However, these extensions are still in their early stages and already social media platforms are blocking them. Is this about minding the slippery slope between information accountability and censorship, or is this about ad revenue? Regardless, we all have the ability to fact and source-check on our own, with or without a plug-in.
Facebook has blocked a new fake news-labeling extension. It’s called “BS Detector” created by activist and independent journalist Daniel Sieradski. The BS Detector was thrown together by Sieradski as proof-of-concept.
The BS Detector labeled news sources detected by the extension as either fake news, extreme political bias, conspiracy theory, rumor mill, satire, junk science, hate group, or news from outlets in repressive states.
This is not the only BS Detector-style extension out there, thrown together in a matter of hours. In fact, in London the Trust Project, which is an organization built to re-establish trust between the public and mainstream media – teamed up with the BBC and organizes a hackathon in which many extensions were developed by the Mirror Group, La Stampa, Washington Post and BuzzFeed, BBC News Labs, and The Guardian that source-checked, fact-checked, offered articles on the same topic from opposing viewpoint, and allowed users to learn about the author of the news story in question. Four students at Princeton University also threw together an extension similar to the BS Detector in short order as well.
Some problems that stirred outrage were that the news sources that were labeled as some species of BS by this extension were not vetted. Also, this extension designed to work with Facebook and Twitter as reported to break some sites and slow Facebook down considerably. Recently, the proof-of-concept extension was released, Sieradski disabled its functionality on all sites except Facebook, which promptly blocked it.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook claimed that that Facebook does not want to suppress or censor, so as policy the company errs on the side of letting users share whatever they want to share, whenever they want to share it. However, ad revenue is tied up in this decision to err on the side of “freedom of speech” for this particular issue. More sharing means more ad revenue, regardless of how reliable or unbiased the content is.
However, by the time it was disabled, it had already been downloaded 27,558 times.
The reviews from users were all across the board. Some held the extension in contempt, feeling that it patronizingly acted to keep perfectly capable adults from being exposed to satire and offensive viewpoints. These reviews also indicated outrage at the idea they couldn’t suss out a fake story for themselves. On the other end, many users reported that the extension accurately identified extreme political bias, rumor mill, fake news and so forth. However, they wanted more transparency as to how the extension determines whether a site is reliable or not.
In an interview with Motherboard’s Vice, Sieradski commented on the subject of the process of determining the reliability of a news source:
“The list of domains has been compiled from various sources around the web. Right now, I and the community of open source contributors to this project are working through the list, classifying sites, removing sites that don’t belong, and adding ones that do. Of course, while this process is open, this isn’t the best methodology and so at this time I am reaching out to media watchdog groups that have more concrete methodologies and research to back up their classifications in hopes that we can partner.”
Of course, we can expect backlash. Remember adblocker? Remember the adblocker blockers? No doubt at least some of the media sources these extensions call BS on have access to counterattack development.
What is the solution?
Do what these extensions do for you. Investigate your news sources, investigate the authors of the articles you read that are presented as news. Read opposing viewpoints on the same topic. Fact-check instead of just assuming that something presented as news is true. Strengthen your research skills and you’ll find that your internal BS Detector gets the job done.