Zuckerberg's Plan To Battle Fake News Sets Off "Widespread Panic" Among Big Conservative Pages
Cyrus Massoumi, the owner of Mr. Conservative, which has 2.2 million fans, told BuzzFeed News he and his fellow publishers find Zuckerbergs guidelines terrifying and extremely wide open to interpretation.
To someone who was reading between the lines to understand what he meant, it didnt really make any sense to a publisher, Massoumi said. It was terrifying to read.
Massoumi spoke exclusively with BuzzFeed News with the blessing of a group of other major conservative page owners so he could raise their concerns with Zuckerbergs post, explain why some hyperpartisan pages on the right published false and misleading content, and to share their proposal for solving the problem. Their goal is to land an audience with senior executives at Facebook to talk more.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/conservative-page-owners-in-fake-news-panic
Related:
As midnight approached on November 6, 2012, a newly re-elected Barack Obama tweeted a photo of himself embracing the first lady, with the message four more years. The presidents election night tweet went unprecedentedly viral, racking up more than 500,000 retweets within a few hours and capping the most active day in Twitter history. Meanwhile, on Facebook, a network four times Twitters size, the same photo had fewer than 100,000 shares evidence the energy around current events was elsewhere. It was a triumph for Twitter, a rare occasion when the little bird out-sang its big blue brother. At Facebooks headquarters in Menlo Park, it was an alarm bell ringing loudly in the middle of the night, a call to action.
Four years later, Facebook couldnt be more relevant. The platform played a defining role in the 2016 election but perhaps not for the reason it hoped. In the days after the vote, its come under fire for creating an infrastructure that played to confirmation bias and allowed political-meme-makers, sensationalists, and fake news purveyors to thrive and perhaps even alter the elections outcome. The companys influence was so apparent that when CEO Mark Zuckerberg denied that the fake news coursing through its system influenced the election his own employees disputed him.
And while it was likely never the companys intent to create a system that encouraged people to hear only what they wanted whether or not it was true Facebook didnt get here by accident. It made a huge push over the last four years to be a destination for news, indeed, to be your perfect personalized newspaper. Since that Obama tweet, the company retooled its platform, creating a system designed to make it easier to share and promote timely and trending stories and to help them spread rapidly across its network. In the process, Facebook, with its 1.79 billion monthly active users, grew to more than five times the size of Twitter.
The promise of tapping into this lightning enticed massive news organizations to go all in on Facebook. But those enhanced sharing and interaction mechanisms, coupled with changing platform dynamics, created a system that catered to reinforcing existing world views. Facebooks News Feed algorithm prioritizes sharing and time spent reading articles, but in a scroll-through world these measurements are prone to reward material that doesnt challenge you. This in turn enabled a host of loose-with-the-truth upstarts to use it, at times, even more successfully than mainstream news organizations to go mega-viral.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/2016-election-blew-up-in-facebooks-face
liberal N proud
(60,334 posts)We know they refuse to use the facts.
JHB
(37,158 posts)...it's always "terrifying" when people want it off the streets.
hatrack
(59,583 posts)After all, we know just how incredibly dedicated Zuckerberg is to the public good, and to responsible journalism.
Raster
(20,998 posts)...FB has nothing to sell, except for you and your information, your privacy. And despite Zuck's insistence that FB is not "media," he knows full well that many of the FB crowd get the majority of their "news" from FB. He also knows that FB's days as edgy, out-there, and cutting edge are over, and that it's main adherents are typically low-information, typically middle-American centrist/conservatives from the "flyover" states. Zuck knows exactly where his billionaire bread is buttered and he does not want to kill his cash cow by doing something stupid as telling the truth or acting in a responsible manner befitting a media outlet of tremendous range and reach.
Zuck new full well that the vast majority of rumors, false news and unproved innuendo was aimed at Hillary Clinton. Knew. full. well, and decided to "work hard" on this only after the election. Gotta have those eyeballs and clicks, now don't we, even if it's patently false and misleading...
I stand amazed at Zuck's denial: he is of Jewish heritage, he is married to a minority and has a mixed-race child. Does he really think the AmeriKKKan Alt-Reich "sunder-kin" are going to give him pass... maybe the luxury suite at AmeriKKKan Auschwitz?
Bill USA
(6,436 posts)Alternate Universe!..oh my!
Skittles
(153,138 posts)kebob
(499 posts)Very skeptical this comes to fruition.