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posted by
janrinok
on Wednesday November 16 2016, @12:17AM
from the truth-and-nothing-but-the-truth dept.
from the truth-and-nothing-but-the-truth dept.
Despite the best efforts of Mark Zuckerberg to downplay Facebook's role in the election of Donald Trump, the scrutiny of how fake news is spread on the platform has intensified.
Buzzfeed News is reporting that "more than dozens" of Facebook employees have created an unofficial task force dedicated to addressing the issue.
Buzzfeed quoted one member of that task force, who did not want to be named over fears for their job.
"[Mark Zuckerberg] knows, and those of us at the company know, that fake news ran wild on our platform during the entire campaign season," the source said.
The election shook out the way it did because there were ways around the narrative the media was pushing?
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Facebook's Fake News Crisis Deepens
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-- E. B. White
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday November 16 2016, @03:24AM
The thing that struck me about the story, and which led me to submit it, is the sheer, pure hubris of the assertion that "fake news" on Facebook cost Hillary the election. It's a primal scream from a media that is fucking pissed that there were people out there who refused to swallow their narrative. It's a colossal tantrum from an entitled infant who shrieks, "How DARE you ignore ME?!!!"
Hillary lost for a number of reasons. She is a corrupt insider and a criminal. She is intensely unlikeable. She lies the way most people breathe, and Wikileaks absolutely confirmed that, especially about really big things like the Trans-Pacific Partnership which she fully intended to revive once elected. She lost because she was the avatar of the Establishment, and Americans are sick to death of an Establishment which has been trying to destroy them for 40 years. She also lost, in part, because a lot of Americans are tired of immigrants coming in and taking their jobs, without any limit or pushback from elected officials. There are probably also people out there who voted against her because they genuinely hate women or because they hate brown people and think Trump hates brown people too.
But she did not lose because some fake news articles were circulated on Facebook. It's a totally ridiculous claim. I have been getting those kinds of things from my crazy relatives for decades as chain letters on paper or via email, and they don't make a damn bit of difference. They recruit no new adherents, and are only used for the purposes of tribal signalling.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 16 2016, @03:40AM
> But she did not lose because some fake news articles were circulated on Facebook.
Its funny how you just provided a litany of reasons for clinton losing, every single one of which was amped up from their actual levels by fake news. That's how fake news works, it reinforces what you already believe, just making it more intense.
Fake news wasn't the only factor in clinton's loss, but it definitely was a factor. Or maybe meta-factor would be more correct.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 16 2016, @03:45AM
This.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jmorris on Wednesday November 16 2016, @04:01AM
Wrong. You could confirm those stories on any MSM site you wanted to search or directly from their own emails in WikiLeaks. Their bias was in reporting them once in the least noticeable way possible and then refusing to discuss "old news" again. The stuff on the alt media was far worse. Check Reddit comet ping pong pizzagate summary [reddit.com] if you want to see what is in the fever swamps. And the worst part is I wouldn't put money on it being false without some odds being laid to sweeten the deal. The Clintons are THAT bad.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 16 2016, @04:15AM
So by the tenets of jmorris logic the way to prove that the MSM is corrupt is by citing something he suspects of being fake news.
No wonder fake news is so popular. You can use it to prove anything you already believe. What's not to love?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 16 2016, @08:01PM
Reminds me of this:
https://partners.nytimes.com/library/national/science/nasa/072169sci-nasa-gwertzman.html [nytimes.com]
Have you ever heard of Luna 15?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday November 16 2016, @04:12AM
I mostly agree with you -- there are a lot of causes for the way the election went, and fake news is probably overemphasized. (Biased news, on the other hand, is probably higher on the list... but that's never going to be solved.)
However...
I have been getting those kinds of things from my crazy relatives for decades as chain letters on paper or via email, and they don't make a damn bit of difference. They recruit no new adherents, and are only used for the purposes of tribal signalling.
This is going overboard to claim that there's NO effect for fake news. If nothing else, it tends to reinforce "tribal" beliefs (as you put it), which makes it harder for someone to be convinced to doubt the "tribe." And it may also motivate "tribal" voters to be more likely to go out and vote if they believe the other side is positively evil or whatever (rather than just being apathetic and staying at home). It also may have an effect on an undecided voter who's already leaning toward that direction.
So, yeah, I agree that these sorts of articles are MOSTLY for people who already are likely to believe in them anyway. But they likely also do have SOME electoral effects. I mean, you call people who share this stuff "crazy," but we know for a fact that some of these fake news articles were "top stories" among the most shared in feeds on some days. Surely that must have some effect, even if it's merely reinforcing beliefs and motivating voters who already are slanted that way.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 16 2016, @06:58AM
Compare it to an ad campaign. If an ad campaign has a response rate of just 5% it would be considered incredibly successful. As facebook is first and foremost about advertising, it would be reasonable to say that months of highly viral fake news would motivate just 1% of the recipients to vote who would otherwise have been apathetic (or depressing 1% of borderline voters into not voting). That's just 1% of facebook users, not all registered voters. But Michigan is currently at a difference of just 12,000 votes, so facebook alone could have made the difference there.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by shortscreen on Wednesday November 16 2016, @05:58AM
While what you say sounds reasonable, like all the other rationalizations for Trump's win that have been popping up, I think it is somewhat overstated.
A large percentage of people who were eligible to vote didn't even bother. Of those who voted D, most probably would have voted D no matter what. Of those who voted R, most probably would have voted R no matter what. 60% of people polled didn't want either Trump or Clinton, yet 95% of voters voted for one of them. And in the end, last I heard the totals are within 2% of each other.
This is like a tug-of-war with 60,000,000 people on each side. One guy has a bad case of hiccups, and his side loses. The lesson to be learned here is not that hiccups are the most important issue facing the country, but rather that we picked a really stupid method of settling this dispute.
So yeah, maybe a small group of informed voters had a particular stance on a particular issue and effectively swung the election accordingly. Then again, maybe it was just hanging chads.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday November 16 2016, @09:54AM
This is like a tug-of-war with 60,000,000 people on each side.
That's a really good analogy: I wouldn't be at all surprised if the amount of people who get torn apart [xkcd.com] by the US' monumentally stupid decision runs into the hundreds of millions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 16 2016, @12:58PM
The sad part is that the overwhelming majority of those "protesting" the outcome across the country didn't go out and vote. More than two-thirds of those 30 and under can't even be bothered to vote. A lot of them, like many who post here, are just too cool to vote. You can't be the nihilistic "insightful" commentator of politics (throwing around "MSM" and "elites" and such) if you actually go and vote! It would have taken only a small number of those to take their pompous sticks out of their collective asses to have gone and cast a ballot in a half-dozen states for them to have flipped to Clinton, if they didn't want Trump to win. This was yet another razor's edge election.
When one party wins a squeaker, especially if the winner just barely takes, or even just barely loses, the popular vote, there are the tiresome cries of "we need to fix the electoral college system!" No, we need to fix the "go out and vote" system. To the 60 to 70 percent of you out there, get off your collective asses and actively participate in your government. If you can't take 30 minutes out of your day to cast a vote, then just STFU and let the grownups make the decisions for you (which is what most people want, because then they can bitch about it and claim that "I didn't vote for XXX").
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 16 2016, @04:29PM
With as crappy as both MSPP candidates were, this
The sad part is that the overwhelming majority of those "protesting" the outcome across the country didn't go out and vote. More than two-thirds of those 30 and under can't even be bothered to vote. A lot of them, like many who post here, are just too cool to vote. You can't be the nihilistic "insightful" commentator of politics (throwing around "MSM" and "elites" and such) if you actually go and vote!
comes off as blaming the victim.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 17 2016, @12:13AM
Sorry, but if you didn't bother to cast a vote then, yes, you are the problem. Not liking either of the two major party candidates is not an excuse for sitting out the election. Even a sizeable minority casting votes for a third party candidate sends a powerful message to the two major parties: either clean up your act or be prepared to see others eat your lunch in front of you come next election!
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday November 16 2016, @04:15PM
A large percentage of people who were eligible to vote didn't even bother.
This is true of every election, but it's fundamental to most outcomes too. A *lot* depends on voter turnout. You can convince all the people you want that your candidate is great and/or that the other candidate is evil, but unless those people actually come to the polls, it's worthless. In this election, people were surprised that Clinton lost many swing states (and some that were supposedly more "safe"), but a lot of that had to do with decreased turnout for the Dems compared to previous elections. Again, that's not meant to be the only cause or even the primary one -- but it's important to remember that elections are about how many people you can convince to SHOW UP, not just how many people agree with you. In an election where both major candidates were widely disliked even by those within their own parties, this is bound to be a significant factor.
So yeah, maybe a small group of informed voters had a particular stance on a particular issue and effectively swung the election accordingly.
I understand why we go through this, but I hate this sort of analysis a bit. It always seems to dismiss the contributions of the large majority of voters (who ARE significant, if only because not all of them are guaranteed to show up), while focusing on some small "critical" group of voters. Often this analysis seemed to be about assessing blame -- "If only candidate X had targeted Y voters more," etc. Worse yet are the narratives that like to try to blame 3rd-party voters and "spoilers."
Classic example: Florida in 2000. The margin of error was so large in the ways that votes were counted that just about anything could have swung that election. (Subsequent analyses of different vote-counting methods showed reasonable scenarios where either candidate -- Bush or Gore -- could have come up with more votes. Ironically, some of the standards Gore was arguing for would have elected Bush, and vice versa.) And even if you get beyond "hanging chads," you have the folks who wanted to blame Nader for everything as a "spoiler." I'm not a Nader fan (and don't live in Florida anyway), but this always struck me as an odd analysis. The number of registered Dems who voted for Bush was well over twice the number of all Nader voters combined (including all registered Dems, Reps, and independents). Gore could have swung the count in Florida by getting just a TINY percentage of those defecting Democrats, whereas he'd need a much larger percentage of the Nader Dems or independents. Or he could have just increased turnout very slightly among the Democratic base. And Nader was a presence in the 2000 race nationally and affected the way the major candidates behaved to some extent -- if you took him out and ran the election again, there's no guarantee that the Florida vote wouldn't have swung a different way entirely.
Bottom line is that elections are incredibly complex, and when it comes down to a few percentage points between candidates, there are generally all sorts of things that could have swung the count one way or the other. I think it often does more harm than good to focus on some tiny subset of "swing voters" and blame them or try to characterize them as the only reason for a win or loss. Often a slight uptick or loss in the turnout of the base for a party is enough to overwhelm such "swing voter" effects in a tight race, so whether Clinton or Gore or whoever "fires up" their base is critical... but it's a lot easier for parties to try to find other scapegoats among "independents" or 3rd-parties or whatever. It deflects attention from the fact that your party made a bad choice in nominating a less popular candidate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 17 2016, @01:26AM
A large percentage of people who were eligible to vote didn't even bother.
One thing that seems overlooked is the disenfranchisement campaign that a number of states engaged in. There were undoubtedly many people that wanted to vote, but couldn't afford to stand in line for multiple hours (due to a significant reduction in the number of polling locations in typically blue areas), or were deemed ineligible to vote for one reason or another.