
How Facebook plans to become one of the most powerful tools in politics - aalleavitch
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/11/26/how-facebook-plans-to-become-one-of-the-most-powerful-tools-in-politics/?utm_term=.4a563b0f5bb6
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aalleavitch
There's one reason above all that I find this article incredibly chilling: It
was published November 26, 2014. Prior to the 2016 election.

"Last week, The Awl's John Herrman noted that growth as he raised an important
consideration for Facebook advertisers: the growth of sites creating
specifically political content, putting more emphasis on virality than
accuracy. It's worth quoting at length.

In the context of a customized feed, where each story is algorithmically
selected based on the likelihood that you will engage with it, content-
marketed identity media speaks louder and more clearly than content-marketed
journalism, which is handicapped by everything that ostensibly makes it
journalistic—tone, notions of fairness, purported allegiance to facts and
context over conclusions. These posts are not so much stories as sets of
political premises stripped of context and asserted via Facebook share—they
scan like analysis but contain only conclusions; after the headline, they
never argue, only reveal.

Most of what is shared is messy and outside of the control of publishers, both
media and advertisers. In Herrman's words, "The thing that grabs your
attention and holds it the longest, that is most likely to be shared again, is
the thing that wins the next slot in the endless algorithmic draw." Facebook
is a particularly polarized place, meaning that political stories often bounce
around quickly -- good and bad, true and false -- and less scrupulous
publishers (both media and advertisers) can tap into that."

