Facebook on its Fake News Problem: 'There's So Much More We Need To Do' (theverge.com)

In the aftermath of election, news outlets are counting Facebook as one of the major reasons that drove Trump to victory. NYMag, for instance, had an essay Wednesday titled "Donald Trump Won Because of Facebook", in which it has documented several instances where lies were peddled as fact on Facebook's watch. The social juggernaut, which has over 1.6 billion people checking the website every month, has been spotted running fake stories on its platform numerous times over the past few months, something that President Barack Obama remarked about recently. This is critical because over 60 percent people in the United States consume their news on social media. When asked if Facebook had anything to say about its influence in Trump's victory, the company said:We take misinformation on Facebook very seriously. We value authentic communication, and hear consistently from those who use Facebook that they prefer not to see misinformation. In Newsfeed we use various signals based on community feedback to determine which posts are likely to contain inaccurate information, and reduce their distribution. In Trending we look at a variety of signals to help make sure the topics being shown are reflective of real-world events, and take additional steps to prevent false or misleading content from appearing. Despite these efforts we understand there's so much more we need to do, and that is why it's important that we keep improving our ability to detect misinformation. We're committed to continuing to work on this issue and improve the experiences on our platform.

Comments

Don't use Facebook

[lgw]

I have a simple and 100% effective strategy for avoiding fake news on Facebook. I think it's a fairly common strategy for Slashdotters.

Re:Don't use Facebook

[Anonymous Coward]

Agree.

Also it wouldn't hurt to have much greater emphasis on critical thinking skills in public education. That's hard to do though, because some people really hate it and seem to have a deficiency there, and many parents hate it when their kids start asking really trenchant questions about their religious beliefs.

Re:Don't use Facebook

[NatasRevol]

Well, until Facebook goes back to less than 1 billion monthly users, your idea sucks for not impacting American politics.

WE FAILED!!

[CajunArson]

Commit Sepuku in your hoodie Zuckerberg.

The platform that you built to limit the flow of information to the population and as a way to make advertising revenue for yourself and Hillary backfired on you.

Incidentally, Trump's expenditures per vote were about half of Hillary's.
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/09...

That's a story that Slashdot doesn't want to cover since they still want to paint this as Trump "buying" the election.

Re:WE FAILED!!

[bfpierce]

Wait, there's stories on slashdot saying Trump 'bought' the election? Did I miss something, or did you just post false tin foil hat bullshit in an article about false fucking news stories.

Great idea!

[Orgasmatron]

Congratulations to Facebook for stepping up against the spreaders of fake news and kicking CNN, (MS)NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, BBC and Fox off their platform! Oh, and all of the polling organizations that got everything 100% wrong for the last 18 months. Very happy to see them go too.

Enjoy your CSPAN and Breitbart News, facebook users.

Re:That's the funniest thing so far .....

[NatasRevol]

Are you aware that saying 'why' something happened isn't the same as blaming someone else for that 'why'?

Let me tell you why this is a non-issue

[chispito]

If Facebook were to censor these stories, people who fall for them would assume Facebook was controlled by the "liberal media" and go elsewhere for their news. It would not keep the stories from spreading virally.

Also, I like the implication that Trump won due to FUD but the Democratic FUD is of no concern--like the incredibly stupid story posted right here about Trump's server secretly communicating with a Russian bank.

It was so obviously a non-story... but read through the comments here and you'll see how eager people were to lap it up. (I linked Snopes as it contains a variety of credible sources debunking the article).

Re:Let me tell you why this is a non-issue

[ScentCone]

Also, I like the implication that Trump won due to FUD but the Democratic FUD is of no concern

Yes. My own FB feed is curated a bit by my un-follows and follows, and no doubt skews a bit towards the conservative/libertarian bent - though I am FB friends with at least as many dyed-in-the-wool liberals who post to FB (or memegurgitate) about as often as they breathe. So while I saw no small number of silly re-posts and likes/shares of breathless fake/shallow news meant to draw in clicks from conservative types, I saw FAR more FUD-ish content from liberals trying to actually shame/change minds through the use of preposterously overblown fear mongering and outright lies.

So, yes: fake news on FB is a problem, or at least a significant annoyance. But the notion that somehow this is limited to stuff from and aimed at right-leaning people in some proportion that, compared to its lefty counterparts, cost Hillary Clinton the election... I call bullshit. The biggest purveyors and apparent consumers of that crap that I saw were outspoken Clinton supporters. So even if I'm wrong by a lot and the amount of it was roughly equal, that DOES NOT explain away the DNC/Clinton-Machine's huge loss. This is just another example of liberals - especially in the media - refusing to look in the mirror and understand that they're not nearly as clever and persuasive as they think they are, and that a whole lot of other people were just sick to death of the condescension, the holier-than-thou presumption of a Clinton coronation, and the deploying of finger-wagging celebrities telling people how to think.

And for those who are mystified that yelling at their non-racist, non-homophic, non-misogynistic friends about how racist, homophobic, and misogynistic they are didn't somehow make them vote for Hillary or feel apologetic following the election: maybe it's time to rethink what you were sure would get people to see things your way.

Re:Let me tell you why this is a non-issue

[meta-monkey]

The system is rigged. We read the DNC leaks. They rigged the primary against Bernie, the debates are rigged, the news coverage is propaganda, this article is about how clearly the problem is they haven't rigged social media enough for the establishment. Oh and the congressional districts are gerrymandered by the Republicans. This is also a form of rigging.

If you're just talking about voting machines and such, there's analysis going into that right now, so we'll see. There are certain precincts of PA and Ohio where it looks like they were flipping votes, but they didn't do it enough to effect the outcome. Nobody cares much about this kind of stuff after your team wins though.

I would also not be shocked if some of the more blatantly fraudulent plans were stopped because of the spotlight O'Keefe and Trump shined on it. Foval and Creamer were smoked out and knew they were being watched, so that took out their men on the ground who would have actually been doing the dirty work.

Beating the rigged system doesn't mean the system isn't rigged.

Re:That's the funniest thing so far .....

[meta-monkey]

And what about on the Democratic side? My FaceBook feed is full of crying women who believe America just elected LITERALLY HITLER and that Trump is going to start deporting or murdering anyone who isn't a straight white male. Their level of delusion seems a little worse than your average Trump voter.

Re:That's the funniest thing so far .....

[meta-monkey]

There have been dozens of articles about how Trump is just like Hitler from the media. When Trump won New Hampshire and HuffPo's front page was all caps screaming "NEW HAMPSHIRE GOES RACIST SEXIST XENOPHOBIC!!!!" I wondered what would happen if Trump wins. Will the people who believe this kind of shit snap out of it and realize the media is lying to them? People voting Trump in New Hampshire want the drugs coming from Mexico stopped because they can't treat their people's addiction problems when you can get $10 heroin on any street corner, not because they're RACIST SEXIST XENOPHOBIC. Or, will they continue to believe that America just elected Hitler, and that half of their friends and neighbors are secret Nazis who are going to hang all the gays and rape the women now? It appears to be the latter. You may not be this delusional, but holy shit a lot of people are. It's psychological abuse what the media did to these people.

Re:That's the funniest thing so far .....

[NatasRevol]

Here are some facts.

1. Trump received about the same number of votes as Romney did in 2012.
2. Hillary received about 10M fewer votes than Obama did in 2012.

Neither was a remotely good candidate.

But only one was 'great' at exposing every little flaw of the other candidate. Meanwhile, the other one stuck to the traditional politician script in a decidedly non-traditional election.

They both won their primaries because they were the best politicians, not the best options.
Trump won the election because he was the best politician, not the best option.

Both the DNC & the RNC need to go back to square one and start promoting their best candidates, not the best politicians. The best candidates will serve more of the whole of America than either one of these candidates ever would.

TRANSLATION: We're all dumb now. It's your fault.

[WolfgangVL]

How about people stop being fucking morons and look a little closer at "the news". We used to absolutely LOVE disgracing our media when they spread bad info. Now we have opinion news, click-bait, and citizen journalists.

You won't believe how Batboy's all grown up love affair with Janet Jackson ended....
Orange clown runs for office and has THIS to say......
See HRC's hot new underwear...

Pointing out bad stories on social media gets you involved in whatever TOXIC topic it relates to, earns you name-calling, and general ass-hole-ry on response for all your "friends" to see. Those of us that know better just left. People really seem enjoy the dumb-shit-echo-chamber we left behind.
(the irony of post right?)

And now what, we are somehow surprised or something? This is exactly what we wanted. It's not on fb to censor bad news, its on us to not be fucking morons.

Is this REALLY not obvious?

Re:That's the funniest thing so far .....

[avandesande]

He won because Hillary ignored the flyover states that Obama had swept previously. Enough with the silly theories.

Re:They want a thicker filter bubble next time.

[Anonymous Coward]

More Trump lies being spread even here on Slashdot. Go away, TrumpTroll.

Yes probably. Yet you didn't bother to provide a counter narrative. Or even a single link. Why do you think he's more effective at spreading his message than you are?

Re:dont censor

[amicusNYCL]

The problem is that people think that polls are accurate, because they use terms like "sample size" and "margin of error" to give the illusion that they are scientific. They aren't scientific. A poll is asking a bunch of people what they think, and assuming that all of them tell the truth. Guess what? They don't all tell the truth. When Nate Silver was publishing his numbers he showed 12% of people saying they were "undecided", but for some reason the margin of error was not +/- 12. How many of those "undecided" people do you actually think had already made up their minds, and didn't want to tell anyone because they wanted to avoid how people would react to their choice? How many of those "undecided" people walked into the polling booth and chose an actual candidate? Those polls are going to say that Hillary has a lead, and that the margin of error is low, and that Trump has a 16% chance of winning, and none of those things are correct but since they list the sample size and bother to come up with a number for "margin of error" then people whose job it is to talk or write for companies that say they publish news (pardon me if I don't want to refer to those people as journalists) will say that all of the polls show that Hillary is in the lead, and this is what's going to happen, and here are the states where there is going to be a real contest, and no one has any idea what they're talking about. But it sounds good, until none of the things that people predicted actually happen.

The real stupid thing is that this same crap happened over and over during the primaries and all of the news talking people still acted like they knew what was going on at the end.