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When searching for information on the Web how confident are you that the site that you have clicked on is authentic, real, reliable, unbiased - not FAKE!?

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Research Guides: Fake News: Develop Your Fact-Checking Skills: Examples of Fake News

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Research Guides: Fake News: Develop Your Fact-Checking Skills: Examples of Fake News

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The Facebook Newsfeed has been under heavy scrutiny since the American elections, with many believing it to be a main cause of fake news distribution. But this is just the tip of the iceberg for a much larger problem.

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Fake News shapes our opinions of issues that affect our world and ourselves. This is an interesting article from a magazine called the New Scientist.

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Fake News shapes our opinions of issues that affect our world and ourselves. This is an interesting article from a magazine called the New Scientist.

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Fake it till you make it. That old adage has never been so poignant in a year that has seen a surge in fake news. The rise in stories describing events that never happened, often involving fake people in fake places, has led Facebook and Google promising to tackle them. But are we really so gullible?

According to several studies, the answer is yes: even the most obvious fake news starts to become believable if it's shared enough times.

Electing Trump

In the months running up to the US election there was a surge in fake news. According to an analysis by Craig Silverman, a journalist, during this time the top 20 fake stories in circulation overtook the top 20 stories from 19 mainstream publishers.

Paul Horner, a prolific publisher of fake news, has said he believes Donald Trump was elected because of him. "My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time... His followers don't fact-check anything - they'll post everything, believe anything," he told the Washington Post.

Silverman previously tracked rumours circulating online in 2014 and found that shares and social interactions around fake news articles dwarfed those of the articles that debunked them. According to Silverman, fake news stories are engineered to appeal to people's hopes and fears, and aren't constrained by reality, which gives them the edge in creating shareable content.

I know it's wrong

You might think you're immune to falling for these lies, but a wealth of research disagrees. Back in the 1940s, researchers found that "the more a rumour is told, the greater is its plausibility". They suggested this means that a rumour born out of mild suspicion can, by gaining currency, shift public thinking and opinion.

This illusion of truth was demonstrated empirically in 1977 when researchers in the US quizzed college students on the veracity of statements that they were told may be true or false. The researchers found that simply repeating the statements at a later date was enough to increase the likelihood of the students believing them.

Last year, Lisa Fazio at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and her team found that students become more likely to believe a statement that they know must be false if it is repeated.

"Our research suggests that false news can and likely does affect people's beliefs. Even if people have the knowledge to know that a headline is false, reading it multiple times will make it seem more true," Fazio says.

Reassuringly, the team found that a person's prior knowledge still has a large influence over their beliefs, but it's still a worrying trend given that falsehoods appear repeatedly in our newsfeeds every day.

Work it out

Can we learn to detect fake news? Despite growing up surrounded by fake news, there is little evidence that young people have grown adept at detecting it. In a recent study, US high school students were shown an image of deformed flowers purportedly growing near the ill-fated Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. When asked if the photo - which appeared on an image-sharing website - qualified as strong evidence about the conditions near the plant, less than 20 per cent had doubts about the source of the photo and 40 per cent considered it strong evidence, despite the lack of information on authorship.

It gets worse: studies show that students tend to place enormous trust in search engines to deliver accurate results, often turning to the first result returned - a concern given that fake news can appear in the section for news stories displayed above Google's search results, a problem Google is rushing to fix.

If we're expecting such companies to be the arbiters of truth, there are other problems - including whether they have the necessary expertise. A recent investigation reported that outsourced workers used by Facebook to manually filter content flagged as abusive make their evaluations on average in just 10 seconds.

So how can you protect yourself from digital lies? An easy step is to check who produced it. Often it is clear from the URL that a website is pretending to be reputable by stealing the name and style of another publication. Also, take a look at the other stories on the website. Fake news websites often have nothing but fake content. If all the stories are outrageous, consider it a red flag. Finally, search for coverage of the story elsewhere, if a story is false you'll often find it debunked on websites such as snopes.com.

Read more: How can Facebook and its users burst the filter bubble; The psychology that explains how Trump's divisive rhetoric won

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Fake news shapes our opinions even when we know it's not true

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Fake it till you make it. That old adage has never been so poignant in a year that has seen a surge in fake news. The rise in stories describing events that never happened, often involving fake people in fake places, has led Facebook and Google promising to tackle them.

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Trust in The Media. How can we protect Truth?

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Trust in The Media. How can we protect Truth?

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A decade ago I became interested in the question of how truth could be better supported both in the traditional media, and in the increasingly important social media. The claim made two centuries ago by James Madison that truth would tend to drive out lies was clearly not happening in traditional media, and there were few signs it would be any truer on the internet.

One of the places I wrote about this was in a pamphlet co-authored with Tom Steinberg. As we wrote: "The competitiveness of the modern news media economy has led to some well-documented distortions to news values: poor ethics, inaccuracy, abuse of power. One result is that print journalists command even lower levels of trust than politicians. Another is that the public have systematically distorted views of many important facts and issues."

At the time (2004) there seemed like an ideal opportunity to fix the problem. The BBC was having its charter renewed - which would determine how several billion pounds of the public's money would be funnelled into the media. Why not use a tiny fraction of this to shift the needle on truth right across the media, from broadcast and print to the internet?

The idea was written up in the form of an Open Commission for Accuracy in the Media (OCAM). The idea was to mobilise public energies to police lies and distortions - just as Wikipedia was mobilising thousands of people to generate reasonably accurate entries. The Commission would be funded out of a very small slice of the licence fee - we proposed 0.5% - and its brief would be to promote accuracy "across all mass media that are depended on by British citizens (not just BBC outputs)".

One of its major tools would be a web-based open system listing journalists, publications, news channels and other websites. Its main role would then be to run a system for allowing the public to complain about factual inaccuracies and a structured way for each side to present evidence, ahead of independent adjudication. Journalists and media outlets that were repeat offenders would be named and shamed.

I thought the BBC might jump on the idea. By encouraging part of the licence fee to go to OCAM they would show that they weren't just concerned with their own growth (as their critics always argued). They would show a broader commitment to truth, and the move would put them ahead of the curve on an issue that was bound to become more important.

Instead, they politely said no. In private they wondered why anyone thought they would support funding anything that wasn't under their direct control. Meanwhile, none of the print newspapers, other broadcasters or internet companies had much interest in the idea either.

So nothing happened. A decade was lost, or at least partly. Google and others made various abortive attempts to embed truth into search engines, but without appreciating the gravity of the issue. The Leveson inquiry proposed some modest moves towards greater accountability, mainly in print media, but was largely blocked.

There have been some moves to promote new outlets dedicated to accuracy. Early this decade the Conversation was launched, first in Australia, and now in the UK, US, France, India, South Africa and the Netherlands, providing academic commentary on what's happening in the world (I'm a fan, and Nesta provided some early support). With some tens of millions of users it's achieved impressive reach. But it's still marginal compared to the scale of the problem, and like the many other sites that try to promote factual accuracy the Conversation remains insecurely funded, while the big media giants and internet search engines have budgets in the billions.

That's why I think that a decade later, the idea of a more serious institutional response is worth reviving, ahead of a new BBC charter to come into force next year. OCAM's brief would, as originally proposed, be to promote accuracy across all mass media that are depended on by British citizens. One of its major tools would be a web-based open system listing journalists, publications, news channels and other websites, which would keep track of:

complaints by members of the public who believe that a newspaper or broadcast report has been inaccurate.

a clearly structured way for journalists to defend themselves, and show evidence supporting their claims (my suggestion would be a series of three columns, one for the initial complainant, a second for the journalist or news organisation to defend themselves, and a third column for others to comment, with a requirement that comments address evidence and fact).

a process for either resolving disputes or escalating them to adjudication panels, best organised as volunteer juries.

some resources for in-depth investigation of the most serious cases.

The result would be an easily accessible source to find out which journalists were repeat offenders. Aggregate rankings would show which media outlets repeatedly turned out to be distorters of the truth (with these adjusted to the volume of their output). These could in turn support kitemarks. A system of this kind would support, and complement, the moves being proposed by Facebook and others to better police truthfulness.

The BBC licence fee now generates a lot of money; £3.735 billion in 2014/15. We get a great deal of value from that. But a tiny proportion - eg the 0.5% proposed before, or around £18m - could have a disproportionate impact if used to promote truth across the system as a whole. It would certainly be a better response than vague hand-wringing.

We all depend on our media environment to give us a roughly accurate view of the world around us. Again and again, the proliferation of new sources has failed in this basic task - leaving people with systematically distorted views of the world, which in turn lead them to make bad decisions.

This isn't a problem that can be solved in a stroke. But nor should we be fatalistic. There are options which would not be hard to implement if there were the will to do so.

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A decade ago I became interested in the question of how truth could be better supported both in the traditional media, and in the increasingly important social media. The claim made two centuries ago by James Madison that truth would tend to drive out lies was clearly not happening in traditional media, and there were few signs it would be any truer on the internet.

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John Oliver presents a satire show Last Week Tonight on which he often explores the way news is reported or misreported, the growth of fake news and demonstrates how easily we are mislead by media bias. Check this out.

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John Oliver presents a satire show Last Week Tonight on which he often explores the way news is reported or misreported, the growth of fake news and demonstrates how easily we are mislead by media bias. Check this out.

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Breaking news on a weekly basis. Sundays at 11PM - only on HBO.
Subscribe to the Last Week Tonight channel for the latest videos from John Oliver and the LWT team.

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John Oliver presents a satire show Last Week Tonight on which he often explores the way news is reported or misreported, the growth of fake news and demonstrates how easily we are mislead by media bias. Check this out.

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John Oliver presents a satire show Last Week Tonight on which he often explores the way news is reported or misreported, the growth of fake news and demonstrates how easily we are mislead by media bias. Check this out.

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Breaking news on a weekly basis. Sundays at 11PM - only on HBO.
Subscribe to the Last Week Tonight channel for the latest videos from John Oliver and the LWT team.

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The New York Times entered the battle over Google and censorship and Fake News with this article.

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The New York Times entered the battle over Google and censorship and Fake News with this article.

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"They're really skating on thin ice," said Michael Bertini, a search strategist at iQuanti, a digital marketing agency. "They're controlling what users see. If Google is controlling what they deem to be fake news, I think that's bias."

Despite Google's insistence that its search algorithm undergoes a rigorous testing process to ensure that its results do not reflect political, gender, racial or ethnic bias, there is growing political support for regulating Google and other tech giants like public utilities and forcing it to disclose how exactly its arrives at search results.

Most people have little understanding of how Google's search engine ranks different sites, what it chooses to include or exclude, and how it picks the top results among hundreds of billions of pages. And Google tightly guards the mathematical equations behind it all - the rest of the world has to take their word that it is done in an unbiased manner.

"The complexity of ranking and rating is always going to lead to some lack of understanding for people outside of the company," said Frank Pasquale, an information law professor at the University of Maryland. "The problem is that a lot of people aren't willing to give them the benefit of the doubt." In his book, "The Black Box Society," Mr. Pasquale warned about the potential risks from an overreliance on secret algorithms that control what information we see and how critical decisions are made.

As the dominant search engine, with an estimated 90 percent global market share, Google was criticized by both the right and the left of the political world during the 2016 election.

In June 2016, a video from the pop culture site SourceFed accused Google of manipulating automatically completed search suggestions to favor Hillary Clinton. Google denied the claim, but right-wing media seized on the video as an example that the company was tipping the scales in her favor.

In the days after the election, the top Google search results for "final election vote count 2016" was a link to a story that wrongly stated that Mr. Trump, who won the Electoral College, had also defeated Mrs. Clinton in the popular vote.

In the research that led to the creation of Project Owl, Google found that a small fraction of its search results - about 0.25 percent of daily traffic - were linking to intentionally misleading, false or offensive information. For a company that aims to deliver the most relevant information for all queries, that constituted a crisis.

Google said it had added more detailed examples of problematic pages into the guidelines used by human raters to determine what is a good search result and what is a bad one. Google said its global staff of more than 10,000 raters do not determine search rankings, but their judgments help inform how the algorithm performs in the future.

Google has often said that it cannot reveal too much or people would use that information to try to game the rankings. The opacity around Google's algorithm has given birth to a cottage industry of search engine optimization experts who dissect the company's comments.

To assuage criticism about that lack of transparency, Google made public its guidelines for search quality in 2013. Pandu Nayak, a Google fellow who focuses on search quality, said disclosing the guidelines is more meaningful.

"The actual algorithm is not as important as what the algorithm is trying to do," said Mr. Nayak. "Being completely transparent of what you're trying to achieve is the central goal because how you accomplish that can change."

Google said hundreds of factors go into its search algorithm and the formula is also constantly evolving. The company said it conducted 150,000 search experiments and implemented 1,600 changes last year.

This is why it's hard to pinpoint exactly why search traffic plummets for a site like the World Socialist Web Site, which calls itself the "online newspaper of the international Trotskyist movement." Mr. North, the site's chairman, said traffic coming in from search is down 70 percent since April, citing data from Alexa, a web traffic analytics firm owned by Amazon.com.

In an open letter to Google last month, Mr. North traced his site's traffic decline to Project Owl. Mr. North said he believed that Google was blacklisting the site, using concerns over fake news as a cover to suppress opinions from socialist, antiwar or left-wing websites and block news that Google doesn't want covered.

In mid-April, a Google search for "socialism vs. capitalism" brought back one of the site's links on the first results page but, by August, that same search didn't feature any of its links. The site said 145 of the top 150 search terms that had redirected people to the site in April are now devoid of its links.

"They should be asked to explain how they're doing it," Mr. North said. "If they say we're not doing anything, that's simply not credible."

Mr. North said that Google has not responded to his claims. Google declined to comment on the World Socialist Web Site.

Mr. North argued the drop-off in traffic is the result of Google directing users toward mainstream media organizations, including The New York Times. The World Socialist Web Site claimed that search referral traffic had fallen since April at a variety of other left-wing, progressive, socialist or antiwar publications like AlterNet and Consortiumnews.

The New York Times could not find the same level of traffic declines at all of those publications, based on data from SimilarWeb, a web analytics firm. Traffic coming from search engines for the World Socialist Web Site was down 34 percent during the months of May to July, compared with the preceding three months, according to SimilarWeb. Traffic that did not come from search was up 1 percent during the same period.

Mr. North said his site provides critical analysis for current events and it has nothing in common with sites peddling blatantly untrue stories. But he said he is opposed to any actions taken by Google under the pretext of stopping fake news.

"I'm against censorship in any form," he said. "It's up to people what they want to read. It's not going to stop with the World Socialist Web Site. It's going to expand and spread."

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As Google Fights Fake News, Voices on the Margins Raise Alarm

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"They're really skating on thin ice," said Michael Bertini, a search strategist at iQuanti, a digital marketing agency. "They're controlling what users see. If Google is controlling what they deem to be fake news, I think that's bias."

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What about Google - the search engine you can trust?

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What about Google - the search engine you can trust?

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SUPPORT JOURNALISM. DONATE AT http://www.timcast.com/donate Google and Facebook vs fake news, the latest fight as the big tech companies try to figure out how to deal with made up stories. But if they just rely on msm how do we know if they are actually weeding out fake news or just catering to large companies?

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Facebook allows people to live-stream their suicide attempts "as long as they are engaging with viewers" but will remove footage "once there's no longer an opportunity to help the person". Pledges to kill oneself through hashtags or emoticons or those that specify a fixed date "more than five days" in the future shouldn't be treated as a high priority.

These are tiny snippets from a cache of training materials that Facebook content moderators need to absorb, in just two weeks, before policing the world's largest social network.
How Facebook allows users to post footage of children being bullied
The guidelines also require moderators to learn the names and faces of more than 600 terrorist leaders, decide when a beheading video is newsworthy or celebratory, and allow Holocaust denial in all but four of the 16 countries where it's illegal - those where Facebook risks being sued or blocked for flouting local law.

The documents detail what is and is not permitted on the platform, covering graphic violence, bullying, hate speech, sexual content, terrorism and self-harm. For the first time the public has a glimpse of the thought process behind some of the company's editorial judgements that go beyond the vague wording of its community standards or statements made in the wake of a live-streamed murder.

"This might be the most important editorial guide sheet the world has ever created. It's surprising it's not even longer," said Carl Miller, research director at the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at London-based thinktank Demos. "It's come out of a mangle of thousands of different conversations, pressures and calls for change that Facebook gets from governments around the world."

It is clear that Facebook has an unprecedented challenge on its hands. The platform has inadvertently become the world's largest media organization, with nearly 2bn readers and contributors encompassing the full spectrum of humanity's capacity to entertain, sadden, bore, horrify and disgust.

In order to provide simple instructions to moderators, the documents highlight specific visceral examples. And it's not pretty.

Footage of animal abuse is allowed but must be marked as "disturbing" if there is, among other things, "dismemberment" or "visible innards". Images of physical child abuse is acceptable unless "shared with sadism and celebration". Comments such as "Irish are stupid" are removed while moderators are told to ignore "Blonde women are stupid". A picture of a child who appears to have Down syndrome captioned "I can count to potato" does not have to be deleted.

The files explain that people "use violent language to express frustration online" without stopping to think about the consequences. This is because they "feel indifferent" towards their target "because of the lack of empathy created by communications via devices as opposed to face to face" - a neat description of the so-called online disinhibition effect.

This appears to contradict much of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's 5,700-word manifesto, published in February, that placed heavy emphasis on the social network fostering human connections. It is jarring to see so many examples of human cruelty and depravity laid bare, but they raise important questions over whether Facebook's users are comfortable with the lines the company has drawn.

Either way, Facebook cannot win.

On one hand, it is expected to clamp down on terrorist recruitment, glorified violence and live-streamed crime, while on the other it is accused of overzealous censorship and collaboration with oppressive regimes. "This is a terrible bind," Miller said. "They found themselves with all these responsibilities and power they never anticipated getting and would rather do without."

"Private companies are doing what we've only really expected constituted officials of sovereign power to do."

Part of the challenge for Facebook is ensuring its rules are applied correctly across the world, taking into account linguistic and cultural nuance. "They want to create a systematic check box exercise in order to universalize the operation, but that's not the way human language works," said Miller, who studies how terror networks use social media.

One solution being explored by Facebook is a global voting system to allow users to set their own levels of comfort with content, an idea floated by Zuckerberg in his manifesto.

"Where is your line on nudity? On violence? On graphic content? On profanity? What you decide will be your personal settings," he wrote.

"Although we will still block content based on standards and local laws, our hope is that this system of personal controls and democratic referenda should minimize restrictions on what we can share."

Moderators also need to take into account local laws, but not in every case.

"We respect, but do not welcome, local law that stands as an obstacle to an open and connected world," said Facebook in the training documents. "Given this we will not censor content unless a nation has demonstrated the political will to enforce its censorship laws."

Facebook has restricted content in Pakistan, Russia and Turkey in the past and has reportedly developed software to accommodate China's censorship demands.

The cherished principles of free speech on which the internet was founded go out the window when they don't align with business interests.

The company's commitment to these things appears to wax and wane depending on public sentiment

Sarah T Roberts, UCLA professor

"So many of these policies are at odds with each other," said Sarah T Roberts, a UCLA professor who studies large-scale moderation of online platforms. "The company's commitment to these things appears to wax and wane depending on public sentiment."

It's no wonder the company errs so regularly, whether that's censoring Napalm Girl or live-streaming the murder of a grandfather in Cleveland. In response to the mounting slip-ups, CEO Mark Zuckerberg pledged to add 3,000 more content reviewers to its community operations team.

Facebook's moderators, known as "community operations analysts", are typically low-paid contractors. The Guardian found job listings offering an annual salary of between $23,000 (in Dublin) and $40,000 (at Facebook's headquarters in California), although many others will earn less in places such as the Philippines. The 4,500-strong community operations team reviews more than 100m pieces of content every month, which leaves around 10 seconds to make a judgement call about each one.

Facebook told the Guardian that it recognizes the work can often be difficult and offers every person reviewing content psychological support and wellness resources.
'No grey areas': experts urge Facebook to change moderation policies
In order to make moderation more efficient, Facebook is developing artificial intelligence to identify offending content. It also uses algorithms to spot suicidal users and is exploring ways to use AI to distinguish between news stories about terrorism and actual terrorist propaganda.

As much as Facebook might want to replace human moderators with automated systems, doing so will not be easy.

"It's impossible for algorithms alone to manage human experience," said Peter Friedman, CEO of LiveWorld, which provides moderation services to big brands.

"This is highly complex work," Roberts said, "and requires a mastery of many topics, current events, other cultures and languages, so it's interesting that it's so devalued."

Miller agrees: "However clever Facebook is, so much of this is impressionistic and contextual and difficult to interpret."

He said he frequently struggles to judge suspected terrorist content because he doesn't understand the tropes, language or internal slang. "The idea that anyone can learn that in addition to all the other bodies of content they need to make judgements about in two weeks is very surprising to me."

"It must be one of the worst jobs on the internet," he said.
Topics In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14.

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To censor or sanction extreme content? Either way, Facebook can't win

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Facebook allows people to live-stream their suicide attempts "as long as they are engaging with viewers" but will remove footage "once there's no longer an opportunity to help the person". Pledges to kill oneself through hashtags or emoticons or those that specify a fixed date "more than five days" in the future shouldn't be treated as a high priority.

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BUT is it all what it seems? This from the Guardian regarding Facebook.

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BUT is it all what it seems? This from the Guardian regarding Facebook.

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Facebook's secret rules and guidelines for deciding what its 2 billion users can post on the site are revealed for the first time in a Guardian investigation that will fuel the global debate about the role and ethics of the social media giant.

The Guardian has seen more than 100 internal training manuals, spreadsheets and flowcharts that give unprecedented insight into the blueprints Facebook has used to moderate issues such as violence, hate speech, terrorism, pornography, racism and self-harm.

There are even guidelines on match-fixing and cannibalism.

The Facebook Files give the first view of the codes and rules formulated by the site, which is under huge political pressure in Europe and the US.

They illustrate difficulties faced by executives scrabbling to react to new challenges such as "revenge porn" - and the challenges for moderators, who say they are overwhelmed by the volume of work, which means they often have "just 10 seconds" to make a decision.

"Facebook cannot keep control of its content," said one source. "It has grown too big, too quickly."

Many moderators are said to have concerns about the inconsistency and peculiar nature of some of the policies. Those on sexual content, for example, are said to be the most complex and confusing.

One document says Facebook reviews more than 6.5m reports a week relating to potentially fake accounts - known as FNRP (fake, not real person).

Using thousands of slides and pictures, Facebook sets out guidelines that may worry critics who say the service is now a publisher and must do more to remove hateful, hurtful and violent content.

Yet these blueprints may also alarm free speech advocates concerned about Facebook's de facto role as the world's largest censor. Both sides are likely to demand greater transparency.

The Guardian has seen documents supplied to Facebook moderators within the last year. The files tell them:

Remarks such as "Someone shoot Trump" should be deleted, because as a head of state he is in a protected category. But it can be permissible to say: "To snap a bitch's neck, make sure to apply all your pressure to the middle of her throat", or "fuck off and die" because they are not regarded as credible threats.

Videos of violent deaths, while marked as disturbing, do not always have to be deleted because they can help create awareness of issues such as mental illness.

Some photos of non-sexual physical abuse and bullying of children do not have to be deleted or "actioned" unless there is a sadistic or celebratory element.

Photos of animal abuse can be shared, with only extremely upsetting imagery to be marked as "disturbing".

All "handmade" art showing nudity and sexual activity is allowed but digitally made art showing sexual activity is not.

Videos of abortions are allowed, as long as there is no nudity.

Facebook will allow people to livestream attempts to self-harm because it "doesn't want to censor or punish people in distress".

Anyone with more than 100,000 followers on a social media platform is designated as a public figure - which denies them the full protections given to private individuals.

Other types of remarks that can be permitted by the documents include: "Little girl needs to keep to herself before daddy breaks her face," and "I hope someone kills you." The threats are regarded as either generic or not credible.

In one of the leaked documents, Facebook acknowledges "people use violent language to express frustration online" and feel "safe to do so" on the site.

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Facebook's policy on threats of violence. A tick means something can stay on the site; a cross means it should be deleted. Photograph: Guardian

It says: "They feel that the issue won't come back to them and they feel indifferent towards the person they are making the threats about because of the lack of empathy created by communication via devices as opposed to face to face.

"We should say that violent language is most often not credible until specificity of language gives us a reasonable ground to accept that there is no longer simply an expression of emotion but a transition to a plot or design. From this perspective language such as 'I'm going to kill you' or 'Fuck off and die' is not credible and is a violent expression of dislike and frustration."

It adds: "People commonly express disdain or disagreement by threatening or calling for violence in generally facetious and unserious ways."

Facebook conceded that "not all disagreeable or disturbing content violates our community standards".

Monika Bickert, ‎Facebook's head of global policy management, said the service had almost 2 billion users and that it was difficult to reach a consensus on what to allow.

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A Facebook slide on threats of violence. The ticks mean these statements need not be deleted. Photograph: Guardian

"We have a really diverse global community and people are going to have very different ideas about what is OK to share. No matter where you draw the line there are always going to be some grey areas. For instance, the line between satire and humour and inappropriate content is sometimes very grey. It is very difficult to decide whether some things belong on the site or not," she said.

"We feel responsible to our community to keep them safe and we feel very accountable. It's absolutely our responsibility to keep on top of it. It's a company commitment. We will continue to invest in proactively keeping the site safe, but we also want to empower people to report to us any content that breaches our standards."

She said some offensive comments may violate Facebook policies in some contexts, but not in others.

Facebook's leaked policies on subjects including violent death, images of non-sexual physical child abuse and animal cruelty show how the site tries to navigate a minefield.

The files say: "Videos of violent deaths are disturbing but can help create awareness. For videos, we think minors need protection and adults need a choice. We mark as 'disturbing' videos of the violent deaths of humans."

Such footage should be "hidden from minors" but not automatically deleted because it can "be valuable in creating awareness for self-harm afflictions and mental illness or war crimes and other important issues".

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A slide on animal cruelty. Photograph: Guardian

Regarding non-sexual child abuse, Facebook says: "We do not action photos of child abuse. We mark as disturbing videos of child abuse. We remove imagery of child abuse if shared with sadism and celebration."

One slide explains Facebook does not automatically delete evidence of non-sexual child abuse to allow the material to be shared so "the child [can] be identified and rescued, but we add protections to shield the audience". This might be a warning on the video that the content is disturbing.

Facebook confirmed there are "some situations where we do allow images of non-sexual abuse of a child for the purpose of helping the child".

Its policies on animal abuse are also explained, with one slide saying: "We allow photos and videos documenting animal abuse for awareness, but may add viewer protections to some content that is perceived as extremely disturbing by the audience.

"Generally, imagery of animal abuse can be shared on the site. Some extremely disturbing imagery may be marked as disturbing."

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The documents include guidance on non-sexual child abuse. Composite: alamy

Photos of animal mutilation, including those showing torture, can be marked as disturbing rather than deleted. Moderators can also leave photos of abuse where a human kicks or beats an animal.

Facebook said: "We allow people to share images of animal abuse to raise awareness and condemn the abuse but remove content that celebrates cruelty against animals."

The files show Facebook has issued new guidelines on nudity after last year's outcry when it removed an iconic Vietnam war photo because the girl in the picture was naked.

It now allows for "newsworthy exceptions" under its "terror of war" guidelines but draws the line at images of "child nudity in the context of the Holocaust".

Facebook told the Guardian it was using software to intercept some graphic content before it got on the site, but that "we want people to be able to discuss global and current events ... so the context in which a violent image is shared sometimes matters".

Some critics in the US and Europe have demanded that the company be regulated in the same way as mainstream broadcasters and publishers.

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A Facebook slide on its Holocaust policy. Photograph: Guardian

But Bickert said Facebook was "a new kind of company. It's not a traditional technology company. It's not a traditional media company. We build technology, and we feel responsible for how it's used. We don't write the news that people read on the platform."

A report by British MPs published on 1 May said "the biggest and richest social media companies are shamefully far from taking sufficient action to tackle illegal or dangerous content, to implement proper community standards or to keep their users safe".

Sarah T Roberts, an expert on content moderation, said: "It's one thing when you're a small online community with a group of people who share principles and values, but when you have a large percentage of the world's population and say 'share yourself', you are going to be in quite a muddle.

"Then when you monetise that practice you are entering a disaster situation."

Facebook has consistently struggled to assess the news or "awareness" value of violent imagery. While the company recently faced harsh criticism for failing to remove videos of Robert Godwin being killed in the US and of a father killing his child in Thailand, the platform has also played an important role in disseminating videos of police killings and other government abuses.

In 2016, Facebook removed a video showing the immediate aftermath of the fatal police shooting of Philando Castile but subsequently reinstated the footage, saying the deletion was a "mistake".

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Revealed: Facebook's internal rulebook on sex, terrorism and violence

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Facebook's secret rules and guidelines for deciding what its 2 billion users can post on the site are revealed for the first time in a Guardian investigation that will fuel the global debate about the role and ethics of the social media giant.

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Let us have a look at the issues concerning how social media websites are attempting to control or censor Fake News on their websites.

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Let us have a look at the issues concerning how social media websites are attempting to control or censor Fake News on their websites.

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The right has power on social media and the left wants to silence them.

44% of American adults get their news from Facebook according to a Pew Research study.

"Two-thirds of Facebook users access news on the social platform, and with 67 percent of U.S. adults active on Facebook, that translates to 44 percent of the overall U.S. population which accesses news on the social platform, the study said." It goes on to further state that "A 2013 Pew report found that 47 percent of Facebook users went there for news. Today, 66 percent of Facebook users get news there, the study found."

That jump from 2013 is huge. Just to show how much power Facebook has, there are currently 1.94 billion users on Facebook as of the first quarter in 2017. These studies can only gauge those 18 years or older. Imagine what it would say if you added those under the age of 18 and where they get their news from?
I wanted to give some numbers for how many get their news from Facebook and the amount of users it has. I feel it is important for the content I will be talking about.
Facebook is claiming they will be a hostile environment for terrorists. Were they not doing this already? Oh, right, they were too busy going after conservatives. This article states that they will ramp up efforts in removing content aimed at supporting terrorism and incidents involving harm. The ironic part about this is that Facebook hired Filipinos for £1.81/hr to filter through the content and remove it. Except they have a quota system and if it's not met, they will be fired. How much do you want to bet these same individuals may be used to further censor conservative views seeing as how we have a good history of the site already doing this?

What's that? You can't find anything else and you have not met your daily quota? Just visit a random conservative page and begin the removal process!

Theresa May, Britain's Prime Minister, is calling for international communication companies to do more to combat "extremist groups."

May called on international communications companies to do more to block cyberspace to extremist groups who use it for recruitment and for encrypted information about plots. She called for international agreements to regulate cyberspace and said Britain needs to become more robust at preventing the internet from being used to the advantage of extremist groups.

The British government has long sought more help from internet companies like Facebook and Google in the battle against extremism.

She doesn't say Islamic terrorism, she says extremist groups. Are you a conservative? Well, you should be worried. We've been called Nazi sympathisers, bigots, Islamophobic, racists, you name it. Seeing as how being a conservative and even a libertarian to some extent can be considered taboo, would it be farfetched to think we might be targeted and censored online? Not really.

We now have Zuckerberg vowing to combat fake news but refuses to be transparent in how they remove it. This article showcases where Zuckerberg stands on being transparent and those who control the company along with himself are not having it.

Some shareholders called for Facebook to produce an annual report detailing what it has been doing to thwart fake news; however, the idea was put to a vote that did not pass.

It also goes on to say:

Facebook has also tweaked its algorithm to better understand if a story is disputed, weighting it less in a user's News Feed. The company has also started working with third-party fact checking organizations to help label stories if they are disputed.

In this Gizmodo article, it points out that Facebook was artificially delisting conservative news while propping up more liberal stories. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out their motive here. Why else would they not want to be transparent in how they deal with fake news? Because it would show them removing conservative viewpoints.

One of the examples of censorship I want to use is Steven Crowder of Louder with Crowder on CTRV. Facebook was censoring Crowder's posts on Facebook and had a plethora of billing "issues" and no one from Facebook could explain why. This video from him does an excellent job at explaining the request of information lawsuit over the blatant censorship. Go watch if you have 20 minutes.

What brings this full circle is the article from Gizmodo where former employees admitted to censoring conservative views. In that article, it states conservative trending stories were being delisted and other stories were being artificially injected into trending news. Twitter has done this for a while where they mark information as "sensitive" and suspend and ban conservative accounts. You talk about a certain subject and if you fit the demographic, you're going to be silently removed.

It's not a shocker when the overwhelming majority of those in Silicon Valley supported Clinton and other democrats. I wish I was kidding but I'm not. These tech companies are not fond of conservatives and have never been.

In this day and age, social media companies will do whatever they can to silence us. They're already doing it but now it will be done under the guise of "you're advocating fake news" or "you align with someone who's considered to be an extremist." All they have to do is say: "You're wrong, Snopes says so and we are removing your content and banning you from our platform."

There are other instances of this continuing to happen across all other social media platforms. The good thing for us is that this isn't the 1930's and we won't be silenced. With outlets like Gizmodo and individuals like Crowder doing their part in making sure to expose what sites like Facebook is doing, we will remain strong. We have many avenues to get our message out and it is impossible to stop us.
If you liked this article, please give a like and share.

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Facebook Refuses To Be Transparent In Combating Fake News - Conservative Censorship At Work

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44% of American adults get their news from Facebook according to a Pew Research study. "Two-thirds of Facebook users access news on the social platform, and with 67 percent of U.S. adults active on Facebook, that translates to 44 percent of the overall U.S. population which accesses news on the social platform, the study said."

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Here is a website produced by the EU, (allegedly :) ) concerning misinformation and Fake News from Russia. What do you think?

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Here is a website produced by the EU, (allegedly :) ) concerning misinformation and Fake News from Russia. What do you think?

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The Independent - which from it's name might suggest that it is an independent voice has produced an interesting website exploring President Trump and Fake News

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The Independent - which from it's name might suggest that it is an independent voice has produced an interesting website exploring President Trump and Fake News

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All the latest breaking news on fake news. Browse The Independent's complete collection of articles and commentary on fake news.

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Here is some interesting information concerning Al Jezeera

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Here is some interesting information concerning Al Jezeera

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There is no doubt that fake news has become one of the key terms of 2017, brought into the spotlight after the US presidential election last November.

It was soon clear thousands of people were unintentionally sharing articles full of misinformation.

The resulting paranoia led people to accuse once trusted sources, including The New York Times, of carrying fake news. And social media is a core part of the problem.

Facebook is trying to do something about that. It is testing a new feature called the "i" button. When clicked, it gives the reader more information about the article they are reading.

The idea is to give people context about their news sources, so they can decide if articles are from publishers they trust, and if the stories themselves are credible.

But Facebook admits it is not always easy to flush out fiction from fact.

So, how do we deal with this modern-day reality? And where does it leave social media?

Presenter: Adrian Finighan
Guests:
Alastair Reid - social media journalist

Sebastian Moss - technology reporter for Datacenter Dynamics

Tom Law - Director of Campaigns and Communications, The Ethical Journalism Network

Source: Al Jazeera News

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Can fake news on social media be stopped?

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There is no doubt that fake news has become one of the key terms of 2017, brought into the spotlight after the US presidential election last November. It was soon clear thousands of people were unintentionally sharing articles full of misinformation.

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What is fake news? How to spot it and what you can do to stop it

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‘Fake news’ has rapidly become a catch-all term to discredit all kinds of stories. We need to be smarter at recognising and combating outright fabrication