a little marketing tip: summarize both the rationale and the conclusion. it’s tempting to think just one or the other is enough to entice the potential visitor, but no, it’s much easier to dismiss a link if it comes off as fantastic, implausible, or unsupported, which is more likely when you leave out one or the other. it’s more enticing to get an obvious full bite rather than an elusive nibble.
The problem with misinformation, ultimately, is that it is given a platform. We've reached an inflection point where people can truly believe these mistruths so deeply, that any fact checking is received as a personal attack -- and they get even more defensive.
Facebook (or YouTube, or Twitter, or whoever) can try to come up with even more infoboxes or disclaimers, but it will continue to exist as long as it is given a platform.
The original sin of social media comes down to the idea that anyone can post, and that virality begets virality. Shocking content is presented on the same level as traditional media -- and in many cases, can exceed those traditional news sources' reach.
Our reporters follow an Editorial Policy, that comes with consequences if they break the guidelines. Virtually every respectable news org has something like this -- we're just making ours public. https://www.forthapp.com/docs/policy.html
Until we hold the reporting produced by professional reporters -- reviewed by editors, fact checked, and held in check by an editorial process -- at a higher esteem than what Firstname Bunchanumbers says, misinformation will continue.
> Until we hold the reporting produced by professional reporters -- reviewed by editors, fact checked, and held in check by an editorial process -- at a higher esteem
Having worked in a news organization, I wish I had more faith in this statement. Most reporters are woefully out of touch or depth when covering complex topics. As a finance major, I'm often surprised how often the explanations for basic topics are wrong or presented without any nuance.
Of course, this is not ideal. There is a big difference between journalism and message boards -- though that isn't to say, of course, that there can't room for both.
We've been working on a platform reimagining how local news can operate -- taking whats good from social media (the format and distribution), but maintaining journalistic rigor.
This is why we're building a news platform that sets up a different incentive structure than the current status quo. If publishers aren't desperate for clicks, there is no reason to stoop to outrage porn.
FWIW, we are working on this. Almost all of the issues listed in this thread can be traced back to the way aggregators and social networks end up monetizing (or not monetizing) news. We're trying something a little different:
https://blog.nillium.com/were-not-an-aggregator/
Apologies -- For now, yes, we are US specific. This requires a lot of individual connections and deals with newsrooms and reporters, so we had to start somewhere.
Can you explain your business model more clearly? Including how you intend to compete with current news outlets, and with the human tendency to not really care about things that should be important to them? The web site was not clear.
But that all requires an informed populace. The problem with Facebook (and others, of course) is that it warps all financial incentives for the publishers, while sapping revenue away from them.
Now if you want any revenue at all, which is required for surviving, you need to have clickbaity headlines so you can get traffic to your page. And even that assumes that certain news can find an audience; local news especially tends to fail in that regard because it by definition appeals to a smaller group of people.
This is more like Amazon diverting the money that used to go to the book authors back to themselves, and then when the authors and publishers start layoffs and go bankrupt, people ask why the writing is so bad.
As we said there, we're trying to take the convenience and brevity of social news updates, but use them to build a new platform that helps reporters and surface trustworthy, local news. We make tools for newsrooms that then syndicates out to the consumer platform, before an article or video is ever even made. (We are to news what OpenTable is to restaurants.) And through rev-shares, our partners succeed when we do.
https://blog.nillium.com/news-was-never-meant-for-social-pla...