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Facebook Waited Too Long To Stop 10 Billion Pageviews of Repeat Misinformation Spreaders (ft.com) 168

Facebook could have prevented more than 10bn pageviews of prominent misinformation-spreading accounts in the US if it had acted sooner in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, a new report has claimed [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. Financial Times: The social media giant took a number of eleventh-hour steps to combat misinformation ahead of November's highly polarised election, such as demoting some misinformation superspreaders and blocking new political advertisements. However according to the US-based non-profit activism group Avaaz, if the platform had tweaked its algorithm and moderation policies in March last year, instead of waiting until October, it would have prevented an estimated 10.1bn additional pageviews on the 100 top-performing pages it classified as repeat spreaders of misinformation. The list comprised pages that Avaaz had identified as sharing at least three misinformation claims that were fact-checked between October 2019 and October 2020, with at least two of the posts falling within 90 days of each other. The report said that Facebook's delay in acting had been critical because it allowed prolific spreaders of misinformation to increase their online footprint dramatically, with some tripling their engagement over the course of the election campaign and even catching up with mainstream US media pages. It added that even after Facebook acted to block top-performing misinformation pages from October 10, the effect was inconsistent. While the average decline in interaction was 28 per cent, not all major figures were affected.
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Facebook Waited Too Long To Stop 10 Billion Pageviews of Repeat Misinformation Spreaders

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  • Perhaps it is time (Score:4, Insightful)

    by LondoMollari ( 172563 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @09:43AM (#61189000) Homepage

    Time to stop arguing for more censorship and instead argue for less

    • When the Left were still in opposition, they were against censorship and for freedom of speech. Senator McCarthy, who tried to lean on private companies to stop hiring Communists, was — and still is — considered a disgrace.

      Now that they are the Regime [washingtonpost.com] — able to survive even a hostile President — they want all the censorship they can get [senate.gov]. And they will get it too, with the help of propaganda-articles like TFA and the punishing regulations [washingtonpost.com] this propaganda allows them to impose withou

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        Senator McCarthy, who tried to lean on private companies to stop hiring Communists, was â" and still is â" considered a disgrace.

        McCarthy was, and still is, a disgrace because he saw "communists" where none existed and ruined people's lives just because. His actions were behind the issue with Milo Radulovich [wikipedia.org]. He accused people of being communists or communist sympathizers without any bit of evidence to support the claim (sound familiar?) and repeatedly lied about people in the new media, in
        • by mi ( 197448 )

          he saw "communists" where none existed

          Can you give examples?

          and ruined people's lives just because

          Dealing with something like COVID-19 or Communism, I'd rather err on the side of the caution.

          I can list quite a few people, who lost their jobs due to the woke campaigns against imaginary racism — can you list names of those wrongfully accused of Communism-sympathies?

          In short, he was the forerunner of today's Republicans who spout the tripe of "socialism" when it comes to people, but who love the fascist

          • by Kyr Arvin ( 5570596 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @04:53PM (#61190740)

            he saw "communists" where none existed

            Can you give examples?

            For example, his famous "list of 57 communists working in the state department" that brandished didn't actually exist. He said he had "penetrated the iron curtain of State Department secrecy" while hiding that most of the names came from the Robert Lee list that had contained mostly named that had been cleared. McCarthy constantly exaggerated the loyalties of the people on the list, converting "has some sympathies for communist causes" to "a communist." He was good at using rhetoric, but rarely produced any evidence towards a person.

            I can say of the nine people charged by McCarthy at the Tydings committee, the evidence against four of them was very flimsy (and they were later cleared by loyalty boards), and the evidence against these five was even weaker:
            Dorothy Kenyon, a feminist who did some work for the UN (good enough for McCarthy to charge her as a communist), who lost her civil service job as a result of McCarthy's allegations.

            Esther Brunauer, who left Germany when the Nazis came to power, and converted previously-pacifist to more specifically anti-isolation and anti-Nazi stances at the start of WW2. After the war, she came under attack from isolationists, but Senator Joe Ball stated she was "perhaps the most violently anti-Communist person I know."

            Gustavo Duran, who joined an anti-Communist faction during the Spanish Civil War. McCarthy claimed that in a picture from that time, he was wearing a uniform of the SIM - The Russian military intelligence. The uniform was actually the Spanish military uniform. No communist ties were ever proven.

            Owen Lattimore, who made some pro-Soviet Union statements. Specifically, during World War II, he was in favor of the USSR's foreign policy of international cooperation against against the Axis Powers of Japan and Germany (before the US's entering the war), and due to that he published an article by a pro-Soviet writer who wrote favorably on Stalin's purge trials to strengthen the Soviet Union against the upcoming war on the Axis Powers. It was absolutely the biggest blunder of his career, and his own editorials arguing against allowing a communist takeover of China didn't erase that stain. Later reporting on how good things looked at a sanitized Russian labor camp did not help his position either. His writings were "superficial and uncritical", but McCarthy trumped up the charges and turned it into "Owen Lattimore is a top Russian spy." No proof was able to be produced, later declassification of intercepted Russian cables mentioned Lattimore, and a retired FBI agent 30 years later said they never had anything substantial against him.

            Harlow Shapley was one of the nine people charged in the Tydings hearings, but I can't find much information here. Despite the report's statements, Shapley was not in the State Department, working as an astronomer with the Harvard College Observatory. He was known for his public contempt for HUAC, but these days contempt for that group is pretty reasonable.

        • Wow, what an extreme partisan view you have if you read about McCarthy, and the modern situation you ascribe it to is Republicans calling people socialists. I haven't seen anyone's career ruined from being called a Socialist.

          The obvious metaphor is left-wing people calling others racists today. It's levelled without any evidence or for the most minor of transgressions (or just outright completely false), associating in any way with someone else deemed a racist, etc. We see daily stories of careers end
          • by Uberbah ( 647458 )

            The obvious metaphor is left-wing people calling others racists today.

            Right wing. Democrats are just another party of right wing assholes with a heavy syrup of virtual signaling piled on top. Didn't like Obama's drone strikes or bank bail outs? Racist. Didn't like Hillary's wars or taking bribes from Goldman Sachs? Sexist. Wont support Kopmala in 2024 for president? Racist and sexist.

        • In short, he was the forerunner of today's Republicans who spout the tripe of "socialism" when it comes to people, but who love the fascist policies of giving taxpayer money to corporations.

          Or even more obnoxious, the people who accuse you of being a racist or a fascist or an agent of a foreign adversary, simply for just disagreeing with them. Or find it perfectly acceptable to condemn a man as a rapist on mere hearsay and zero evidence, where the place or even the year it occurred can't even be described.

        • Giving taxpayer money to corporations is fascist in what way? Fascism puts everything under the direct control of the government. Socialism puts everything under the direct control of the government. The closer a government is to being socialist (and little differentiates fascist from socialist economies), the more likely they are to be subsidizing businesses. China is an excellent example of this.

          And while McCarthy's hearings may have gone off the rails, it was not without substance. 90% of the KGB

      • When the Left were still in opposition, they were against censorship and for freedom of speech.

        The Republican legislature of Kentucky just passed a law making it illegal to insult a cop. Speech has never been free. There have always been consequences. Our system is supposed to protect us from our government infringing on free speech. Apparently the exception is our militarized law enforcement.

        https://bit.ly/318a7sy [bit.ly]

    • Sure that fine... However the problem with Facebook isn't too much or too little censoring. But a lack of oversight and moderation. Free Speech doesn't mean all speech needs to be weighted equally. In a country of over 300 million people and a world of over 6 billion people. Most likely there will be people talking about really stupid things, that are just wrong, which are easily proven wrong.
      When you come across false information being spread, treating on equal stance as proven factual information is j

  • Three questionable (for some definition of "questionable") shares in a year, with 2 of those within 90 days of each other. That's not "prolific".
  • Fake news lost.
    The system works.

  • It’s not facebook’s job to force censorship. Remove pornography and gore, sure, but not “misinformation”.
    • Facebook is free to allow or disallow any content they choose. In this case "misinformation" had real world consequences including deaths.

      • sure, but if that's the case the should be classified as publishers and as such be exempt for section 230 protections.
      • by Jodka ( 520060 )

        Facebook is free to allow or disallow any content they choose...

        Film productions are incorporated, so when Democrats wanted to arrest and jail the makers of a movie [wikipedia.org] critical of then-presidential-candidate Hillary Clinton, they told us corporations were not people and did not have legal rights. Now that Democrats use their control of social media corporations to censor their critics, how dare you question the rights of corporations?

        In this case "misinformation" had real world consequences including deaths.

        We must have censorship or else people will die.

        • We must have censorship or else people will die.
          You forgot to add, "won't someone think of the children!" to your ridiculous plea.
        • I'm glad you included that link to the wiki page so I was able to see that your post is basically a lie. Very thoughtful of you.

  • by BardBollocks ( 1231500 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @10:34AM (#61189172)

    ... Facebook were 'trending' fake news on behalf of the Hillary Clinton Campaign during the election.

    Caught them red handed - posted the DNS transfer history, Alexa webstats, and details of the PR company that created the fake news sites on the Facebook pages of the involved parties and within minutes they disappeared, only to reappear some time later.

    Facebook is not Social Media - it's a surveillance, advertising and dissemination platform - tacked on to social media.

    We need something decentralised that removes everything but users and user content.

    • We need something decentralised that removes everything but users and user content.

      How? The spam problem is the biggest problem with decentralized networks, and it has killed more than one of them.

  • Wow. Shocker. I'm so astonished. Who could have foreseen this eventuality. :|

  • The consumers of the fake news would be just as stupid had those posts been censored.

    What you want is a population that has enough critical reasoning skills and enough connection to reality that fake news postings on social media won't fool them. The censorship route is like a hot house that all the flowers within cannot survive without. Long term that is bad enough by itself but for obvious reasons you don't want any private corporation in control of the sunlight for obvious reasons.

    • The consumers of the fake news would be just as stupid had those posts been censored.

      They'd be as stupid, but they would not be as misinformed.

      What you want is a population that has enough critical reasoning skills and enough connection to reality that fake news postings on social media won't fool them

      Which is why there have been cuts to education spending, the W administration passed a law to make teachers have to focus on standardized tests instead of things like "critical reasoning", and the ramping up of "college is indoctrination!".

      you don't want any private corporation in control of the sunlight for obvious reasons.

      When in US history has private corporations not been in control of the sunlight?

  • by kaatochacha ( 651922 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @10:48AM (#61189222)

    I'm starting to see more and more of this in "fact checks".
    Someone makes a claim, like "all National Socialists hate Jews".
    The fact checker tags it Untrue, and when you read the explanation is says something like "the contention 'all' is technically incorrect, five National Socialists were discovered who did not hate Jews".

    While technically true, it's another sort of massaging of the facts.
    Who checks the fact checkers?

  • Facebook is only concerned about pageviews. That's how they make money. Why would they limit pageviews?
    The only time they would even think of limiting pageviews of one type of misinformation is public blowback (which might limit other pageviews).

  • There is absolutely no need whatsoever for any tech company to exercise censorship of end-user content unless it is illegal (such as child porn) or harms other users of the service (such as spam.) For all other kinds of content, the answer to "misinformation" is to let the user decide.

    We already do this with ad blockers, parental controls, etc. The Facebooks of the world make it super-easy for users to nominate what they do see, they just need to do the same to help them select what not to see.

    One man's disinformation is another man's secrets of the universe. Fine. The only legitimate answer to that is to let the user choose. Done and done.

    Treat people like adults and get the heck out of the censorship business.

  • How about just booting the lying fuckers off facebook.

  • by sideslash ( 1865434 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @11:47AM (#61189520)
    Maybe they could have done even better at suppressing the story that Joe Biden's son Hunter abused drugs and received influence payments. Particularly such details like "10 held by H for the Big Guy" and Tony Bobulinski's related testimony. What was Facebook thinking, letting that information get out there?

    The people don't need the truth. They need The Narrative. It's for the best!
  • by algaeman ( 600564 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @11:49AM (#61189530)
    How much money would Facebook have lost if they had stopped this misinformation in March instead of October? That is the only metric that they care about.
  • by thrasher thetic ( 4566717 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @12:35PM (#61189790)
    Let people talk, even if they're wrong.
  • by joe_frisch ( 1366229 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @02:26PM (#61190256)
    That is always at the core of this question: Who do we trust to declare something to be "misinformation" that should be removed? There is not authority that the majority of Americans trust.
    • by Uberbah ( 647458 )

      Well, at a certain point lass spring, anyone suggesting people wear masks to reduce the spread of covid could have been tagged as spreading "misinformation". In 2002, the idea that Saddam didn't plan 911 or have WMD's would have been "misinformation". Last fall, the Hunter Biden laptop story was censored by tech platforms despite it being completely true.

      So, this is mostly just misinformation about misinformation, and the people whining the most about it are the most guilty about misleading the public. Same

      • Sadly, it seems that if you can put allegations of an opponent engaging in some kind of wrongdoing into the public consciousness before the evidence that you're the one doing it can reach them, you have a good shot at getting away with it.
    • Having noticed great similarities between what is called misinformation and what is politically and/or financially disadvantageous to the speaker, I cannot trust anyone with that authority.

It is contrary to reasoning to say that there is a vacuum or space in which there is absolutely nothing. -- Descartes

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