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votes
Crazy idea to help stop the spreading of untruthful news
One of the main issues with news on social media is the spread of fake or false news. This happens on every platform that allows sharing news. If Tildes continues to gain popularity, this will likely happen on Tildes. I had an Idea: what if tildes had a group of fact checkers that check to see if the news is truthful, and block posts that link to untrustworthy new sites? could be like a 3 strikes thing, where if a new source has 3 articles posted that have misinformation, they would be blocked (the post also removed).
This is just an idea, feel free to highlight any issues with it.
the first problem i see is: how do you define any of this? you really need a definition for what constitutes fake news and what would qualify under the definition to start actually judging things. is it fake news, for example, if someone omits certain facts but not others? if the crux of the article is untrue but is then corrected, does that count? etc. simply put, i don't think you can really boil fake news down to any singular thing that a few people can determine, which is part of why it's difficult to deal with. news as a whole is less black and white/true and false and more a very large number of shades of grey with a few things falling black and a few things falling white, and to deal with fake news you have to determine what shade of grey is a shade of grey too far (or if certain other shades are acceptable in certain circumstances, and so on). and that, of course, is next to impossible, as i think many of the moderators here from reddit can attest. just that i think is enough to render this idea basically nonviable for even major websites with huge amounts of infrastructure like facebook, much less smaller sites like tildes.
Plenty of other folks have highlighted the challenges this presents, so I won't bother recapping that except to say I agree with those sentiments. That said, this is a critical problem in social forum software.
I have a different approach based on watching internet forums argue for several decades. The users of these forums have suggested the same answer by their behavior - not their words - on nearly every forum I've ever visited. Some just take the job more seriously than others do. This activity is most visible when contentious topics that split the userbase emerge, so I'll use that as an example because most of you will probably recognize it from your own time reading forums.
When a contentious topic appears, someone in the comments lays down the knowledge bomb with a mountain of citations. These comments are typically plastered with whatever flavor of upvoting and 'reddit gold' that exists, and are sometimes stickied by moderator types. Typically that provokes others to respond with their own viewpoints and any relevant citations they've collected.
Most of these threads die a quick death once the conversation runs out. Sometimes these threads are good enough to merit keeping around, and they wind up stickied to the top of a forum, or cited somewhere in the FAQ/rules that literally no one on the internet ever bothers to read. They end up this way because they can be cited in the future when whatever issue it is pops up again and starts round two of the exact same discussion. By now all the forum regulars are aware of the old thread and just link it in the new one along with some level of 'fuck off not this again' sentiment. That diffuses the discussion in most cases.
Do you see the solution there? It's staring us right in the face.
What's missing is a permanent public record of, shall we say, big-ticket discussions and events in a group's history. If you want to force people to improve the conversation, take steps to make sure it starts back up again exactly where it left off the last time. I think once we add a wiki to Tildes, and give people some way to shortlink from memory like they do with ~groups and @users, that's the foundational element of this system. People will use it to make knowledge-base pages for a lot of topics.
The more people are sent back to these pages, the more likely those pages are to acquire sources and refine the information presented in them. Given enough time and repetition they could become pretty excellent sources of information that basically 'settle' issues in a fact-based manner. At the least, those who want a thorough view of a topic with citations and links will be satisfied.
The next step (which is more pertinent to your request) is finding a way to help discussions and submissions facilitate this process somehow. I think the 'megathreads' on reddit point the way here. I was initially skeptical those would ever have value... but when someone submits a news story, and the mods collect every link to that story, you can see at a glance in a single post, without reading any comments, the entire media sphere's collective reaction to any news or issue. The users are telling us here that they like to collect and compare and contrast various takes on the news. Well, why not design for that?
Imagine a megathread that works like this, but without mods doing the legwork. All that requires is a special type of thread that allows the users to submit new links to it - not in the comments like they usually do - but directly to the post itself. Those links get collected at the top of the thread somehow. Then, everyone votes on those links. Let the group do the work, let the group find the links, and let the group sort them and vote on them. I expect if competition is re-introduced like this, it'll favor pushing the best news stories on any given topic to the top of the pool. Guess which one most people are going to click on when they visit the megathread? The best one(s) at the top, of course. Now we're sending news traffic to the not-shit sites who take the time to write a good article.
I don't know if this will work. I do think it's a shot at finding a better solution. These are basic mechanics and will probably need a lot of experimentation and refinement. I think it's worth pursuing, though. It might bring a sense of order/a public record to otherwise chaotic forums with larger numbers of users.
Note that this possible solution doesn't require any formal definitions of what facts are, or what merits removal or inclusion. Instead it lets the users sort that out for themselves every time, and just gives them the tools to do that job together, and pick up on specific topics right where they left off with them.
Some idle speculation... I think this is a bit bigger than just news and deep discussions. I think it's a failure of the platforms we use to allow collaboration above and beyond simple commenting and single-topic single-link sharing.
Let's take ~music and the ever present issue of music streams themselves. Many have expressed the sentiment that streams are little better than cat pictures - the 'low effort content' of the music forum world. I'd echo that sentiment... and yet, if one takes the time to dig deeply and pull together all of that information (thousands of streams from thousands of users) one can create content like this that utterly defies that low-effort expectation.
Well, what if instead of just your usual 'what have you been listening to' thread, there was also a thread that was, effectively, a collaborative playlist that anyone visiting ~music could submit streams to instead? Turn them over on a weekly basis, and perhaps people would post special ones asking for certain types of music, as has happened on reddit with occasionally spectacular results.
What are we missing to make that happen? Seems to me it's the same mechanic as the 'voting on news links in a megathread' system would use, just wearing a different hat. It's a collaborative link collection and curation mechanism.
We're always talking about fluff and low effort content here, which dominates most other sites. Perhaps it's less about the 'effort' than it is about the mechanisms we use to collect and share that content. Maybe fluff just needs a little help like this, to place it in a more constructive framework.
As for the accountability, people have biases, and power can be abused. If the fact checkers get together and all decide they don't like [news source], even if there's nothing wrong with it, what stops them?
The idea of putting down fact checkers without oversight isnt great, but I dont think adding oversight would be that hard.
Agree with the concept. Implementation needs work.
This rule would result in every major US news publication being banned
Remind me of the problem here
This sounds similar what Newsguard does, though what you want is more specific to each article rather than an entire outlet.
I feel like your proposal is a little too grand to apply though. At best I think marking a website as possibly untrustworthy is the best you can achieve, because I don't think you'd be able to incentivize a group of people to constantly fact check every article, especially on a growing website of tens of thousands, and eventually hundreds of thousands of users, and Newsguard is even a perfect showcase of this problem. Their sole purpose is literally to fact check websites to see if they're trustworthy, and even then they have a giant backlog that takes a lot of time to go through.
I'm not inherently against a fact checking system of course, I'm also vehemently against misinformation, I just don't know how feasible it is to have one on a social platform like Tildes.
Every news source will get things wrong occasionally. Three strikes sounds like a bad metric. Your idea isn't very new either. A group which checks content against certain criteria and blocks it accordingly is how any censorship works. Who watches the watchers?
But you are right, give it some time and I don't see how tildes won't suffer from the exact same problems as reddit. I personally would like a system where users must provide a source for every single claim to a fact. Likewise, if an article you submit makes such a claim without providing a source, you must find it and post it with the submission. I'm sick of internet forums being all rhetoric and people pretending to know more than they do, and the hivemind judging by if what they say sounds about right, and if there's a second opinion now that one must be right, ha, OP just got busted, that's how busting works, right, when there's an opposed, SECOND opinion that sounds about right, right? PWNED. I am the hivemind and I am very smart.
If you have a set of rules where people must source their claims, of course Socrates trolls would rule that forum by asking suggestive questions, never having to go through the process of checking anything they say because that's how questions work. So you would need an additional rule along the lines of "If you can look up the answer to your question yourself, do that and share your findings instead of asking the question". So a scenario like "This company did something evil. (source)" -"How does that make them different from any other company in the business?" could never happen.
With rules like this, submitters would already notice some articles being deceptive before they even post it, since they have to verify its claims. Of course, often times articles will link to older stories from the same publisher whenever they postulate something, and some articles are made up from A to Z while claiming to be exclusive, like an interview that never happened. So here you can think about an extra rule that sources must be independent from the claimant. The community should probably also keep track of news stories which later turn out to be complete fabrications, meaning that there was intent to deceive, which is different from all the errors you would catch if you just check for truthfulness as you suggested.
Even articles that have no "fake or false" facts in them can be highly misleading based on which facts are chosen to include and how they are framed. How would you deal with these sort of sources?
Not using clickbait titles, for a start...
I think this is something we can sort out through meticulous tagging and commenting on the tag threads. For instance, a tag for a specific news event would inevitably aggregate the links on that topic.
Fake news becomes evident because it can be compared against the other links in the thread. As well as from comment.
Every prohibition discussion boils down to the same thing. You can't just eliminate fake news by trying hard. You can limit it maybe or slow it down. But you can't stop it. A better solution is conditioning Tildes users to think critically about news and engage critically with each other in the comments. If we the users vote up fake news, then it's our own fault.
The people who want to share the fake news have more power than "the knowledge that you are stopping the spread of misinformation". They can bribe and blackmail your group of checkers. If people are sheep and rely on the shepherd to protect the flock, then they shouldn't be surprised with the shepherd sells them once it's in their best interest to do so. People need to look out for themselves and throw out the notion that content is curated to only be true. There was a time when "don't believe everything you read on the internet" was legitimate advice.
Not everyone is open to bribery or susceptible to blackmail.
Fake news is impossible to stop because news is inherently a statement on base truth. You can argue from the credibility of the source, from the explicit biases of the piece, but proving falsehood is extremely difficult. I can't prove or disprove the existence of Uighur concentration camps in China; I am fairly certain there are, but that is a probabilistic determination.
I think a hypothetical will help me explain my point. Suppose I am a journalist in Azerbaijan, and I decide to to write a false article on a massacre by ex-Georgian soldiers for the LOLS. It is well-written and some how it gets sucked into the global zeitgeist. Everyone is talking about this brutal massacre and pundits are passionately taking sides. Now, there are some Georgian articles that try to refute my claims, but clearly they're biased. There are some others who question my "sources", and wonder why no other news source can verify my story. But since they can't actively disprove my story because I did my research and the story is plausible, they are generally ignored. The only people that can disprove me live in a tiny, isolated village on the border, but they have no global voice. By the time any group could reach them, the story has left the zeitgeist and no one cares.
There is only one way fir fake news to be disproven, not plausibly rejected, is independent first person documentation.