Facebook Fake News
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Facebook promises not to stop politicians’ lies & hate
Facebook confirms it won’t fact check politicians’ speech or block their content if it’s newsworthy even if it violates the site’s hate-speech rules or other policies. This cementing of its policy comes from Facebook’s head of global policy and communication Nick Clegg, who gave a speech today about Facebook’s plans to prevent interference in the 2020 presidential election.
But by seeking neutrality, Facebook may become complicit in the misinformation and malevolence some politicians will use it to spread. It leaves users to fend for themselves as they try to discern fact from fiction and opinion from reality. Clegg claims the idea is for users to “judge what politicians say themselves.”
Isn’t that disgorgement of responsibility already what Facebook was doing by merely routing false news links to fact checkers and affixing their verdicts to shares of the content while still leaving it up on the site? To now say politicians can’t be fact-checked directly at all sets a critical and questionable precedent.
Facebook’s head of global policy and communications, Nick Clegg
“We don’t believe, however, that it’s an appropriate role for us to referee political debates and prevent a politician’s speech from reaching its audience and being subject to public debate and scrutiny,” writes Clegg, the former deputy Prime Minister of the U.K. “That’s why Facebook exempts politicians from our third-party fact-checking program . . .This means that we will not send organic content or ads from politicians to our third-party fact-checking partners for review.”
Yes, it prevents direct censorship of politicians and leaves critique to the media. Yet it also ignores how Facebook turns any voice into a publication, amplified by engagement-seeking algorithms distributed to billions of people. Users often treat Facebook as the internet and what they see on the internet as true.
Facebook doesn’t want false news distorting voters’ decisions ahead of the 2020 elections. However, the year-old “no fact-checks” rule and three-year-old “protected newsworthy speech” rule effectively elevate whatever comes out of a politicians mouth as above consequence.
If they share a debunked link, that can be labeled as wrong and demoted, but what they say is free to proliferate and confuse people. Not even a politician’s ads are subject to fact check, so you can spread whatever lies you want on Facebook as long as you’re rich enough and running for office. Facebook only draws the line at allowing content from politicians that would cause real-world harm, or running politicians’ ads that violate its policies.
This is certainly easier operationally for Facebook. It doesn’t have to be responsible for paying in-house staff or outside fact checkers to assess politicians’ diatribes. And it won’t as often end up in the cross-hairs of elected officials claiming Facebook is biased against them.
Some could see the benefit of these rules being that Facebook could never directly censor a politician unless they directly threatened people. If speaking for themselves from their own accounts, they get what’s close to free speech.
But it ignores how politics has evolved in the post-truth era. Rather than win with facts, it’s easier just to shout lies or insults loud and frequently enough that they’re accepted at face value, rebroadcast and culturally ingrained. Sensationalism spreads further than what’s level-headed. The fact check never gets as many shares as the incendiary claim. And those with a bully pulpit can keep an iron grip on their megaphone.
Facebook may not want to be the arbiter of truth, or even be considered “media,” but it transmits falsity without question; it’s not a platform, it’s a pawn.
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Facebook must police Today In, its local news digest launching in 400 cities
Facebook has a new area of its app it will have to police for fake news and biased sensationalism. Facebook is launching “Today In”, its local news aggregator it began testing in January, in 400 small to medium-sized US cities. It’s also now testing it in its first overseas spot in Australia. iOS and Android users can open the Today In bookmark or opt in to getting digests of its local news in their feed. The feature includes previews that link out to news sites about top headlines, current discussions, school announcements and more.
“We have a number of misinformation filters in place to ensure that fake news and clickbait does not surface on Today In. We also provide people the ability to report suspicious content on Facebook and within Today In specifically” a Facebook spokesperson tells me. “The misinformation filters are the same across Facebook that we’ve previously talked about – downranking clickbait, ratings from third-party fact checkers” they said. However, “the content in the surface is pulled by algorithm”, so there’s always a chance that problematic content slips through. For now, there will be no ads in Today In.
Facebook is also now testing Local Alerts with 100 local government and first responder Pages that can be issued to inform citizens about urgent issues or emergencies, such as where to take shelter from a hurricane. The Local Alerts are delivered via News Feed, Today In, and Pages can also target users with notifications about them. Again, while Facebook may be vetting which Pages get access to the Local Alerts feature, it must closely monitor to make sure they’re using it to provide vital info to their communities rather than just grab traffic at sensitive moments.
Facebook is hoping to fill a void after surveys found 50 percent of users wanted more local news through Facebook. It previously tested Today In with New Orleans, La.; Little Rock, Ark.; Billings, Mont.; Peoria, Ill.; Olympia, Wash.; and Binghamton, N.Y. The feature could give local outlets a referral traffic boost that could help offset the fact that Facebook has drained ad dollars from journalism into its own News Feed ads. And to make sure “news deserts” without enough local outlets still have robust Today In sections, Facebook will collect headlines from surrounding areas.
But the launch also opens up a new vector for policy issues, and it’s curious that Facebook would push forward on this given all its policy troubles as of late. It will have to ensure that Today In only aggregates content from reliable and fact-focused local outlets and doesn’t end up peddling fake news. But that in turn could open it to criticism suggesting it’s biased against fringe political outlets that believe their clickbait is the real story.
Users who want to check if they have access to Today In can visit this interactive map. The list includes Facebook’s hometown of Menlo Park and nearby Oakland, but not San Francisco. It’s also skipping big cities like New York and Washington, D.C. in favor of places like Mobile, Alabama; and Provo, Utah.
To find the mobile-only feature in Facebook (there’s no desktop version), users will hit the three-line “More” hamburger button and scroll down looking for “Today In [their city]”. Otherwise, they may stumble across one of its digests showing the headlines, thumbnail images, and publications for three of the biggest local news stories.
After tapping through or opening the Today In bookmark, they’ll be able to horizontally swipe through different sections like In The News that features recent stories and can be toggled to display sports. As per usual, Facebook isn’t above promoting its own content, like user and Page News Feed posts discussing local topics, Groups you could join, or Events you could RSVP to. Once you hit the end of a daily edition, you’ll see a “You’re all caught up” notice, similar to Instagram’s feature designed to keep you from over-scrolling.
Today In: Facebook’s local news and information section
Posted by Facebook on Friday, September 21, 2018
Facebook infamously turned away from news in favor of content from friends at the start of 2018, precipitating a significant decline in News Feed reach and referral traffic for links to articles. That left a lot of outlets feeling burned, as many had staffed up thanks to the that flow of traffic and the ad dollars it generated. Now some are having to lay off journalists, especially those making video content that Facebook also dialed down.
By resurfacing local news, Facebook could help strengthen ties in local communities as part of its new mission statement to “bring the world closer together”. But if that news contains heavy partisan bias or hypes up nothingburgers, it could lead to more polarization. Facebook already has trouble finding enough third-party fact checkers to verify viral news stories. Now it may expose itself to even more liability to be the arbiter of truth now that it’s fragmented the news space into hundreds of distinct digests.
This conundrum will play out again and again. Facebook wants to keep pushing forward with product launches it thinks can help society, but it in turn takes on even greater responsibility to protect us that it hasn’t proven it deserves.
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Facebook rolls out photo/video fact checking so partners can train its AI
Sometimes fake news lives inside of Facebook as photos and videos designed to propel misinformation campaigns, instead of off-site on news articles that can generate their own ad revenue. To combat these politically rather than financially motivated meddlers, Facebook has to be able to detect fake news inside of images and the audio that accompanies video clips. Today its expanding its photo and video fact checking program from four countries to all 23 of its fact-checking partners in 17 countries.
“Many of our third-party fact-checking partners have expertise evaluating photos and videos and are trained in visual verification techniques, such as reverse image searching and analyzing image metadata, like when and where the photo or video was taken” says Facebook product manager Antonia Woodford. “As we get more ratings from fact-checkers on photos and videos, we will be able to improve the accuracy of our machine learning model.”
The goal is for Facebook to be able to automatically spot manipulated images, out of context images that don’t show what they say they do, or text and audio claims that are provably false.
In last night’s epic 3,260-word security manifesto, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained that “The definition of success is that we stop cyberattacks and coordinated information operations before they can cause harm.” That means using AI to proactively hunt down false news rather than waiting for it to be flagged by users. For that, Facebook needs AI training data that will be produced as exhaust from its partners’ photo and video fact checking operations.
Facebook is developing technology tools to assist its fact checkers in this process. “we use optical character recognition (OCR) to extract text from photos and compare that text to headlines from fact-checkers’ articles. We are also working on new ways to detect if a photo or video has been manipulated” Woodford notes, referring to DeepFakes that use AI video editing software to make someone appear to say or do something they haven’t.
Image memes were one of the most popular forms of disinformation used by the Russian IRA election interferers. The problem is that since they’re so easily re-shareable and don’t require people to leave Facebook to view them, they can get viral distribution from unsuspecting users who don’t realize they’ve become pawns in a disinformation campaign.
Facebook could potentially use the high level of technical resources necessary to build fake news meme-spotting AI as an argument for why Facebook shouldn’t be broken up. With Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp combined, the company gains economies of scale when it comes to fighting the misinformation scourge.
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Facebook assigns you a fake-news-flagging trustworthiness score
A new way to attack Facebook is to fraudulently report a news story as false in hopes of reducing its visibility, either because someone wants to censor it or just doesn’t agree with it. Sometimes known as “brigading,” a concerted effort by trolls to flag a piece of content can reduce its visibility. Facebook now sends stories reported as false to third-party fact checkers, and these purposefully inaccurate reports can clog the already-overcrowded queues that fact checkers struggle to worth through.
That’s why Facebook gives users a trustworthiness score ranging from 0 to 1 depend on the reliability of their flags of false news, The Washington Post reports. If they flag something as false news but fact checkers verify it as true, that could hurt their score and reduce how heavily Facebook factors in their future flagging. If users consistently report false news that’s indeed proven to be false, their score improves and Facebook will trust their future flagging more.
Facebook’s News Feed product manager Tessa Lyons confirmed the scoring system exists. There’s currently no way to see your own or someone else’s trustworthiness score. And other signals are used to compute the score as well, though Facebook won’t reveal them for fear of trolls gaming the system.
Friend-ranking scores
This isn’t the only way Facebook ranks users, though. It assigns you a shifting score of affinity toward each of your friends that determines how frequently you see them in the News Feed. This “friend-ranking” score is essentially a measure of graph distance from you to someone else.
If you like a ton of someone’s posts, get tagged in photos with them, search for them, view their profile, communicate with them, have lots of mutual friends, are in the same Groups and have similar biographical characteristics like location and age, your score toward them is lower and you’ll see more of them in your feed. However, they have a different score for you depending on their behavior, so constantly viewing someone else’s profile won’t make you show up in their feed more if they don’t reciprocate the interest.
I first reported on these friend scores almost exactly seven years ago, and you can still view them for yourself using this browser bookmarklet built by Jeremy Keeshin. Visit this site, drag the “Facebook Friends Rankings” link into your desktop browser’s bookmark bar, open Facebook while logged in, and tap the bookmarklet to reveal the Friend Ranking scores of your friends. It snoops the Facebook JavaScript to pull out the scores. The people you see at the top are who you’re closest to.
The need for this score highlights the difficulties of Facebook’s battle against fake news. Between subjectivity and purposeful trolling, there’s a lot of noise coming in with the signal about what should be removed. Anyone saying Facebook should have easily solved the fake news problems is likely underappreciating the nuance required and the intelligent human adversaries Facebook must defeat.
Facebook has a huge array of signals it can use to calculate Friend Rankings or trustworthiness scores. The question will be whether it can intelligently sort those signals to make coherent inferences about what to show us and when to believe us.
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Facebook demands ID verification for big Pages, ‘issue’ ad buyers
Facebook is looking to self-police by implementing parts of the proposed Honest Ads Act before the government tries to regulate it. To fight fake news and election interference, Facebook will require the admins of popular Facebook Pages and advertisers buying political or “issue” ads on “debated topics of national legislative importance” like education or abortion to verify their identity and location. Those that refuse, are found to be fraudulent or are trying to influence foreign elections will have their Pages prevented from posting to the News Feed or their ads blocked.
Meanwhile, Facebook plans to use this information to append a “Political Ad” label and “Paid for by” information to all election, politics and issue ads. Users can report any ads they think are missing the label, and Facebook will show if a Page has changed its name to thwart deception. Facebook started the verification process this week; users in the U.S. will start seeing the labels and buyer info later this spring, and Facebook will expand the effort to ads around the world in the coming months.
This verification and name change disclosure process could prevent hugely popular Facebook Pages from being built up around benign content, then sold to cheats or trolls who switch to sharing scams or misinformation.
Overall, it’s a smart start that comes way too late. As soon as Facebook started heavily promoting its ability to run influential election ads, it should have voluntarily adopted similar verification and labeling rules as traditional media. Instead, it was so focused on connecting people to politics, it disregarded how the connection could be perverted to power mass disinformation and destabilization campaigns.
“These steps by themselves won’t stop all people trying to game the system. But they will make it a lot harder for anyone to do what the Russians did during the 2016 election and use fake accounts and pages to run ads,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook. “Election interference is a problem that’s bigger than any one platform, and that’s why we support the Honest Ads Act. This will help raise the bar for all political advertising online.” You can see his full post below.
The move follows Twitter’s November announcement that it too would label political ads and show who purchased them.
Twitter’s mockup for its “Political” ad labels and “paid for by” information
Facebook also gave a timeline for releasing both its tools for viewing all ads run by Pages and to create a Political Ad Archive. A searchable index of all ads with the “political” label, including their images, text, target demographics and how much was spent on them, will launch in June and keep ads visible for four years after they run. Meanwhile, the View Ads tool that’s been testing in Canada will roll out globally in June so users can see any ad run by a Page, not just those targeted to them.
Facebook announced in October it would require documentation from election advertisers and label their ads, but now is applying those requirements to a much wider swath of ads that deal with big issues impacted by politics. That could protect users from disinformation and divisive content not just during elections, but any time bad actors are trying to drive wedges into society. Facebook wouldn’t reveal the threshold of followers that will trigger Pages needing verification, but confirmed it will not apply to small to medium-size businesses.
By self-regulating, Facebook may be able to take the wind out of calls for new laws that apply to online ads buyer disclosure rules on TV and other traditional media ads. Zuckerberg will testify before the U.S. Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees on April 10, as well as the House Energy and Commerce Committee on April 11. Having today’s announcement to point to could give him more protection against criticism during the hearings, though Congress will surely want to know why these safeguards weren’t in place already.
With important elections coming up in the US, Mexico, Brazil, India, Pakistan and more countries in the next year, one…
Posted by Mark Zuckerberg on Friday, April 6, 2018
For more on Facebook’s recent troubles, check out our feature stories:
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Facebook fights fake news with author info, rolls out publisher context
Red flags and “disputed” tags just entrenched people’s views about suspicious news articles, so Facebook is hoping to give readers a wide array of info so they can make their own decisions about what’s misinformation. Facebook will try showing links to a journalist’s Wikipedia entry, other articles, and a follow button to help users make up their mind about whether they’re a legitimate source of news. The test will show up to a subset of users in the U.S. when users click on the author’s name within an Instant Article if the author’s publisher has implemented Facebook’s author tags.
Meanwhile, Facebook is rolling out to everyone in the U.S. its test from October that gives readers more context about publications by showing links to their Wikipedia pages, related articles about the same topic, how many times the article has been shared and where, and a button for following the publisher within an “About This Article” button. Facebook will also start to show whether friends have shared the article, and a a snapshot of the publisher’s other recent articles.
Since much of this context can be algorithmically generated rather than relying on human fact checkers, the system could scale much more quickly to different languages and locations around the world.
These moves are designed to feel politically neutral to prevent Facebook from being accused of bias. After former contractors reported that they suppressed conservative Trending topics on Facebook in 2016, Facebook took a lot of heat for supposed liberal bias. That caused it to hesitate when fighting fake news before the 2016 Presidential election…and then spend the next two years dealing with the backlash for allowing misinformation to run rampant.
Newsroom: Article Context Launch Video
Posted by Facebook on Monday, April 2, 2018
Facebook’s partnerships with outside fact checkers that saw red Disputed flags added to debunked articles actually backfired. Those sympathetic to the false narrative saw the red flag as a badge of honor, clicking and sharing any way rather than allowing someone else to tell them they’re wrong.
That’s why today’s rollout and new test never confront users directly about whether an article, publisher, or author is propagating fake news. Instead Facebook hopes to build a wall of evidence as to whether a source is reputable or not.
If other publications have similar posts, the publisher or author have well-established Wikipedia articles to back up their integrity, and if the publisher’s other articles look legit, users could draw their own conclusion that they’re worth beleiving. But if there’s no Wikipedia links, other publications are contradicting them, no friends have shared it, and a publisher or author’s other articles look questionable too, Facebook might be able to incept the idea that the reader should be skeptical.
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Facebook tries fighting fake news with publisher info button on links
Facebook thinks showing Wikipedia entries about publishers and additional Related Articles will give users more context about the links they see. So today it’s beginning a test of a new “i” button on News Feed links that opens up an informational panel. “People have told us that they want more information about what they’re reading” Facebook product manager… Read More
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Facebook bans ‘cloaking’ of spam sites that fool filters
“Cloaking” sounds sci-fi, but it’s actually a trick used today by spammers to show content moderators or search engine spiders an innocent-looking version of their site while real visitors just see ads and scams. Facebook requests input on hard questions about censorship and terrorism
How should Facebook decide what’s allowed on its social network, and how to balance safety and truth with diverse opinions and cultural norms? Facebook wants your feedback on the toughest issues it’s grappling with, so today it published a list of seven “hard questions” and an email address — hardquestions@fb.com — where you can send feedback and… Read More
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Facebook shrinks filter bubbles with alternate news sources in Trending
You’re vulnerable to bias and polarization if you only get your news from one source. So instead of highlighting a single news outlet when you click through to a Trending topic, Facebook will now show a carousel of the other most popular articles written about the subject by different publishers. Meanwhile, Facebook is giving more exposure to Trending Topics on mobile. Rather than only… Read More
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