Facebook will mark hoax news stories as hoaxes, and conservatives are melting down … again
“Among other steps, the social network said it will start flagging ‘the worst of the worst’ hoaxes shared on the site, which draws more than a billion users in an average day. […]
Under the new system, when Facebook users attempt to post a story that Poynter-affiliated fact checkers have rebutted, they’ll get a pop-up saying,
‘Before you share this story, you might want to know that independent fact-checkers disputed its accuracy.’
If the user opts to go ahead, the post will still appear on their friends’ News Feeds, but it will be tagged with red danger-style signal indicating its veracity is in dispute — with a link to a fact checker’s debunking.”
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2nd- The whining from those whose gullibility and exploitation of such sites would have the most to suffer:
“Fact-checkers all seem to be from the left,” tweeted Evan Siegfried, a Republican strategist. “Not good for conservatives.”
“Charles Cooke, editor of National Review Online, the premier conservative news outlet for decades, told Business Insider in an email that he agreed with everything some conservative Twitterpundit said.
And what did that conservative pundit say? “Fake News is a thing because “fact-checkers” are biased towards liberals/Democrats. […] Fake News cropped up in response to people feeling like the media AND the fact-checkers weren’t being fair.”
I like Hunter’s (Daily Kos author) summation:
“What of the fakest news sites of them all? Conspiracy huckster Alex Jones says Facebook’s new plan is, of course, a CIA plot. Possibly in league with the lizard people, possibly not, I don’t know. Maybe Jones and the National Review editor can get together and hash it out for us and Snopes both.We’ll see. Maybe this newest Facebook experiment will work, and maybe it won’t. Maybe it will catch stories that it shouldn’t have caught because some fact-checkers are themselves too loose with their own interpretations of statements they’re evaluating. But conservatives put us in this mess with their faux-outrage that Facebook was “censoring” them by not giving readers enough possibly faked news, so of course they’re going to get their knickers in a twist over the mere notion of putting a few of those checks back in place.”
if I want to confirm or dispute some piece of news, it could take a lot of time surveying a bunch of sources. Then it would require a comparative assessment much like these guys who were aggregating an assortment of polls to give us an “odds”-based prediction of how the election would turn out. That’s too much work.
In the old days, before you were born, it was guys like Murrow and Cronkite who we could trust. Then their replacements came along and, well, we’ve seen the rest going back to the time right after you were born.
Can’t trust a single news source.,, and don’t believe a thing just because someone you know – like me for example – tells you it is so.
Curmudgeon at Work 