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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.
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 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'.
The pollsters used the same techniques they did as before with reasonable success. McCain and Mitt's results pretty much matched them. The problem is that Trump is not a normal candidate and that surveyee's didn't react to him like they did a normal candidate. He's thrown monkey wrenches into a lot things (for good or bad).
There was no reason for DNC to manipulate the polls. A close election produces more turn-out, which is what they wanted. If anything, the bad polls hurt Hillary rather than Trump.
Table-ized A.I.
Actually, that statement is itself based around fake news. Funny, that.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
I am in no way alleging that the DNC manipulated polls. My observation is more that the fawning media always interpreted every poll within or near the margin of error as a win for Clinton. I think the DNC proved to be self-defeating and blundering more so than dishonest, but the media showed a lot of bias this time around, IMHO. I think they're going to spend a long time earning trust back. Not a Trump supporter here, by the way.
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.
From a conservative website.
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. . . .
Yes, yes, why couldn't they act humble, abashed, and conciliatory like Trump himself, the paragon of modesty and politeness.
A big chunk of American voters had been shat on for years, so they picked the biggest asshole they could find to answer that. This is why the constant narrative that Trump was an asshole didn't hurt him - feature, not a bug.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The alleged email quote: "We are going to try to do an oversample of seniors on the poll. Sample too small otherwise..."
That can be interpreted at least in two ways. It may mean they simply don't have enough data for a given factor and so use a subset with more factors to extrapolate that factor to a general set. It's a statistical "trick" to tease more info out of a limited data set.
Perhaps one can argue that they are "over-guessing" which makes their poll bad, but that's not the same as introducing intentional bias. It could be being a cheap-skate rather than propagandist. I don't know enough about their data to say for sure.
Further, I cannot tell from that alone that they are talking about an internal poll or a public poll. If it's an internal poll for internal usage, then it's not "public manipulation". It's then for internal reports.
Without more evidence about the context, I see no reason to make a default assumption of malice. Context matters. Don't jump to conclusions.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
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."
Between the UAW and Wayne/Oakland/Macomb Counties, Democrats are used to having Michigan handed to them on a Silver Platter, it didn't happen. The Unions are losing their sway over voters and Trumps mantra of Unfair trade deals really resonate. A lot of minority voters are still smarting from Kwame Kilpatrick, and the Bipartisan involvement in the Flint Water Crisis, and I believe this played a part in sensitising them to Trumps "What have you got to lose" message as well.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Or reporting that Trump was racist to Mexicans when he said that illegal immigrant gangs were raping women.
There's probably some of that happening. But there's a big difference between that and Trump's public assertion that most Mexican illegal immigrants were rapists and murderers.
Or reporting that there was nothing at all to Benghazi and no reason to investigate. Or reporting that Muslims were mad about a movie about Mohammed and not celebrating the anniversary of 9/11 by showing their strength and attacking US embassies around the world.
Most of the protests, including the one at Benghazi, were a direct result of the Innocence of Muslims video which had just been released. This isn't even questioned by authorities of either political persuasion, what was controversial was whether the administration said that the attacks came because of the protest or because of al-Quaeda terrorism. The truth was that the protests over the video were real, and terrorists used to protests as cover to sneak up to the embassy undetected.
Or reporting that Huma Abedin had been vetted and there was nothing to suggest she had a connection to the Muslim Brotherhood when every member of her family was MB and their journal was funded by one of the first financiers of al-Qaeda.
Not that I trust your "vetting" of her family but this sounds like guilt by association. Not even association, but guilt by family member's association. And it was always bullshit. That was a fake story without merit, and even Michelle Bachmann's campaign manager thought she should apologize for making it up. John McCain also came out against it, saying that the letter offered no prove, and there not a single report to indicate that she was promoting anti-American activities in the government.
Or reporting that Hillary Clinton's email scandal was only about the use of a private server and not about putting classified SCIF and GAMMA data on unsecured systems, destruction of evidence, and lying to federal investigators
The private server was a wildly overblown issue, but just like Nixon, it wasn't the crime that got Hillary into trouble, but the coverup.
Or reporting that Gamergate was a harassment campaign
I guess you weren't paying attention, but both sides looked pretty shitty, and no one won in that conflict. We all lost.
Or reporting that the 2nd Amendment gives the National Guard the right to bear arms.
This is an absolutely bizarre thing to bring up. Why wouldn't the National Guard be able to bear arms? An individual right does not invalidate a group right.
Or reporting that transgender rights are being violated by making them use the correct bathrooms or referring to them by their real names or with the correct pronouns.
Times change, buddy. Used to be that gay folks couldn't get married either, or that women were sold off by their family for marriage with a dowry, and that they didn't any say in the matter. Over time, we get better, and there is NO benefit to the automatic assumption that people in the past had things figured out morally.
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.