Facebook's WhatsApp Explores Using Google To Fight Misinformation (venturebeat.com) 56
An anonymous reader shares a report: WhatsApp is working on a major new feature to tackle the spread of misinformation on its service. The Facebook-owned chat app is internally testing a new option that would allow a user to quickly verify the legitimacy of images they have received on WhatsApp by checking if those images had ever appeared on the web before. [...] The unnamed feature relies on Google's reverse image search function to let WhatsApp users upload an image and find where it has appeared on the web. This is a clever solution by WhatsApp, which protects all messages and media content on its platform with end-to-end encryption. While hugely beneficial to end users, using encryption also significantly curtails WhatsApp's ability to scan the content of messages and media on its platform. In emerging markets, users are exhibiting a growing appetite for sharing information through images. In places like India, WhatsApp's largest market and where the service is grappling with the spread of false information, the feature could potentially help many users quickly verify facts and get more context about the image they have received.
Good precedent. (Score:3, Insightful)
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The USA, the leader of the World?
Thanks for the laugh.
Maybe you should focus on basic education in your country before trying to teach others what to do.
Only in the USA are there people who believe that the Earth is flat, that vaccines are harmful or that climate change is not real. And the reason they do is because them because dumb is in the interest of your corporations.
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But then again, a country that calls itself 'civilized' so much that it looks like it is trying to proof something but can't because it's run by a brain-dead carrot is asking for a good bashing.
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I live in the Netherlands and here it's about the same.
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Leader of the World? Who gave you that idea?
Hillary has a 90% chance to become president (Score:1)
With gems like this why wouldn't we want large multinational corporations telling us what to think:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-poll/clinton-has-90-percent-chance-of-winning-reuters-ipsos-states-of-the-nation-idUSKBN1322J1
Many democrats are actually socialists. Hell - they even have an organization with the name:
https://www.dsausa.org/about-us/what-is-democratic-socialism/
There are many many articles from "credible" news organizations questioning the methodology of many climate change cl
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"I like being ignorant. I resent anyone trying to make useful information easier for me to find."
"Calorie counts on menus, the green light at a crossing, the safety information on medicine. All this is just nanny corporations trying to brainwash me, and I don't like it."
Worthy of Infowars.
Re: Good precedent. (Score:1)
There's a demonstrable difference between calorie counts on menus and a chat app intercepting and censoring communications.
You know this of course, but as an arrogant, smug, condescending emotional midget, you try to move the dial towards authoritarian leftism at every juncture.
You are an enemy of humanity.
Who informs the informers (Score:2, Funny)
So, if they're sent a picture of Donald Trump, they will gettooltip links like "Russian Spy" and "Was 2016 election legitimate?"
Personally, I liked it better when you were expected to use your own brain on the internet.
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No, it will say something like "This photo originates from AFP" with a link to their original post. It's then up to you to decide if you trust AFP or Infowars or whatever.
It's a very clever idea because it's not commenting on the accuracy or truthfulness of the image at all, merely telling you where it originates from.
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And fucking morons like you would disbelieve a truth because of the messenger.
Wolf! Wolf! [wikipedia.org]
The Great Deregulation of Censorship (Score:2)
Free speech used to have some protection in public space. Now there's an open market where social platforms are willing to play along with any pressure group with some clout to make their target disappear. And of course also with whatever feelgood project happens to be hip.
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And don't forget: (Score:1)
The one "internet giant" (==overvalued webshit co.) using another "internet giant" (==web advert co.) to be their arbiter of their truth.
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An even though all the proud defenders of corporate freedom are utterly incapable to see it, the largest pressure group is the government. Why the hell is all the publishing of US opponents or even remotely sympathetic to it, so actively suppressed?
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How is giving you extra information any kind of censorship?
Are you saying that knowing an image came from 4chan is censorship because it might cause people to doubt its authenticity?
Ignorance is strength, apparently.
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You're not even asking the right question. Google in this specific case is just providing a tool here for helping you lookup things. They're not even giving information.
But to answer the stated question. Censorship is so last century. It was the policy for when the library was small and the only way to hide a book was to keep it out of the library. Nowadays the library is large. There still is censorship but there are new methods to complement it. N
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Problem with this argument is that you can't give equal ranking to every crackpot. There is only one top spot, there is only one first page of results. When people search for NASA videos they probably don't want stuff about the moon landings being fake and the earth flat either, so to provide a good service that stuff has to be "de-ranked" for searches about NASA.
On the other hand you have guys like Tarrant getting sucked into these conspiracy theories. The argument is that we should just debunk them and th
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We can't do without rankings anymore but not all types of rankings are the same. A community ranking like a product appraisal or a karma score can suffer from all the groupthink there is but it is relatively flat and there can be multiple competing rankings. It often works well. But with rankings now being outsourced to 'experts' everyone with clout knows they have to get their people in there. So you get the Atlantic Council or the (meanwhle demised) Weekly Standard to control the rankings now.
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Community rankings are too easy to game. Slashdot gets it all the time, Reddit is group-think central, everything else is gamed relentlessly. Any attempt to fix the spamming is decried as censorship and Big Brother telling us what to think.
In any case, it doesn't fix the problem. How are you going to stop people getting radicalized by people like Southern and Sargon? Just recommending a debunking video as the next in line doesn't seem to work.
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Who says we should fix the problem? I want there to be a way for people to improve their understanding if they want to, and I want to avoid things getting out of hand.
And that means there is a need for trust. No debunking video will help when there is no degree of trust. If you have whole groups of people who distrust the system there are no rational arguments to change that , but there is an approach, and that is starting to work to earn their trust again. Because there are real reasons for the distrust. I
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Who says we should fix the problem?
People who don't want to be murdered by extremists.
So you get a groupthink where they all trust each other.
Not really, they are constantly attacking each other in fact.
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Also I don't have a clue what Southern and Sargon are.
Make Facebook Legally accountable! (Score:2)
Facebook's GOAL is to replace the web for most everything. It's an actual stated goal!
Why are not more people seeing Facebook as the new AOL Online? We even have advertising saying "find us with AOL keyword ------" that is, find us on Facebook; sometimes leaving out the URL just like back then. The major difference being AOL didn't have personal blog pages; which they surely would have if they hadn't decided to be an ISP instead of trying to recreate the www.
You can't control the internet and the web is
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Free speech used to have some protection in public space.
Your free speech is NOT infringed if listeners can more easily consult a third party to check if what you're saying is accurate.
Honestly the so-called defenders of free speech here do such a bad job that you're doing it more harm than good.
You have a right to speak. You certainly do not have the right to infringe others free speech so they can't call bullshit on you.
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Actually I think you are right in this specific case. The feature is an image lookup feature. I don't have any real objections to it as it is stated It is not a top down implementation if it does nothing more than helping the user to look things up.
Your 'honestly' part on the other hand...
It is a problem how to respond to the positive initiatives of Google. There is an actual conflict there. My statement was focused on the heart of the matter and it did not criticize this specific initiative. The whole fake
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So much for Whatsapp messages being encrypted (Score:3)
Encryption and privacy is not exactly ensured by the two largest hoarders of PI sharing message content, is it?
A service belongs to the user (Score:2)
Not take time to question the politics of the message.