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Facebook tests explaining media sources

Facebook tests explaining media sources

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Facebook news source button
Image: Facebook

For its latest attempt to cut down on the sharing of propaganda and made-up stories, Facebook is testing a new button that will pull up more information about a story’s publisher and some context on the article. In an example, Facebook showed how tapping the button — which appears as a small “i” — on an Associated Press story about the recent eclipse will pull up a card explaining what The Associated Press is, related stories about the eclipse, and a heat map of where in the world the article is being shared and who else you know who’s shared it.

It all sounds ever-so-slightly useful, but mostly like more of the same. Facebook already pops out a box of related links when you click on a story, so all this is adding is the share map and the explanation of the publisher. The share map seems like it could be interesting from a curiosity perspective, though it won’t tell you if a source is legitimate — just whether a news story is appealing to people in the area the story is about or somewhere else.

Mostly, this seems like a really bland attempt to solve the “fake news” problem by telling people whether they’re reading from a reliable source, like the AP. But the problem isn’t that people don’t know whether the source they’re reading is reliable or not; the problem is that people don’t care. The US president regularly disparages some of his country’s most respected news institutions for no reason at all, or sometimes just for reporting things he’s actually literally said on tape. His supporters are encouraged to only believe sources that support their existing viewpoints or the viewpoints of the president. So where a story comes from doesn’t matter; it just matters what a story is saying.

Facebook thinks that this feature might be able to tip people off to when they’re reading from an unreliable source nonetheless. It gave an example of a UFO story — to be clear: actual fake news — where tapping the “i” button would bring up a card saying that there is “no information on this website,” indicating that it might be unreliable. (Facebook sources information from its own pages and from Wikipedia, so a newly created site is unclearly to return results.) There’s also a little warning icon with an exclamation point. It’s the kind of thing that might be helpful if it were displayed on the actual story, but it’s hard to imagine tons of people tapping a tiny little “i” to investigate.

The button is just a test for now, so it’s not appearing for everyone. Facebook also says that “this is just the beginning of the test,” which seems to imply that it plans to expand the kind of information that’ll pop up when you hit the little button. I think it would also help if Facebook refocused its product on being a network for people to tell their friends about moments from their lives, instead of an endless jumble of links in identical boxes.