Facebook Doesnt Get It

[marble falls]

Facebook Doesn’t Get It

David Leonhardt MARCH 21, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/21/opinion/facebook-trump-election.html?mabReward=ART_TS7&recid=12FWr4CnoNxFwnuZXNLbpGhuJv7&recp=0


The election of Donald Trump was so shocking — and damaging to the country — that many people went looking for a scapegoat. There was a long list of candidates.

Hillary’s flawed campaign. Bernie’s long campaign. The Electoral College. The media. Sexist voters. Racist voters. Economically anxious voters. Nonvoters. James Comey. Anthony Weiner. Vladimir Putin. Twitter. And Facebook.

By spreading false news stories and giving a megaphone to Russian trolls, Facebook — a vastly larger social network than Twitter — played a meaningful role in the presidential campaign. Of course, so did many other suspects on the list. There was no single factor that allowed Trump to win. It was a confluence.

<snip>

But, as Thompson explains, “The problem comes when arguing about details results in missing the big picture: fake news on Facebook may not have been the deciding factor many think it was, but Facebook’s effect on the news surely mattered.” And Facebook’s executives have indeed missed this big picture, claiming that their company played no significant role in Trump’s victory.

<snip>

Facebook, as Vox’s Emily Stuart wrote yesterday, “is under siege from lawmakers, regulators, users, shareholders, and even its own employees amid revelations that Cambridge Analytics, a data analytics firm used by the Trump campaign in the 2016 election, secretly harvested personal data from 50 million of its users.”

In a 2014 speech, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s C.E.O., said, “In every single thing we do, we always put people first.” By that, he said he meant that Facebook would give people “control over how they share their information.”

Facebook didn’t do that.

“Where is Mark Zuckerberg?” asks Recode’s Kurt Wagner. “Facebook has dealt with these kinds of firestorms before,” Wagner writes. “But this time feels different. Users are fed up. Politicians are fed up. And investors are clearly concerned: Facebook just had its worst two-day stock performance since 2012, the year the company IPO’d. It has lost more than $50 billion off its market cap.”
<snip>

[wasupaloopa]

1. I don't understand something. I think most of us Hillary supporters here did not fall for false

information about her. I think we followed her career ever since she was first lady. Of course we were aware back then. We knew she wasn't a republican first just because she was a Goldwater girl in high school. We read of her reasons for becoming a Democrat.

We knew that speaking to Wall Street firms did not mean she was on their side against working Americans.

We knew a lie about Hillary when we read one here.

So who fell for anti Hillary stuff on Facebook? Who could be gullible enough to think she was more of a hawk than trump?

It had to be people who did not grow up with her. People who did not know her history. But they also had to be people incapable of critical thinking.

It had to be people who thought she was the liar and trump was telling the truth.

Russians knew that these people existed and could be manipulated. That took a lot of psychology training and planning. My guess is the Russians studied fox news and it's viewers.

Now those manipulators are in the White House.

So what is it that we aren't doing to use Facebook and Twitter and other social media. It isn't against the law. Obama used social media to his advantage.

[progree]

2. You can find a whole bunch of them at JackPineRadicals

So who fell for anti Hillary stuff on Facebook? Who could be gullible enough to think she was more of a hawk than trump?

It had to be ... people incapable of critical thinking.

So it's not just Fox News viewers or self-described conservatives

[LeftInTX]

5. They were anti-Hillary before there was CA/Russian anti-Hillary stuff on FB

They were anti-Obama here on DU.

They hated that Hillary was rich and gave speeches to Goldman-Sachs.
They hated Bill Clinton because he was "third way".

They have a whole forum dedicated to "third way", "blue dog" bashing.

[progree]

6. Yes there were some like that

There are also a lot of people who spend a most of their time on Facebook and other social media and get their "news" from opinions and postings by others, rather than reading news stories from reputable sources (though that's certainly not a cure-all for getting the truth). I know some unfortunately. The garbage people pick up and start to believe is amazing (without any attempt to confirm any of the information).

People do get influenced by that stuff. I've known at least two Democratic voters that slowly became right-wingers after listening to right wing hate radio -- "to get the other side's perspective", and there was nothing else to listen to in the car except Christian radio, sport talk, and other garbage.

Altogether, about 13 percent of voters nationally made up their minds in the final week, according to Pew data reviewed by the researchers. That's in line with past elections.

https://www.npr.org/2017/05/05/526936636/pollsters-find-at-best-mixed-evidence-comey-letter-swayed-election

[Igel]

3. You're confusing all sorts of things.

Which is easy to do, because the number of similar things is astounding.

We have fake news. Some went (D), some went (R). Some was Russian in origin, some wasn't. Right there, 4 categories. Some of the (D)-directed fake news was anti-Sanders, some anti-Clinton. Some of the anti-(R) fake news was anti-Trump, some was anti-various others. Suddenly we're at about 10 distinct categories.

Then there's the claimed CA master plan. Mostly based on a plan that was leaked coupled with a video that was a sales pitch. (Do you believe everything a salesman tells you?) That "microtargeting" is what every advertising agent wishes he could have. I look at the ads I see on DU when I'm not logged in and some are reprehensible--only because the AI doesn't see enough information about me. We hear DUers complain about inappropriate ads. The ads are based on the words in the stories that *are* available to the AI's perception. When we click to say "we don't like this kind of ad" we store that information so that the engine involved has more personal information about us and can tailor the ads to us a bit more narrowly.

There's not much evidence the CA-paid for ads were fake. There's also a claim with some evidence that they were early in the campaign, many months before the election. Even before the end of the primaries. So here's another category of news. Heck, if CA is to be believed, hundreds of categories. All similar.

It's the kind of info that Obama actually managed to get from Facebook in order to use: Information to target those who might be interested in the ads. It's like my making a bunch of gun or tuxedo postings on Facebook and then seeing ads for guns or tuxedos or the kinds of things tuxedos are used for. Who knew that because I was posting about guns or tuxedos I might be interested in them.

When I look at Twitter, I see all kinds of clues as to what I'm interested in. Look at my hashtags. Now I look at the ads I see. Oh. Wait. That's the kind of thing I must want to see made illegal. Because I'd much rather see ads for things I'm entirely uninterested in. Like, perhaps (in reality) guns and tuxedos.

The scant research available seems to say that the targeting of even fake news to those who were likely to believe it--those already hating or liking a particular candidate--really only affected those who didn't need to be swayed, just motivated to vote. So that most of the objection to the fake news isn't "it mislead people"--sure, it did--but "it got people that I don't want at the polls at the polls." In other words, we luvs us low turnout except when it helps us, because we love democracy. Or, at least, winning. (Then we come along and when the surveys show that we'd win if we had better turnout, we want mandatory voting or some such crap.)

[wasupaloopa]

7. I see two kinds of people here. No matter how many types of lies or sales pitches. There are those

with the ability to think critically and those who can't. What I am saying is that none of the Facebook Twitter stuff made up the minds of critical thinkers. They had a mechanism to recognize untruths. It was all aimed the ones without the ability to recognize bull shit when they see it.

Emmanuel Kant knew this in 1784.

"Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?"

Kant answers the question in the first sentence of the essay: "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity." He argues that the immaturity is self-inflicted not from a lack of understanding, but from the lack of courage to use one's reason, intellect, and wisdom without the guidance of another. He exclaims that the motto of enlightenment is "Sapere aude"! – Dare to be wise!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answering_the_Question:_What_is_Enlightenment%3F

[Hekate]

8. I don't understand Clinton Derangement Syndrome, but 30 years of vile propaganda worked...

...even on some very intelligent (high IQ, educated) people that I know personally. "Hillary's a warmonger." "Hillary's more dangerous than Trump because she knows where the levers of power are." And my favorite, after the emails were released, "I'm going to wait until I see what comes out next week before deciding if I'll vote for her," said with such a smirk I almost slapped the speaker's face.

Advertising gets people to buy tobacco products even when they know the stuff is dangerous. Propaganda tells people who to hate. Big Tobacco makes billions off a product that causes lung cancer and heart disease, and they would not spend millions on advertising unless it worked. Propaganda also works. They both use emotional appeals in increasingly sophisticated ways.

Whole treatises get written on who falls for it and why. I don't know why I did not and do not generally fall for the lies, except maybe it was being raised by a mother who believed in Reason and gave me some guideposts (not "because -- reasons," but actually using one's rational faculties for analysis). But that doesn't explain everything.

Hell, we had people here at DU who decided early on in the primaries which Democratic candidates they were going to hate and stuck to it forevermore. Not all of them were even trolls.

[LeftInTX]

4. Our Texas primary indicated that no one read newspaper endorsements!

People voted for Hispanic women no matter what.

I also know activists, Democratic activists who voted for Ted Cruz in 2012: Because of his name.