Facebook's model is social rent seeking. Fake news helps this by keeping people involved and by increasing time spent on the site/app. Efforts to curtail fake news are lip service only. Seeing a disputed tag will make a user do what exactly?
They will likely seek out more confirming opinions from their own "trusted" networks of friends, sites, and bloggers and their own already echoing facebook feed.
I don't know this for sure but if I were doing a study I'd assign very low probability to the null hypothesis.
Agreed. I believe Facebook understands the true problem, but simply can't address it without major changes to structure and philosophy. So they do things like this- to appease lawmakers just enough to avoid scrutiny.
It's politics in general around the world but mostly in the US where the internet and the rise of confirmation bias has increased polarisation. The only solution is to teach people to be more flexible in their beliefs and increase their willingness to compromise. And this is not something Facebook alone can do.
>Seeing a disputed tag will make a user do what exactly?
A few years ago I added tags on my site, when people posted a satire link it'd say 'this is satire', fake news was the same etc there were 7 categories altogether covering hundreds of sites and links (satire site, potentially fake, malware, objectionable content, disreputable source, fake story, click bait).
I thought it was a fantastic idea because people would spend literally hours arguing over satire pieces (American site) but it backfired spectacularly.
I got accused of 'censorship' and 'who are you to say what's true or not', so I just dropped the idea. I still think it was great but end users hate that stuff, for some of them the entire reason they're on these sites is just to post and argue about that stuff.
So Facebook could never win doing the same, it just alienates their customer base.
People who are heavily in a particular camp where never the target of the fake news. They are integral parts of its distribution but the target has always been swing voters and those who needed a push to get out to vote.
Likewise the purpose of the disputed tags are to give those who are susceptible to influence or not up to date on the news an easy way for them to cut through the noise and get to the truth.
the fact-checkers say they have no way
of determining whether the “disputed”
tags they’re affixing to “fake news”
articles slow (or perhaps even accelerate)
the stories’ spread.
Gee, why doesn't facebook employ the popular downvote-flag-and-hellban tactics that work perfectly for HN?
Simply marking something as antithetical only attracts your antithesis. As a benevolent dictator, you just have to black hole the things people like, that you don't like.
Social media platforms like Facebook have more political power in the US than the president, and should be just as accountable for their actions as any political organization must be. I don't think the full extent of how much control social media has over our lives has reached the popular imagination yet.
I have stopped using most forms of social media (except this one, obviously), but I don't think the buck stops there. Deleting your profile isn't much of a vote when they don't stop tracking you after your profile has been deleted. It also seems like for most people that to stop using these services would be like to stop using electricity. It's a choice that's almost inconceivable.
Many companies of a decent size e.g. 100 will have someone dedicated to PR. So we are talking a significant proportion of businesses. And the role of PR is merely to disseminate factual, accurate information about the company e.g. press releases. It's by definition not fake news.
Now granted this is just a move by google and news corp and washingtonpost to create a "uniform" ad delivery format and to collect more data from chrome.
> They benefit way too much from fake news to shut them down.
Absolutely. That's why they joined news corp and washingtonpost in "Coalition for Better Ads".
Another thing they can do to make the web a better place is just publish a list of the ads that people are seeing, and their reach. The users are stuck in silos, and no one can see what other people are seeing.
The recent admission of accepting $150K from a "Russian fake news entity" hardly scratches the surface of the massive influence that Facebook's algorithm had on Trump's victory.
It is the algorithm itself that made Trump's victory possible. By amplifying content that shows early signs of virality, the algorithm gave Trump a way to dominate the news cycle whenever he wished. He then used this tactic and shrewd timing to control the narrative, even when a large percentage of the stories were about him and contained broadly negative coverage.
The other major factor in Trump's riding the Facebook news feed algorithm to victory is the way people form friendships on Facebook. If someone has 800 friends, then even if most of those friends share political beliefs, there will be some small percentage who hold different beliefs. Trump created controversial stories that were designed to read differently based on political affiliation, which is why many of his remarks sounded so utterly stupid to people who likely opposed him in the first place.
For example, by generalizing immigrants as criminals and rapists, Trump alienated people who would likely not have voted for the less immigrant-friendly of the two candidates under any circumstances, while reassuring those who fear and/or resent immigrants that he "gets it" and is willing to offend people to speak the truth about an issue they care about.
He used the same tactic with many permutations, and kept repeating the ones that worked again and again. When the WaPo or NYT would write a story harshly criticizing his brashness or insensitivity and someone would share that with their 800+ friends, even if 750 were like-minded, the rest of those friends were being effectively "reached" by Trump with the message that he wanted them to take away. Once reached, they could share the same post and editorialize it with their own framing, targeting their own like-minded friends. In a very literal sense, when using this tactic, no publicity was bad publicity for Trump.
The strategy is partly a feint and partly a trojan horse. Everyone who kept Trump in the news when he was mind-bogglingly starting to gain votes during the GOP primary helped him become the only story worth reporting for all news outlets. The other candidates seemed boring and un-newsworthy in comparison.
The tactic only worked for Trump because of the the demographic layout of the US, but it was (as is obvious in hindsight) the only strategy that could possibly allow someone who was outspent by at least 4:1 by a candidate who was expected to win by a landslide, to have any chance at all of winning.
Zuck should not be targeting fake news. The damage was not done by the many hundreds of different domains that hosted blogs styled like newspapers touting conspiracy theories that were often among the most shared Facebook articles during the election.
The damage was actually done by the major news organizations for taking the bait and letting Trump become the story far too early and letting him control the narrative, keeping it about scandal and frivolity and keeping the focus away from policy and issues.
While I think Zuck may be a truly great leader and visionary, I find it fairly disappointing that he's so nakedly getting involved in politics by decrying fake news (instead of actually taking the blame for his algorithm being so easily expoited by Trump). It seems likely that the next election will lead to significant human-vetting before an article can trend significantly on Facebook, and some sort of ideological litmus test being imposed by Facebook when screening that content. This shows a knee-jerk technocratic response that devalues free speech and the marketplace of ideas.
One other reason Trump was able to so effectively hijack the algorithm was that news organizations are essentially trying to create viral articles, and their own internal metrics are heavily linked to data about social shares and virality rather than traditional, longe...
At first i was going to challenge your FB responsible for trump
....but your 800 analogy got me really thinking. All !all! Those i know who voted trump didn't like lima beans. Never order them. Never taste them. Never buy them. Simply hate the taste of them. Hillary is a lima bean. Plus, they dont have FB. But their friends do and so does the tv humans they watch. So even the 800 is really more...
But... Isnt it simply the fact that its the many to many aspect? Today its trump. Tomorrow it can be [someonefamous.al]
I would be careful with anything politico's says about fake news or anything for that matter.
"In November 2013, The Washington Post wrote a lengthy article detailing a payola scandal in which Allen would give favorable Politico coverage in return for advertising dollars.[10] Mr. Allen has refused to publicly comment.[11] Jonathan Chait described Politico's response as 'evasive tripe'.[12] Writing in Salon, Alex Pareene described his work as "indistinguishable from a paid advocate for business interests."
And Mike Allen is no longer with Politco (he left to co-found Axios), which makes your complaint erroneous and unfounded.
Moreover, this article has interviews with the very fact-checkers Facebook has partnered with to try to stop "fake news," as well as comment from Facebook itself.
This whole endeavor was fairly ill-starred from the beginning. Looking at their list of arbiters, they're pulling in places like Politifact whose bread-and-butter is in parsing out politicians' statements themselves and ranking them N pinocchios, or whatever.
This kind of "fact-checking" is inherently political, since everything depends on exactly how much charity you grant the speaker for simplifications that may or may not convey an accurate picture of reality, or out-of-context presentations of true facts that don't have the implications a naive audience might draw. Therefore, all such attempts will have a necessary and massive credibility problem; it's very easy for non-mainstream elements to simply paint the fact-checker as biased. See, for instance, the alacrity with which Trump and his supporters turned around the label "fake news" itself as an insult against the mainstream organizations they feud with.
Meanwhile, there's the separate issue of clickbaity news stories that describe events which simply never happened, presumably for the ad revenue. Unlike political stories, these can generally be quickly and objectively categorized as such; however, Facebook also has the incentive to keep these on their platform to drive more engagement with Facebook, and so it's near-certain they won't be productively addressed, despite being a problem that everyone can agree on.
An underlying problem is that we really are moving into a dystopian, post-truth world. There's a huge part of the population that is less interested in facts, and more interested in sustaining a certain narrative.
It's really scary when you understand this point, because it's self-fulfilling. If enough people don't care about the truth and act accordingly, then facts actually don't matter and the belief, no matter how false, becomes the effective reality.
Where that can lead and who'll be leading us are the scariest parts.
31 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 79.5 ms ] threadThey will likely seek out more confirming opinions from their own "trusted" networks of friends, sites, and bloggers and their own already echoing facebook feed.
I don't know this for sure but if I were doing a study I'd assign very low probability to the null hypothesis.
It's politics in general around the world but mostly in the US where the internet and the rise of confirmation bias has increased polarisation. The only solution is to teach people to be more flexible in their beliefs and increase their willingness to compromise. And this is not something Facebook alone can do.
A few years ago I added tags on my site, when people posted a satire link it'd say 'this is satire', fake news was the same etc there were 7 categories altogether covering hundreds of sites and links (satire site, potentially fake, malware, objectionable content, disreputable source, fake story, click bait).
I thought it was a fantastic idea because people would spend literally hours arguing over satire pieces (American site) but it backfired spectacularly.
I got accused of 'censorship' and 'who are you to say what's true or not', so I just dropped the idea. I still think it was great but end users hate that stuff, for some of them the entire reason they're on these sites is just to post and argue about that stuff.
So Facebook could never win doing the same, it just alienates their customer base.
People who are heavily in a particular camp where never the target of the fake news. They are integral parts of its distribution but the target has always been swing voters and those who needed a push to get out to vote.
Likewise the purpose of the disputed tags are to give those who are susceptible to influence or not up to date on the news an easy way for them to cut through the noise and get to the truth.
Simply marking something as antithetical only attracts your antithesis. As a benevolent dictator, you just have to black hole the things people like, that you don't like.
They are. Vote with your... profile?
In the same way that your vote gives the president power, your consumption of services gives those providers power.
Many companies of a decent size e.g. 100 will have someone dedicated to PR. So we are talking a significant proportion of businesses. And the role of PR is merely to disseminate factual, accurate information about the company e.g. press releases. It's by definition not fake news.
“Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.” -- Orwell
http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Now granted this is just a move by google and news corp and washingtonpost to create a "uniform" ad delivery format and to collect more data from chrome.
> They benefit way too much from fake news to shut them down.
Absolutely. That's why they joined news corp and washingtonpost in "Coalition for Better Ads".
Ultimately, it's all about money.
It is the algorithm itself that made Trump's victory possible. By amplifying content that shows early signs of virality, the algorithm gave Trump a way to dominate the news cycle whenever he wished. He then used this tactic and shrewd timing to control the narrative, even when a large percentage of the stories were about him and contained broadly negative coverage.
The other major factor in Trump's riding the Facebook news feed algorithm to victory is the way people form friendships on Facebook. If someone has 800 friends, then even if most of those friends share political beliefs, there will be some small percentage who hold different beliefs. Trump created controversial stories that were designed to read differently based on political affiliation, which is why many of his remarks sounded so utterly stupid to people who likely opposed him in the first place.
For example, by generalizing immigrants as criminals and rapists, Trump alienated people who would likely not have voted for the less immigrant-friendly of the two candidates under any circumstances, while reassuring those who fear and/or resent immigrants that he "gets it" and is willing to offend people to speak the truth about an issue they care about.
He used the same tactic with many permutations, and kept repeating the ones that worked again and again. When the WaPo or NYT would write a story harshly criticizing his brashness or insensitivity and someone would share that with their 800+ friends, even if 750 were like-minded, the rest of those friends were being effectively "reached" by Trump with the message that he wanted them to take away. Once reached, they could share the same post and editorialize it with their own framing, targeting their own like-minded friends. In a very literal sense, when using this tactic, no publicity was bad publicity for Trump.
The strategy is partly a feint and partly a trojan horse. Everyone who kept Trump in the news when he was mind-bogglingly starting to gain votes during the GOP primary helped him become the only story worth reporting for all news outlets. The other candidates seemed boring and un-newsworthy in comparison.
The tactic only worked for Trump because of the the demographic layout of the US, but it was (as is obvious in hindsight) the only strategy that could possibly allow someone who was outspent by at least 4:1 by a candidate who was expected to win by a landslide, to have any chance at all of winning.
Zuck should not be targeting fake news. The damage was not done by the many hundreds of different domains that hosted blogs styled like newspapers touting conspiracy theories that were often among the most shared Facebook articles during the election.
The damage was actually done by the major news organizations for taking the bait and letting Trump become the story far too early and letting him control the narrative, keeping it about scandal and frivolity and keeping the focus away from policy and issues.
While I think Zuck may be a truly great leader and visionary, I find it fairly disappointing that he's so nakedly getting involved in politics by decrying fake news (instead of actually taking the blame for his algorithm being so easily expoited by Trump). It seems likely that the next election will lead to significant human-vetting before an article can trend significantly on Facebook, and some sort of ideological litmus test being imposed by Facebook when screening that content. This shows a knee-jerk technocratic response that devalues free speech and the marketplace of ideas.
One other reason Trump was able to so effectively hijack the algorithm was that news organizations are essentially trying to create viral articles, and their own internal metrics are heavily linked to data about social shares and virality rather than traditional, longe...
But... Isnt it simply the fact that its the many to many aspect? Today its trump. Tomorrow it can be [someonefamous.al]
"In November 2013, The Washington Post wrote a lengthy article detailing a payola scandal in which Allen would give favorable Politico coverage in return for advertising dollars.[10] Mr. Allen has refused to publicly comment.[11] Jonathan Chait described Politico's response as 'evasive tripe'.[12] Writing in Salon, Alex Pareene described his work as "indistinguishable from a paid advocate for business interests."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Allen_(journalist)
Politico is a well known "fake news" money grubbing operation. Their "news" stories are pretty much paid advertisements.
Moreover, this article has interviews with the very fact-checkers Facebook has partnered with to try to stop "fake news," as well as comment from Facebook itself.
This kind of "fact-checking" is inherently political, since everything depends on exactly how much charity you grant the speaker for simplifications that may or may not convey an accurate picture of reality, or out-of-context presentations of true facts that don't have the implications a naive audience might draw. Therefore, all such attempts will have a necessary and massive credibility problem; it's very easy for non-mainstream elements to simply paint the fact-checker as biased. See, for instance, the alacrity with which Trump and his supporters turned around the label "fake news" itself as an insult against the mainstream organizations they feud with.
Meanwhile, there's the separate issue of clickbaity news stories that describe events which simply never happened, presumably for the ad revenue. Unlike political stories, these can generally be quickly and objectively categorized as such; however, Facebook also has the incentive to keep these on their platform to drive more engagement with Facebook, and so it's near-certain they won't be productively addressed, despite being a problem that everyone can agree on.
It's really scary when you understand this point, because it's self-fulfilling. If enough people don't care about the truth and act accordingly, then facts actually don't matter and the belief, no matter how false, becomes the effective reality.
Where that can lead and who'll be leading us are the scariest parts.