Facebook Uses Wikipedia to Call Conservative News ‘Harmful’

[Poetlister]

Following the Youtube controversy, we have ...

Facebook is launching new tools to help users better assess news sources — by using the crowdsourced Wikipedia. On Tuesday, April 3, Facebook began rolling out new “About This Article” tools in the U.S. after launching tests last year.

Digital Trends

[JCM]

This will almost certainly increase the frequency of POV pushing vandalization of many many articles, and probably ridiculously overburden the few editors working on them. I honestly think that this might do wikipedia a hell of a lot more damage than it will help Facebook, so it might make sense for Facebook to put up a fair amount of money to the WMF to pay for all the content damage this might do.

[Poetlister]

This will almost certainly increase the frequency of POV pushing vandalization of many many articles, and probably ridiculously overburden the few editors working on them. I honestly think that this might do wikipedia a hell of a lot more damage than it will help Facebook, so it might make sense for Facebook to put up a fair amount of money to the WMF to pay for all the content damage this might do.

So Wikipedia is damaged, unpaid editors have more work to do and the WMF has more money. That doesn't seem like a good solution.

[Johnny Au]

Facebook could offer a bounty approved by the WMF.

[Poetlister]

Facebook could offer a bounty approved by the WMF.

That might lead to a controversy about paid editing.

[Poetlister]

"Morning Mediawire: YouTube, Facebook lean on Wikipedia, but is it too much?"

.Poynter

[Poetlister]

Over the summer, someone vandalized the Wikipedia page for the California Republican Party to say that it supported Nazism. While most cases of Wikipedia vandalism are caught fairly quickly, this incident case made its way to Google, which surfaced the false edit high up in search results.

That’s rare. But given the volume of edits that are made to Wikipedia each day, it can be hard for tech platforms to catch all instances of vandalism.

“Of course it is a pretty weak way to combat fake news because Wikipedia is not a reliable source of information — as even Wikipedia acknowledges,” Magnus Pharao Hansen, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen, told Poynter in June. “Wikipedia is very vulnerable to hoaxes and contains all kinds of misinformation, so it is not a very serious way to combat the problem of fabricated news.”

Poynter.org

[Poetlister]

Facebook is subtly trying to discredit conservative media as “conspiracy theories” and it’s using Wikipedia to do it. The company’s latest policy update, “Expanding Our Fact-Checking Program,” included new details on how the platform planned to combat “misinformation.”

newsbusters.org

This is ridiculous. When did say Voice of Europe or Breitbart ever peddle conspiracy theories?

[Beeblebrox]

Wow, what a sterling example of unbiased and even handed reporting you've found...

I mean, the alt-right trolls will eat this up as it fits with their narrative, but this is some really shoddy "journalism".