less of a nuisance for you personally, but it's still important to keep information known to be fake off the board.

So I hope we can have that small change in the TOS, ideally in the section I quoted.

Again, just falling for a deepfake or fake quote or fake news shouldn't violate the TOS, ever. Especially with AI making fakes more convincing. It's reluctance to correct or delete after being shown that something's fake that's a serious problem for the board. Especially since these fakes were created originally elsewhere as clickbait and will often get a lot of views and recs when copied to DU, or anywhere else, from where they started.

I wish the fraudsters who create those fakes in the first place could be banned from the internet, at least temporarily. YouTube is getting flooded with AI deepfakes - of Obama, Jimmy Kimmel, Robert De Niro and other famous people - and it isn't surprising that DUers and others are fooled by them. And the fake quotes, and fake news stories.

So I don't mind seeing it as long as it is labeled appropriately.

If there are specific portions of a post that are false, fake, etc. they should be clearly highlighted - say in red. If it is known, the source of the erroneous information should be stated so that others are made aware of untrustworthy sites and sources. Where ever possible corrections to the misinformation should be inserted.

Simply deleting the post and/or punishing the poster is not the answer. Very often the poster is not aware that their post is not accurate (been there - done that) and chastising them is not productive. Correcting incorrect posts is actually an educational process which can lead to a better understanding of an issue. We should never be censors, but should always strive to be educators.

Also information is power.
We need to know what the enemy is saying and how they are saying it.

Posts here are censored by being removed daily.

I know. It happened to me multiple times prior to Biden dropping out of the race. It has also happened because I have been critical of Democratic "leadership" for failing to understand the gravity of the situation and failing to act upon it. The military warns its members about the dangers of group think. See Battle of the Bulge as a classic example.

I still think that enforcement would be a potential nightmare, at least in terms of writing this into the TOS and making it subject to the Jury system.

I also believe, as Irish_Dem says in this thread, that it is beneficial to see fake information corrected in public.

There may be a way to deal with this which highlights potential misinformation in a way that is consistent with DU's community-based moderating system, but also doesn't ask Jurors to spend their time fact-checking. For example, if we added a rule for "potentially fake information," perhaps instead of sending alerts to a Jury, the system could take note of the number of that type of alert being received on that particular post. If a certain threshold is reached, the post could be automatically labeled as "potentially fake information."

As someone whose job is to consider the downsides of this kind of thing though, I'll also say it might be difficult to calibrate the number of alerts required to trigger the system. Set it too high and it might not be effective enough, but there is probably a lower limit whereby partisan groups could cause mischief when we get to, say, the Democratic primaries which will be kicking off relatively soon. Unlike the regular Jury system, a threshold system would allow people to potentially organize to get real information automatically labeled as suspicious.

So I think there would have to be a manual component where perhaps if the threshold is reached, an alert is sent to someone (Me? Forum Hosts?) for a second look. If the alerts are fair, the "potentially fake information" label could be applied to the post. It could be effective provided that it works to correctly label as much potentially fake information as possible without causing too many false positives. False positives would be a problem because you could end up with too many posts being sent for review. Then there's the issue of how we are defining misinformation/false information/fake content/AI generated content, etc.

That's not to say it couldn't be done -- I'm just thinking aloud really. Bear in mind to pull off something like the above would require a fair amount of time to build out.

Also, spitballing here aka thinking "aloud."

People don't always self correct. Even if they are called out for spreading misinformation. Which is then disinformation because it's the intentional sharing of known misinformation.

Personally, I believe letting it stand without a challenge or disclaimer leads to the degradation of DU content and by extension degrades DU's value and appeal.

But I do get your point and agree. Propaganda is for the Repukes. We don't do that shit.

It would be a significant amount of work to create a new MIRT-type group with different powers to perform this role. If we were going to have new alerts for potentially fake information, I would prefer to either handle them myself or send them to Hosts. Potentially, we could alert all the Hosts of any forum on DU if a post in their forum was alerted for potentially fake information. They could then manually apply a label to the post if they agree. But again, this could only work if we were able to come up with a way to effectively send notifications which really are likely misinformation, without creating a flood of misfires and false positives.

With regard to that point, another problem here is that defining "fake information" might be more difficult than you expect. For example, what about jokes and parody? Does the Onion count? And if jokes are permitted (which I think they should be), where do you draw the line between what is considered a joke and what is considered deliberate misinformation? It can be easy to discuss this stuff in principle, but it gets a lot more difficult when you get down to writing actual rules and providing people with information about what they're supposed to be doing.

The more I think about this, the more I think that there might be a more straightforward solution than building out a bunch of new features to solve the problem. Fake information is becoming more of a problem on DU in the age of AI, but it's certainly not an overwhelming problem yet. So perhaps the solution is to have something more like the copyright alert. Copyright alerts go directly to me, and when I receive one I check out the post and if it is in violation of the copyright guidelines I can hit a link which sends an automatic copyright notification to the poster to let them know about it. After that, it's up to them to deal with it. We could perhaps set up something similar for potentially fake information, possibly in combination with some kind of labeling system that labels a post if I send a notification to the person who posted it.

I am concerned though that putting responsibility for dealing with this in the hands of one person (or a handful of people) is not the right way to deal with this. The reason I currently am happy with people repudiating fake information in replies is because it's fast, and it works. The more replies there are saying "this is fake," the better. Then readers who might have been fooled by the OP can take a second look and understand for themselves why what they're looking at might not be real. I think it better educates people to spot fake content in the long run.

I agree with Irish Dem that there are benefits to discussions about such posts without censoring the OP. Overly zealous monitoring of DU member posts can discourage members from posting in good faith. No one is perfect.

Most of the time I think posters just get fooled by fake news and innocently want to share it with friends on DU. I don't think it's a good idea to go around treating that as an infraction and dinging people for it.

I'm starting to lean towards a notification system -- we give the benefit of the doubt and assume that any given author is unaware that they've posted fake information, so we send them an official notification similar to the copyright policy reminder. This would let them know that the information they've posted may be fake, and give them the opportunity to delete or correct it. This could potentially be combined with a labeling system that would place a small note on any post where the author was sent a notification -- without casting aspersions on the author. The label would simply let DUers know that they should double-check the post's content.

Or...Could one of the existing smilies be "rebranded" to represent mis/disinformation?

I have alerted multiple times on copyright violations due to having well over 4 paragraphs pasted, and not once have I seen any action occur. Doesn't appear that there is enforcement of that section of the TOS.

Whether the OP or any sub-posts. A nice orange border around the content would work well.

Leave the message up unless the MIRT decides to delete for reason.

Perhaps a few of the posters just drive by once a day, plant their story(ies) and wouldn't see responses saying that the content may be fake/AI.

don't see the corrections till the next day. We've seen that happen before. I don't worry that anyone is deliberately ignoring the corrections until it's clear they've been back on DU and would have seen the replies and maybe emails sent to them.

But since it's always possible any DUer might be away from.DU for some time, it would really help to have a fair way to label information that's potentially fake.

That way, if a mistaken piece of info comes across DU, and we see the correction, e.g., proven false or something of the like, then the rest of us will see that remark. We ALL work together to keep this site (DU) clean and free of crap and garbage, for the most part, and I like it that way. Go, DU!

You can't even alert on them, because the kooky, extremist alert item isn't accurate.

Occasionally these are taken as being real even if their intent was to give a laugh to the reader. Of course even the most finely crafted satire is occasionally taken as fact. I think that for humorous, non-factual content there should be a required stickie posted at the end, like the sarcasm stickie.

Of course if the intent is not humor, but to spread misinformation or malinformation that's a different story. I still personally want to hear the lies, with as much information on the source and the actual facts as possible, in order to know what the other side is saying. It is easier to defend the truth the more information you have.

aren't all created by our political opponents. Some are from misguided people who seem to be on our side and maybe say they're fans of the famous people - liberal politicians or celebrities - they exploit as puppets to have them appear to say things they never said. But people aren't puppets and should nevet be exploited that way. (And some of those fraudsters aren't actually fans, either, but just clickbait producers.)

Misinformation kills and it is necessary we keep this in mind at all times.

my posts. We’re all human, but if the community calls out something as not factual, we should be grownups and self delete the offending post.

"Source?" If there is no response, I consider it false until proven otherwise. It helps a great deal to look at profiles. It ranks right up with having clean socks in my opinion.