Community Discussions
Explore the latest discussions and community conversations related to this domain.
News apps need to "[provide] valid contact information for the news publisher"
Main Post:
Hey!
As you may know, Google has begun rolling out a new News Policy that that says all news apps must
- provide adequate information about the news publisher and its contributors including clear ownership, and
- have a website or in-app page that provides valid contact information for the news publisher.
I'm developing a Hacker News client meaning users submit links from whatever domain they choose and am interested in how other developers of similar clients have managed to solve this. I tried adding a section in my app where I link to the Hacker News legal page but that update was rejected for not providing valid contact information for the news publisher.
Policy on the Play Console: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/9935326
Top Comment:
Yo, so I ran into this issue, too. Google's pretty vague about this for a reason, I think, maybe something about avoiding unverified news sources.
There's a pretty important identifier in all this. Is your app designed to to produce and distribute news, or simply aggregating it? An entire section of the Play store is devoted to news aggregators that don't claim to be their own news source, so long as it's obvious where the information is coming from.
“Fake” News Subs are Polluting Reddit with Rage Bait and Biased Information
Main Post:
Has anyone noticed the massive increase of “news” subreddits here on the platform that are SPECIFICALLY focused on posting Israel/Palestine content, usually from heavily biased sources against Israel? People always speak about “Hasbara” and “Israeli Propaganda” but over the last year I’ve seen a massive increase in the number of “news” subs promoted to me by Reddit that appear to specifically for pushing Palestinian propaganda.
This seems like a strategy to flood redditors’ feeds with constant “reporting” from Gaza to either keep people’s attentions constantly on Gaza or to bombard people with biased reporting to soothe their confirmation bias.
All of the comments in these subs are always a hive mind and any reasonable discussion of the content, validity and bias of the post always ends with a massive flood of downvotes and name calling. It seems people (if most of them are even real people) use these kinds of subs as echo chambers to post and repost content that confirms their opinions. At this point, these subs are barely “news” subs but really places for those who are fervently pro-Palestine to openly be bigoted towards Israelis and Jews.
I truly think this is a strategy to pull in and radicalize as many users as possible on Reddit by feeding people constant rage bait and sometimes even misinformation from multiple different sources. All dissenting opinions are downvoted and banned so as to never have any form of nuanced discussion. It might just be my Reddit algorithm but that’s at least been my experience.
Top Comment: Check the mods of the subreddits. 9/10 the mods overlap with r/palestine . There is a massive disinformation campaign done over there that nearly no one wants to acknowledge. Typically a lot of the posts over in these subs are out of context in other to make israel look as bad as possible. One example I remember is taking 3 out of 15'ish responses of israelis from the yt channel "the ask project" and editing them together. The 3 responses in the video were bad and ignorant, but they maliciously did not include the other 12 responses that were decent and reasonable.