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Facebook Users Cry 'Censorship' After Being Told Which Russian Troll Pages They Liked (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: As the FBI's investigation into Russian election interference reaches a fever pitch, Facebook rolled out a new News Feed alert Monday night. The bulletin told users who followed pages created by Russian trolls that those pages have been removed. And some of the affected users did not like this. A brief search revealed that numerous people believe that this is an act of censorship by Facebook. Some users argued that they should be allowed to decide what's "true, fake, or otherwise," a challenge that's bound to be a slippery slope in this era of algorithm-based confirmation bias. Others took on a more conspiratorial tone, claiming that Facebook failed to reveal which pages were removed (despite the alert containing a link listing the pages in question). Facebook first released the information in December, creating a help page that showed users if they liked or followed pages and accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency, Russia's notorious troll farm, but today's alert seems to have inspired newfound alarm. The fact that Facebook explicitly stated which pages were deleted seems to have done little to reduce the anger over the allegedly clandestine silencing.
How many of the notified/complaining users are in fact MORE Russian misinformation accounts that have not yet been discovered... and the outcry is simply a ploy to destabilize Facebook?
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
The DNC spent 1.2 BILLLION and lost to some trolls on facebook?
But selectively discussing truth is what is going on here. The news reports what's demonstrably true, but they only present the facts which support their desired narrative and ignore the things that do not.
I learned this 25 years ago, watching the local TV station's (which I worked for) news coverage of a Senatorial campaign. The incumbent was sure to win, he'd won many senate races before, but that wasn't the desired narrative. We where also subject to "equal time" rules at the time. So how do you cover this when you don't like the incumbent? Easy.. They granted two 3 min segments, one to each campaign's rally in town. For the challenger, you got 3 min of him speaking about how his policies where better than the incumbent's with background video of the cheering crowd. For the incumbent's rally we got a discussion of the protestors who showed up with background video of their protest outside the rally. Both segments where 100% true, but the implication of the coverage was the incumbent was loosing. He won the election by nearly 30% margins the following week.
So being True isn't enough... You need the Truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth... Or you are subject to being mistaken.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I don't think it was infighting, I think it was complacency and misreading the data.
Clinton's campaign acted all along as if they could leave it to Trump lose the election, and the polls seemed to be bearing that out. However polling figures aren't as reliable as the "margin of error" figures suggest, because that margin only represents random sampling errors. It does not account for systematic sampling errors.
Every poll is adjusted by some kind of likely voter turnout model, and in state after state anomalously high rural turnout knocked those models into a cocked hat. The thing is there were warning signs of this from Clinton's own campaigns in those states, which Clinton chose to ignore because the numbers were telling her what she expected to hear.
That's always a danger when you manage by numbers. Numeric and anecdotal data both have their place, mostly to raise healthy doubts about the other.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Does collusion with a foreign government to influence the election for a quid pro quo of easing sanctions matter to you at all?
You are welcome on my lawn.
We almost need some kind of education program to identify legitimate sources of news. Using Google to search for "Fact Check title" often works, though care is required there as with anything else.
Which exactly what is happening in some other countries : France is having a few pilot program of teach media to kids (random example of a youtuber who's a teacher in real life and has published records of a classroom. Sorry it's in French. And sorry for the unfortunate implication if you translate the title in English, that wasn't intended in French).
The Herman Goering applies, and I fear it probably always will.
His assert about people getting used to (and eventually somewhat believing) a lie repeated enough might apply as well.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]