Facebook threatens to demonetize site over obviously satirical article.

M

Max E.

This is the problem with having left wing fact checkers in charge of monitoring facebook, its already being weaponised to shut down sites they dont like.

Snopes Has to Hilariously Fact-Check Story Accusing CNN of Buying a Washing Machine to ‘Spin News’

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That bastion of reputable journalism, The Babylon Bee, recently ran a story alleging that CNN bigwigs bought a giant washing machine to help “spin the news” before publication.

Here is a quote, for your perusal.

“In order to aid the news station in preparing stories for consumption, popular news media organization CNN purchased an industrial-sized washing machine to help its journalists and news anchors spin the news before publication,” the publication wrote.

“The custom-made device allows CNN reporters to load just the facts of a given issue, turn a dial to ‘spin cycle,’ and within five minutes, receive a nearly unrecognizable version of the story that’s been spun to fit with the news station’s agenda.”

The story is obviously an attempt at Onion-like satire but, allegedly, many people took it as fact, forcing Snopes to issue an actual correction,in which they noted the column as false and indicated that, no, CNN does not use an “industrial-sized” washing machine to spin the news.

“Although it should have been obvious that the Babylon Bee piece was just a spoof of the ongoing political brouhaha over alleged news media ‘bias’ and ‘fake news,’ some readers missed that aspect of the article and interpreted it literally,” they wrote.

Well, that’s settled! Now what about the rumor that MSNBC employees cook up Russia conspiracies in a pizza oven?

https://www.mediaite.com/tv/snopes-...cnn-of-buying-a-washing-machine-to-spin-news/
 
Oh yeah heres the part of facebook threatening them, which didnt show up on the liberal news sites.

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(Image via Babylon Bee)
See below for an update.

Christian satire site The Babylon Bee received a terse warning from Facebook this week after the "independent fact-checkers" at Snopes reported that one of the site's humor articles was "false."

Adam Ford, who runs The Babylon Bee, was warned by Facebook that a recent satire article about CNN "contains information disputed by (Snopes.com) an independent fact checker." Repeat offenders, Ford was told, "will see their distribution reduced and their ability to monetize and advertized [sic] removed."

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The story in question pokes fun at CNN with the headline: "CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine To Spin News Before Publication." Anyone with even a sliver of a funny bone tucked away behind their appendix would know that it wasn't a serious news piece, but, alas, the humorless dolts at Snopes had to spell out the obvious.





Claim: CNN invested in an industrial-sized washing machine to help their journalists and news anchors spin the news before publication.


Rating: False



"Although it should have been obvious that the Babylon Bee piece was just a spoof of the ongoing political brouhaha over alleged news media 'bias' and 'fake news,'" Snopes explained, "some readers missed that aspect of the article and interpreted it literally."







'The Babylon Bee' Founder Wants to Change the Way You Get Your News






Is that so? Are we to believe there are people who really accepted at face value the claim that CNN bought a literal washing machine to literally "spin" their news? Highly doubtful. What more likely happened is that some trigger-happy activists who don't appreciate Christian and conservative satire reported The Babylon Bee to Facebook, setting off an investigation by Snopes.

Snopes conceded that "the site’s footer gives away the Babylon Bee’s nature by describing it as 'Your Trusted Source For Christian News Satire,'" and explained that the site "has been responsible for a number of other (usually religious-themed) spoofs that have been mistaken for real news articles."

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Babylon Bee's Adam Ford told PJM that this isn't the first time Babylon Bee has been "fact-checked" by Snopes. (You can read the other instances here.) "But this is the first time Facebook has used that to threaten us with reduced reach and demonetization," Ford said. "Also it seems that anyone who clicked on the article got a notice that it was 'disputed.'"



14h
Adam Ford@Adam4d
Really, Facebook?? pic.twitter.com/HEtBc7C0Gz

https://twitter.com/Nate0fAmericans/status/969409288404905984
Nathan Hall@Nate0fAmericans

I find this so funny. pic.twitter.com/lfDBj4OVW7

10:09 PM - Mar 1, 2018

Twitter Ads info and privacy










14h
Adam Ford@Adam4d
Really, Facebook?? pic.twitter.com/HEtBc7C0Gz

https://twitter.com/MrB_Loves_Jesus/status/969425733100720128
Roger for Christ@MrB_Loves_Jesus

So I clicked on the headline and Facebook gave me this.
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pic.twitter.com/793CqTRwdB

11:14 PM - Mar 1, 2018

Twitter Ads info and privacy








He said they also reduced the image size on the Facebook card after it was flagged, which "probably stamped out the reach" of the article.

While on the surface this may seem like nothing more than a silly misunderstanding or overreaction on the part of Snopes and Facebook, it's important to view the warning in the context of conservative groups and individuals being removed from Facebook and other social media outlets at an alarming rate. Facebook claims that they're in the process of hiring thousands of fact-checkers along with "professional" fact-checking organizations that oh, by the way, happen to lean left.



This past December PolitiFact discussed its partnership with Facebook and explained how it works. "Our partnership with Facebook is part of a push by the social media company to clean up its news feed and become a more trustworthy platform," PolitiFact's Aaron Sharackman wrote. "Facebook introduced a new tool after the 2016 campaign that allows users to mark a post as a 'false news story,' and if enough do, the post is sent to fact-checkers like PolitiFact, Snopes and Factcheck.org."

Sharackman continued:



If the fact-checkers find the story to be "false," a warning label is attached to the original post in Facebook’s news feed, and Facebook’s algorithm makes it more difficult for the disputed post to spread virally.


PolitiFact has been doing that work for a year now, and we have attached that false label to at least 1,722 individual URLs. That’s nearly five articles debunked a day, every day for a year.



Factcheck.org, PolitiFact, and Snopes all have reputations for being biased in favor of liberals, so it's no wonder Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, a flaming liberal himself, is relying heavily on these organizations to be arbiters of truth in the Facebook universe. The company that utterly failed at keeping Russian bots from interfering in the 2016 election now has apparently set its sights on conservative websites.



***



UPDATE: March 2, 11:47 p.m. EST: The Daily Caller is reporting that Facebook has apologized, claiming the whole thing was a "mistake."

“There’s a difference between false news and satire,” Facebook told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “This was a mistake and should not have been rated false in our system. It’s since been corrected and won’t count against the domain in any way.”
 
Like the IRS with the Tea Party targeting scandal, it's always conservative or right wing groups that are penalized. So the argument that this was just an innocent mistake, again, is beginning to wear thin. Extremely thin. There are loads of examples of vile hate speech from the left, islamists, et al on social media that are never censored. Now even satirical conservative articles are.

What we have here is far left silicon valley monopolists who apparently answer to no one controlling what speech is allowed into the public square. They might as well be setting up physical road blocks, but they have antifa to do that. They "partner" with other far left groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, a notorious leftwing hate factory, and the liberal journalists at Politifact to project an aura of objectivity, but they are best judged on their results. Those results clearly show that one side of the political spectrum is being targeted.

Some principled conservatives and libertarians will shrug and say they are private businesses and can do what they want. After all, the TV networks and major print media are also laughably biased, so what's the big deal?

The big deal is they are censoring other people's speech. The First Amendment limits what government can do in censoring speech itself. What we have now is that censorship function has been delegated to private monopolists. As with the immigration debate and IRS scandal, both political parties are not all that upset with the situation, because the kinds of insurgent voices that are being censored are ones they want silenced.

The solution to this is obvious. We need laws that treat social media companies, at least those having monopoly power, as public utilities. That means they have to serve all comers. They should no more have the right to block legal content any more than the electric company can cut off your service because they disagree with your views.
 
AAAintheBeltway said:
Like the IRS with the Tea Party targeting scandal, it's always conservative or right wing groups that are penalized. So the argument that this was just an innocent mistake, again, is beginning to wear thin. Extremely thin. There are loads of examples of vile hate speech from the left, islamists, et al on social media that are never censored. Now even satirical conservative articles are.

What we have here is far left silicon valley monopolists who apparently answer to no one controlling what speech is allowed into the public square. They might as well be setting up physical road blocks, but they have antifa to do that. They "partner" with other far left groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, a notorious leftwing hate factory, and the liberal journalists at Politifact to project an aura of objectivity, but they are best judged on their results. Those results clearly show that one side of the political spectrum is being targeted.

Some principled conservatives and libertarians will shrug and say they are private businesses and can do what they want. After all, the TV networks and major print media are also laughably biased, so what's the big deal?

The big deal is they are censoring other people's speech. The First Amendment limits what government can do in censoring speech itself. What we have now is that censorship function has been delegated to private monopolists. As with the immigration debate and IRS scandal, both political parties are not all that upset with the situation, because the kinds of insurgent voices that are being censored are ones they want silenced.

The solution to this is obvious. We need laws that treat social media companies, at least those having monopoly power, as public utilities. That means they have to serve all comers. They should no more have the right to block legal content any more than the electric company can cut off your service because they disagree with your views.
More...


Uh, I don't know about treating social media companies like public utilities. They don't provide a necessity that needs to be regulated (power, water, etc). They're more akin to media companies, which aren't regulated at all.
 
AAAintheBeltway said:
Like the IRS with the Tea Party targeting scandal, it's always conservative or right wing groups that are penalized. So the argument that this was just an innocent mistake, again, is beginning to wear thin. Extremely thin. There are loads of examples of vile hate speech from the left, islamists, et al on social media that are never censored. Now even satirical conservative articles are.

What we have here is far left silicon valley monopolists who apparently answer to no one controlling what speech is allowed into the public square. They might as well be setting up physical road blocks, but they have antifa to do that. They "partner" with other far left groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, a notorious leftwing hate factory, and the liberal journalists at Politifact to project an aura of objectivity, but they are best judged on their results. Those results clearly show that one side of the political spectrum is being targeted.

Some principled conservatives and libertarians will shrug and say they are private businesses and can do what they want. After all, the TV networks and major print media are also laughably biased, so what's the big deal?

The big deal is they are censoring other people's speech. The First Amendment limits what government can do in censoring speech itself. What we have now is that censorship function has been delegated to private monopolists. As with the immigration debate and IRS scandal, both political parties are not all that upset with the situation, because the kinds of insurgent voices that are being censored are ones they want silenced.

The solution to this is obvious. We need laws that treat social media companies, at least those having monopoly power, as public utilities. That means they have to serve all comers. They should no more have the right to block legal content any more than the electric company can cut off your service because they disagree with your views.
More...

The solution is to put a label on satire. If Facebook is going to be consistent they have address all of these articles, including the obvious ones. I would do the same thing. Associating their brand with corruption and deception is not a good long term business strategy.
 
They can always take their business elsewhere.

One of the reasons I never buy Apple products are their Nazi like restrictions
 
as I said a week or two ago. Breitbart or Bannon need to make a search engine without bias.

If the searches were good they would be killing it.
 
Tsing Tao said:
Uh, I don't know about treating social media companies like public utilities. They don't provide a necessity that needs to be regulated (power, water, etc). They're more akin to media companies, which aren't regulated at all.
More...

I expected that would be your reaction. You're a principled libertarian and I get that. The fact is though, these social media companies have been given legal protection through a federal law that limits their exposure to libel claims. It was an oversight not to require them to be politically even-handed. Now that they are obviously weaponizing their platforms, it is past time to correct that oversight.

Or we can wring our hands about how unfair it is. Kind of like people who wanted to hear conservative speakers at Berkeley or other university campuses. That's been the problem for Conservatism Inc for decades. They win the intellectual argument but lose the actual battle.

We really don't have a whole lot of ground left to lose. They control the media, the universities, all levels of government bureaucracy, the professions, the entertainment industry and increasingly, big business. Either we fight back or we learn to live like we are students at Berkeley, ie afraid to voice a dissenting opinion and always in fear of Big Brother.
 
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