Facebook has decided they must indeed do something about the proliferation of fake news stories in user's feeds.
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.
The fact-checking will apply, therefore, only to "news" stories so egregiously wrong that they've landed on fact-checkers' list of hoaxes and false stories. For example, that certain pizza parlors have sex slaves in their basements when Actual Damn Reporters have checked it out and determined that the building in question doesn't have a basement at all. And given that the collected fact checkers of the world don't have time to police even a small fraction of the total fraud output of the news cycle, the number of stories that will be affected by the new Badge of Overt Crookedness is going to be very, very small. One hopes.
But, needless to say, the notion that news stories proven to be false will be labeled as such is causing conservatives to melt down in indignation.
"Fact-checkers all seem to be from the left," tweeted Evan Siegfried, a Republican strategist. "Not good for conservatives."
This seems like it would have been a good moment for introspection as to why that might be, but no. It must be a plot by Big Facts. Those sneaky pro-reality bastards.
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 have to say, if one person says there are sex slaves in the basement of a pizza parlor and another person points out that the pizza parlor doesn't have a basement to begin with, that does not sound like one person is just being too "liberal." And that's where we're at right now: The notion that maybe there are sex slaves in the imaginary basements of pizza parlors, and that you're now "biased" if you think that the lack of imaginary basements ought to be considered a flaw in that theory.
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.