Facebook's Safety Check Activated For Fake Bangkok Bombing

Fake news has plagued Facebook over the last year, and now even the social media giant is falling for it. From a report on CNET: The site's Safety Check feature has been crucial during terrorist attacks and natural disasters, helping friends and families find out if their loved ones are safe during emergencies. It's been activated across the world more than 335 times by its users, for events like hurricanes, mass shootings and terrorist attacks. On Tuesday, the automated tool went haywire, pushing out an alert about an explosion in Bangkok, Thailand, citing "media sources" as a confirmation. It was deactivated within an hour after those media sources turned out to be fake news. One of the sites used as a media source was Bangkok Informer, which scraped a video from the 2015 Erawan bombing.

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[hey!]

The story is that Facebook's Safety Check feature began to propagate a fake news story but that Facebook figured that out and shut it down.

If you don't know what that feature is, it detects what might be a big event like a terrorist bombing or a natural disaster and tells you how many of your friends are in the affected area. If you are in the affected area it prompts you to confirm that you are OK and relays that information to your friends. It's actually quite a useful feature but of course if activated

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[AmiMoJo]

It's because people have realized they can influence people by spreading fake news on social media, even if it is eventually debunked. In this case you have people just waiting for the next terror attack so they can push their isolationist/xenophobic agendas, and then a larger number of useful idiots who will repost and react to it.

Centralization fail...try something else...

[vvaduva]

Like Cell 411, which is decentralized: http://getcell411.com/ [getcell411.com]

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[ELCouz]

Civilians playing cops...what can go wrong?

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[vvaduva]

Oh no...because cops never ever kill dogs, kids and brown people for no reason.

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[ELCouz]

It's not about the "patrol" (it's what they call it in Cell411) shooting but also being shot/entrapped/raped? Vigilantism is a gray area.

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[vvaduva]

It allows users to build trusted cells...no strangers are involved unless you want them to. If your brother shows up and rapes you when you ask him for help, you have bigger problems to worry about. just saying...

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[Highdude702]

Why did you have to bring skin color into it? Cops kill more white people than "brown" people every year. Why couldn't you just leave it at people. This is what's wrong with slashdot and the world for that matter. Nobody can reply to someone without trying to bait someone into stepping on their own dick.

Sad news ... Carrie Fisher, dead at 60

[slashdice]

I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Star Wars actress Carrie Fisher was found dead in her LA hospital room this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss her - even if you didn't enjoy her work, there's no denying her contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.

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[iggymanz]

did social media confirm this news? -- millenial tard

Re: Sad news ... Carrie Fisher, dead at 60

[Zorpheus]

She was brought to an emergency hospital after a great attack to she had on a flight before. It was on the news a few days ago.
Found in a hotel you say? Didn't hear that she got out of hospital.

Automated news is the real problem

[michaelwigle]

I think the real problem here is that media sources are turning to automated scrapers instead of using human beings to investigate and report the news. Look at some of the sources that rebroadcast this fake report. The BBC, Telegraph, Mirror, and MSN news. How can anyone take an article they read from a news source seriously knowing that automated scripts likely wrote it. This is a growing trend as well. A growing number of news articles are the result of automated reporting scripts. From my point of view,

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[Cro Magnon]

It's what I've said before. Bloggers aren't as good as real journalists, but "real journalists" have gotten as bad as bloggers.

Vote my Committee

[randomErr]

The only way something like this would work would be to have a human look at this. Think Reddit just for Facebook news. If you push out an article like this you need a disclaimer saying this has not been fully reviewed, please review. You would get tons of people waiting to vote on that when they see that disclaimer.

A Wired article about Fb's Safety Check...

[antdude]

I just read this in my hardcopy and found it online for anyone to read on Wired web site [wired.com].