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Days after President Donald Trump's surprise victory, Zuckerberg brushed off assertions that the outcome had been influenced by fictional news stories on Facebook, calling the idea "pretty crazy ."
But Facebook's blase attitude shifted as criticism of the company mounted in Congress and elsewhere. Later that year, it acknowledged having run thousands of ads promoting false information placed by Russian agents. Zuckerberg eventually made fixing Facebook his personal challenge for 2018.
[...] The war room is a major part of Facebook's ongoing repairs. Its technology draws upon the artificial-intelligence system Facebook has been using to help identify "inauthentic" posts and user behavior. Facebook provided a tightly controlled glimpse at its war room to The Associated Press and other media ahead of the second round of presidential elections in Brazil on Oct. 28 and the U.S. midterm elections on Nov. 6.
"There is no substitute for physical, real-world interaction," said Samidh Chakrabarti, Facebook's director of elections and civic engagement. "The primary thing we have learned is just how effective it is to have people in the same room all together."
More than 20 different teams now coordinate the efforts of more than 20,000 people—mostly contractors—devoted to blocking fake accounts and fictional news and stopping other abuses on Facebook and its other services. As part of the crackdown, Facebook also has hired fact checkers, including The Associated Press, to vet new stories posted on its social network.
To assess the factual content of news stories published by agencies like the Associated Press, Facebook is hiring the Associated Press.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by Bodger on Friday October 19 2018, @11:46AM (7 children)
One person's choices of gospel truth, is another person's source of fake news.
This goes against the First Amendment, plain and simple. And although Facebook is a publicly traded company and not a government organization, it is by definition a monopoly on one aspect of social media, Twitter is or is likely to do the same thing. I am thinking that the Sherman Anti Trust laws are likely to be applied after the mid terms.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 19 2018, @11:56AM
Careful how you are treading, there's that nagging thing called objective reality.
Which takes quite a piss on your First Amendment the moment you start to ignore or blatantly contradict it.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday October 19 2018, @04:13PM (5 children)
There should be a concept of objective truth out there. By all appearances, for a lot of people there isn't. It's cognitive dissonance theory writ large: "My previously held beliefs and actions depend on a certain idea being true/false, therefor it is regardless of the facts, and anything I see to the contrary is lies meant to confuse me." This is aided considerably by media systems that have been set up for the explicit purpose of pushing various political agendas (e.g. Fox News exists to back the Republican Party, MSNBC exists to back the Democratic Party).
This is one reason I dislike the term "fake news", because it encompasses a lot of different concepts, like:
- Propaganda, where a person or organization is deliberately trying to convince you of lies using various psychological manipulation techniques.
- Genuine mistakes, where a news organization had every reason to think that what they reported was true, even though it wasn't.
- Spin, where a person or organization is saying things that are technically true but very misleading.
- Advertising, where again what is being said is technically true, but it's all geared towards "buy more kumquats" or what have you.
- Straight-up lying, where the person knows what's being said is false but says it as convincingly as they can.
Part of the problem is that when people are conditioned to believe things that make no sense (e.g. 2 of every species were all on 1 boat), they'll be more likely to believe other things that make no sense, a la George Orwell's concept of blackwhite.
Carl Sagan's "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection" ought to be required reading, because that's the best way to counter this bunk.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Runaway1956 on Friday October 19 2018, @04:55PM (4 children)
Yes - but - the Dems have multiple media giants backing them, while the R's have only Fox. It's the lopsided numbers that aggravate me most of all. If it were only MSNBC vs Fox, and if all the others were neutral and/or represented different parties, or even points of view, I might not hate MSM so much. In such a situation, I could spread my contempt out among all those parties and/or points of view.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday October 19 2018, @05:31PM (3 children)
No they don't, unless you think Sinclair Broadcast Group, InfoWars, and quite a few other organizations don't exist.
In the world of cable news, there are basically 3 big players: Fox, NBC, and CNN. Fox is basically Republican propaganda. NBC is basically Democratic propaganda. CNN alternates between saying nothing of substance at all (Wolf Blitzer in particular has made a career of this) and toadying to whoever happens to be in charge at the moment.
As for local TV, I happened to be watching the local news broadcast in an auto shop waiting room and noticed something very peculiar: Except for the attack ads, you would have had no idea that an election was going on.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by jmorris on Friday October 19 2018, @09:29PM (1 child)
You are of course lying by spin and false equivalence. It isn't three cable channels with FNC dominating the other two in viewers. The left has the Universities, the government schools, Hollywood, all of the broadcast networks (including PBS) and all of cable with the exception of primetime on FNC, every large circulation newspaper, it has all of the major social media, the entire Silicon Valley tech monolith, the venture capitalists, the Fortune 500, the banks. Paypal, Stripe, Visa / MC, shall I continue?
Yes. The propaganda in the programming rolls on, election or no election.
But that doesn't make any of what they push factual, true or even Truthy. A lie does not become the slightest bit true by repetition. And that is why, despite those massive advantages, your side is losing, is in fact bound for the ash heap of History.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 20 2018, @12:53AM
the matrix has you
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday October 19 2018, @11:48PM
ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, each of which is as influential as FOX, plus PBS. That doesn't look the least bit lopsided to you? As jmorris said, that is outright dishonest on your part. Infowars, for instance, is a niche thing, that fails to reach the markets that the others reach.