipients' own expressed preference for who they should be connected to. How is that really different than what a phone company does? If you can't answer that question with any level of coherency, all you're doing is hating.
Personally, I am well aware of how badly these globe-spanning groups spreading fake news SUCK. But how do we distinguish them from other groups? I see plenty of groups that consist of real people who know each other in real life, deriving benefit from communicating and coordinating through Facebook. I see others that spread humor or support, even though they have many thousands of members who don't really know each other. Maybe it's not a great idea for every random idiot to have that big a megaphone, but how do we eliminate the bad without also eliminating the good? It's all too easy to say "kill them all" from a distance, when you're not among those who benefit from such connections, but being easy doesn't make anything right.
The free-speech common-carrier answer to that central question is a valid one. I'm not convinced it's the best one, but it's valid. Just the medium, the messages are someone else's. There's a mental and legal model for that. If you think that's the wrong model, propose another. One that actually has some hope of working. Like it or not, Facebook and Twitter and Hacker News and other social media are part of how people interact. Not every malady is best solved by picking an organ to remove. Killing the medium is the lazy way out. Maybe we should try addressing the reasons or mechanisms by which that medium is being abused. If you succeeded in killing Facebook and the exact same thing happened on the next social network, and the next, and the next - as it surely would - what else might you try?
Without social media, you normally have to go out of your way to consume news. With social media, it's consolidated with your cousin's vacation photos. There's a massive difference in the work required to call up all your friends to tell them that you heard there's a pizza place running a child sex trafficking ring in its basement versus just quickly hitting a Share button.
Comcast/Verizon don't have a moral obligation to censor fake news because to do so, they'd have to listen in on your private conversations. Facebook and Twitter? I'm not sure. It still presents a major feasibility problem with fake news sites just easily creating new pages.
But back to my original comment...
If Facebook was really interested in curbing the spread of fake news on their platform, certainly they would have budgeted more than a measly $100,000. That's pennies to a company that has well over $15B in quarterly revenue.
So what does "private" mean? If I'm in a group restricted to only people in my RL ski club (which I am), are our posts there not private as far as FB is concerned? Is there a numeric cutoff? A lot of groups spreading fake news on Facebook are nominally private in the exact same way, even though they have thousands of members and do almost nothing to vet new ones. Even humor groups are often private, which I just don't get.
I agree that the "broadcast" nature of Facebook posts is probably significant, but I'm still not sure how to draw a useful line that would distinguish it from the thousands of forums that came before which weren't assigned this kind of moral responsibility. The Prison Planet forums on InfoWars still exist. Stormfront still exists. They do nothing but spew misinformation and hate. Any Facebook-specific accountability standard would be like endless Christmas for them.
> certainly they would have budgeted more than a measly $100,000
They most certainly did. Orders of magnitude. That's only the amount for the external-fact-checker program, which is a tiny (and IMO not all that effective) slice of what they're doing. It doesn't count the thousands of people working on the problem internally, or the billions of machine-hours spent dismantling these "inauthentic content" networks. There are successes on that front almost every day, but everybody would rather focus of the fifth editorial about the third re-post of whatever the last bad news was.
I don't have a catchy derogative name for a future where truth is determined by the number of upvotes, but it's clearly not less dangerous than an "Orwellian" future where truth is established by elites.
Also -- Snopes is hardly Big Brother.
Bloomberg
Facebook Loses Fact-Checking Group Snopes After Two Years
By Sarah Frier February 1, 2019, 3:36 PM EST Updated on February 1, 2019, 4:29 PM EST
Snopes Media Group Inc., one of Facebook Inc.’s first fact-checking partners, said it’s ending the relationship after two years, even though the decision may cause financial distress.
“We want to determine with certainty that our efforts to aid any particular platform are a net positive for our online community, publication, and staff,” the company said.
Snopes’ contract with Facebook was worth $100,000 in 2017, but was far more valuable than that for Facebook, which frequently touted its fact-checking partners as helping combat the fake news problem on its site. Snopes said it hasn’t ruled out working with Facebook, or any other platforms, in the future.
Facebook has been working since the 2016 U.S. election to rein in misinformation across its platform, though its results have been spotty. External fact-checking partners have criticized Facebook’s attempts as only scratching the surface of false content on the social network.
The fact-checking efforts are often understaffed and have only recently begun to address the explosion of misleading photo and video content. Repeat offenders have also found workarounds. One site that was frequently flagged by fact-checkers simply changed the name of its site, Poynter reported this week.
“We value the work that Snopes has done, and respect their decision as an independent business,” Facebook said, noting that it has 34 other fact-checking partners.
Fact-checking initiatives may not be as important for the site’s misinformation problems as other technological improvements, like detecting fake accounts trying to spread the content, Alex Stamos, Facebook’s former head of security, said on Twitter.
“The fact checking partnerships were always PR, because it’s the kind of well-understood, visible intervention that journalists can see and cover,” Stamos tweeted. “The really effective product changes are often invisible.”
(Updates with Facebook comment in the sixth paragraph.)
I've had vigorous discussions about Snopes with friends. I'm mostly conservative, I feel Snopes has a liberal bias. My liberal friends feel otherwise.
After much back-and-forth, what we found is this: - Snopes seems to be careful about printing only true things - But Snopes controls the narrative and decides which issues to fact-check. They seem to publish a lot more material that validates left-leaning opinions than right-leaning ones
At the time of last checking, Snopes had a single political fact-checker, she was a staunch Democrat.
I just finished reading a BBC article on Jussie Smollett, the actor in the news this week. The BBC article gave no hint the issue under discussion is anything less than accepted fact as Smollett presents it. A review of police findings (especially video reviews) suggests there is much to be investigated.
I can't see how the BBC justifies this.
I'd posit that people on the left typically value education more than people on the right and are therefore more likely to attend universities.
> and the papers they write reflect this. It is not an accident the way money has corrupted research.
I read this as "research is coming up with conclusions that don't fit my world view/opinions/beliefs and I don't like it."
Also no one can fact check everything just like no one can report everything. So I agree there are subtle ways of being biased that don’t require telling lies.
That will always be a limitation. That said the right tells so many more lies that any fact checking service should be spending more time on the right vs the left.
"It must also be said that given that the average life expectancy of a patient diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease is eight to 10 years, Reagan, who died in 2004 (10 years after his diagnosis), would have been extraordinarily long-lived for an Alzheimer’s patient if he was already suffering from the disease, as some claim, in 1984."
I was certainly being hyperbolic above in saying this article was the worst offender though. Here is also another mild case: (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/california-senate-ban-he-s...), where the headline is geared toward the strongest claim and yet there is in fact a nonstandard situation in that there is a push within the committee to designate 'they' as the standard pronoun, and documents were altered. But seeing as the right winged media made the claims of banning themselves, Snopes is boxed in here.
> At the time of last checking, Snopes had a single political fact-checker, she was a staunch Democrat.
What's your source on this? Snopes's own documentation for their team doesn't indicate that any particular person is "the single political fact-checker", and Snopes itself is run by 2 passionately apolitical people.
I just did a random sampling of several of the "latest fact checks" that appear to relate to politics (e.g. about Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, or Trump) and in the first 5 facts I checked, I found 4 different writers. So as far as I can tell, it's not remotely true that they have "a single political fact-checker".
Please give it a fair read, offer your perspective.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/22/the-dai...
Still, if the assertions are true, it raises concerns.
There's definitely truth to that and worth some concern.
> They seem to publish a lot more material that validates left-leaning opinions than right-leaning ones
Probably because while media on both sides has their bias and will twist the facts a bit to fit their narrative, right-wing media just invents complete lies and falsehoods.
Nobody on the left has even come close to something as dumb as Pizzagate.
My wife is a podiatrist. A significant part of her job is lopping off toes. I asked her if that was true, and she said that it absolutely was not. Her post-amputation patients are routinely perfectly fine and have no trouble walking. Even losing your big toe isn't a huge deal. Try it yourself: point it upward so that it doesn't touch the ground and walk around some. It's not hard at all.
I wrote them to share the information. I agreed that the myth was false, but that the bit about her being unable to walk afterward wasn't good supporting evidence. They replied with a snide comment basically accusing me of believing that Marilyn had six toes (which I absolutely don't believe, or more precisely, I could not care less about). Since then I've read a lot of their debunking skeptically. I mean, I think they mean well and I'm sure they're mostly accurate. However, I have first hand experience with them being unwilling to vet their own evidence. If they can play fast and loose with a goofy story about an extra toe, are they being rigorous elsewhere? I don't know.
Do you still see an imbalance if you take out one or both of the following:
1. Fact checking of President Trump, and
2. Fact checking of politicians' claims on matters of science?
President Trump makes a lot more statements than any other politician, especially on Twitter, making a lot of very specific and objectively reviewable claims that often have no support even from conservative sources. He is the President, and so a fact checking site can't really ignore him.
He's basically a huge outlier, and this alone is probably going to push any fair and balanced fact checking site into appearing left leaning.
For example, he Tweeted "We are not even into February and the cost of illegal immigration so far this year is $18,959,495,168. Cost Friday was $603,331,392. There are at least 25,772,342 illegal aliens, not the 11,000,000 that have been reported for years, in our Country. So ridiculous! DHS". Nobody can figure out where he got those numbers, his staff says they don't know, and they are about twice as high as even conservative anti-immigrant groups claim. And he does this kind of Tweet a lot.
As far as science goes, both liberal and conservative politicians do have problems with putting ideology ahead of facts, but not with the same sciences.
For example, I think liberals are more likely than conservatives to think there is a connection between autism and vaccines, and so take a political position on vaccination that is at odds with science. Conservatives are more likely to think climate change is not happening, or if it is that human activity does not affect it, and so take a political position on that at odds with science.
But vaccination is simply not something that comes up as often as climate in the news, meaning that there is simply less opportunity for politicians to says something stupid about vaccines than there is for them to say something stupid about climate.
Vaccination rates are usually only going to become prominent enough to prompt politicians to make stupid statements when we have something like a measles outbreak which is still fairly rare. With climate, all it takes is some cold weather to get a few politicians to stupidly say that this proves that the climate is not warming, and this happens several times a year.
(Also, the vaccination situation is muddled by the people who are against vaccination requirements for religion reasons or personal liberty reasons rather than misunderstanding autism, and these people tend to be more on the right than the left).