‘If someone previously gave us feedback that an article was false and the article was confirmed false by a fact-checker, then we might weight that person’s future false news feedback more…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Fake news. Data mining. Anti-conservative bias.
It would seem consumer trust in Facebook is at an all time low, with co-founder Mark Zuckerberg posting a personal loss of $3.3 billion last quarter after announcing yet another change in its newsfeed algorithms.
But it turns out that the social-media megalith may trust you just as little as you trust it.
Outlets including The Washington Post and The Sun report that Facebook recently acknowledged employing a user-rating system to determine trustworthiness, in order to “help identify malicious actors.”
The Sun cited Facebook product manager Tessa Lyons confirming that the zero-to-one rating scale measures how people interact with articles. Thus, if people were to flag articles simply because they disagreed with them, they might see their ratings downgraded.
“If someone previously gave us feedback that an article was false and the article was confirmed false by a fact-checker, then we might weight that person’s future false news feedback more than someone who indiscriminately provides false news feedback on lots of articles, including ones that end up being rated as true,” Lyons said.
However, as The Hill pointed out in a 2016 commentary, the question some may have is, “Who will check Facebook’s fact-checkers?”
Sites such as FactCheck.org, PolitiFact and Snopes.com have been known to demonstrate a clear bias against conservative perspectives through the way they qualify information and in their selection of stories.
In addition, the Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network has accepted substantial sums of money from liberal activist groups such as George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and The Omidyar Network.
The third-party fact-checkers that Facebook uses, including Snopes and ABC News, are culled from the IFCN list.