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Buzzfeed: Renegade Facebook Employees Form Task Force To Battle Fake News

visionary

By visionary
in The Tailgate

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Zguy28

Zguy28

Posted
Posted
On 11/16/2016 at 7:35 AM, grego said:

 

its a problem. there are stories on right or left leaning sites that you wont find on sites with the opposing viewpoint, yet are factually correct.

i dont know how you can be informed and not go to a variety of sites to gather information.

anyone know some good, non partisan news sites? 

Because when the facts of a story may sway people against your cause, silence is better than facts.

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No Excuses

No Excuses

Posted
Posted

I don't care what side you are on but this is just god awful:

This is not even about politics. It extends to literally everything. 

This mess started right around the time Facebook fired its trending news team and automated the whole process. 

They ****ed up and now they need to make sure that their platform isn't becoming a platform for charlatans to con gullible and naive people.

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codeorama

codeorama

Posted
Posted

I hate Facebook. I have an account because I signed up for it the day my ex and I separated. It has become for me, an online journal of what I do with my son.  I have the most vanilla FB account ever.  Its literally just pics of my son and I etc...

I hate going on FB though because of all the BS fake news and people's opinions on everything.  oh well...

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tshile

tshile

Posted
Posted

A fun senior project would be to write a news generator, train it on the fake news, then put in unsupervised learning that's based in retweets and Facebook likes

 

I bet it'd be rather easy and would produce something to study about how dumbed down our news and critical thinking is these days

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Destino

Destino

Posted
Posted
On 11/21/2016 at 3:20 PM, Sacks 'n' Stuff said:

Ignorance and irresponsibility are the driving forces behind a President Trump.

You'd limit it to President Trump?  I think US culture has grown entirely too accepting of dishonesty.  Our politicians talk to us like we're children and we expect them to lie to us.  The media is rewarded more for stories that scare or outrage than those that calmly tell the truth.  The greatest sin in American culture is to be boring.      

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China

China

Posted
Posted

Teens can’t tell the difference between real and fake news, unsettling study reveals

The ghost of Edward R. Murrow wept in the afterlife today as a Stanford University study revealed that 82 percent of middle-schoolers were unable to tell the difference between a legitimate news story and “sponsored content” from an advertiser. This is a significant finding, especially as America reels from the results of a bitter presidential election that some have theorized might have been swayed by the proliferation of fake news via social media. According to The Wall Street Journal—a reputable, fact-checked news source that has existed since 1889 and is beholden to certain professional standards of accuracy and integrity—Stanford surveyed over 7,800 students from middle school to college in order to determine how teens were interpreting the information they received online. The results were disheartening. More than two-thirds of middle-schoolers neglected to “mistrust a post [about financial planning] written by a bank executive,” while nearly 40 percent of high school students chose to believe in the veracity of a purported news photo, even without a verifiable source attached to it.

Click on the link for the full article

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PleaseBlitz

PleaseBlitz

Posted
Posted
On 11/17/2016 at 8:37 AM, No Excuses said:

Just read and weep about our future:

 

We are living in maybe the most dangerous information era in human history.

 

If you click on the link in the tweet that you posted, it goes to a WaPo article about a guy that makes up fake "news."  That article talks about some of the stuff that guy has just made up out of nothing and links to a thing he wrote and posted to his website ABCNews.com.co (read that carefully).  It is about a guy that bought a van and goes around performing gay marriages.  

It includes the following passage that, really, should have tipped off anyone reading it with an 8th grade education.

Quote

“It was actually really simple,” Horner said. “I bought a van, fixed it up and added a sweet rainbow paint job. Then I went online and became an ordained minister, took me just a few minutes. Then I bought some camera equipment, flowers and some ingredients to make wedding cakes with; I’m good to go!”

The vans are also licensed to do abortions too.

“I got me an abortion in one of those vans last week, it was great,” Shanique Mumbarton told ABC News. “I highly recommend one one of these for anyone looking for a great abortion experience.”

 

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No Excuses

No Excuses

Posted
Posted
5 minutes ago, PleaseBlitz said:

If you click on the link in the tweet that you posted, it goes to a WaPo article about a guy that makes up fake "news."  That article talks about some of the stuff that guy has just made up out of nothing and links to a thing he wrote and posted to his website ABCNews.com.co (read that carefully).  It is about a guy that bought a van and goes around performing gay marriages.  

It includes the following passage that, really, should have tipped of anyone reading it.

 

I'll see if I can find this, but I saw a while back that according to facebook's own statistics, a lot of the news stories that get shared and linked are not even opened by a significant majority of the people doing the sharing.

A catchy headline and some semblance of legitimacy (abcnews.com.co is clever in a really sinister way) gets people sharing things that they never bother opening or reading.

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PleaseBlitz

PleaseBlitz

Posted
Posted
18 hours ago, Destino said:

You'd limit it to President Trump?  I think US culture has grown entirely too accepting of dishonesty.  Our politicians talk to us like we're children and we expect them to lie to us.  The media is rewarded more for stories that scare or outrage than those that calmly tell the truth.  The greatest sin in American culture is to be boring.      

 

Agree, but would add that there are twin sins.  Being boring and being complicated.  If a topic requires nuance and is not either ALL one thing or ALL the other thing, people just can't be bothered to take 5 seconds and think about why small differences matter.  

This is a major reason why the job interview process for politicians is ridiculously divorced from the actual job.  

Voters:  Can you solve all of my problems?

Candidate 1:  Yes, I actually can if elected President.  I have a 15-point plan for addressing each of your problems in turn, as follows.  Step one ...............

Voters:  ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

........

Voters:  Can you solve all of my problems?

Candidate 2:  Not a chance in hell, but MEXICANS!

Voters:  OMG YES!!!!!

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Bang

Bang

Posted
Posted

It's our own fault. We the People have willingly become fat lazy swill drinking cattle, happily marching along to news and info that plays into our preconceptions. (meaning, someone else conceived it and sold it to your stupid ass). Kardashian Kulture isn't funny.

Critical thinking skills are gone because too many people don't want them.. any chance of being proven wrong is not going to be tolerated. 

the media isn't the root problem. We are. And the worst part of that is that collectively we aren't smart enough to give a ****.

~Bang

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PleaseBlitz

PleaseBlitz

Posted
Posted
5 minutes ago, No Excuses said:

 

I'll see if I can find this, but I saw a while back that according to facebook's own statistics, a lot of the news stories that get shared and linked are not even opened by a significant majority of the people doing the sharing.

A catchy headline and some semblance of legitimacy (abcnews.com.co is clever in a really sinister way) gets people sharing things that they never bother opening or reading.

For awhile I was essentially heckling people on my FB feed that posted demonstrably false articles and memes (and demanding in legalese that they take them down, i swear it was funny).  My favorite was one that said something along the lines of "before he was running against the democrats, nobody had ever accused Donald Trump of being a racist" the implication being that unfounded charges of racism are the democrats go-to move.  I of course noted that Trump had been charged with racism in his housing practices by the Dept of Justice in the 1970's (and linked to the newspaper reports from the time).  The republicans believed the meme, not the press reports from the time. 

Here's the meme and the NY Times story from 1973.  https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2186612-major-landlord-accuse-of-antiblack-bias-in-city.html?version=meter+at+9&module=meter-Links&pgtype=Blogs&contentId=&mediaId=&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F&priority=true&action=click&contentCollection=meter-links-click

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