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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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(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.