Online media is the supreme equalizer, it provides a platform and a voice to everybody willing to participate.
Facebook is establishing an AI called TL;DR that summarises news into shorter snippets. TL;DR is an acronym for "Too Long, Did not Read".
People lead called lives however the trouble is, it is difficult to get the full picture of a story in only a short snippet.
In a world where fake news can be posted and spread like wildfire across online networks – almost completely unchecked – it feels even more dangerous to normalize “news” being delivered in short-form without full context.
There are 2 sides to every story, and it is difficult to see how both may be summarised properly.
TL;DR needs to strike a healthy balance between summarising the news although not a great deal that people do not get an adequate amount of the story. Based on BuzzFeed, Facebook demonstrated to off TL;DR while in an internal meeting this week.
Facebook seems to be preparing to include an AI-powered assistant to TL;DR which could answer questions about the post. The assistant could help to clear up anything the reader is uncertain about, but it will have to prove it doesn’t suffer from any biases which arguably all current algorithms suffer from to some extent.
The AI is also going to need to be very cautious in not taking things as quotes out-of-context and finish up even further automating the spread of misinformation.
There is also going to be a debate over what sources Facebook must use. Should Facebook stick just to the "mainstream media" that many feels follow the agendas of some powerful moguls? Or perhaps serve news from smaller retailers without much historic authority? The answer most likely lies a place in the middle, though it is gonna be tough to get right.
Facebook is still a major source of misinformation - in big part driven by algorithms encouraging such content - and it has had very little good results so much in any news-related efforts. I think many people will be wanting this to be an additional disaster waiting to come about.