Considering that American's trust in mainstream media is an all time low [1], I'm sure there is a big demand for alternative news. I'm not surprised people are looking for content that fits their narrative and end up reading fake articles.<p>As someone observing from Mexico, I noticed almost all of the mainstream US media became an echo chamber for pro-Clinton content. I only realized this after after seeing how Sanders was sabotaged and the media collectively tried to bury it. Here in Mexico it's a similar situation with a few big media outlets protecting the corrupt status quo.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/185927/americans-trust-media-remains-historical-low.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.gallup.com/poll/185927/americans-trust-media-rema...</a>
I don't believe he is in denial at all.<p>In fact the article strikes me as more of the same reason why so many voted for Trump. The people who write these articles just can't accept the idea that people didn't vote for Trump unless they were tricked into it, or were fed lies. The idea that because they have a different reality they based their votes on never occurred to them.<p>What fake news do is reinoforce what people already believe to be true which is quite another discussion and anyone who have been debating with some 9/11 truther knows that no amount of data will convince them of anything else and neither are you going to be convinced it's suddenly true even though we all have been bombarded with claims from friends.<p>Also maybe my facebook feed is different, maybe my friends are different but I had and still have plenty of disagreement in my feed plenty of articles pointing both ways.<p>Here is a good example from my feed.<p><a href="https://cl.ly/1b1s2W2w0G0c" rel="nofollow">https://cl.ly/1b1s2W2w0G0c</a><p>Basically a four year old history surfaces which is wrong and look at the articles underneath.<p>I have seen plenty of examples of that. But maybe my feed is unique.
We are all in denial.<p>As a non-FB user, I hit every day a Facebook captcha to test if I'm a bot, each time I land near a Facebook site. When it's not a captcha, a panel hides a third of the Facebook page.<p>I have a "shadow" empty FB account that I sometimes use: if I'm logged in, anything I watch online ends up polluting recommendations and suggested sites. I looked up information on Syria and Trump the other day - I now have creepy sites displayed on my suggested sites. I also get giant "YOU ARE NOW QUITTING FACEBOOK" alerts anytime I try to click a link to, yes, go to this address.<p>We all obsess on Google/Apple for privacy and yet do not hold Facebook to any standard regarding an open, honest web.<p>I feel we're all getting slowly conditioned by Facebook (and others) to stay siloed. To fear that the web we browse will have "consequences" and that we should avoid being curious altogether.<p>It's by now clear that the entire purpose of FB is to build a "unified profile" that advertisers can track on- and offline.<p>We're all in denial on the consequences of this unified tracking. If we were in the Renaissance, anonymous publications like Spinoza's would be impossible. Free speech and opinion _requires_ freedom to change mind, wander around.<p>This has to stop.
I think it's too early to tell if these fake stories had any effect on people's political leanings, so diving in without knowing much about it is a bit of a different kind of fake news. It's hunches and opinions without critical examination.<p>Now it's definitely a question to ask but I'm afraid it's being asked as a way to explain Hillary's loss because it's easier to find a scapegoat than look introspectively --and Dems at least publicly say we want to avoid scapegoating, politically speaking.<p>In the end, I wonder, had Hillary won, would be seeing the same examination? Would we have people at the Times wondering if Hillary had won because of the spread of false news, or wonder about a conspiracy to railroad Bernie? Hard to say, but one wonders.<p>On the other hand, I can't agree more that they should surface more than mostly self-reinforcing news or information to their users.
At the root principle of the article, I agree that a platform which spreads erroneous information should be held accountable in some fashion - but it's the following kind of set up that is troublesome:<p>><i>In addition to doing more to weed out lies and false propaganda, Facebook could tweak its algorithm so that it does less to reinforce users’ existing beliefs, and more to present factual information. This may seem difficult, but perhaps the Silicon Valley billionaires who helped create this problem should take it on before setting out to colonize Mars.</i><p>Right, in principle Facebook <i>should</i> do this for the benefit of society, but on a practical consideration, would becoming a highly-involved arbiter of content be good for making money? Facebook isn't under any legal mandate to act as a referee - consider it unfortunate if you like, but I kind of shrug it off. Individual user responsibility should be a noteworthy counter-point, because as trite as it might sound, if Facebook is rife with issues and rot, then going there is probably not a good idea. If they happen to make more money by allowing junk in their system, then that's their decision to make. Eventually will it cost them users?<p>><i>The company’s business model, algorithms and policies entrench echo chambers and fuel the spread of misinformation.</i><p>If they want to serve up a garbage buffet and make a profit from it, I can't sit back and scold them too hard, I just have to excuse myself. It's not just on Facebook - commenting communities of any sort tend to generate clusters of like-minded folk. "Right" thinking or "wrong" thinking. Personally I don't walk around downtown digging through the trash for my lunch, and I don't get my worldview from Facebook. I do keep up with some people, but can count my weekly minutes on the site with two hands pretty much. Just my approach, YMMV.
If Hillary won this wouldn't have been an issue for the NYT. Close to the election I repeatedly saw articles comparing Trump to Hitler and predicting the end of free society of he were to win. The only fake news I saw was satirical "news." I did not vote for Trump, but it's crazy how hysterical and witch-hunty the left is right now.
I'm scared people are going to keep pushing for social media to implement stronger filters.<p>I believe very strongly that the free flow of information (even when it's just wrong) is critical. Information gives people power, but withholding information takes power away. If a company like Facebook implements the filter, we're giving that power to them and hoping they are ambivalent.<p>The solution to fake news is for people to learn how to live in this new world. There used to be only a handful of news organizations, but now there are an infant amount of them. This is GOOD, it's democratizing, but it puts a burden on us as citizens, and consumers of information to understand the motivations of the authors.<p>This is an opportunity we should be happy to have and be scared of technological or manual solutions that threaten it.
The Times is in denial that anyone considers it anything other than a mixture of Democratic party propaganda and clickbait legacy media. The stats are not looking good for them and dying industries always lash out reflexively and ineffectively at random opponents.
His job is not get this or that candidate elected. It's more like the New York Times is in denial blaming everybody but the poor candidate they endorsed for her failure to get elected.<p>The New York Times was also in denial during the campaign dismissing Trump's candidacy as a joke, then giving Hillary 99% chances to win.<p>Had they taken Trump seriously from the get-go and try to do a proper rebuttal with fact checking and not just "Pepe the frog is a fascist symbol", maybe the outcome would have been different.
This is more than a little bit ironic coming from the New York Times, which just issued an apology for its blatantly biased, divisive, and disappointing coverage of the entire election cycle: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/us/elections/to-our-readers-from-the-publisher-and-executive-editor.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/us/elections/to-our-reader...</a>
I've mentioned this before in another thread. It does not matter if it was less than 1% of facebook content. The problem is, it's also every where else. Have you guys seen the front page of Yahoo lately? And also, some how this crap crept into my Google Now news feed. Probably because I visited a dumb link on Reddit. I had to manually block them. But that probably means people who regularly read this crap, gets a ton of them.
Lol NYTimes. Pot kettle black.<p>Looks like Zuckerberg doesn't have veto power at nytimes ;).<p><a href="https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/4213" rel="nofollow">https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/4213</a><p>Lack of any self-awareness can only be attributed to arrogance. This is exactly the type of arrogance that got their candidate defeated and made Trump an underdog.<p>Fuck you nytimes.
Facebook has 1.79B MAUs, and users do not inject enough self-generated original content into the system to make Facebook consistently interesting for those 1.79M MAUs. Therefore their links to outside sites – good and bad, and it isn't particularly simple to decide – will continue to be core to Facebook's business.<p>I always find it funny when I see HNers complaining about The Wall Street Journal's paywall. Pay it, man! And read the news.<p>Too much emphasis on Facebook's alleged influence. It's a link/aggregation/search application, and the complexion of its output is strongly going to reflect what users input.
I don't trust the main stream media at all. As part of my long term research on NLP + text mining, I got in the habit of using English language news article from around the world as a text corpus. As part of this process I noticed the disconnect to US coverage compared to foreign news sources. Realizing that everyone has their own agenda, this experience still makes me sceptical of our news.<p>That said, I am also very sceptical of what I read on the web. I follow several people's blogs and what they post on social media because over the years what they say usually turns out to be correct.
> The Macedonian teenagers found this, too. They had experimented with left-leaning or pro-Bernie Sanders content, <i></i>but gave up when they found it wasn’t as reliable a source of income as pro-Trump content<i></i>. But even if Mr. Zuckerberg were right and fake news were equally popular on both sides, it would still be a profound problem.<p>Perhaps because the market was already saturated with pro-Hillary pieces from mainstream media? If they produce only one-sided hit pieces on Trump, are you surprised those on the right will share anything positive they can find?<p>The left has made it's own bed.
I can't believe how people are trying desperately to find a culprit, a reason, an explanation and turning to Facebook for their choice of scapegoat. I mean if half your country is voting for a person whose face could easily illustrate the entries for both demagogue and ignorant in a dictionary, you have bigger problems than Facebook.
The only problem is: you can't fix stupid. It doesn't really matter. If it's not Facebook, it's Gawker, Buzzfeed or a thousend other clickbait outlets.<p>If somebody actually believes the pope would endorse an American election candidate there really is nothing you can do.
<Mr. Zuckerberg is doing real damage to American democracy — and to the world.<p>We are so so so much better now that newspapers matter less and that the network news is not the main game in town. How does more sources make democracy worse even if it's "buyer beware?" it's arrogant to think truth is always hidden.<p><<People vote the way they do for a variety of reasons, but their information diet is a crucial part of the picture.<p>We had a choice of candidates that was leftovers or diner food for Thanksgiving. That was the problem<p>Do you really think the NYT will say good things in an op-ed about it's nimble young competitor?
This "fake news" thing goes all the way back to the founding of our country (USA that is). It has always been a problem. And the solution now is the same as then - be critical and know thy source.
"Fake stories" are not the biggest problem, and focusing on them could fix surface issues without addressing the underlying echo chamber effect. This piece is better than most, but I wish all people arguing for Facebook and Google to stop enabling opinions to be manipulated weren't so distracted by simple lies. It's the series of cherry-picked facts that create a narrative that we have to watch out for.
And this is coming from NYT, a bullshit venue, whose boss said in a recent letter: "... we aim to rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism. That is to report America and the world honestly, without fear or favor ...". NYT should close the business, nobody trusts them anymore.
Am I reading between the lines correctly, is she saying Trump won because his supporters read about lizard people on Facebook?<p>Speaking of denial, wonder where on a realness gradient she puts NYTimes or CNN?
<p><pre><code> reporters have found that the spread of false news is far more common on the right than it is on the left
</code></pre>
Citation needed.
This is not so bad. I think that lies in the media are good if they help to balance public opinion.<p>The world that I'm really scared of is one where everyone agrees about everything and people who disagree are locked up; that's where I saw things going before the election (when I thought that Hillary was going to win).<p>Chaos and disagreement is one of the most important things in our society. We always need at least two sides to every story (even if one side is a complete fabrication) - Balance of public opinions is the most important thing for freedom.
What about all of the fake Trump news? My friends on Facebook still think Trump is a rapist (he never raped anyone), Racist (I'm still not sure where this one came from), and homophobic (he is not reversing gay marriage).<p>When his first speech came out about immigration, he said he wants to deport illegal immigrants (which is actually already law). The media turned it into just 'immigrants' and we now have entire groups of legal immigrants that are afraid Trump will deport them. Did nobody watch the speech or does the mainstream media have problems comprehending English?<p>There is anti-Trump violence growing in the US and people have been assaulted and harassed for even saying they supported him. The protests aren't 'peaceful', they are riots.<p>This is all ignored on the news, however. The only thing they can spew out is the story about the girl that got her Hijab pulled, which turned out to be fake. MSNBC still reports it as fact.<p>Will Facebook ban links to MSNBC for this fake story?<p>This is exactly why half the country voted Trump into office. Even now, you still can't figure out that it was your own fault and want to blame the rest of American for losing the election.<p>The other irony is complaining about bias and marginalizing and then painting an entire group of people (Trump supports) as 'racists' and 'islamaphobes'.<p>It really shows me that all of the people that claim we need more 'love' and 'peace' are just using it for political gain and power. When they don't get what they want, the fangs come out.<p>You want understanding and compassion when it comes to gay marriage and the transgender community, but give none of it in return.