Facebook Hopes Tiny Labels On Posts Will Stop Users Confusing Satire With Reality (theverge.com) 113
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Facebook is adding additional labels to posts from Pages that appear in users' News Feeds in a bid to reduce confusion about their origin. These labels will include "public official," "fan page," and "satire page." The company says it's already started testing the deployment of these labels in the US, and will gradually add them to more posts. Facebook hasn't offered any explanation as to why it's adding these labels, but identifying satire seems particularly important. Take a look at the social shares for any news articles written by well-known satirical sites like The Onion or The Babylon Bee and you'll find plenty of people taking these stories at face value. In such a context these posts are essentially a type of misinformation, even if their creators did not intend this. Even high profile figures like former president Donald Trump have mistaken these stories for real reports.
Yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, some stories need to be clearly marked satire.
(For some reason I've never seen The Onion stories forwarded as if they were real-- Onion seems better at making their stories funny enough that you can tell it's satire.
Re:Yeah (Score:5, Interesting)
https://www.newsweek.com/trump... [newsweek.com]
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That guy is just dumb. But explains how he could be voted into office nicely: Many people can clearly identify with that dumbness.
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IKR?
You'd have to be a complete fucking idiot to fall for obvious satire like that.
Like when the NYT believed The Onion's satirical Tiger Beat cover of Barack Obama was real?
No doubt they were distracted by the tingle up their leg at the thought.
https://www.baltimoresun.com/e... [baltimoresun.com]
or when Snopes fact-checked such a story?
https://www.snopes.com/fact-ch... [snopes.com]
Hilariously, they refuse to admit their gullibility today - note it's identified "labeled" satire as if there's some question whether an article in the Babylon
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I don't think you are accurately portraying the NYT example. They weren't fooled by an Onion article. They were doing an article on the past 40 years of Tiger Beat magazine. In that article, they showed a sample of pictures of covers from magazine over the years. In that series of pictures, they included a picture of the parody cover from The Onion. They didn't reference anything from the Onion piece in the text of the story. And it was a ridiculously short "article" on top of that...4 paragraphs. It wasn't
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I wonder how long before semantic satiation will render those labels useless.
Interesting effect. Did not know about this one. Thanks for bringing it up.
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Re:Yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, so what? (Score:2)
This is Polish president on the phone with the king of Jordan [wprost.pl].
Yeah and what's your point?
Why point out the empty network/built-in-hub RJ45 port on back of the VoIP phone?
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I think Ron White said it best:
"You can't fix STUPID"
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No, but on the plus side, it is a resource that renews itself infinitely as long as there are humans around. (As we have a finite planet and no real way to get off it, the requirement for humans tends to limit its availability eventually.)
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If we could just harness stupidity in the form of energy...
Re:Yeah (Score:4, Insightful)
I make that mistake a couple of times a year.
Otherwise, the Bee is plainly, to me, satire, 99% of the time. And notthebee isn't.
The root problem is that what we used to think of as 'news', once titled 'journalism', has become mere propaganda. Almost all of it, and for many outlets it is 100% propaganda, only correct or accurate as often as a stopped clock is so.
We've let this happen, somewhat, subscribing to popular thought without discernment And we've let the politicians dictate too much.
Re: Yeah (Score:4, Insightful)
You say "we've let this happen" as if the Hearst empire of the 1900s or the Hippie Panic of the 1960s was somehow a golden age of Truth and Integrity in Journalism. It wasn't. People remember the Pentagon Papers and the Silent Springs and forget all the horseshit that padded the papers out to 100 pages. Just like zoomers will remember the Snowden Leaks and forget all the fluff when making up their own delusional memories of how bad journalism has "become" in 2050.
Whatever failures exist have always existed, and you can't recapture what never was. Australia can't recapture Brazil. They can only CAPTURE it.
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And what ever happened to Bay Boy [wikipedia.org]. Is he hiding in a CIA safehouse? Is the media trying to cancel him? It's all very suspicious.
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thats the level of facebook users ?
YMMV (Score:5, Informative)
> For some reason I've never seen The Onion stories forwarded as if they were real
Really? Because there's a huge subreddit dedicated to precisely that which regularly hits the front page:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AteTheOnion/ [reddit.com]
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You clearly need to associate with brighter people.
I don't actually associate with Donald Trump.
Turns out that for the last four years I got bombarded with his blatherings whether I wanted to associate with him or not.
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"For some reason I've never seen The Onion stories forwarded as if they were real-"
The Chinese communist party fell for them multiple times also some republican senators in the day.
Seriously? (Score:3)
People are ignoring the most obvious red flags, inconsistencies, violations of basic scientific principles, etc. and a "tiny label" is supposed to fix that? I mean, Facebook obviously knows this will not work, but how utterly stupid are the people they are trying to convince they are doing something with that?
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I am in my mid 40's. I never had taken a school class or my parents taught me how to catch "red flags, inconsistencies, violations of basic scientific principles, etc. " I had learned most of it myself, just by growing up with the internet and knowing how the software works. I grew up in an era where if it was on the 6:00 TV News, it had to be true, or if it was in one of the bigger papers than the content had to be true. Producing such content back then costed a lot of money, risking your brands reputa
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From observations by me and others (mostly, but not only from teaching), in any larger groups of human beings, you have about 10...15% independent thinkers. These are the people that can and will fact-check, notice red flags and generally have a reasonable understanding as to how things work and when somebody may attempt to con them. The fascinating thing is that high intelligence or significant education is not a real factor in this. These people just care to understand and have a reasonable estimation on
Hard to tell reality from satire these days (Score:4, Insightful)
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hmm (Score:4, Insightful)
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Indeed. "Interesting times" and deeply funny as long as you like dark humor and have a high pain threshold.
Like Sheldon's sarcasm sign (Score:2)
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Hehe,.. You're proving something there.
Aww, they think they can fix that. (Score:2)
Isn't this autism? (Score:1)
Having to explain what the difference is because people do not understand seems like autism to me.
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Step 1: Post INVADE THE CAPITOL, I'll be with you.
Step 2: Mark as "Satire"
Step 3 (after the event) "No reasonable person would have taken that seriously"
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Step Infinity: Divide and conquer the population until they no longer are able to stand against tyranny. Obvious Satire
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You obviously didn't get that his post was satire.
Never underestimate stupidity (Score:1)
Reality is worse than the satire (Score:2, Interesting)
The Babylon Bee likes to periodically put out articles that suggest that reality is so fucked up that they've basically called X number of news stories when they published satire.
This is part of the problem with modern woke politics. If you'd published an article in 2001 saying "progressive activists shout at homeless man about his privileged status as a white male" it would be taken as satire at face value.
By 2021, there are real reports of woke Antifa/BLM-aligned activists literally telling a 70 year old
Woke (Score:2)
You used the word woke. Everyone drink.
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And well accurately defined it.
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If you'd published an article in 2001 saying that at some point Donald Fucking Trump, of all people, would become President of the United States, basically everyone and his dog would have immediatly known that it was satire.
There's a reason old "yelling at clouds" farts like me are saying that people are getting dumber and dumber with each generation. It's because they are.
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Do not make the mistake of believing TPTB are stupid or insane. They are deliberate, intentional, and sincere. This is about the P.
FB people, stop using drugs (Score:1)
That would help you come up with better ideas
Many people still don't know how to read properly (Score:1)
Onion predicts the future (Score:4, Insightful)
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Who really trusts the CIA [theonion.com] anyway?
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This is the only Onion story that I didn't realize immediately was The Onion: https://politics.theonion.com/... [theonion.com]
It seemed entirely believable. Though in retrospect the Trump quotes are far too articulate.
Does the label say ... (Score:4, Funny)
... "Whoosh"?
I'm sorry to say it won't work (Score:2)
People are generally stupid, and don't read labels.
They believe whatever was put into their heads as children, and don't bother to think to change.
You may call it "cynicism." I call it "realism."
Reality? (Score:2)
And how will they help people distinguish all the other nonsense posted to Facebook from reality?
they need one for (Score:3)
Hilarious (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact here is a whole book by Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) - "Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter"
https://www.amazon.com/Win-Big... [amazon.com]
Adams has evidence on his side. He predicted Trump would beat Hillary, having identified him early on as a master of "weapons grade persuasion," which Adams admires. I hated this book and found it profoundly cynical, but I'm afraid it's mostly true.
Re:Hilarious (Score:4, Insightful)
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But to go back to the original point, I can give a simple example. If you have a network with a broadcast licens
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Actually, it *does* sometimes work. It depends on the degree to which public experience prepares it emotionally for the facts.
I'm old enough to remember the end Vietnam war. If you look at the opinion polls by year, the vast majority of Americans supported the war in 1965, but that approval steadily drained away, month by month, so that by 1973 2/3 of the American public thought going into Vietnam was a mistake. I believe that mirrored the spreading *personal* impact of the war on families and friends o
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Actually, it *does* sometimes work. It depends on the degree to which public experience prepares it emotionally for the facts.
Never was too strong a word, but the statement is still substantially correct.
I'm old enough to remember the end Vietnam war. If you look at the opinion polls by year, the vast majority of Americans supported the war in 1965, but that approval steadily drained away, month by month, so that by 1973 2/3 of the American public thought going into Vietnam was a mistake. I believe that mirrored the spreading *personal* impact of the war on families and friends of men drafted to serve. By the time the Pentagon Papers were published in 1971 the public was ready to believe the whole thing was undertaken under false pretenses.
This is exactly what you would expect, the news was brutal across the board. People trust the news, it brought down Nixon. It’s one of the sources people statistically latch onto when operating in that mindset. Public opinion was swayed on Nixon and Vietnam because of the limitations of information transfer only passing through a few sources that by today’s standards were relatively unbiased. Nowadays any crazy c
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I hated this book and found it profoundly cynical ...
And yet you admitted it was "mostly true" and even provided a link to it. Kudos. I'd say, sir, that you win the thread.
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I hope (Score:2)
the "tiny label" is a link that explains what that fancy word satire means in very small words.
Correcte headline" (Score:2)
"Facebook hopes tiny labels on posts will enable them to avoid any blame for users confusing satire with reality."
satire vs reality (Score:3)
Don't we already have the "Fox News" logo for indicating satire instead of reality?
Facebook is ruining my fun (Score:2)
Did you know some people don't have (Score:2)
I guess my point is yes, stuff like this is a good idea, even if it seems silly to you and me.
Protecting the world, one idiot at a time. (Score:2)
Your projection does not equal reality.
Facebook power (Score:1)
Dear former customer,
You took a satirical post seriously and therefore have been banned for 1 year from Facebook. During that time we recommend that you educate yourself with regards to satire and the ability to identify "real" vs "not real". Facebook is a service that allows people to post both "real" and "fake" items. Understanding that will allow your return in 1 year to be a much m
Figures! Facebook is defining, enforcing (Score:2)
It didn't with warning labels on household items (Score:2)
Why do you think it works with tiny stickers?
Am I wrong? (Score:1)
Satire? (Score:2)
Making political points with satire is really really hard to pull off. No matter how obvious you try to make it, somebody will take it literally. [I am not going to share how I learned that :-)]
Nope [Re:it isnt there job] (Score:5, Informative)
to police content that isnt illegal. This turns them into a publisher, which in turn risks them losing sec 230
No.
Section 230 had no such clause about not applying if an internet site "turns into a publisher".
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I liked Justice Thomas's recent remarks on this....we need to rewrite the laws and make them into common carriers with no control over access as long as it is legal speech.
Social media needs to be treated like the phone companies.
The time has come.
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It isn't just Phone Companies, it is a whole slew of business types.
Hotels cannot discriminate in any way shape or form.
Transportation (busses, taxis, trains, airplanes).
Restaurants
These (and a whole lot more) fall under "commons" legally. Social Media should as well. What Justice Thomas was implicating was not just Social Media, but identifying business classes that have become modern commons. It is so ubiquitous that we don't even notice.
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we need to rewrite the laws and make them into common carriers with no control over access as long as it is legal speech.
That would be a disaster. You would ban these companies from moderating spam (just that alone would completely swamp everything), trolling, and hate speech. Here's a different take on Thomas' thoughts: https://www.techdirt.com/artic... [techdirt.com]
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I'd rather have the spam, than to have suppression of points of view (politically and socially) to the current main stream mantra, if it goes against the views of the corporation heads running the company hosting social media.
Alternate points of view are being actively suppressed.
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You would end up with effective suppression of those views anyway. They would be lost in the sea of spam. If hardly anyone is going to see them anyway, what have you accomplished?
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Re:Nope [Re:it isnt there job] (Score:4, Informative)
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I for one simply believe that it isnt a hosts job to do anything other than....well host
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it isnt there [sic] job to police content that isnt illegal.
Technically it is, as long as they have terms of service, which they have.
This turns them into a publisher
It doesn't.
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That's incorrect, but oft repeated.
There are a whole slew of Commons "businesses" that have no such "private company" privileges. The case here is that Social Media is operating in the Commons.
See Hotels, Restaurants, taxis/busses etc,
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If I walk into a Hotel, ask for a room and one is available, they HAVE to provide me that room. They cannot kick me out later because I said something the proprietors don't like ( a bad YELP review, for example).
Steven Crowder was suspended by YouTube and Twitter for FOLLOWING their own requirements, literally giving NO REASON (blank space) and against their own testimony to congress.
Are you okay with censorship on public platforms and ever shifting "Terms of Service" that are retroactive?
Re:it isnt there job (Score:5, Insightful)
THERE IS NO MECHANISM FOR LOSING SECTION 230 PROTECTIONS. NONE. ZERO.
YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT
At this point your obliviousness has to be taken as malicious. We have literally been discussing this here for years and there is no excuse for not knowing how this works.
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Repealing Sec 230 would prove you wrong. and that I am in favor of. Both, if you're confused.
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So what?
What Twitch does with their platform has very little relevance to that argument because the impetus to alter the only good part of the CDA is about Faceboot, not Twitch. Nobody in government cares about Twitch yet.
However, nothing about this makes Twitch more or less like a publisher, even if that were relevant, and it is not. Lawmakers do not imagine that social networks are publishers of the content they carry. Some of them want it to be that way so that they can suppress freedom of speech (in thi
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Categorizing, ranking, and moderating isn't policing.
The problem with social media, is that everyone has the same ability to voice their opinion. While this sounds nice in terms of an ideology, in practice they are a lot of people with just evil/wrong (based of invalid facts)/dangerous opinions (which need to be moderated). They are peoples opinions which may be stated as fact, where it is just their opinion which will need to be ranked, then they are people trying to satire or explain something where it
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evil/wrong (based of invalid facts)/dangerous opinions
For various definitions of "evil/wrong" and "dangerous opinions", which may or may not align with your particular viewpoints.
which need to be moderated
I find that evil/wrong and a dangerous opinion. Who are you to decide if my opinion is dangerous or not?
This concludes today's lesson in Liberty.
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Because Social Media is making money off of everyone's post (with advertisements connected to the content, as well targeted based on who sees your content) Facebook is in essence endorsing everything that is said on its site, so they do need to take responsibility on what is said and what is seen.
They couldn't possibly accept liability for everything posted on their site. And this has nothing to do with how big Facebook is, because if you limit FB to a million users so they can handle the volume better, then you just end up with a thousand Facebooks, because people want to use these sites. So it's exactly the same problem, just with a thousand different companies tackling it instead of one. Unless you want half the world's population moderating the other half (and even that wouldn't work), we mus
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They're not "policing" anything. This is no different than when NPR does a story about Facebook and mentions that Facebook is one of their sponsors. Or when Marketwatch has an article about a company and the writer informs the reader they do or do not own stock in the company.
All that is being done is clarification.
Also, their. And apostrophes are a thing.