Facebook's Fight Against Fake News Was Undercut by Fear of Conservative Backlash (gizmodo.com) 470
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."
Mess of their own making. (Score:5, Insightful)
If they hadn't been rigging the news feeds and injecting their own bias, they wouldn't have gotten into this mess.
No fear of conservative backlash (Score:5, Funny)
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... [theonion.com]
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The Onion is co-owned by Univision Communications... whose chairman Haim Saban juuust happens to be the Clintons' biggest individual financial backer.
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and this brings to mind a question I've been wondering for a while. At this point, is there _any_ source which both sides would accept as authoritative? If not, it's gonna be pretty durn hard to confirm or refute anything to the opposition's satisfaction, which puts a serious dent in the ability to reconcile...
Re:No fear of conservative backlash (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes and his transition team is starting out with a Woman, a Gay Male and an Black, an obvious display of his "Fear of minorities "! Also everybody knows Trump is really a Conservative Democrat who ran as a Republican.
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Islam is a religion. There is a political movement that is largely based on interpretations of Islam. These are two different, but related, things.
Re:No fear of conservative backlash (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, it is shit like the GP posted that is why Clinton lost.
Fear of minorities is why Trump was elected. Period.
As long as that is your rhetoric, you will continue to lose.
Because you continue to blame strawmen instead of learning from your mistakes.
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"As long as that is your rhetoric, you will continue to lose.
Because you continue to blame strawmen instead of learning from your mistakes"
No. The mistake was not voting for your candidate even if you didn't think much of her. Hillary was never going to be my 1st choice but better her than Trump.
For all the blather about the revolt against the establishment, Trump failed to get as many votes as MITT ROMNEY, the blandest whitebread establishment candidate in many a year. And he got ~700,000 fewer votes than
Re:No fear of conservative backlash (Score:4, Insightful)
"I'm saying that if Democrats want to be successful it would certainly help if they can find people to run that weren't accused of committing multiple felonies"
Can you explain why that standard should be applied only to Democrats?
Chris Christie, Scott Walker & Rick Perry have more than a few legal woes
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
And the President-elect is now begging off his own upcoming court appearance regarding Trump University - a case that's been ongoing for over 5 years.
Re:Mess of their own making. (Score:5, Insightful)
The operative phrase in this story is "after Trending Topics." They got caught grooming their feed through an SJW filter. The backlash they felt was well deserved and their caution since is wise.
Is this "fake news" meme anything more than progressive echo chamber stuff? I saw plenty of pure anti-Trump bullshit polluting Facebook before the election.
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Is this "fake news" meme anything more than progressive echo chamber stuff? I saw plenty of pure anti-Trump bullshit polluting Facebook before the election.
Wait, so you doubt that there's fake news on Facebook, and as evidence you cite the fact that you saw a lot of anti-Trump fake news? Wouldn't that still be fake news?
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Re:Mess of their own making. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well, Hitler won some elections. He was elected NSDAP party chairman in 1921 after a rousing tour via car giving anti-treaty and anti-jew polemic speeches. He was the most popular face of the NSDAP party, so he demanded an election and won it.
And then he got sent to jail.
He was appointed chancellor because he got the second-place vote and Hindenburg didn't get enough votes to have a majority. Joining with Hitler was his attempt at a majority coalition.
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If they hadn't been rigging the news feeds and injecting their own bias, they wouldn't have gotten into this mess.
private corporations are allowed to have bias and opinions
And are allowed to experience backlash because of it.
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More like an advocate of the 1st Amendment, which pretty much bans the government from restricting the speech of private individuals, including groups of them like a corporation.
Fake stories like... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Fake stories like... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Fake stories like... (Score:5, Insightful)
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I followed many of the polls also, and they indeed seemed to lean toward a Clinton win. It was a valid interpretation based on the numbers.
Overseas betting sites, such as Paddy Power, showed about a 3-to-1 advantage for Clinton. Those betting are putting their money on the line and won't generally rely on superficial interpretations of polls. And most are overseas such that pol
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Overseas betting sites ... They are gamblers, not partisans.
But, judging by post-election interviews, seems a lot of the US electorate are both.
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It's not just that, it's also that everybody, be it media or pollsters, were so arrogant in their attitudes towards Trump supporters that they got the bird from them while doing surveys. There ain't a good way to predict the reaction of people who refuse to be surveyed.
I for one am glad that I ignored much of the news in the last few days of the campaign. Even FNC was insufferable, w/ their tiresome what-if games, and even Hannity getting into it. The only 2 who got it right were Newt and Huckabee, the
Re:Fake stories like... (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org], 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.
Re: Fake stories like... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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The pollsters assumed that the Obama voting patterns would persist, and that was the failure. If there was a bias, it was a bias based on the last two or three elections.
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That could go either way. Maybe the media was trying to demoralize Trump supporters by showing that their vote was useless.
I know that at 7:45pm or so (EST), I turned on the news and say that Clinton was winning North Carolina (where I live), and I thought oh shit, why did I even bother going to vote today, they were right and this is going to be a landslide for Clinton.
You know something very odd? I checked the official NC election results website, which was updated pretty often (maybe once a minute), and
Re:Fake stories like... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Fake stories like... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Best unintentionally funny headline I've ever read (Score:4, Funny)
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"Reality has a well-known liberal bias".
Not this past election.
Re:Best unintentionally funny headline I've ever r (Score:4, Insightful)
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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.
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Re:Best unintentionally funny headline I've ever r (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Best unintentionally funny headline I've ever r (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's an excellent explanation why the system was set up to have an electoral college: https://geopoliticalfutures.co... [geopoliticalfutures.com]
"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."
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Something only a liberal would think. Reality has a fascist bias. All your feely-good hugbox ideas don't mean a thing when the Islamist comes to saw off your head.
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Radical Islamic Terror in the US is very rare - even if we include the outlier of 9-11.
Meanwhile, an anti-Semite has been appointed to Chief Strategist and hate crimes are on the rise. As a Jew, do you really think I should be more afraid of Muslims than of someone who hates Jews whispering in the President's ear?
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Bannon's not an anti-semite. And what's on the rise is leftist rioters beating people and setting fires in the streets. If Hillary had won and Trump supporters were doing this shit you'd be calling for drone strikes. Oh and most of those "hate crimes" are hoaxes. No Trump supporter is spray painting "make america white again" with a swastika on the side of buildings.
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It's George Bush's fault.
Re:Best unintentionally funny headline I've ever r (Score:4, Funny)
" You can't fix stupid."
And that explains Trump
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Liberals think that reality doesn't affect them...
They believe that because in their experience it is true. Private college students, government employees with guaranteed employment and large pensions, the wealthy, celebrities. These are all groups insulated from consequences of their own actions. They do not experience scarcity and financial hardship. They receive an inequitable degree of deference from law enforcement and when they do get into trouble they can often buy their way out with money, lawyers or political influence.
None of the people I'v
Re:Best unintentionally funny headline I've ever r (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Sometimes it feels like living in alt. reality (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Sometimes it feels like living in alt. reality (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't get the people saying Trump won the popular vote. He narrowly won quite a few states, some very narrowly while HRC won 2 to 1 in several of the very liberal states such as New York and California. These states are very heavily populated and she won big there. The electoral college worked just as it was designed, to curb the impact larger populated states have on the election. All those flyover states have an impact too.
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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.
I saw this on Facebook from Judge Jeanine Pirro. I went and checked, and couldn't find any returns that supported it.
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?
Another friend of mine posted the Trump quote and I linked to Snopes showing it was a fake, figuring he would see that as authoritative.. One of his friends said "Yeah, and who runs Snopes?!?" Another one of his friends said something like "So what if it's not true? After all the lies he told about Hillary, we need to keep circulating it a million times!" SMH.
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Not that the left is innocent in all of this.
Well really, it's not like it's just Democrats and Republicans posting fake news during this election. Every once in a while, my mom posts a story that says something like, "If you post this story on Facebook, Bill Gates will give you a millions dollars!" Every time I have to explain that it's not real. I understand the story says, "I know it's hard to believe, but it's REAL!" It's still not real. It doesn't even make sense. Stop posting it.
We can debate about what Facebook should do about it, or eve
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A fact is not half true. There are votes, there are a record of them, and that number is known.
Jesus. "A half true fact." On a fucking technology and science website.
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Most Republicans don't care that Hillary won the popular vote. Everyone already knew that California and illegal immigrants were going to vote for her in huge numbers.
Sure, and dead Syrians were risen back from the death, given Mexican sombreros and taken to the voting polls in taco trucks financed by George Soros. C'mon Johnny, connect the dots.
Here's the thing (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm always amazed at some of the crazy stuff I see circulating on social media. I look at it and wonder how people can be so naive as to believe this bullshit. It happens on network news as well. I once saw a woman talking about how the number of children's deaths from handguns had doubled every year since 1960. This was in like 1994 or so. Obvious bullshit to anyone who has ever done a little simple arithmetic but the news anchor just blandly accepted it as fact. Amazing how stupid people are.
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Alternative to censoring (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
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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?
If the fact-checking sites report 38% of fake-stories for the alt-right and only 19% for the alt-left, then it is in the interest of conservative politicians to declare those sites as left-wing: the conservative electorate will then look at them with distrust, will stop visiting them and will not be exposed to opinions that contradict their opinion.
The right alternative to fact-checking is no fact-checking.
Funny way of perceiving reality (Score:2, Informative)
If I recall correctly most fake news were against Trump, not against Hillary.
I am more surprised that despite the many word twists, omissions of context and outright lies about Trump he still managed to win.
Do not mistake me for pro Trump please, I think he is an idiot who is not half as smart as he thinks he is (especially that wall idea is silly), but that does not justify making stuff up about him, such as the 3 (or more) allegations about rape, out of which none proved to be true.
Or the twisting of his
List would have been enormous... (Score:2, Informative)
Eliminate fake news? Jesus, you'd have to block CNN, MSNBC, WaPo, NYT, HuffPo, on and on... Would have been a bloodbath.
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C'mon (Score:3, Insightful)
...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.
Re:C'mon (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, that statement is itself based around fake news [washingtonpost.com]. Funny, that.
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This Kool-Aid is delicious! Let's have more of it!
Why censor? (Score:2)
I would have thought that Facebook would avoid censoring viewpoints, however crazy. Once they start editing or restricting content, AFAIK they lose their legal immunity as a neutral platform. Once they take control of content, they become liable for that content. Some people get their news from tabloids. Some Facebook sites are the equivalent. So what?
On top of that: one person's "crazy" is another person's "entertainment" is another person's "truth". Remember the tinfoil conspiracy theories about the gover
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I don't think there should be censorship. But a little tag that pops up under the story preview with "This story's accuracy is doubtful; see more info here" wouldn't go awry. With of course a procedure to contest incorrect claims of fakery, and a procedure to flag other stories as being fake.
Maybe it worked perfectly. Which side faked more? (Score:2)
Don't see the problem (Score:2)
Which means those right-wing "news" sites were putting out fake stories. What's the problem? An algorithm doesn't determine what party a comment is affiliated with, it only determines the veracity of the comment.
But remember, Zuckerberg laughed about FB having an impact on the election. Because that's totally crazy [cnn.com].
Then again, based on this posting, it appears Zuckerberg was lying about
Doesn't matter the side...it's still fake news (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Buy Snopes (Score:2)
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No monopoly by ideology (Score:3)
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.
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Anyone trying to claim there's as many phony liberal-created stories out there as conservative ones is either a liar or a fool.
Who just wants facts anymore? (Score:2)
I want a snopes button (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Nothing to see here folks (yeah, right) (Score:2)
Of course, it's a matter of pure coincidence that Facebook board member Peter Thiel has been named to Trump's transition team.
Just as anti-Trump "Half Truths" Ramp Up (Score:2)
The devil is always in the details (Score:2)
"The goal of eliminating any appearance of political bias" is not the same as "eliminating political bias." In short, their goal is to improve their skills at generating propaganda, so they don't get caught as much.
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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.
Re:Climate change (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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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".
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Re:Climate change (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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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...
Re:Climate change (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org]. 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.
Re:Climate change (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Climate change (Score:5, Informative)
The alt-right is [buzzfeed.com] 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 [buzzfeed.com] - 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.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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 conte
Re:They want to filter anything they disagree with (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
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 pr
Re:Backlash or Bias? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Unintended consequences. (Score:2, Interesting)
Mod parent up.
Not only the the Ds manipulate their own primaries to make room for the Queen, they also engaged in a "pied piper" strategy to put Trump at the front of the pack in the R primary. Instead of playing the game fair, they thought they were smart enough to manipulate it, and caused a series of unintended consequences that bit their junk off.
My D friends who were so eager to get me to vote for Trump in the primaries (I didn't, fwiw), talking down his negatives, and emphasizing their horror at the
Re:Backlash or Bias? (Score:4, Informative)
Speaking of living in an alternative reality...
Obama nominated Merrick Garland [time.com] three quarters of a year ago. It has been official republican strategy [forbes.com] 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. [wikipedia.org]
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I didn't say he didn't nominate anyone. I said he didn't try to get anyone appointed.
He made no effort, and his own party didn't push the issue like they did for prior appointments. Where was the media coverage we had when Sotomayor was up? The media has already admitted to being a tool for the DNC and working their asses off for Hillary. (They keep talking about how they were wrong, how they were biased for Hillary, how they underestimated Trump, etc. in order to announce to the GOP that they'll dance
Re:Backlash or Bias? (Score:5, Insightful)
It has been official republican strategy [forbes.com] 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.
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>Obama's fault for not trying to appoint anyone to the Supreme Court.
You forgot your /s. It's hard to tell you're being sarcastic without it.
There might *actually* be some people who don't know that Obama has nominated a judge and the Republicans are the ones who refused to confirm him.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Free speech, assembly, petition, and religion (Score:2)
Once you give people freedom of religion, you give them permission to believe out and out lies. That's a feature, not a bug.
At the end of the day, what people believe isn't your responsibility, nor is it the responsibility of Facebook.
Re:Fake news from whose perspective? (Score:5, Informative)