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Facebook Bans Fake News Sites from Using Its Advertising Network

62 points by kawera 10y ago

dvhh 10y ago
would that be the end of the onion http://www.theonion.com/ http://www.theonion.com/ ? And what is defined as fake news ? These developments will prove really interesting.
- Tempest1981 10y ago
  This page provides some examples of fake news: https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/partisan-fb-pages-analysis https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/partisan-fb-pages-an... "We rated 82 out of a total 666 right-wing Facebook posts as mostly false, for a percentage of 12.3%. Another 169 posts (25.4%) were rated as a mixture of true and false. Viewed separately or together (38%), this is an alarmingly high percentage."
  - Frqy3 10y ago
    The critical part is the difference in how those on the right and left rate articles that are viewed as right or left leaning. No prizes for guessing how that will turn out.
- Houshalter 10y ago
  I love the onion, but it's deeply disturbing how many people believe their articles are real. There is a small niche online of screenshots of people falling for them: http://literallyunbelievable.org/ http://literallyunbelievable.org/
  - tscs37 10y ago
    I admit that I once fell for an article from the German-based equivalent of the Onion. I had a good laugh when I checked the domain though.
- m1sta_ 10y ago
  I'd be surprised if they couldn't identify satire sites.
  - dvhh 10y ago
    Some people are not able to tell the difference ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Onion#Taken_seriously https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Onion#Taken_seriously ) , and on the other side of the coin, some website could hide behind the the veil of satire to bring fake news ( or maybe put this article as one offshot satire attempt ).
yosito 10y ago
Interesting development and a move in the right direction.
vinhboy 10y ago
I find it odd that a lot people think discerning between real and fake news is hard, or has some sort of insurmountable "gray area" filled with slippery slopes. We've done it for pornography, and it has worked really well. I don't get bombarded with pornography on the internet anymore. Why can't we apply the same logic to fake news? And no one thinks banning certain type of advertising from pornography sites as censorship. It still exists, it's still growing, and you can find it easily. Same applies here I think.
- trendia 10y ago
  Because there are perverse incentives to ban news that don't vibe with a company's/CEO's political goals.
  - vinhboy 10y ago
    Isn't there a bigger incentive to keep fake news since it attract eyeballs and make them money?
    - dictum 10y ago
      There's an even bigger incentive to control the narrative (political, cultural, economic etc.) which could greatly benefit an enterprise in the long term. Running ads for shady publications improves your quarterly results, but in the long term worsens the public perception of your company and drives off high quality advertisers/publishers. Disclaimer: I don't think this new policy from Google/FB is an attempt to control the narrative.
      - vinhboy 10y ago
        You're asking me to believe that companies think about long term benefits over quarterly results. You may be absolute correct, but I have a time hard believing it.
        dictum 10y ago
Tempest1981 10y ago
Fake news is a natural extension of sticking to news sources that reaffirm our beliefs. We tend to live in our own information universes. Broadening our views is uncomfortable.
forgingahead 10y ago
The problem is that so-called "real" news is itself full of subjectivity, bias and hyperbole. So continues the hand-wringing and pearl-clutching from last week.
- ec109685 10y ago
  How is that the problem? Can you cite some examples?
  - fareesh 10y ago
    There are multiple reporters who colluded with the Clinton campaign to push a specific narrative during the election. In one example, Glenn Thrush went so far as to call himself a hack in one of the emails to her campaign chairman, which he ended with "Please don't tell anyone I did this". Granted there's a difference between bias and a completely fabricated article about something that did not happen, but presenting half the story is also problematic, as is coordinating with the people who the story is being written about. Unfortunately, if one were to entertain the idea of banning Politico, it would be considered an affront to the idea of freedom of the press. By agreeing to allow biased coverage to profit from advertising, Facebook is essentially saying that you can do this as long as you don't get caught. By the same yardstick, several right leaning media companies are guilty of the same sin, but the fact that we have proof in this case suggests that this is a standard practice in the industry, which reveals that honest reporting may only exist upto a particular point. Source: https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/12681 https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/12681
    - ec109685 10y ago
      Hack language aside, wasn't he asking if the article had an falsehoods in it? How do you expect reporters to have access to "sources inside the X campaign" without making an effort to build relationships and trust?
  - forgingahead 10y ago
    This article does a great job highlighting the double standards halfway down: http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/media/how-the-mainstream-media-destroyed-itself-with-a-little-help-from-donald-trump/news-story/67952f876e42ee61ca794c9ccd370b41 http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/media/how-the-mainst...
JacobJans 10y ago
The next step is to ban them from the platform. Any Facebook Page that continually posts fake news should be given a warning, and then booted if the practice continues. Just as Google has quality guidelines for websites, there should also be quality guidelines for Facebook Pages. To do otherwise is to open up Facebook's users to abuse.
_audakel 10y ago
When fb starts getting into the business of censorship, it's time there monopoly is investigated.
- wmf 10y ago
  That's why if they're smart they won't block "fake news" but will add some kind of disclaimer.
untog 10y ago
Facebook apparently already had a fix ready for fake news, but didn't implement it because it disproportionately affected right-wing news sites, and they were afraid of backlash: http://www.gizmodo.com/facebooks-fight-against-fake-news-was-undercut-by-fear-1788808204 http://www.gizmodo.com/facebooks-fight-against-fake-news-was... This got me thinking. I'm center-leftish, but I'd like to think open minded. To me, the results FB saw are correct - from Birtherism, Obama being a Muslim, Sandy Hook trutherism, all the way to Democrats using the voting records of dead people to swing the election, the false conspiracy pedalling news stories I've seen have been overwhelmingly on the right. (note that I am not saying all right-wing people believe these things, just that most of the people who do are right-wing) But am I wrong? I'm constantly aware that Facebook puts me in a filter bubble. Does anyone have any good examples of left-leaning fake, conspiratorial news stories in the last few years?
- adventured 10y ago
  The left was rampant with conspiracy theories about the FBI throwing the election. Hillary went so far as to partially blame Comey. Half of my more liberal friends on Facebook believe the election was rigged in one way or another. Of course I don't know if other people are seeing the same response post election in their social feeds. It seems common on Twitter. The great right wing conspiracy that the Clintons claim have been following/targeting them for decades, rather than their own actual behavior being the issue. That's not new, however it was present during Hillary's run. Some of the more fringe leftists claim that Trump is in the pocket of zionists and that the election was being thrown for the benefit of Israel's interests (he was very outspoken in favor of Israel during all phases of the election). That's also not new however, that group tends to be universally anti-Israel regardless of the candidate. Or the greatest conspiracy theory of them all for the election: Hillary was prevented from winning by sexist men determined to keep a woman out the Presidency. I've seen that one commonly in the mainstream left-leaning media.
  - untog 10y ago
    > I've seen that one commonly in the mainstream left-leaning media. Out of interest, in news reports or in opinion pieces? I wish newspapers did away with opinion sections, they serve no good purpose and cloud what news reporting actually is. I'd be interested to read the justification a news organisation gives for stating something like that as fact and not opinion.
piotrjurkiewicz 10y ago
All of you are complaining about fake news, but what about omitted news? What's the point in having a news source which presents only/mostly true news, the same time ignoring huge amount of those ones which do not fit their political line? This will result in people having a false image of an overall situation, exactly the same as fake news will. Moreover, I think news omitting is the root cause of fake news problem. People see certain events happen around them. They know these events are true because they see them with their own eyes. But they do not see reports on these events in mass media. The same time alternative and partisan media report these events, people see them on their FB timelines. So they redirect their trust towards these media and FB. If this schema repeats for years, they can trust these media so much that they can accept fake and unbelievable stories (which are also naturally more likely to appear in partisan media). And refuting these stories by mass media makes them even more sound in their eyes, especially if they once saw these media refuting stories which were real. And this applies to both sides.
- wmf 10y ago
  OTOH the media also loves to report non-newsworthy events, making them appear to be more common than they are. We now return you to our developing "missing white woman" story...
gscott 10y ago
Please ban the Huffington Post while you are at it.
- basch 10y ago
  before salon?
  - gscott 10y ago
    You are right. Some samples from the Salon webpage: “The racist, fascist extreme right is represented footsteps from the Oval Office”: Republicans warn of Trump presidency Donald Trump has killed American Exceptionalism: Why his election was the deathblow for our great national myth White flight from reality: Inside the racist panic that fueled Donald Trump's victory Has the American “experiment” run its course? The empire of chaos has overtaken America. Please Google/Facebook add this to the list to remove as well.
    - basch 10y ago
      The misogyny apocalypse: Turns out being white and male counts for more than intelligence, grace or decency http://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-misogyny-apocalypse-turns-out-being-white-and-male-counts-for-more-than-intelligence-grace-or-decency/ http://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-misogyny-apocalypse-turn...
olivermarks 10y ago
who is going to rubber stamp 'news' as 'real'?
- venomsnake 10y ago
  The Ministry of Truth
  - wattt 10y ago
    Exactly this. Worst possible outcome. It is solving the problem with more of the same the problem.
planetjones 10y ago
I don't think it would be so hard for FB to partner up with snipes.com and provide some kind of check which flags news stories as potentially fake and offer the user the chance to click through to snopes in order to read more about it. With simple text matching and maybe extracting text from some of the images this shouldn't be too difficult. I know FB already have a tool, but I am not sure how it's implemented.
- xiaoma 10y ago
  snipes.com -> snopes.com
venomsnake 10y ago
The cure is worse than the illness. The left went out of its way to take every word Trump said literally. In the most damning way, to produce outrage. Are the 3000 thousand opinion pieces assuming that that Megyn blood was coming from her vagina and not her eyes, because it suited them more also fake news? You cannot abstract talking to the other side. You cannot abstract discussion - and I mean real discussion, not demonstrating intellectual superiority
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
qwrusz 10y ago
While debating what is a "fake news" site. Maybe it's also time to revisit the debate what is a "news" site... Organizations that do original journalism and news reporting seem to be struggling financially. Meanwhile, many popular sites now considered legitimate "news sites" don't do much original journalism of their own and instead they are mainly just curating or aggregating news from those original news sites. (I'm not talking about sites like HN or reddit, I'm referring to large popular sites with "articles" where they're rewriting/spinning/summarizing news stories found elsewhere, then linking somewhere in their "article" to the original news site, lastly they add the most sensationalist clickbait headline they can come up with!) News curation/aggregation sites offer a service people want, they are usually free to read, and copyright law cases have determined what they are doing is legal. Facebook and Google clearly have a huge amount of power here. I support them taking action against fake news sites (I do look forward reading details what that means and how they do this). But it's not just FBerg and Googy at fault here, part of the reason things have gotten this bad is the slippery slope where "real" newspapers, news-agencies and other organizations that have trained journalists doing original news reporting have let themselves be overrun by sites using their work without appropriate compensation or recognition. They have also fallen behind on the tech skills needed to deliver news on the noisy interwebs, and they have not pushed to revisit copyright laws that aren't working for anyone as intended.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
gremlinsinc 10y ago
What's considered 'fake news' though.. I mean you could argue breitbart/huffington post which are both very biased are fake... yet they do have some honest articles in there- - but many REAL news services were calling it w/ major odds for Hillary even if they had data that pointed otherwise... MSM also did not report pro-Bernie news that might have led to him beating Clinton, and Trump in the end... Since we've removed the rule that requires news to show the opposing view point on every piece of news -- it's pretty much all op-ed anymore...

62 points by kawera 10y ago

dvhh 10y ago

would that be the end of the onion http://www.theonion.com/ http://www.theonion.com/ ? And what is defined as fake news ? These developments will prove really interesting.

Tempest1981 10y ago
This page provides some examples of fake news: https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/partisan-fb-pages-analysis https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/partisan-fb-pages-an... "We rated 82 out of a total 666 right-wing Facebook posts as mostly false, for a percentage of 12.3%. Another 169 posts (25.4%) were rated as a mixture of true and false. Viewed separately or together (38%), this is an alarmingly high percentage."
- Frqy3 10y ago
  The critical part is the difference in how those on the right and left rate articles that are viewed as right or left leaning. No prizes for guessing how that will turn out.
Houshalter 10y ago
I love the onion, but it's deeply disturbing how many people believe their articles are real. There is a small niche online of screenshots of people falling for them: http://literallyunbelievable.org/ http://literallyunbelievable.org/
- tscs37 10y ago
  I admit that I once fell for an article from the German-based equivalent of the Onion. I had a good laugh when I checked the domain though.
m1sta_ 10y ago
I'd be surprised if they couldn't identify satire sites.
- dvhh 10y ago
  Some people are not able to tell the difference ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Onion#Taken_seriously https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Onion#Taken_seriously ) , and on the other side of the coin, some website could hide behind the the veil of satire to bring fake news ( or maybe put this article as one offshot satire attempt ).

yosito 10y ago

Interesting development and a move in the right direction.

vinhboy 10y ago

I find it odd that a lot people think discerning between real and fake news is hard, or has some sort of insurmountable "gray area" filled with slippery slopes. We've done it for pornography, and it has worked really well. I don't get bombarded with pornography on the internet anymore. Why can't we apply the same logic to fake news? And no one thinks banning certain type of advertising from pornography sites as censorship. It still exists, it's still growing, and you can find it easily. Same applies here I think.

trendia 10y ago
Because there are perverse incentives to ban news that don't vibe with a company's/CEO's political goals.
- vinhboy 10y ago
  Isn't there a bigger incentive to keep fake news since it attract eyeballs and make them money?
  - dictum 10y ago
    There's an even bigger incentive to control the narrative (political, cultural, economic etc.) which could greatly benefit an enterprise in the long term. Running ads for shady publications improves your quarterly results, but in the long term worsens the public perception of your company and drives off high quality advertisers/publishers. Disclaimer: I don't think this new policy from Google/FB is an attempt to control the narrative.
    - vinhboy 10y ago
      You're asking me to believe that companies think about long term benefits over quarterly results. You may be absolute correct, but I have a time hard believing it.
      - dictum 10y ago

Tempest1981 10y ago

Fake news is a natural extension of sticking to news sources that reaffirm our beliefs. We tend to live in our own information universes. Broadening our views is uncomfortable.

forgingahead 10y ago

The problem is that so-called "real" news is itself full of subjectivity, bias and hyperbole. So continues the hand-wringing and pearl-clutching from last week.

ec109685 10y ago
How is that the problem? Can you cite some examples?
- fareesh 10y ago
  There are multiple reporters who colluded with the Clinton campaign to push a specific narrative during the election. In one example, Glenn Thrush went so far as to call himself a hack in one of the emails to her campaign chairman, which he ended with "Please don't tell anyone I did this". Granted there's a difference between bias and a completely fabricated article about something that did not happen, but presenting half the story is also problematic, as is coordinating with the people who the story is being written about. Unfortunately, if one were to entertain the idea of banning Politico, it would be considered an affront to the idea of freedom of the press. By agreeing to allow biased coverage to profit from advertising, Facebook is essentially saying that you can do this as long as you don't get caught. By the same yardstick, several right leaning media companies are guilty of the same sin, but the fact that we have proof in this case suggests that this is a standard practice in the industry, which reveals that honest reporting may only exist upto a particular point. Source: https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/12681 https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/12681
  - ec109685 10y ago
    Hack language aside, wasn't he asking if the article had an falsehoods in it? How do you expect reporters to have access to "sources inside the X campaign" without making an effort to build relationships and trust?
- forgingahead 10y ago
  This article does a great job highlighting the double standards halfway down: http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/media/how-the-mainstream-media-destroyed-itself-with-a-little-help-from-donald-trump/news-story/67952f876e42ee61ca794c9ccd370b41 http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/media/how-the-mainst...

JacobJans 10y ago

The next step is to ban them from the platform. Any Facebook Page that continually posts fake news should be given a warning, and then booted if the practice continues. Just as Google has quality guidelines for websites, there should also be quality guidelines for Facebook Pages. To do otherwise is to open up Facebook's users to abuse.

_audakel 10y ago

When fb starts getting into the business of censorship, it's time there monopoly is investigated.

wmf 10y ago
That's why if they're smart they won't block "fake news" but will add some kind of disclaimer.

untog 10y ago

Facebook apparently already had a fix ready for fake news, but didn't implement it because it disproportionately affected right-wing news sites, and they were afraid of backlash: http://www.gizmodo.com/facebooks-fight-against-fake-news-was-undercut-by-fear-1788808204 http://www.gizmodo.com/facebooks-fight-against-fake-news-was... This got me thinking. I'm center-leftish, but I'd like to think open minded. To me, the results FB saw are correct - from Birtherism, Obama being a Muslim, Sandy Hook trutherism, all the way to Democrats using the voting records of dead people to swing the election, the false conspiracy pedalling news stories I've seen have been overwhelmingly on the right. (note that I am not saying all right-wing people believe these things, just that most of the people who do are right-wing) But am I wrong? I'm constantly aware that Facebook puts me in a filter bubble. Does anyone have any good examples of left-leaning fake, conspiratorial news stories in the last few years?

adventured 10y ago
The left was rampant with conspiracy theories about the FBI throwing the election. Hillary went so far as to partially blame Comey. Half of my more liberal friends on Facebook believe the election was rigged in one way or another. Of course I don't know if other people are seeing the same response post election in their social feeds. It seems common on Twitter. The great right wing conspiracy that the Clintons claim have been following/targeting them for decades, rather than their own actual behavior being the issue. That's not new, however it was present during Hillary's run. Some of the more fringe leftists claim that Trump is in the pocket of zionists and that the election was being thrown for the benefit of Israel's interests (he was very outspoken in favor of Israel during all phases of the election). That's also not new however, that group tends to be universally anti-Israel regardless of the candidate. Or the greatest conspiracy theory of them all for the election: Hillary was prevented from winning by sexist men determined to keep a woman out the Presidency. I've seen that one commonly in the mainstream left-leaning media.
- untog 10y ago
  > I've seen that one commonly in the mainstream left-leaning media. Out of interest, in news reports or in opinion pieces? I wish newspapers did away with opinion sections, they serve no good purpose and cloud what news reporting actually is. I'd be interested to read the justification a news organisation gives for stating something like that as fact and not opinion.

piotrjurkiewicz 10y ago

All of you are complaining about fake news, but what about omitted news? What's the point in having a news source which presents only/mostly true news, the same time ignoring huge amount of those ones which do not fit their political line? This will result in people having a false image of an overall situation, exactly the same as fake news will. Moreover, I think news omitting is the root cause of fake news problem. People see certain events happen around them. They know these events are true because they see them with their own eyes. But they do not see reports on these events in mass media. The same time alternative and partisan media report these events, people see them on their FB timelines. So they redirect their trust towards these media and FB. If this schema repeats for years, they can trust these media so much that they can accept fake and unbelievable stories (which are also naturally more likely to appear in partisan media). And refuting these stories by mass media makes them even more sound in their eyes, especially if they once saw these media refuting stories which were real. And this applies to both sides.

wmf 10y ago
OTOH the media also loves to report non-newsworthy events, making them appear to be more common than they are. We now return you to our developing "missing white woman" story...

gscott 10y ago

Please ban the Huffington Post while you are at it.

basch 10y ago
before salon?
- gscott 10y ago
  You are right. Some samples from the Salon webpage: “The racist, fascist extreme right is represented footsteps from the Oval Office”: Republicans warn of Trump presidency Donald Trump has killed American Exceptionalism: Why his election was the deathblow for our great national myth White flight from reality: Inside the racist panic that fueled Donald Trump's victory Has the American “experiment” run its course? The empire of chaos has overtaken America. Please Google/Facebook add this to the list to remove as well.
  - basch 10y ago
    The misogyny apocalypse: Turns out being white and male counts for more than intelligence, grace or decency http://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-misogyny-apocalypse-turns-out-being-white-and-male-counts-for-more-than-intelligence-grace-or-decency/ http://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-misogyny-apocalypse-turn...

olivermarks 10y ago

who is going to rubber stamp 'news' as 'real'?

venomsnake 10y ago
The Ministry of Truth
- wattt 10y ago
  Exactly this. Worst possible outcome. It is solving the problem with more of the same the problem.

planetjones 10y ago

I don't think it would be so hard for FB to partner up with snipes.com and provide some kind of check which flags news stories as potentially fake and offer the user the chance to click through to snopes in order to read more about it. With simple text matching and maybe extracting text from some of the images this shouldn't be too difficult. I know FB already have a tool, but I am not sure how it's implemented.

xiaoma 10y ago
snipes.com -> snopes.com

venomsnake 10y ago

The cure is worse than the illness. The left went out of its way to take every word Trump said literally. In the most damning way, to produce outrage. Are the 3000 thousand opinion pieces assuming that that Megyn blood was coming from her vagina and not her eyes, because it suited them more also fake news? You cannot abstract talking to the other side. You cannot abstract discussion - and I mean real discussion, not demonstrating intellectual superiority

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

qwrusz 10y ago

While debating what is a "fake news" site. Maybe it's also time to revisit the debate what is a "news" site... Organizations that do original journalism and news reporting seem to be struggling financially. Meanwhile, many popular sites now considered legitimate "news sites" don't do much original journalism of their own and instead they are mainly just curating or aggregating news from those original news sites. (I'm not talking about sites like HN or reddit, I'm referring to large popular sites with "articles" where they're rewriting/spinning/summarizing news stories found elsewhere, then linking somewhere in their "article" to the original news site, lastly they add the most sensationalist clickbait headline they can come up with!) News curation/aggregation sites offer a service people want, they are usually free to read, and copyright law cases have determined what they are doing is legal. Facebook and Google clearly have a huge amount of power here. I support them taking action against fake news sites (I do look forward reading details what that means and how they do this). But it's not just FBerg and Googy at fault here, part of the reason things have gotten this bad is the slippery slope where "real" newspapers, news-agencies and other organizations that have trained journalists doing original news reporting have let themselves be overrun by sites using their work without appropriate compensation or recognition. They have also fallen behind on the tech skills needed to deliver news on the noisy interwebs, and they have not pushed to revisit copyright laws that aren't working for anyone as intended.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

gremlinsinc 10y ago

What's considered 'fake news' though.. I mean you could argue breitbart/huffington post which are both very biased are fake... yet they do have some honest articles in there- - but many REAL news services were calling it w/ major odds for Hillary even if they had data that pointed otherwise... MSM also did not report pro-Bernie news that might have led to him beating Clinton, and Trump in the end... Since we've removed the rule that requires news to show the opposing view point on every piece of news -- it's pretty much all op-ed anymore...