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  Geebo 10:00 am on February 4, 2019 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Facebook ( 178 ), fact checking, Snopes ( 2 )   

  Snopes pulls out of Facebook’s fact-checking program 

  

  If you’ve been on the internet for any length of time you’ve probably encountered the fact-checking site Snopes.com. Snopes has been an internet vanguard for over 20 years as a resource people can use to determine whether or not the latest viral story is true or not. Snopes started back in 1994 as an urban legend debunking site but has evolved over the years to debunking everything from whatever chain email that one annoying friend kept sending you to whatever exaggeration the President has posted to Twitter this week. Due to its extensive research of such subjects, Snopes is well-respected across the internet as the de facto fact-checking source.

  In 2016, Snopes was contracted by Facebook to be one of many fact-checking resources used by the social network to try to combat the spread of misinformation Facebook became infamous for during the 2016 Presidential Election. Just a little over two years later, Snopes has left Facebook’s fact-checking initiative. Now, the reason Snopes left depends on who at Snopes you happen to be talking to at the time. The official response has been that it’s not financially viable for Snopes to continue to participate in the program as it’s more expensive to fact-check Facebook than what Facebook is paying Snopes. Another report states that Facebook allegedly doesn’t take fact-checking seriously at all. And a former Snopes employee has said that Facebook is more concerned about using fact-checking to make themselves look good rather than stopping the spread of misinformation.

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNwzk3-h56E%5D

  So which of the reasons for Snopes’ departure from Facebook is the real one? If we had to guess we’d probably say it was a combination of all of them. As Facebook has shown in the past, it seems to be more interested in keeping people engaged on their platform by counting on users’ outrage, not the truth. The truth doesn’t make for a good story that Facebook users will write epic-length rants about leading to more outrage. And when a Snopes link is posted to try to debunk the latest outrage post, it’s usually met with a resounding “What do they know?” If some of the stories are to be believed, Facebook only wants to have the appearance of fact-checking while promoting any incendiary idea that will keep their users engaged through hate and fear.

   

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  Geebo 9:52 am on October 14, 2016 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: fact checking, Google ( 29 ), Google News, News ( 7 )   

  Google to bring fact checking to News 

  

  With the advent of fake news sites, wild Facebook claims and slanted political sites, Google has decided to enter the fray. Google has added the tag ‘Fact Check’ to Google News along with the already active tags of ‘highly cited’ and ‘opinion’. Google says that they have strict guidelines in place to be considered a fact checking source. It’s almost guaranteed that someone will try to game the system however, Google has a better reputation for content moderation than someone like Facebook.

  Will it be a successful feature though? With the 2016 Presidential Election being what it is, never before have we seen more people clutch to their confirmation bias. Even if a controversial story has been vetted by Google’s fact checking process there will still be a large enough group of people who will refuse to believe the evidence to make the fact check tag irrelevant or they will accuse Google of having a bias.

  People who do actually try to fact check a story generally tend to be like-minded, not necessarily politically aligned, but having the same sense of wanting to know the truth. This group tends not to engage the groups with confirmation bias so there will still be a rather large rift between the two. That’s not to say that the fact check tag isn’t completely useless. As long as someone in our society is striving to find the impartial truth then maybe there is hope for civil discourse after all.