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Mark Zuckerberg Says Fake News on Facebook Affecting the Election Is a 'Crazy Idea' (fortune.com)
A lot of questions are emerging about Facebook's role in this year's election cycle, especially given the proliferation of sensationalistic and even outright fake news stories, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has responded. From a report on Fortune: "I think the idea that fake news on Facebook -- of which it's a very small amount of the content -- influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea," he said on Thursday at the Techonomy conference in Half Moon Bay, Calif., just two days after Donald Trump was elected president, according to media reports. "There have been hoaxes on the Internet, there were hoaxes before," he said. "We do our best to make it so that people can report that, and as I said before, we can show people the most meaningful content we can."
The burden of proof is on the person doing the accusation.
It is not up to Zuckerberg to show that facebook did not influence the elections.
It is up to the people accusing facebook to show that the fake news influenced the elections.
That's a bias against real news. TFA was regarding a propensity to display entirely fake 'news', from dubious sources with clickbait-ey, ad-loaded websites. eg.Putin has access to alien weaponry?
Hanlon's Razor -- Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I live and grew up in a red state. Because of my background a significant number of my friends on Facebook are die hard Republicans. A small number of those spend way too much time worrying about politics and sharing fake news items and various anti-Democratic Party stories. Some of what I've seen is actually offensive. But is anybody actually convinced to change their minds because of this? All I see is other die hard Republicans comment about how true this stuff is. A rather large part of the US voting population is party locked and they are just not ever going to vote for the other party no matter what. Does it really matter if these stories are lies if all they do is preach to the already converted? Studies have shown that people deliberately seek out sources of information to reinforce already decided opinions and that if you confront people who hold a false belief with real proof that their belief is false, they will actually double down on the false belief and get even more adamant that it can't be wrong.
Fun fact: US healthcare costs have been rising faster than inflation since the 60s.
Fun fact: pooring out of the health insurance market left some of us with only the ACA as an option. Now that's rising in cost because:
Fun fact: a republican congress decided to starve what they couldn't kill outright, leading to higher costs to insurers
Fun fact: US health care is among the most expensive in the world, and we aren't the healthiest by far-- for example, we don't live any longer than poor people in Cuba.
Fun fact: Most of the civilized first world nations act like healthcare is a basic human right. Whether you agree with that or not, you can't possibly want to keep the minimum wage people preparing your food from staying healthy or treating disease when they are sick. Likewise, the poorly-paid help at daycare for your kids. Likewise all the kids at the school.
It's all connected, babies.