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The Washington Post Tracked Facebook's Trending Topics For 3 Weeks, Found 5 Fake Stories and 3 Inaccurate Articles (washingtonpost.com)
An alarming number of people rely on social media, including and especially Facebook, for news. Over the past few months, we have seen how Facebook's Trending Topics feature is often biased, and moreover, how sometimes fake news slips through its filter. The Washington Post monitored the website for over three weeks and found that Facebook is still struggling to get its algorithm right. From the report: The Megyn Kelly incident was supposed to be an anomaly. An unfortunate one-off. A bit of (very public, embarrassing) bad luck. But in the six weeks since Facebook revamped its Trending system -- and a hoax about the Fox News Channel star subsequently trended -- the site has repeatedly promoted "news" stories that are actually works of fiction. As part of a larger audit of Facebook's Trending topics, the Intersect logged every news story that trended across four accounts during the workdays from Aug. 31 to Sept. 22. During that time, we uncovered five trending stories that were indisputably fake and three that were profoundly inaccurate (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternate source). On top of that, we found that news releases, blog posts from sites such as Medium and links to online stores such as iTunes regularly trended. Facebook declined to comment about Trending on the record. "I'm not at all surprised how many fake stories have trended," one former member of the team that used to oversee Trending told the Post. "It was beyond predictable by anyone who spent time with the actual functionality of the product, not just the code."The Post adds that "there's no guarantee" that it was able to catch every hoax, since it looked at Trending feature only once every hour.
The relevant question is "what would happen to me if I had done the same thing?"
Yes, let us examine this question. If I released the name of an undercover CIA agent I would, without a doubt, have gone to solitary confinement for the rest of my life.
Now compare that scenario to Dick Cheney who told Scooter Libby that Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA agent, was the wife of the guy who outed the yellow cake document as a fake. We know this because Libby's own notes indicated the date and meeting Cheney told him about Plame. That's why Libby went to jail. He obstructed justice by not naming Cheney as the primary source for Plame's outing.
Plame gets outed, thus endangering herself, her husband and every other contact she had made over the years, thus endangering our overseas contacts, yet Cheney walks around like nothing happened. He even lied under oath when he said he didn't remember if he had ever said anything to anyone about Plame.
You are correct, it just makes no sense the way people gloss over this like it doesn't matter. After all, what could possibly happen if we start naming undercover CIA agents out of political vindictiveness? It's like the failure of Bush to protect this country from terrorist attacks. No one seems to care he let 3,000 people die in the span of a few hours because he ignored 8 months of daily warnings of the impending attack
Talk about a criminal act.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
No, it's that the demographic that uses Facebook a lot is Trump supporters. Between private groups and fake accounts it's pretty much Stormfront lite in some places.
These idiots share this stuff over other stuff. That's why it makes it trending.
It's an algorithm.
That's effective propaganda? You must have been living in a hole if you think that's propaganda.
You know what propaganda is? Saying the same thing over and over because you want people to believe it's the truth. Look at Trump. He's such a great businessman he never turned a profit at any of his casinos while he ran them for a decade. Every year they lost money.
He was such a great businessman his dad had to give him an illegal loan to keep one of his casinos afloat (at least until Trump declared bankruptcy).
He was such a great businessman he lost nearly $1 billion at a time when everyone else was making money hand over fist.
Trump Airlines. Failure.
United Football League. Failure.
Tour de Trump. Failure.
Trump University. Failure and a scam.
Here, take a look at his other failures (not an inclusive list)
To keep saying one is successful after repeated and numerous failures is nothing but pure propaganda.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower