
Facebook undermines its own effort to fight fake news - prostoalex
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/09/07/facebook-fake-news-social-media-242407
======
alethiophile
This whole endeavor was fairly ill-starred from the beginning. Looking at
their list of arbiters, they're pulling in places like Politifact whose bread-
and-butter is in parsing out politicians' statements themselves and ranking
them N pinocchios, or whatever.

This kind of "fact-checking" is inherently political, since everything depends
on exactly how much charity you grant the speaker for simplifications that may
or may not convey an accurate picture of reality, or out-of-context
presentations of true facts that don't have the implications a naive audience
might draw. Therefore, all such attempts will have a necessary and massive
credibility problem; it's very easy for non-mainstream elements to simply
paint the fact-checker as biased. See, for instance, the alacrity with which
Trump and his supporters turned around the label "fake news" itself as an
insult against the mainstream organizations they feud with.

Meanwhile, there's the separate issue of clickbaity news stories that describe
events which simply never happened, presumably for the ad revenue. Unlike
political stories, these can generally be quickly and objectively categorized
as such; however, Facebook also has the incentive to keep these on their
platform to drive more engagement with Facebook, and so it's near-certain they
won't be productively addressed, despite being a problem that everyone can
agree on.

------
iamthepieman
Facebook's model is social rent seeking. Fake news helps this by keeping
people involved and by increasing time spent on the site/app. Efforts to
curtail fake news are lip service only. Seeing a disputed tag will make a user
do what exactly?

They will likely seek out more confirming opinions from their own "trusted"
networks of friends, sites, and bloggers and their own already echoing
facebook feed.

I don't know this for sure but if I were doing a study I'd assign very low
probability to the null hypothesis.

~~~
josefresco
Agreed. I believe Facebook understands the true problem, but simply can't
address it without major changes to structure and philosophy. So they do
things like this- to appease lawmakers just enough to avoid scrutiny.

~~~
threeseed
The problem isn't specific to Facebook.

It's politics in general around the world but mostly in the US where the
internet and the rise of confirmation bias has increased polarisation. The
only solution is to teach people to be more flexible in their beliefs and
increase their willingness to compromise. And this is not something Facebook
alone can do.

------
maxxxxx
Facebook fighting fake news is like Google developing ad blockers. They
benefit way too much from fake news to shut them down.

~~~
josefresco
Also like Google fighting click-fraud.

~~~
frenchie4111
Google has more incentive to fight click-fraud. People prefer to buy ads on
platforms that have high conversion rates.

------
briga
Social media platforms like Facebook have more political power in the US than
the president, and should be just as accountable for their actions as any
political organization must be. I don't think the full extent of how much
control social media has over our lives has reached the popular imagination
yet.

~~~
parineum
> should be just as accountable for their actions as any political
> organization must be

They are. Vote with your... profile?

In the same way that your vote gives the president power, your consumption of
services gives those providers power.

~~~
briga
I have stopped using most forms of social media (except this one, obviously),
but I don't think the buck stops there. Deleting your profile isn't much of a
vote when they don't stop tracking you after your profile has been deleted. It
also seems like for most people that to stop using these services would be
like to stop using electricity. It's a choice that's almost inconceivable.

------
unclebucknasty
An underlying problem is that we really are moving into a dystopian, post-
truth world. There's a huge part of the population that is less interested in
facts, and more interested in sustaining a certain narrative.

It's really scary when you understand this point, because it's self-
fulfilling. If enough people don't care about the truth and act accordingly,
then facts actually don't matter and the belief, no matter how false, becomes
the _effective_ reality.

Where that can lead and who'll be leading us are the scariest parts.

------
grandalf
The recent admission of accepting $150K from a "Russian fake news entity"
hardly scratches the surface of the massive influence that Facebook's
algorithm had on Trump's victory.

It is the algorithm itself that made Trump's victory possible. By amplifying
content that shows early signs of virality, the algorithm gave Trump a way to
dominate the news cycle whenever he wished. He then used this tactic and
shrewd timing to control the narrative, even when a large percentage of the
stories were about him and contained broadly negative coverage.

The other major factor in Trump's riding the Facebook news feed algorithm to
victory is the way people form friendships on Facebook. If someone has 800
friends, then even if most of those friends share political beliefs, there
will be some small percentage who hold different beliefs. Trump created
controversial stories that were designed to read differently based on
political affiliation, which is why many of his remarks sounded so utterly
stupid to people who likely opposed him in the first place.

For example, by generalizing immigrants as criminals and rapists, Trump
alienated people who would likely not have voted for the less immigrant-
friendly of the two candidates under any circumstances, while reassuring those
who fear and/or resent immigrants that he "gets it" and is willing to offend
people to speak the truth about an issue they care about.

He used the same tactic with many permutations, and kept repeating the ones
that worked again and again. When the WaPo or NYT would write a story harshly
criticizing his brashness or insensitivity and someone would share that with
their 800+ friends, even if 750 were like-minded, the rest of those friends
were being effectively "reached" by Trump with the message that he wanted them
to take away. Once reached, they could share the same post and editorialize it
with their own framing, targeting their own like-minded friends. In a very
literal sense, when using this tactic, no publicity was bad publicity for
Trump.

The strategy is partly a feint and partly a trojan horse. Everyone who kept
Trump in the news when he was mind-bogglingly starting to gain votes during
the GOP primary helped him become the only story worth reporting for all news
outlets. The other candidates seemed boring and un-newsworthy in comparison.

The tactic only worked for Trump because of the the demographic layout of the
US, but it was (as is obvious in hindsight) the only strategy that could
possibly allow someone who was outspent by at least 4:1 by a candidate who was
expected to win by a landslide, to have any chance at all of winning.

Zuck should not be targeting fake news. The damage was not done by the many
hundreds of different domains that hosted blogs styled like newspapers touting
conspiracy theories that were often among the most shared Facebook articles
during the election.

The damage was actually done by the major news organizations for taking the
bait and letting Trump become the story far too early and letting him control
the narrative, keeping it about scandal and frivolity and keeping the focus
away from policy and issues.

While I think Zuck may be a truly great leader and visionary, I find it fairly
disappointing that he's so nakedly getting involved in politics by decrying
fake news (instead of actually taking the blame for his algorithm being so
easily expoited by Trump). It seems likely that the next election will lead to
significant human-vetting before an article can trend significantly on
Facebook, and some sort of ideological litmus test being imposed by Facebook
when screening that content. This shows a knee-jerk technocratic response that
devalues free speech and the marketplace of ideas.

One other reason Trump was able to so effectively hijack the algorithm was
that news organizations are essentially trying to create viral articles, and
their own internal metrics are heavily linked to data about social shares and
virality rather than traditional, longer-term metrics like subscriptions,
pulitzer prizes, etc.

This means that all Trump had to do was get a story about something he said
going viral, and he could pretty sure that no matter who wrote that original
story, the big players (NYT, WaPo, etc.) would soon follow with their own
version of that story, like arbitrageurs trying to get in on a winning trend
and reap some ad revenue from the clicks.

Ironically the things that would help make Facebook a force of good would be
exactly the things that the heavily partisan "my team is better than your
team" major party loyalists want -- it would be mechanisms to help like-minded
people find holes/flaws in articles that say good things about their
candidate, and help people appreciate and respect exposure to diversity of
opinion as a way of offering insight into their own convictions.

Sadly, Facebook has shown no signs of wishing to truly improve the marketplace
of ideas, its response seems likely to end up as censorship or propaganda
embedded so deeply into the algorithm that people keep using it naively
thinking that it is somehow fair.

~~~
losteverything
At first i was going to challenge your FB responsible for trump ....but your
800 analogy got me really thinking. All !all! Those i know who voted trump
didn't like lima beans. Never order them. Never taste them. Never buy them.
Simply hate the taste of them. Hillary is a lima bean. Plus, they dont have
FB. But their friends do and so does the tv humans they watch. So even the 800
is really more...

But... Isnt it simply the fact that its the many to many aspect? Today its
trump. Tomorrow it can be [someonefamous.al]

------
eighthnate
I would be careful with anything politico's says about fake news or anything
for that matter.

"In November 2013, The Washington Post wrote a lengthy article detailing a
payola scandal in which Allen would give favorable Politico coverage in return
for advertising dollars.[10] Mr. Allen has refused to publicly comment.[11]
Jonathan Chait described Politico's response as 'evasive tripe'.[12] Writing
in Salon, Alex Pareene described his work as "indistinguishable from a paid
advocate for business interests."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Allen_(journalist)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Allen_\(journalist\))

Politico is a well known "fake news" money grubbing operation. Their "news"
stories are pretty much paid advertisements.

~~~
filmgirlcw
And Mike Allen is no longer with Politco (he left to co-found Axios), which
makes your complaint erroneous and unfounded.

Moreover, this article has interviews with the very fact-checkers Facebook has
partnered with to try to stop "fake news," as well as comment from Facebook
itself.

------
jonny_eh
Another thing they can do to make the web a better place is just publish a
list of the ads that people are seeing, and their reach. The users are stuck
in silos, and no one can see what other people are seeing.

------
bluetwo
Taking money from russian trolls. Letting fake news slide. Hmmm.

------
hurp_a_derpderp

      the fact-checkers say they have no way 
      of determining whether the “disputed” 
      tags they’re affixing to “fake news” 
      articles slow (or perhaps even accelerate)
      the stories’ spread.
    

Gee, why doesn't facebook employ the popular downvote-flag-and-hellban tactics
that work perfectly for HN?

Simply marking something as antithetical only attracts your antithesis. As a
benevolent dictator, you just have to black hole the things people like, that
you don't like.

~~~
josefresco
The audience is too large & diverse, the downvote would be exploited. HN
benefits from a small, rather homogeneous audience.

