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Facebook's Fight Against Fake News Was Undercut by Fear of Conservative Backlash (gizmodo.com)
Facebook has been concerned about fake news stories that circulate on its social platform and how often such incidents occur. The company has had high-level internal debates over the matter since May, discussing different options to curb movements of hoax and false stories. Gizmodo reports Monday that Facebook executives conducted a wide-ranging review of products and policies earlier this year with "the goal of eliminating any appearance of political bias." The company even had a major update for the News Feed planned which could have supposedly filtered fake stories, but the update never saw the light of the day because it was afraid to use it. From the report:One source said high-ranking officials were briefed on a planned News Feed update that would have identified fake or hoax news stories, but disproportionately impacted right-wing news sites by downgrading or removing that content from people's feeds. According to the source, the update was shelved and never released to the public. It's unclear if the update had other deficiencies that caused it to be scrubbed. "They absolutely have the tools to shut down fake news," said the source, who asked to remain anonymous citing fear of retribution from the company. The source added, "there was a lot of fear about upsetting conservatives after Trending Topics," and that "a lot of product decisions got caught up in that." In an emailed statement, Facebook did not answer Gizmodo's direct questions about whether the company built a News Feed update that was capable of identifying fake or hoax news stories, nor whether such an update would disproportionately impact right-wing or conservative-leaning sites. Instead, Facebook said it "did not build and withhold any News Feed changes based on their potential impact on any one political party."
If they hadn't been rigging the news feeds and injecting their own bias, they wouldn't have gotten into this mess.
Reporting that HRC had the election win all sewn up?
The auto-filtering criteria apparently caused far more right-leaning stories to be filtered than left-leaning stories, and it was scrapped for that reason.
So basically, it was bad code that they didn't know how to fix, and probably shouldn't have been in production regardless of the political aspect.
Reminds me of Steven Colbert's brilliant Correspondents' Dinner performance, which included gems like "Reality has a well-known liberal bias".
"Reality has a well-known liberal bias".
Not this past election.
or they were bad stories. The truly bad idea was in trying to implement a filter in the first place.
Nullius in verba
The most recent fake one that I've seen, with its supports absolutely adamant that it's real, is the "Clinton didn't really win the popular vote, Trump did!" thing. They defend it to the day they die, despite the fact that it's flatly contradicted by all official sources, can be traced back to the guy who made it up, and is based around factually incorrect statements about how votes are tabulated.
Not that the left is innocent in all of this. I still keep seeing that fake quote about Trump saying that Republican voters are idiots who will believe anything. How many times do you have to point out that it's fake for people to stop circulating it?
We need more fact checks, period. It bugs me to no end that news stations just broadcast politicians giving speeches and pundits making claims, wherein they may reiterate a dozen different things that have literally zero basis in reality... and just let it go uncorrected. That's journalistic malpractice, plain and simple. I know they want to jeep the pace of coverage up, but they're willfully letting their viewers get misinformed in order to do so.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
The auto-filtering criteria apparently caused far more right-leaning stories to be filtered than left-leaning stories... So basically, it was bad code...
Was the decision made purely based on the fact that it was filtering more right-leaning stories? Did someone evaluate whether it was because there were more false right-leaning stories being posted?
Fake news can and does from both political wings. I see no reason that Facebook cannot squelch bullshit wherever it comes from - impartially, transparently and fairly. And perhaps some (a lot) does target the right and it might spark a backlash to snuff it out. Man the fuck up and do it. The alternative of allowing it so the stupid propagates is FAR worse as we are now witnessing.
I on the other hand, have no fear of conservative backlash,
so I am happy to recycle this dated but completely true news story:
http://www.theonion.com/graphi...
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
The truly bad idea was in trying to implement a filter in the first place.
That is the message that will go unheeded for all time. Let the readers do their own filtering. They do anyway.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Outright banning them is too extreme in my opinion, in part because of the appearance of or risk of censorship.
Instead, tag the suspect stories, or all stories, with a link to lists of alternative sources, viewpoints, and fact-checking sites for the claims given.
By the way, some conservatives consider politifact.com and snopes.com to be left-leaning. Evidence of this is thin, or at least doesn't show significant bias in my inspections. (I see errors in ranking judgement more than bias.)
However, assuming it is left-leaning, where is the right's alternative?
Table-ized A.I.
Eliminate fake news? Jesus, you'd have to block CNN, MSNBC, WaPo, NYT, HuffPo, on and on... Would have been a bloodbath.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
...seriously?
They were afraid of a conservative backlash...BECAUSE THEY'D ALREADY BEEN MANIPULATING THE NEWS.
Jesus wept, people. How far down the rabbit hole of post-facto rationalization do you need to go? Even the NYT has admitted that they'd abandoned any pretense of objectivity in their coverage, to the point that LIBERALS were getting sick of it.
-Styopa
The alt-right is posting more fake stories than the alt-left - 38% to 19%. Now, a lot of people will point to that as a "right is more gullible for fake news than the left!" point, but I see it as "even 19% is really bloody terrible".
A lot of the BS, mind you, isn't to say maliciously done; it's a consequence of the clickbait era that we live in. Many people - including even teens in Macedonia - have learned that if you make up something with dramatic language and a sensationalist headline, people click and share it, and they get ad revenue. Factual accuracy doesn't come into equation - if you can sensationalize a real story: great; if you have to make up a story from whole cloth: also great! A single widely shared article can earn them $3k in a day. So they create fake news sites like "WorldPoliticus.com", "USADailyPolitics.com", etc and fill them with clickbait. Early on many of them did it about equally with the left and right, but they found that they got more clicks and shares from the right.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
It looks like maybe the Democrats have the issues. When you rig your primary to insure the candidate most hated by all conservative voters is guaranteed the nomination and then wonder why you lost that's called the issue of self delusion. No matter how bad Trump acted. No matter how rude and obnoxious. No matter what dirt was dug up on him. They still lost the election because they picked a bad, bad candidate and when an outsider challenged her they cheated and undercut him in any way they could. All so they could run the Queen. Well they ran her and Americans rejected her. The only people they have to blame are themselves. I'd be willing to bet there were hundred of other politicians they could have run with and won but they wanted the most corrupt one they could find that wasn't in jail at the moment.
There's a difference between being wrong and intentionally publishing fake and misleading information. Plus the fact that Hillary won the popular vote (by +650K votes and still counting) just demonstrateshow hard it is to call an election when there are several swing-state votes in the electoral college.
" You can't fix stupid."
And that explains Trump
Trump: "I will make apps applier and they will be bigly* great, the best appy apps that ever apped, and you will be apply proud of them! I know more about apps than Apple and goggle, or is it google?, and I will make them pay for it. Make Apps Great Again!"
* Some claim he's saying "big league", the debate on that continues.
Table-ized A.I.
I'm very left leaning, but do understand the importance of an objective, unbiased press. What people aren't getting is that Facebook is the press for the 21st Century. I feel they do need to realize this and figure out some way to deal with it. Otherwise, this problem is going to get worse and cause a huge mess.
Back not so long ago, there were three news networks and a handful of "newspapers of record" that served as almost the sole authoritative source of information for most people. If something made it into the New York Times or Washington Post or Boston Globe, the story was at least believable and researched. it didn't get there just because some reporter bashed some keystrokes into his smartphone without thinking and hit Send. But, this is exactly what happens with Facebook and other Internet publishing media. Fringe groups (on both sides!) who would previously never get the time of day are suddenly given the world's biggest microphone and access to almost the entire population. Using sophisticated, polished publication techniques they can produce whatever content they want and call it unbiased news. Twitter is an even more interesting beast, in that you get access to unfiltered streams of consciousness. Not that it did any good, but look at how many times Donald Trump took to Twitter at 3 AM to personally insult a person or group of people...people loved it.
Why is this bad? I hate to say it because it sounds elitist, but people as a whole are dumb. There's just no getting around it...the average person is much more likely to be swayed by something they see on their Facebook news feed. And since Facebook is an echo chamber, and hones in on exactly what you're interested in, "your" messages keep getting reinforced. Humans are animals, and civil society gets way less civil when people are screaming at each other as loud as they can.
The thing I don't like about this social media revolution is that it brings out all the crazy fringe people on both sides who do things like incessantly post angry comments to news sites or spend hours a day listening to conservative talk radio people...and gives them open free license to yell whatever they want as loud as they want. Over time, moderate people are going to drift over to these extreme sides in an effort to be heard.
Maybe I just have a lot naive liberal friends. I see lots of fake stories from both sides I would say at least equal amounts left and right. I just scroll past and I have stopped following some on both sides. I never challenge anything on-line because you just get incoherent rants from the poster and they do not hear what you are saying. It is not fake because they believe the premise. The facts are just an annoyance.
People will believe without question anything that matches their ideology or preconceived notions and they will vehemently challenge anything against them. This is true across all ideologies and probably true for the people at Facebook who saw fake news as a conservative problem.
Speaking of living in an alternative reality...
Obama nominated Merrick Garland three quarters of a year ago. It has been official republican strategy to block his nomination until the election so that there would be a chance that the next president might be a Republican and they could get a more conservative court instead. A strategy that ultimately paid off.
For more details, Wikipedia has a full article on the fight, with 88 references.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
Hmmm, does anyone know if there's an extension that looks up every post on snopes and puts a badge on it?
That's what I need.
The question is, how much of the right-wing (or the left-wing) stuff is by actual right (or left) leaning people? I wouldn't put it past any of these party operatives to set up fake pages posting fake shit to discredit the other side.
Except that Snopes has Liberal biases of its own, as does Factcheck.org
650k votes is minuscule compared to the overal vote totals 121M+
Just because she got 2.5million more votes than Trump in California is not enough to use the popular vote as some sort of vindication.
From a conservative website.
Early on many of them did it about equally with the left and right, but they found that they got more clicks and shares from the right.
If I had to speculate on this, it's because websites like the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, etc. already fill that market. They've already built their brand and there's a certain legitimacy to those sites even if it's known that they are heavily left-leaning. The political right really didn't have anything like that, at least not on the same level. The only one I can think of that gets posted on the the internet regularly is Breitbart, and maybe Drudge Report but the latter doesn't really create its own content. Otherwise the right's main sources for media are still Fox News and AM radio which may not be as easy to share on something like Facebook.
I don't think Facebook can really solve this problem as creating an algorithm that can detect fake news would require some top-notch AI. Otherwise, actual intelligent humans will just figure out how to get around the algorithm and you get a weird cat and mouse approach. The underlying problem is that people want news that confirms their existing beliefs and not something which contains factual information or even an objective assessment of factual information. That's not something Facebook can do anything about.
In their desire to become some all-encompassing one-stop-shop for people, they had to anticipate that they'd drag in political discourse and all of the ire that goes with arguing on the internet. They could have just stayed a nice website where people could post pictures of their family or a recent vacation, but it sprawled out from there. I haven't used it in years (I stopped shortly before the big Facebook game craze swept through the user base and everyone was playing some farm game through Facebook), but I imagine its a bit of an overgrown mess at this point.
The only real solution is for users to engage with each other and point out the fake news. I recall some years (early 2000's around time of the Iraq war) in the past a relative of mine had emailed everyone in the family what was effectively fake news. It was something to the extent about Muslim's taking over America and how in a decade they'd be in complete control. I just pointed out that according to census data, Islam was a tiny minority and that it was essentially impossible for this to happen based on immigration and birth rates. Maybe things have changed, but this person did admit that they were wrong and emailed everyone saying that their previous email probably wasn't true.
You can't stop fake news, but you can train people to spot it and ignore it, removing the profit incentive. However, I don't think that's an easy task either as apparently humans have evolved to possess those cognitive biases and have a tendency to fall into them.
And they wonder why we don't love censorious asshats who cannot compete in the marketplace of ideas.
The big-money establishment left keeps looking anywhere but a mirror for why they failed. It's not Facebook, guys, nor racism, nor whatever else you came up with. Clinton was simply a toxic candidate. She came across like someone from Capitol City in the Hunger Games, didn't give a press conference for nine months, barely interacted with voters (and almost never with people who hadn't already contributed to her campaign), but spent a lot of time re-assuring Wall Street.
There's no mystery here why voters rejected her. Heck, she couldn't even get the majority of votes from white women - no one felt she was going to represent them. Trump didn't win the primary because people liked him, but because they rejected the big-money establishment right. He didn't win the general because people liked him, but because they rejected the big-money establishment left. Trump won because he's so obviously not a standard politician, and everyone he ran against was. Elections are going to keep going further afield until "business as usual" changes in DC - and that's a bigger driving force than left or right.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Plus the fact that Hillary won the popular vote (by +650K votes and still counting)
I really wish people would stop talking about this. I'm NOT a Trump supporter, but talking about the popular vote is emphasizing an irrelevant aspect of the data given how our system is set up.
Trump and Clinton did NOT campaign to win the popular vote. If they were doing so, they likely would have skipped rallies in many "swing states" and instead held them in places more likely to get out the maximum votes for their side. That could have led to a very different popular vote split.
It's kinda like playing a game of Monopoly and losing but saying, "But, but I had more properties! I should win! I had more properties!" Except Monopoly isn't about accumulating the most property, it's about accumulating more money and bankrupting the opponent. Those are the rules of the game. If you want to play by different rules, fine... but that's a different game. The US election is set up one way, and the candidates "played" to win by those rules (i.e., Electoral College).
By the way, I'm not defending the Electoral College either, and there are legitimate reasons to get rid of it. But the mismatch here isn't really a strong argument -- if you believe that campaigns and rallies and advertisements have ANY effect on voter turnout, then there's absolutely no guarantee that the numbers would have been the same if the candidates were trying to win the popular vote and made campaign choices based on that.
It has been official republican strategy to block his nomination until the election so that there would be a chance that the next president might be a Republican and they could get a more conservative court instead.
That the Republicans then talked of further delaying for the next 4 years should Clinton win sends an even more ominous message that they care more about politics than the Constitution, the Country and *all* of its people.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Exactly. Trump won the popular vote in 30 out of 50 States.
I don't disagree with anything you wrote. I only made the point about the popular vote in the context of how difficult it is to call a close election when more people voted for the candidate who lost.
There are many mirrors being ignored. Trump wiped the floor with Jeb, Cruz and Rubio before he defeated Hillary. Watching the Sunday morning talk shows this weekend gave the impression that about as many high-ups in the Republican party seem to believe that they won this Presidential election as there were people running the DNC that thought Hillary's loss was due to everything but the Democratic party.
Hillary and the Democrats were given a golden opportunity in an opponent like Trump. They ignored the progressive populism that could have brought many new voters to the polls on election day. The Dems also took for granted too many traditional voting blocks that should have been courted. Labelling a large portion of the population as deplorable, xenophobic racists didn't win Hillary any cross over votes and turned many people against her. The Democrats seem to be acting as if they did nothing wrong in the 2016 election.
The Republicans now have a golden opportunity, but they will have to accept that their message did not win the election, Trump's message did. They can make this a way to rebuild their party. Programs based on need, not race. Government that delivers for all, not just handouts for the poor and tax breaks for the rich. Equal justice for all Americans, of all races. The Republicans can transform their party and truly do something great.
They'll probably just use it to shovel trillions of dollars in defense and security funding to the biggest donors to their elections and run up the national debt like they usually do, but they have the opportunity to do something big.
If the Republicans try to run this administration like they have in the past, and they ignore the populist themes that caused their chosen ones to get beaten, just as Hillary ignored so many, they will pay a big price in the 2018 mid-term elections. The Republicans are in a great position to take advantage of the mood in America, if they can actually do some good for working, middle class Americans in the next two years and be inclusive of all of those Americans, regardless of race. They need to put aside the history of the Republican party being the party of the already rich and embrace this new opportunity.
If we follow the standard method of interpreting these kinds of things, "Disparate Outcome", then it doesn't matter what the facts f he matter are, it is inherently discriminatory.
Hey, not my rules...
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Did someone evaluate whether it was because there were more false right-leaning stories being posted?
Of course there are. The right has been much faster to adopt post truth politics. I used to live in eastern Tennessee and have plenty of alt-right relatives, and I am amazed at some of the nonsense they are willing to believe, and how immune they are to factual information. For instance, my idiot brother-in-law has emailed me petitions 3 times to stop atheist activist Madalyn Murray O'Hare from banning any mention of God on TV, despite the fact that I have told him each time that 1) Her name is spelled "O'Hair", 2) She has no authority over what is on TV, 3) She has been dead for more than 20 years. None of that matters to him, and now he thinks I am part of the God denying conspiracy.
Here's an excellent explanation why the system was set up to have an electoral college: https://geopoliticalfutures.co...
"The United States is a geopolitical invention. The 13 original colonies were very different from each other. As the nation expanded westward, even more exotic states became part of the union. Constantly alienating smaller states through indifference could undermine the national interest. The Senate and the electoral college both stop that from happening, or at least limit it. Any state can matter in any election.
You might charge that this is undemocratic. It is. It was intended to be. The founders did not create a direct democracy for a good reason. It would have prevented the United States from emerging as a stable union. They created a republican form of government based on representation and a federal system based on sovereign states. Because of that, a candidate who ignores or insults the “flyover” states is likely to be writing memoirs instead of governing."
Let the readers do their own filtering. They do anyway.
I believe you have hit the nail on the thumb: The overriding problem is that THEY DON'T. Or that their filtering criteria do not include "reality".
This might just be the dumbest thing I've ever read: The majority of social media users do no filtering at all, beyond the filtering that was done when they chose their circle of friends. Even the most transparently obvious fake stories are parroted ad infinitum in what is essentially an echo chamber for idiocy.
None of the people I've known who grew up working their butts off on farms as children grew up liberal. Some Democrat, yes, but none liberal. When the only way the cows get water when the pipes freeze in winter is to smash a hole in the ice on the pond and spend the day dragging 80-pound milk cans of water up a hill in snowstorm, you do not retreat to your safe space.
The same reason why everyone here in rural western Ohio identifies at Catholic and as Browns fans (NFL). These aren't choices the children made, they were beliefs passed down by their parents and most of the kids never move far enough from home to experience anything out of their comfort zone.
I grew up Catholic, a Browns fan, and Conservative. Religion for me was gone by middle school, probably helps that we were C&E (Christmas and Easter) Catholics except when visiting my grandmother. Never cared enough about the NFL to stick with the Browns. It was my political leaning that remained with me the longest.
But then I started traveling in my early 20s. First it was seeing more of the US, then it was to Brazil a couple times, then to Asia and finally a couple countries in Europe. What I realized is that while the US is a great place, there is so much we can do better. It just happens that the Democrats at least talk about accomplishing some of those things while Republicans wish the 1950s would return.
Since you used hard working farmers as your example, let's not forget that many receive substantial government subsidies.
The tl;dr version is that most people have beliefs imprinted at an early age and rarely adjust their thinking.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
That's one of the things that blows my mind. There are a lot of people in the U.S. who basically said, "I'm sick of all you billionaire New York atheists controlling my life! You're out of touch with the working man, and don't care about me!" and then proceeded to elect Trump. It's like an Onion article.