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Nov 24, 2016The entire structure of Facebook is not set up as a news-sharing platform, but as a headline and image-rating platform.
↩︎ Vice News
Particularly, the mobile share button, which Facebook added in 2012 as it sought to compete with Twitter as a source of news. That and other Twitter-imitation moves like Trending and hashtags created a hybrid platform that achieved massive publishing success while problematically retaining the editorial freedom afforded by "original sharing," that was Facebook's original meat-and-potatoes.
A librarian who studies information literacy says we may be miscasting the issue: the problem isn't always that people can't tell when news is fake, it's often that they don't care.
Minor fake news panic: Jesse Singal, in a Twitter thread, suggests Trump is throwing false information to the press on purpose to gauge his ability to get away with lies.
Nov 17, 2016I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything—they’ll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist.
↩︎ Washington Post
In the 1800s, people believed newspaper stories about trips to the moon and monkeys picking cotton. Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken printed stories made from whole cloth. More recently, Joseph Mitchell and David Foster Wallace embellished wholeheartedly. Our best hope is that it's in Facebook's interest not to let this get out of hand. (But then again: Isn't it already?)
Nov 17, 2016Sure, those Macedonian news stories aren’t great, but their effect such as it is comes from confirming what people already believe. Contrast that to Miller’s stories in the New York Times: because the New York Times was a trusted gatekeeper, many people fundamentally changed their opinions, resulting in a disaster.
↩︎ Stratechery
The 20 top hoax news stories on Facebook garnered 1.4 million more engagements than the top 20 pieces of journalism.
Yesterday we found out that Facebook really has been worried about fake news all along—but they’re even more worried about appearing to be anti-conservative. They have the tools to shut down fake news, but backlash against Trending News’ alleged bias led the company to shelve an algorithm update that would downrank fake news.
Nov 15, 2016For Mark Zuckerberg to say that less than 1% of news on Facebook is a hoax is a little like saying that less than 1% of your brain is malignant cancer. It’s not the 1% but the malignancy. It sounds like things are 99% okay, but it’s actually a very bad diagnosis.
↩︎ Track Changes
A Slate journalist covering LGBT issues posted the death threats that people were sending him on Facebook. The threats were real, but the company said posting them violated community standards.
The top Google result for "final election results" is a random, very fake blog that claims Trump won the popular vote. (He did not.)
Nov 15, 2016When Mic shared a story about convicted rapist Brock Turner on its own Facebook page, it gathered about 7,700 reactions and was shared 4,400 times. When Takei shared that same story the next day, it got nearly three times as many reactions—over 22,000—and drove over 5,000 shares.
↩︎ Digiday
The day before the election, 20% of all political tweets were made by bots. We need to engage deeply and quickly with the reality of algorithmic democracy.
If the election weren’t such a shitshow we’d probably be a lot more alarmed about the fact that Russia just shut down LinkedIn for failing to store data on Russian servers.
Analysts see it as a shot across the bow aimed at sending a message to larger tech companies. Needless to say, Russian servers could be more easily used by the state to keep tabs on dissidents—and, presumably, the flip side is true for the United States and our ever-vigilant NSA.
