5 ms·
Well from an engineering perspective you could create a blacklist and a whitelist. There's not a huge amount of variance in news sources out there, i'd say 80%
by pentae 8y ago
Well from an engineering perspective you could create a blacklist and a whitelist. There's not a huge amount of variance in news sources out there, i'd say 80% of news sources being shared on social media are less than 100 domains. The rest of the fake news sites domains could be added to the blacklist based on a combination of user reporting and moderation. You could literally put a team of about 5 people on this and over a long enough timeline it would be solved.
- bonniemuffin 8y agoThere's a huge long tail of small publishers though-- probably tens of thousands, and shadier fake news sites can always put up a new domain if they get blacklisted.
- pentae 8y agoHaving 200 million users to "Report this site as fake news" and a moderation team should overcome that
- mikeash 8y agoThe moderation team is key. Too often I see techies say a problem is impossible because computers can’t do it. Humans are also an acceptable solution, even if companies like Google try to pretend otherwise. I anticipate replies along the lines of “Facebook has a billion users, they’d need a gigantic team to handle their volume.” To preemptively respond: yes they would. That’s the nature of business. Sometimes you have to put substantial resources into it. Not all problems scale infinitely with just data centers. If you really want to scale with just data centers, stick to services where that’s appropriate.
- bonniemuffin 8y agoThe parent said "You could literally put a team of about 5 people on this", and now we're up to "they’d need a gigantic team" in 3 levels of comment replies. I bet if it was easy they would've already done it, and I wouldn't be surprised if they DO have a gigantic team working on it.