Fake news is a pendulum. Now we have it, we start to know what it is, we start to understand how it's created and distributed. Things can start swinging the other way. But this takes time.
If you really wanted to end fake news and had unlimited time and money, a great way to do it would be to publish as much completely fake news as possible, so that people figure out that they need to use reputable, trusted sources, or end up a fool. Out of money, out of time, and that what they believed after learning about it on a Facebook group or reddit was wrong. People learn from painful experiences the most, unfortunately. So some people have learned from Trump getting elected. Others haven't learned, some probably won't. It's very easy to be fooled.
If you think of fake news like a virus, then publishing more fake news acts kind of like an anti-virus. Distributing a version of the problem that is easier for the immune system to detect and combat and won't kill anyone - to inoculate against the real thing.
Painful experiences that are the direct result of believing fake news simply gets misattributed to something totally irrelevant after consuming more fake news. People don't like admitting that they're gullible.
Pretty sure the idea is not to be Netflix and offer a family plan, it's to sell a suite of features into small businesses and corporations. E.g. They just acquired HelloSign.
You should move to iCloud if you absolutely want those features unless they say they're building them or you anticipate some form of auto-tagging and face recognition being useful for professional/business users.
So, what's the normative suggestion here? All content on user-generated websites should be moderated for truth and anything edited, editorialized, fictional, or not strictly representing reality should be removed?
Or is the idea that only when there is enough public pressure to take down a particularly popular and deceptive video ... then it should be removed?
It seems sort of ridiculous that we should engage in across-the-board censorship of anything mis-representing reality in any way. OTOH removing things only as they become popular enough to go viral and meet some agreed upon definition of "fake" enough seems like it would establish a permanent, weird shouting match with no clear rules.
Or is the idea that we should ban and penalize Facebook specifically? Because they're Facebook. I don't really get that, but okay. We could do that. I don't think it would solve the user-generated content problem or the fake news problem.
We could not allow any website with posts, images and comments that isn't filtered through a some sort of sacred guardian of truth/editorial board. That sounds like a pretty locked-down version internet.
As some other commenters mentioned, the fact that the President/right-wing seem into this sort of approach and that this video became popular in the first place is a separate, sad issue.
I'd love for the NYTimes to spell out what they're advocating FOR as the solution. If it's just "delete facebook" and read our comments section instead, well-played I guess.
Maybe there should be a threshold such that things seen by a million or more people could could be flagged for a moderator to take note of and tag with certain contextual clues for the next however many viewers (“satire”, “unproven”, “doctored”, “verified”, “trustworthy source”).
Good read. I'm glad people are working on these challenges. Facebook gets the most press coverage and is the biggest platform, but if free expression and assembly is to occur online you kinda have to figure out approaches for these kinds of problems.
Not that it'd be easy but I imagine that you can steal their customers by adding chat rooms and integrations slowly to some other type of software, rather than a more direct angle where you have to win at one of those two moments.
The company I worked at previously tried to force MS Teams on everyone. Problem was that most developers there ran Linux and the client was far inferior to Slack on that platform. Unsurprisingly very few developers used Teams and it failed horribly as a decent communication replacement. It became yet another communication channel devs may, or may not, respond in. End result: email still reigns supreme, complemented by xmpp for the non-devs with the technical know how to understand how to connect to the internally hosted server.
So my view is that until Microsoft get their act together, Teams is not a serious contender to Slack. Companies can get it
"free" together with their Office subscription, but most developers won't use it until it works decently on their development platform of choice.
That's the discussion we're actively having now. My only concern is how to move the knowledge and context that's currently in Slack somewhere else. Also, who knows if Teams will actually catch on - though with Microsoft threatening to get rid of Skype, it'll end up being the more official looking meeting app anyways, so why not bring the rest along?
I’m pretty sure Teams is here to stay. It’s growing. MS is investing a lot of resources and it’s improving rapidly.
But I think your point about MS getting rid of Skype for Business in favor of Teams is the most important one. Once that happens, which MS has stated publicly, Teams will become a necessary app for MS to support, since enterprises won’t tolerate MS not having s chat service in O365.
My employer ran several pilots of alternative chat systems alongside our primary. It sucked. Having both clients open, remembering which rooms are actually in active in which systems, etc. was obnoxious. Might work for a single closed-loop team but even then.
I would be curious to learn/hear some of the backstory on how they picked 3, since where to draw the line with freemium seems like it's hard to get right.
Force nuclear family unit into pricier plan. I know a lot of people that use dropbox for family photos, and after events and gatherings pass links to people to view or add their own photos from these events.
Haha, it is pretty awful, but they seem like they're getting a little traction at least. So, hopefully serves to make it catchy and memorable. It can happen. I remember plenty of people thought "Twitter" and "tweets" were dumb names too.
If you really wanted to end fake news and had unlimited time and money, a great way to do it would be to publish as much completely fake news as possible, so that people figure out that they need to use reputable, trusted sources, or end up a fool. Out of money, out of time, and that what they believed after learning about it on a Facebook group or reddit was wrong. People learn from painful experiences the most, unfortunately. So some people have learned from Trump getting elected. Others haven't learned, some probably won't. It's very easy to be fooled.
If you think of fake news like a virus, then publishing more fake news acts kind of like an anti-virus. Distributing a version of the problem that is easier for the immune system to detect and combat and won't kill anyone - to inoculate against the real thing.
Bill Gates is right. He's just early.