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Facebook Will Warn Users Who 'Liked' Coronavirus Hoaxes (apnews.com) 132

The Associated Press reports that soon Facebook will start warning users who "shared or interacted with dangerous coronavirus misinformation": The new notice will be sent to users who have clicked on, reacted to, or commented on posts featuring harmful or false claims about COVID-19 after they have been removed by moderators. The alert, which will start appearing on Facebook in the coming weeks, will direct users to a site where the World Health Organization lists and debunks virus myths and rumors...

Facebook disclosed Thursday that it put more than 40 million warning labels in March over videos, posts or articles about the coronavirus that fact-checking organizations have determined are false or misleading... Facebook says those warning labels have stopped 95% of users from clicking on the false information. "It's a big indicator that people are trusting the fact checkers," said Baybars Orsek, the director of the International Fact-Checking Network. "The label has an impact on people's information consumption."

Google and Twitter have also joined Facebook in altering algorithms to stop the spread of online misinformation, according to the article, but "Challenges remain. Tech platforms have sent home human moderators who police the platforms, forcing them to rely on automated systems to take down harmful content.

"They are also up against people's mistrust of authoritative sources for information, such as the WHO."
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Facebook Will Warn Users Who 'Liked' Coronavirus Hoaxes

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  • by davebarnes ( 158106 ) on Sunday April 19, 2020 @12:39PM (#59965546)

    So, I suppose that Facebook will censor the true account of how Putin's people created the virus in a Grupo Modelo laboratory.
    Why do you think it is called the CoronaVirus?

  • by JoeyRox ( 2711699 ) on Sunday April 19, 2020 @12:54PM (#59965576)
    Because if you're stupid enough to have a Facebook account then you clearly don't possess good judgement on a variety of matters, science and medical likely included.
    • The union I am in conducts business in a facebook group, "because thats what people wanted"

      Are you telling me that I shouldnt be active in my union?
      Are you telling me that I should leave the union?

      Lay it down sir. What are you really telling people.
      • by Pascoea ( 968200 )

        What are you really telling people.

        That they are better than you because you do $thing, and they don't.

      • Meanwhile my union threatened a walkout if the boss made us sign up for fuckerberg's data miner to "send us information".

        We all have emails, personal and company.

      • by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

        Ideally the union you are in should not conduct it's business in a walled garden that some of it's members may be ethically opposed to and as such they may not be members of the site. The union should find a neutral site to use instead.

        /my union uses whatsapp, fuck that, no thanks, I don't get paid to sit around talking non-productive crap in whatsapp.

      • If you still participate in a union even now that it's voluntary, you are an even bigger idiot.
        • If you think all unions are bad you too are an idiot!
          • by Q-Hack! ( 37846 )

            The simple fact that unions contribute to political parties (almost always the DNC) and their leadership always seems to have golden parachutes. Yeah, I have to say that pretty much every union is bad. In the 2018 election cycle, unions spent $2 billion. Mostly to push for candidates willing to grant union bosses enormous privileges in direct opposition to worker freedom. Not everybody in the union agrees with or wants their dues going toward the DNC. By comparison, the NRA (an organization that people

            • Speaking from a different country: Why the fuck can anyone give that much money to a political campaign? Any good reason why campaign finance should not be capped?
              Quoting from BBC, regarding the UK:

              Political parties' spend is also capped at £30,000 for each constituency that it contests in a general election. So if a party stood a candidate in each of the 650 UK constituencies, its maximum spend would total £19.5m.

              That kind of makes sense to me. Also would invalidate most of the arguments ag

    • The world is locked down. Communication via facebook is perfectly fine, and very beneficial for a great many people. Just because the platform happens to contain misinformation - like every single other online communication platform in the world - does not mean that all the people that use it are idiots.

      • by Corbets ( 169101 )

        Except Slashdot, of course. No misinformation here.

        Or information, these days. But that’s another story.

    • It's also self-defeating, people who go to Fecebook to read the conspiracy theories have already been told that the WHO is part of the conspiracy, so they'll never read anything from them. At most, it'll convince them that Fecebook has been taken over by the conspiracy as well. Thank God they have Fox to tell them the truth!
  • Which truth? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Way Smarter Than You ( 6157664 ) on Sunday April 19, 2020 @01:02PM (#59965598)
    We already know the WHO was giving out false information. A lot of other "officially true" has been walked back, too. Seems like almost every day something we heard yesterday is no longer true.
    Either way, a scumbag like Zuckerberg deciding what is true or not is just scary and wrong. Who died and left that asshole king of all truth?
    • Who died and left that asshole king of all truth?

      They're not dead, but the assholes on his platform made him king of all truth. They trust him. Dumb fucks.

    • Re:Which truth? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Sunday April 19, 2020 @01:12PM (#59965626)

      A lot of other "officially true" has been walked back, too. Seems like almost every day something we heard yesterday is no longer true.

      I think it's called "learning" -- which is why you don't see that type of behavior from our Illustrious Leader, who still needs to walk back 18,000+ statements, just from the past 3 years, we know aren't true.

      • I think it's called "learning"

        Learning begins when you know that you do not know.

        This is not that. This is jumping from Truth to Truth.

        • by Anonymous Coward
          We've always been at war with Eastasia.
      • by guruevi ( 827432 )

        Dude, criticism of Xi Jinping is dangerous in your country.

      • Re:Which truth? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Sunday April 19, 2020 @02:43PM (#59965856)

        I think it's called "learning"

        Some of it was intentional lying.

        Like saying that masks don't help when they knew they do.

        The purpose of the lie was to dissuade people from buying masks so more would be available for medical workers.

        But it was still a lie and eroded their institutional credibility.

        It also didn't work, because it was obviously a lie since medical workers wouldn't be wearing masks if they didn't work. So people did panic-buying of masks anyway.

        It would have been better to just tell the truth and ask people to not buy masks and to just use bandanas instead.

        • Like saying that masks don't help when they knew they do.

          (a) Masks used improperly don't help -- you or others -- and that was the real issue, which should have been stated more clearly, but then people would just say, "It's a mask, how hard could it be to use?" Sure, it's very easy to use one incorrectly, but less so to use it properly.

          The purpose of the lie was to dissuade people from buying masks so more would be available for medical workers.

          (b) That was probably also a reason, and should have been stated more clearly, but then people would say, "Well, if it protects medical workers, it should protect me." I refer you to (a) above...

          Ya, it would be nice to be ab

          • (a) Masks used improperly don't help

            Thats not true either.

            Any face covering is better than none. Even if its only 1% more effective than not wearing it, that 1% makes you a liar right now.

            (b) That was probably also a reason

            They've admitted that this was the reason.

            Would you be OK with facebook censoring you for shoveling these falsehoods?

            • Any face covering is better than none. Even if its only 1% more effective than not wearing it, that 1% makes you a liar right now.

              Even if I am mistaken. the World would be a better place if people like you would default to seeing things like this as a mistake rather than a lie -- or simply knowing the difference between a mistake and lie. More to the point, the problem is that improperly worn masks can give people the believe/illusion that they are safe to ignore other mitigation strategies, like social distancing. In those cases, no - any covering is not better than none as you're still acting recklessly or perhaps feel comfortable

        • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          Like saying that masks don't help when they knew they do.

          The purpose of the lie was to dissuade people from buying masks so more would be available for medical workers.

          Welcome to the wonderful world of the misinformed! Because guess what - the public is completely misinformed.

          Surgical style masks are NOT to protect you from the virus. They're to protect the rest of the world from you, should be either sick, a carrier, or worse, an asymptomatic carrier. This is the style of mask the WHO is recommending peopl

        • Still missing context I see Bill.

    • by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

      So you don't want Facebook to stop Facebook from becoming a total information cesspit, would you like the government to do it instead? Or do you think it is better that endless absurd and harmful conspiracy theories and lies swamp the site?

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

          Where did the COVID-19 outbreak start?

          Answer: it started in China. So given that COVID-19 outbreak started in China, where do you think that WHO should get information about COVID-19?

          France? ~

          • Re:Which truth? (Score:5, Insightful)

            by rossz ( 67331 ) <ogreNO@SPAMgeekbiker.net> on Sunday April 19, 2020 @02:26PM (#59965808) Journal

            You don't simply pass along what China says without at least a minimal effort in vetting. WHO took the CCP statements that were clearly bullshit and passed it along through their official channel. This gave the world the impression that the information was correct.

            WHO is China's bitch and Trump is right to question continued funding.

            • Perhaps he's right to question continuing to fund them but cutting that funding in the middle of a pandemic seems like a very emotional reaction on his part. Then again if it fucked up the government's response as badly as he did I would be working overtime to find scapegoats right about now...
            • by Corbets ( 169101 )

              You don't simply pass along what China says without at least a minimal effort in vetting.

              Or what the US says, particularly with Captain Orange at the helm. The superpowers of the world have moved past a model of honest effort at truthfulness to hiding the occasional embellishment and now to simply not caring if they lie, because the populace doesn’t hold the government to account for any of it.

            • So you didn't read their statements then, which clearly reported that "Chinese authorities said...". They didn't lie, they did their job of passing on reports.

              You are the one lying, in willfully misrepresenting their position.

            • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              Trump believed what China was saying too, he is only now claiming that it was just the WHO who mislead him.

              https://twitter.com/realDonald... [twitter.com]

              China for its part was in an impossible situation and did about as well as most countries did. If they sounded the alarm too early it might have been a false one and they would have been accused of crying wolf. They also knew there were limits to their own data collection on the ground, just like in every country. Like us they were reluctant to shut down the country for

        • The WHO are a bunch of cunts who report exactly what China tells them to report.

          That is false.

      • I would prefer a big bold banner at the top of every page declaring fb to be a cesspit of idiocy and users are dumb for believing anything they read on fb.

        By stamping falsely determined things true or not they are creating a level of truth that does not exist. The medicine is far more dangerous than the illness. Now you have people believing nonsense because some bullshit "fb fact checkers" made up some shit which may or may not be true or partially true. Fb's stamp of approval does not increase truth le
        • by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

          You say that like Facebook doesn't own the Facebook site and so they should some-how be hands off.

          Do you really think having fact checkers is worse than just letting every stupid opinion piece, every lie and every conspiracy theory masquerade as news?

          Either they try to stop the flow of total bullcrap or they don't, personally I think it's better that they try to deal with it.

          • We agree they should deal with it. You missed my method of how.

            Zuckerberg and his fb staff are not qualified.
            Anyone they hire would just be people who match Zuckerberg bias and therefore not qualified.
            The government has absolutely no business getting into the censorship business and the US Constitution clearly forbids it.

            My answer was right at the top my post, above: a giant bold faced statement that fb is purely for entertainment and socializing, not a legitimate news source and anyone who believes any ne
        • Who exactly then is an authority on truth? Only sources that you trust? If you're just a dumb nihilist then you can fuck off.
    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      The CDC had over 12 people in WHO during January who were reporting the danger of SARS-CoV-2. The White House knew this and their smoke screen of "false information" is repeated by yokels like you who believe them.

      • Is cv19 transmissible between humans?
        Should we close borders, stop air travel, etc?
        Is cv19 a big deal for which we should take serious economically damage actions?
        Should be avoid coming near other people?

        Is that enough?
        • To be clear, the WHO said everything is all hunky dory for a long time and put out public statements against closures and social distancing etc. Trump didn't force them to say those things.
    • by jgoemat ( 565882 )
      "We already know the WHO was giving out false information. A lot of other "officially true" has been walked back, too." Examples? The outbreak is an evolving situation and what is true one week might not be true the next.
    • What do you mean? It's not transmitted from person to person. Amazon has been doing a booming business shipping bats from Wuhan to NYC.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The WHO isn't in the business of verifying information, that's not part of its charter. It relies on countries giving it data, and only acknowledges the limits of such data. Aside from anything else if it issued a statement saying or implying that China was deliberately falsifying data it would have been cut off from its only source of information.

      It's up to governments to look at the WHO data and decide if it is reliable. Your government decided it was good data and made decisions based on it. Blame your o

  • by thereitis ( 2355426 ) on Sunday April 19, 2020 @01:18PM (#59965650) Journal

    Imagine if the governments and media weren't allowed to lie. More people would be willing to take them at their word.
    How did that quote go: "fool me once, shame on you. fool me twice, shame on me"
    The problem with being a liar is at some point, people stop believing anything you say.

    • Lying can take many forms. You can lie by omission. You can lie by implication. You can mislead without lying by using slanted language. Courts could spend years dealing with the matter.

      • by hey! ( 33014 ) on Sunday April 19, 2020 @02:25PM (#59965806) Homepage Journal

        In politics we used to take a similar approach to lying as is trials. Witnesses and lawyers aren't allowed to deliberately make false representations of fact, but they *are* allowed to lie: by omission, distraction or equivocation.

        It's not a problem in trials because there's an opposing counsel who catches the lie and challenge it. But there is a key difference between trials and politics: we exclude people from the jury who have any connection to the lawyers arguing the case.

        Politics is about building a coalition that shares a sense of identity. Propaganda has become so good at shaping peoples identities that questions of fact are routinely judged on one thing: is the speaker on of us? That changes things. Nobody actually cares if someone on their side is caught in a lie.

        Partisanship makes making up your mind extremely easy, but not very useful when confronted with something that doesn't care what you think.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Half the jury just doesn't care about lies. They know some politicians lie all the time right to their faces, they just don't care. They think all politicians lie or that the liar might do what they want anyway, or just want to annoy people they blame for something.

    • by Rockoon ( 1252108 ) on Sunday April 19, 2020 @05:12PM (#59966336)
      Lets do an imaginary timeline.

      January you post that wuflu transfers from human to human. Facebook censors you and refers people to the WHO that says different.
      February you post that covid19 (because P.C.) is airborne. Facebook censors you and refers people to the WHO that says different.
      March you post that everyone should wear a mask. Facebook censors you and refers people to the WHO that says different.
      April you post that there is growing evidence that covid19 originated in a lab. Facebook censors you are refers people....

      (the WHO still says not to wear a mask unless you are sick)

      See the problem?
      • I think the problem is that you are engaging in useless hypotheticals that fail to prove your point.
      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        The problem is you are some random guy on the internet who is occasionally right about stuff, but as often as not wrong (e.g. the "evidence" that it originated in a lab, or that the WHO still doesn't recommend masks in public [scmp.com]).

        Taking your word for it is just as bad as taking the word of experts who sometimes make mistakes.

        There is no right answer here. Censorship is bad, false information is bad, everyone made mistakes.

    • Fool me once, shame on ... shame on you. Fool me... You can't get fooled again!

      Source [time.com].

  • but don't take down the bullsit. Thanks a lot for nothing.

    • WHO was also guilty of putting out bullshit at the start, as much as Trump later.

      • If you only we could just cut Trump's funding and make him go away... I guess we call that an election...
        • Trump will win the next election, because he is being voted for my Americans.
        • Unfortunately the Democrats are running a senile meat puppet against Trump; Biden will get confounded and destroyed in debate. It's the Hilary mistake all over again.

          • Unfortunately the Democrats are running a senile meat puppet against Trump; Biden will get confounded and destroyed in debate. It's the Hilary mistake all over again.

            And America will continue to get the government it deserves.

  • if it's considered less-than-truthful to the point they'll take it upon themselves to scold others, then just remove the option to 'Like' it altogether, or phukkin remove the entire post

    or maybe it's retroactive scolding, after they've enough time to assess the pros/cons of pretending to care
  • Tech platforms have sent home human moderators who police the platforms, forcing them to rely on automated systems to take down harmful content.

    Ok, so online platforms can't have their moderators work from home, because... no reason at all?

    • by SuricouRaven ( 1897204 ) on Sunday April 19, 2020 @01:39PM (#59965706)

      Possibly legal issues not worked out. Moderators can run across some pretty nasty stuff - all kinds of weird pornography included, some of which is illegal to possess. Confidential personal information too. Business documents their employer does not want leaked. If they are working in the office all that dangerous material can be contained in locked-down computers and employees searched for recording devices and storage media going in and out of the secure office. Have them working from home, even on company-issued 'secure' laptops, and it becomes much more difficult to deal with. Do you want to tell the employees that they have to take a company laptop home to potentially look at child sex abuse videos on? And what is to stop them from pointing a camera at the screen and telling all their friends about the weird stuff they come across, or sending the secret moderation rules to the press?

      • +5 informative/insightful.

      • Possibly legal issues not worked out. Moderators can run across some pretty nasty stuff - all kinds of weird pornography included, some of which is illegal to possess. Confidential personal information too. Business documents their employer does not want leaked. If they are working in the office all that dangerous material can be contained in locked-down computers and employees searched for recording devices and storage media going in and out of the secure office. Have them working from home, even on company-issued 'secure' laptops, and it becomes much more difficult to deal with. Do you want to tell the employees that they have to take a company laptop home to potentially look at child sex abuse videos on? And what is to stop them from pointing a camera at the screen and telling all their friends about the weird stuff they come across, or sending the secret moderation rules to the press?

        Thank you for posting this. I believe a lot of people are under the impression that work-from-home in the tech/entertainment fields is strictly a technical issue. It's not, and I appreciate that you're explaining this in such a concise and clear way.

        I'd like to add another complication to the mix: Clients. They're the ones paying us where I work (as opposed to customers), they're the ones that have to feel comfortable that the process is both secure AND productive enough for the money they're paying.

  • by pele ( 151312 )

    It wasn't that long ago when prople would get fed up with a "platform" and move on. Remember the likes of gopher, usenet, bbs, irc, muds and talkers, icq, lycos, altavista, yahoo, napster..they all lasted a relatively short time and then people moved on.
    Why aren't people moving on from facebook and google?
    We don't need alternatives we just need something new, fresh. Search has been stale for 20 years now. Websites don't exist if they don't have a facebook page to go with it. Sad.

    • Perhaps growth? During that period, the internet was in constant, explosive growth - new users flooding in at a great rate, with no commitment to any existing platform or technology. That made it easier for new ones to appear and grab from this stream of free users. Now it's reached saturation in much of the world. Everyone has already picked their platform, and usually that's the one all their friends are on.

    • by hjf ( 703092 )

      People are moving away from facebook left and right.
      Kids no longer have facebook acounts, they have zero interest in them. Facebook games like that farm thing, or plants vs. zombies appealed to kids that are now young adults. Kids today have heard of FB but they aren't interested in it.

      Last year Instagram started to die too. Kids DO NOT want to be where their parents are. Instagram was quirky enough to confuse "adults", but after they were bought by Facebook (because FB saw their main platform is dying), ad

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday April 19, 2020 @01:52PM (#59965734)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Biased fact checker (Score:2, Informative)

    by rossz ( 67331 )

    Facebook used a clearly biased fact checker. Danielle Anderson worked at the Wuhan lab that is rumored to have released the virus due to improper safety protocols. Whether the virus originated from the lab or not is besides the point. You don't have someone with such blatant ties be the arbitrator of the truth, but Facebook is using her statements to label comments as hoaxes.

    • Facebook used a clearly biased fact checker. Danielle Anderson worked at the Wuhan lab that is rumored to have released the virus due to improper safety protocols. Whether the virus originated from the lab or not is besides the point. You don't have someone with such blatant ties be the arbitrator of the truth, but Facebook is using her statements to label comments as hoaxes.

      And you had at least one example of where she was wrong don't you...

      • by rossz ( 67331 )

        It doesn't matter whether she is right or wrong. She is biased so can't be the fact checker.

        • It doesn't matter whether she is right or wrong. She is biased so can't be the fact checker.

          The entire point of the job is whether they are right or wrong...
          If you can't even find a single example of them being wrong or showing any bias at all. Then that just makes you biased and wrong.

  • by Xenna ( 37238 )

    This has been happening on Reddit for (at least) weeks now.

  • I'm just disappointed, like a Japanese father, that it isn't eradicating ALL the human pest! :)

    Like bed bugs, it only takes two, to overlook, and your planet is *fucked*.

  • If FB wasn't allowed to buy out any potential competitors it would've long ago been replaced by Instagram, Whatsapp, or relegated to the AOL Messenger annals of flash in the pan tech history. Instead we have a company protected and mainstreamed to dictate the groupthink. We all know this but wonder why it hasn't vanished after losing all credibility a decade ago.
  • I would be ok with this, if there was a really good way to tell what is a hoax and what is simply something that is new or they disagree with. For example, CNN has been giving false information trying to create drama:
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ne... [dailymail.co.uk]

    somehow, I expect they won't get flagged. If it is only applied to small fry and not seeking the truth, face book should leave it the fuck alone.
  • Well, this is just Sage 1:

    Witch family CorpDragon Brain-F-ing for "Bad Thoughts"
    https://apnews.com/348d772c8a5... [apnews.com]

    Stage 2:

    Some Crack-Head incontinent evil-Possesed Granny
    come to house - Screeches and Pisses-self w foaming
    screams of;
    "be Afraid!! no Time to Think Aaaaa!"

    Stage 3:...

    Enjoy.

    https://twitter.com/StevWork/s... [twitter.com]

  • "“Through this crisis, one of my top priorities is making sure that you see accurate and authoritative information across all of our apps,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page Thursday." One might ask who gave Zuckerberg the right to force his opinion over those of millions of others, most of whom are free under the Constitution to evaluate the evidence and come to their own opinion? That the CEO's of Facebook, Google, YT and Twitter believe they have the right to censor th
    • Wow, you sound like an alarmist. What the fuck does the Constitution have to do with what you see and do on Facebook? FFS, if you are going to work yourself into a froth at least try to be coherent with your whining.
  • I was most recently frustrated by this garbage when I tried to share a very interesting documentary put together by a reporter for the Epoch Times about the origins of Coronavirus.

    A link to the 60 minute long video was kept on Facebook for several days and then suddenly erased completely.

    When I started Googling to see what happened to it, I found sites explaining how FB decided to remove all links to it because they deemed it essentially "fake news". Well, I knew going into watching it that Epoch Times is

  • ... who watches the watchers? Who decides what is "misinformation"? How long before "political positions they don't like" = "hoaxes"?
  • People still use that?

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