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It seems like a valid and useful way to slow the rate of propagation of fake news. Much of the current problem is that fake news spreads faster than moderators
by Kadin 8y ago
It seems like a valid and useful way to slow the rate of propagation of fake news.
Much of the current problem is that fake news spreads faster than moderators can make a decision on it, or journalists can fact-check it. If you can keep it in a "slow burn" phase longer, where it's being forwarded along to a handful of people at a time, it's easier to combat.
- mateo1 8y agoIt also seems like a valid and useful way to slow the rate of propagation of real news. Real news also spread very fast and faster than moderation. The point is, this has next to zero selectivity. It just makes the platform hostile to encrypted group messages. My guess would be that (besides PR regarding the Indian stories, which is a social problem, not a technical one) this is about censorship. You can't censor things you can't see. Better stop them from communicating freely.
- DoctorPenguin 8y agoPeople probably won't understand this but I totally agree with you.
- xpaulbettsx 8y agoFacebook has a limited amount of mitigation that they can do because of the nature of WhatsApp. Trying to suppress Fake News is hard when you can't even read the content
- fipple 8y agoYou can have a blacklist of message texts that are sent to the apps as hashes
- Kalium 8y agoGood idea! That could definitely work. This seems like it could only be implemented client-side. It also seems like it would require rapid and frequent updates to the ever-growing blacklist. That in turn would require a way to figure out what hashes needed to be blacklisted, which implies either less-than-ideal cryptography practices or the ability to decrypt messages. Neither is desirable for user privacy. I have a rule I use in computing: whenever you think you want a blacklist, you probably want a whitelist.
- fipple 8y agoWell these fake viral messages are usually quite temporary so you could expire the cache after some time and if some messages have particularly long “legs” just re-send them to clients after their TTL expires
- Kalium 8y agoWell done! You've elegantly solved the problem of the cache being append-only.