In an Attempt To Tackle Spread of Fake News, Facebook's WhatsApp Puts Limit on Message Forwarding (theguardian.com) 132
WhatsApp users will be blocked from forwarding messages to more than five individuals or groups under new rules the messaging service is rolling out worldwide to fight the spread of misinformation. The company's vice-president for policy and communications, Victoria Grand, announced the policy at an event in Jakarta on Monday. The five-recipient limit was initially put in place in India last July. A larger limit, of 20 recipients, was put in place globally. WhatsApp said at the time the limits would "help keep WhatsApp the way it was designed to be: a private messaging app." Carl Woog, the head of communications at WhatsApp, which recently reportedly surpassed parent company Facebook's app in usage recently, said, "We settled on five because we believe this is a reasonable number to reach close friends while helping prevent abuse."
But... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:But... (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it doesn't. Nor would it limit the ability to manually spread fake news either.
Just yesterday I shared on WhatsApp a Facebook post with pictures of some wicked-ass PC modding. I shared it with 8 people, by copy/pasting the URL to the Facebook entry. You will be able to do that in the future as well.
Let's forcus on the perps, not the victims (Score:2)
Not surprised to see the entire discussion on Slashdot is wrongheaded. The REAL victim is the REAL news and the FAKE news is more like the gun that murdered it. The people who propagate the FAKE news are the REAL perps here, but I sure couldn't find any trace of understanding in this discussion.
It's the reputation of the perps that matters. In other words, if no one paid any attention to people who propagate FAKE news, then the problem would be solved. Right now the best approach I can imagine to doing this
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> It's the reputation of the perps that matters. In other words, if no one
> paid any attention to people who propagate FAKE news, then the problem
> would be solved. Right now the best approach I can imagine to doing
> this would involve MEPR (Multidimensional Earned Public Reputation).
Have you heard of "brigading"? https://www.urbandictionary.co... [urbandictionary.com] https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOf... [reddit.com] SJWs use it a lot on YouTube to knock out videos they don't like. When YouTube gets enough complaints against smal
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No relation to anything I wrote. Par for today's Slashdot, eh?
Any actual reaction of any conceivable relevance? Anything to write worth reading? Perhaps an explanation of who you imagined might conceivably be interested in your mumble? Or just time to regard this as yet another attempted discussion that got aborted before conception?
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I shared it with 8 people
I'm sure those 8 people started a *huge* anti-government riot.
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Yes, PC modding can be very dangerous to governments.
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They are specifically talking about the forward functionality, you know, that little arrow next to a received post which allows you to click and select one or more recipients. Not the ability to copy an URL or a text to clipboard and paste it manually to other recipients.
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The most likely outcome of this is that the conpsiracy kooks are going to have more ammunition for their claims that mainstream news, government, etc. are all in bed together censoring the exposure of Deep State machinations.
WhatsApp doesn't want us to share this. WHAT ARE THEY HIDING???
I wish I were kidding.
Web of trust (Score:4, Interesting)
Does anyone have a messaging system with a web of trust system? That would solve the spam problem too, but without arbitrary limits. Of course, it requires technical competence, so perhaps that rules out Whatsapp from ever doing it...
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Would you trust most of your Facebook friends?
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Yes. ...
Or why else would they be my facebook friends.
Oh, you have "facebook friends" which you don't know in RL? Shame on you
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Or why else would they be my facebook friends.
Because Facebook is the method the union I am in keeps the members updated and motivated.
No, I dont get to opt out of the union. Instead I am forced to pay dues, therefore I am forced to keep an eye on them all.
Workers unite!!!!11!!1
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Oh, I never was in a union. Is it fun? More fun than boy scouts?
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As fun as a five day work week!
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That does not sound so funny :D
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My Facebook friends are people I know. Friends, family, coworkers. I have not selected them based on their IT knowledge and most of them are not on Slashdot.
Some of them still forward some fake news from time to time. Typical cases include:
-You must post this or your Facebook account will be closed
-Child has disappeared, please help find him*
-You have a chance to win a BMW, please share this post!
-Political spins
*might have been true at some point, but the child was usually found 8 years ago.
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Luckily only my 10 year old nephews send posts like "-You must post this or your Facebook account will be closed" ... actually only once on WhatsApp .... I told him I will block him, if he does it again, that woke him up.
Re:Web of trust (Score:4, Insightful)
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No, it would not solve the spam problem. For a web of trust to work you need to have authentication. That is doable, but now suddenly trusted accounts are high-value targets. But we make sure authentication works, not that a big problem.
But how do you propose that a new user gets trusted? Do they have an "untrusted" score to begin with? How will people see their legitimate e-mails? Or are everyone implicitly "trusted" until their score is lowered? But that just open up the same problems we have today. Peopl
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But how do you propose that a new user gets trusted? Do they have an "untrusted" score to begin with?
There would likely be two kinds of scores, a system-assigned score, and user-assigned scores. The system would assign you an untrusted score to start with, and only people who chose to see untrusted people would see them at all. But the user's scores would override or at least be weighted more strongly than the system's scores, so once you scored someone, you'd always or never see their posts, or something in between. Groups would be free to choose their own thresholds for membership. Dipping into groups wi
Won't work (Score:5, Funny)
Does anyone have a messaging system with a web of trust system? That would solve the spam problem too, but without arbitrary limits.
Your post advocates a
(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
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"(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate uses would be affected"
No, this is for just one service, and the only way legitimate users would be affected is positively, since they would be able to send and receive mass messages, but "only" in accordance with users' wishes (within reason anyhow)
"(X) Users will not put up with it"
I would. Probably others would. Enough percentage to make a useful site? That's the question.
"(X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves"
No, that is exactly what a web of trust is
Too much overhead and other problems (Score:3)
No, that is exactly what a web of trust is for.
Efforts at web of trust mostly do not work for non-technical users which accounts for the majority of them. Without some central authority controlling things, it requires too much overhead and technical proficiency and cost to reliably build and maintain for a well performing decentralized system, especially at large scale. With a central authority controlling things you have the situation we have now with conflicts of interest on the part of the controlling authority. To date nobody seems to have come u
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I am happy to now have a copy of the official Slashdot conversation template, thanks!
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The problem with a web of trust is that each user needs to build their own, and it is easily corrupted, and does relatively little to stop the spread of fake news.
It's been tried but is too much work for too little benefit.
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It's been tried but is too much work for too little benefit.
Who's actually tried it in public? Is anyone still trying it in public?
I used to work for a sleazy little web/games company that hosted websites mostly for music acts, including BB King, Rod Stewart, and N'Sync. Before they went under, the last big project they did was make a website for a major electronics manufacturer. They wound up flushing the site and keeping the trademark for a line of mp3 players which was discontinued in 2009, but the site and players were supposed to go hand in hand. The concept of
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I'm sure it was great but it sounds like it was never opened up to the public for real world testing. In practice, looking at messaging apps specifically, there are two problems.
1. Too much burden on the user. Most people barely use the blocking/muting tools available, they just ignore their relatives and "friends" posting fake news. So the web of trust has too little information to go on, and the user isn't motivated enough to spend time rating posts or individuals.
2. It's too easily gamed. Bad actors get
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Death of journalism resulted in fake news (Score:3, Insightful)
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Jeezus christ that would make the problem 10x worse! Every tom, dick, and harry would suddenly be a 'journalist' hoping to cash in, creating false and inflammatory stories just to try to get them to spread. You're basically suggesting they add gasoline to a fire that's already going.
Why do you immediately assume that participants going to only "create false and inflammatory stories"? Sure, some would do that. Others will provide insightful commentary and report on stories with journalistic integrity.
This is already playing out on Youtube, where individuals provide political commentary and monetize based on Patreon donations (well, until Patreon went full SJW). There channels that offer content (e.g. Rubin, Rogan) tend to outperform click-bait fake news.
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I doubt Fox News would become more trustworthy if Facebook started paying them. Why would they?
CNN is Fake News (Score:2, Insightful)
Bash Fox News just 3 days out from CNN, MSNBC, CNN, NBC, ABC, Buzz Feed, NYT, WaPo, and on and on all running with a story from BuzzFeed that sounded false, with unnamed sources and no ability to check if story is true. It was Fake News, but if it was true it "might" have lead to Trump being removed from office so that was more important than verifying the story.
Yea, Fox News is the big problem here.
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I doubt Fox News would become more trustworthy if Facebook started paying them. Why would they?
Fox News exists as-is because there are no conservative alternatives readily available. Effectively, it is take it or leave it situation with Fox News for conservative viewers. With more money there might be a business case for another conservative outlet, and that would result in competition forcing improved quality of journalism.
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Thats the rub. I personally gave up on FoxNews in Nov 2001. There are no good conservative view points. It is not because conservative news is 'bad'. It is because no one wants to hire good people to do it. They do not have the money to do it.
The 'liberal' side is no better. When you have places like MSNBC hawking silver 'freshly minted' coins', foam pillows, and herbal remedies. You know they have a problem. It is one of money. CNN stated in 2009 that they were going to fire all of their journalis
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Thats the rub. I personally gave up on FoxNews in Nov 2001. There are no good conservative view points. It is not because conservative news is 'bad'. It is because no one wants to hire good people to do it. They do not have the money to do it.
Try Reuters. They've been suffering from a small SJW streak, but it's very very isolated. They have a lot of real reporters, world wide.
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I don't see how the transfer of funds would motivate news outlets to care more for quality.
If Facebook pays to those it links to (link tax) then the motivation for making click-bait articles just increases. That's pretty much the situation we are having. Newspapers maximizing ad revenue to survive and quality isn't a priority.
If Facebook pays to a fund which hands out money only to "quality" journalism then you have you the problem of deciding what quality is. Basically, you need some organization which dec
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Because of: facts!
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This would only make things worse. Can you imagine giving click-bait companies more money for making those headlines? Or maybe letting face book or (your most hated left or right wing outlet) the ability to say what is news or what is not news?
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...the ability to say what is news or what is not news?
Deciding what is or is not news will still be up to readers. I am suggesting sharing revenue with providers of news once the reader decided to follow them.
FB is not all click-bait, memes, and fake news because there is no way to monetize anything else. You have to go viral to make money, and regular and reliable news never go viral. Monetization model FB offers is one of the key reasons for spread of Fake News through their platform as it strongly incentivizes such bad behavior without providing any incent
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I am not sure if I took your analogy the right way but here is something they once did with rats. They had a bounty where if you brought them rats they would pay you money for cleaning up the streets. The problem is once this happened people began to breed rats for the purpose of getting the bounty.
As for revitalizing the news, they have to get paid from somewhere and that is the problem. If you do not pay them then you get garbage or fake news as you see it today (trolls paying them behind the scene).
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The spread of Fake News is a direct result of the death of truth. In the post-truth world you just assume everyone is lying all the time and pick the alternative facts that appeal to you the most.
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The Truth didn't just die, it was murdered. Trump had many accomplices both on the left and right.....
Explain what Trump has to do with Dan Rather, the man responsible for a big part of my awakening.
"Fake but accurate" wasnt it?
This was like 15 years ago now.
Fake news isnt new. Its very very old. Whats new is people doing an end run around the fake press.
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"Make America Great Again" and "Build the wall" are mutations of "Black Lives Matter" and "Down with Patriarchy".
That's the most batshit thing I've heard all year. Admittedly it's only January.
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Both Trump and SJWs ignore all nuance to present false sense of moral clarity.
Both Trump and SJWs outright dismiss any facts that contradict their position.
Both Trump and SJWs change their positions without acknowledging this change. This change is also applied retroactively to past events.
Both Trump and SJWs demand unquestioning loyalty and turn hostile on dissenters.
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Can't say I disagree with any of those points to be honest.
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"Make America Great Again" and "Build the wall" are mutations of "Black Lives Matter" and "Down with Patriarchy".
That's the most batshit thing I've heard all year. Admittedly it's only January.
Also, you link GNU Kind Communications Guidelines in your signature. I want to let you know that you are not following them with that post.
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It seems to be incompatible with Slashdot. Might go back to the old one, the sjw slur seems to be back on the rise.
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I'll remind you of that the next time you whine about being called a Nazi.
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Spread of Fake News is a direct result of death of journalism. If Facebook was serious about tackling this problem they would find a way to revenue share with journalists.
I'm pretty sure that this would do SFA to stop the spread of fake news.
The death of journalism was caused by the industry placing the importance on getting page views and eyeballs on ads became more important to publications than printing reliable, factual information in the least biased and inflammatory language possible.
Now publications are owned by huge conglomerates like News Corp that not only embellish the truth, but print outright lies, deliberately in biased and inflammatory language in order
Only listen to your overlords (Score:2)
Corporate media getting scared, huh? They can no longer control the message. They can't control the horizontal. They can't control the vertical. Eventually, the narrative they want to feed you will be exposed.
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All the big players are shaping the content already. Google shapes search results. Facebook shapes shared stories. Even Patreon+Paypal are getting in on the game.
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There are some people working on an alternative to Patreon. This may fall through if the credit card companies block them, though.
I've switched to Diaspora to get away from FakeBook.
People died because of fake news... (Score:2)
This is mostly a direct response to incidents that happened in India. People would start rumors of someone being a pedophile, which would then propagate like wildfire via WA forwarding. As a result, some people were killed by mobs. These were malicious rumors that led to people being killed! I was actually visiting India while some of this was going on. I didn't see any mobs, but it was all over the news.
It's SCARY that something like that could happen anywhere. It's a little more extreme than what we
Fake vs real (Score:1)
How will this apply to fake news and not to real ones?
News will turn into Gossip (Score:5, Insightful)
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When you are lucky, its "He said. She said."
Real journalists require 3 sources before they run with a story. The MSM just requires someone to be saying it.
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Don't worry--I'm sure that only news items that don't directly attack straight white male Americans will be limited in how much they can be forwarded. Lies which do, you know like the Catholic school kids yesterday, those they'll gleefully spread as far, wide, and fast as possible.
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Rephrasing the news would take effort. Based on the fake news I see in my feed(s), it's the sheer lack of effort needed that spreads it so fast.
If people have to internalize what they've just read before passing it on, we'll not only get less of it, we MIGHT get people actually reading sh*t and not just fwding based on the headline they just skimmed.
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Controlling speech (Score:1)
This is nothing more than totalitarian oppression. When Facebook et al firmly create and support fake news as trumpeted from "authoritarian sources"
Here's one that had everybody ready to start impeachment proceedings on Trump until Mueller countermanded them. Now it's been dropped down the memory hole.
https://news.yahoo.com/congressional-democrats-pledge-bottom-article-alleges-trump-directed-193508576.html
How about The Rock claiming SJWs are snowflakes also from a "reputable" source of journalism? Nah -
Should have let it go to 6 shares (Score:2)
Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon
whats' app what's? (Score:2)
Facts are true, news is fake (Score:1)
This goddam policy is the most idiotic thing ever. (Score:2)
The "war on fake news" from what'sapp is very stupid.
Firstly they don't actually give a shit in the slightest, they just need to pretend they do.
Secondly it impacts normal people not forwarding fucking "news"
Example: I tell a friend a story of some kind, who knows? Maybe a big 3 paragraph job about what happened with my car crash or my crazy incident at the supermarket.
If I wrote such a thing in a particular way, I could forward to others without it being obvious. Saving me time. Then they added a "forward
Just keep forward history! (Score:2)
Keep the entire forwarding history and do not let anyone be hidden. This will also expose all the forwarding bots out there in short order.
Censorship (Score:2)
A GUI layer over a website that has shows a web site is trusted by a think tank, NGO, NATO/EU govs and past US gov/mil workers?
Not been able to talk to more than 5 people about the news?
Someone really wants the USA only reading a few news and newspaper brands.
Thats your right to publish, be the press and be secure in your own papers getting reduced.