Facebook Eyes the Midterms | Power Line

Facebook Eyes the Midterms | Power Line:
"...I think it remarkable that Facebook intends to take on “false narratives,” i.e., “intentionally divisive headlines and language.” 
Is it surprising that people disagree about “what an appropriate narrative is”? 
How Facebook intends to referee competing narratives, I can’t imagine. 
Well, no, actually I can.

How about “false facts”? 
Here, Facebook must rely on fact-checkers:

Today, I want to talk about one part of our strategy: our partnership with third-party fact-checking organizations. We’re seeing progress in our ability to limit the spread of articles rated false by fact-checkers, and we’re scaling our efforts.

Here’s how it works:

* We use signals, including feedback from people on Facebook, to predict potentially false stories for fact-checkers to review.

* When fact-checkers rate a story as false, we significantly reduce its distribution in News Feed — dropping future views on average by more than 80%.

* We notify people who’ve shared the story in the past and warn people who try to share it going forward.

* For those who still come across the story in their News Feed, we show more information from fact-checkers in a Related Articles unit.

* We use the information from fact-checkers to train our machine learning model, so that we can catch more potentially false news stories and do so faster.

So it all comes down to, who are the fact-checkers? 

A Facebook employee stated at the press conference that approved fact checkers will be those who have signed on to Poynter’s international fact checking network principles. 

You can see the list of signatories at the link; the only one that I recognize as more or less conservative is the Weekly Standard. 

Facebook has already said that it will use Politifact and Snopes, both left-leaning, as fact checkers. 

At the press conference, it got even worse:

In the US, we recently announced a partnership with The Associated Press to use their reporters in all 50 states to identify and debunk false and misleading stories related to the federal, state and local US midterm elections.

The Associated Press is the number one source of left-wing bias in the American press. 

Its “fact checks” are directed almost exclusively against President Trump and his administration, rarely against Democrats. 

I have written about them a number of times. 

In my judgment, the AP’s anti-Trump “fact checks” are wrong as often as they are right. 

Most often, they just assert Democratic Party talking points. 

If the AP is to be Facebook’s principal fact-checker for the midterm elections, Facebook may as well outsource the function to the Democratic National Committee..."

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