{"id":29932,"date":"2018-01-20T10:23:20","date_gmt":"2018-01-20T15:23:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=29932"},"modified":"2018-01-20T10:23:20","modified_gmt":"2018-01-20T15:23:20","slug":"facebook-will-trust-its-untrustworthy-users-to-rank-the-trustworthiness-of-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=29932","title":{"rendered":"Facebook Will Trust Its Untrustworthy Users to Rank the Trustworthiness of News"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo: Daniel Leal-Olivas\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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FACEBOOK WILL TRUST ITS UNTRUSTWORTHY USERS TO RANK THE TRUSTWORTHINESS OF NEWS<\/a><\/h3>\n
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FACEBOOK USERS, BY<\/u> and large, are not very good at differentiating between what\u2019s fact and what\u2019s false. Many users\u00a0will eagerly share both reliable news and the fake stuff without any hesitation. It happens because users either want the falsehoods to be received as true or simply can\u2019t tell the difference. Rampant media illiteracy is the root cause of the fake news handwringing we\u2019ve been dealing with since before the election, and will be fretting over until the end of time (or the end of Facebook, whichever comes first). Today, Facebook honcho Mark Zuckerberg\u00a0said he is\u00a0setting out to fix this fundamental problem of digital media illiteracy \u2014 by putting more power in the hands of the illiterate.<\/p>\n

In a new Facebook post today<\/a>, Zuckerberg\u00a0said he \u201casked our product teams to make sure we prioritize news that is trustworthy, informative, and local.\u201d Why this has only become a priority in the company\u2019s 14th year of existence is left unsaid. Zuckerberg admitted that \u201cthere\u2019s too much sensationalism, misinformation and polarization in the world today,\u201d and that his website \u201cenables people to spread information faster than ever before.\u201d As with the rest of Silicon Valley, Facebook is obsessed with the appearance of machine-like objectivity, and so Zuckerberg\u00a0said\u00a0figuring out which outlets deliberately package viral-ready falsehoods and which do not is a head-scratcher (spoiler \u2014 it isn\u2019t):<\/p>\n

The hard question we\u2019ve struggled with is how to decide what news sources are broadly trusted in a world with so much division. We could try to make that decision ourselves, but that\u2019s not something we\u2019re comfortable with. We considered asking outside experts, which would take the decision out of our hands but would likely not solve the objectivity problem. Or we could ask you \u2014 the community \u2014 and have your feedback determine the ranking.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Photo: Daniel Leal-Olivas\/AFP\/Getty Images FACEBOOK WILL TRUST ITS UNTRUSTWORTHY USERS TO RANK THE TRUSTWORTHINESS OF NEWS FACEBOOK USERS, BY and large, are not very good at differentiating between what\u2019s fact and what\u2019s false. Many users\u00a0will eagerly share both reliable news and the fake stuff without any hesitation. It happens because users either want the falsehoods […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1493,1648,2779,570,15125,5567],"class_list":["post-29932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-facebook","tag-facts","tag-fake-news","tag-news","tag-sam-biddle","tag-the-intercept"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29932"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29932\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29933,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29932\/revisions\/29933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}