Does Facebooks new attempt to distinguish good news sites from bad ones work? Is it fair to all sides? If a new
study by two Yale professors has it right then the answers are no and no.
The study claims to mimic Facebooks crowd sourcing" readers to find the most trustworthy news sites. It asked participants whether theyre familiar with a site then whether they trust that site. It then compared the results to a list of mainstream media" hyper-partisan" and fake news" sites to judge at how well readers could tell the difference.
Hyper-Partisan Vs. Fake
The authors explain that hyper-partisan sites do generally report true events (albeit in a biased or deceptive way) whereas fake news sites typically fabricate content entirely." They dont think crowd-sourcing will help Facebook distinguish them from each other. They defined sites as fake partly on how often
Snopes dealt with them.
Read the rest of the article at The Stream
