Zuckerberg: it's crazy to think Facebook fake news influenced voting

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The rise of the internet and the destruction of the main stream media as a trusted form of communication have had a remarkable influence in the world’s direction over the last few decades. Everyone, whether leftist Bernie supporters or rightist Nazi fan boys, spent this election cycle screaming about media bias. We have been schooled now for thirty years to distrust the media, and we see bias in any thing that fails to agree with our own narrative. Then you can toss in the seemingly endless stream of fake news sites, and the news sites that use hyperbole and fear mongering to generate clicks, and the news sites that may not lie but clearly distort information to feed their populace… and you get where we are today (and I haven’t even begun talking about the situation on reality TV that seems to be about promoting controversy and fighting as resolutions to a situation).

Like anything, it’s complicated. Free speech and a free press are two of the foundations of our republic, so important that they were enshrined in the first amendment along with freedom of religion. Any measures taken have to respect that, and yet since I first heard Rush Limbaugh blowing smoky lie filled shit out of a radio in the late 1980’s, I could see the iceberg coming and seemed completely powerless to convince anyone that, no, the media isn’t biased even though it is. Just not in the way he meant. The media is about ratings and will say ANYTHING to get them. It’s going to promote that juicy sex story over a boring one about some guy being sued for breech of contract. Email servers and deleted emails? That’ll get plenty of play, but really who cares about the intricacies of a tax proposal. Celebrity gossip matters, but not news about families coping with tough times in areas where jobs have been lost and haven’t come back (we’ll give them a minute or two fluff piece at the end of the news show if we have time).

We steep ourselves in a brew of 24 hour news, and we can now tailor the results to match our beliefs. FOX, MSNBC… pick your poison. Every editor has to make choices, and if they make the wrong ones and lose viewers, they lose their jobs. So do we blame the media… or do we blame the people for choosing bad news sources? We can try to teach more critical thinking skills, but when? Who is going to teach it? Many right wing parents think that’s socialist bullshit and kids should be taught to listen only to their parents and their beliefs, not think for themselves.

We need to find a way to ensure trust in the press again, and I hate to say it… but maybe the orange oompa loompa is right about weakening libel protection laws. It would actual work to the advantage of facts and truth, because the most egregious lying seems to come from the right (and there’s my bias at play, which I’m all too aware of). Jade Helm… FEMA death camps… the press isn’t going to repeat those false claims on the nightly news or in the papers if they think they might get sued more easily. Repeating word for word what a candidate says is not going to get you sued (and if they do, you’re going to win). Or at the very least, we need to bring back the Fairness Doctrine, which was eliminated in 1987… right before the rise of Rush and the alt-right news press.

And let’s ditch the pundits and the people who try to interpret the news for us. Stop hiring political operatives of the candidates to tell us what to think. Let’s do that ourselves. Just tell me what happened. Just the facts. I’ll figure it out on my own.

Still long… I’m shutting up now, I don’t have any answers, I’m bloviating.

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Uh…So… this is awkward… If you ask people who voted for Trump why they voted the way they did, they’ll give you a bunch of fake news.

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I dont think Twitter should be let off the hook either.
Much of this election boils down to echo chamber opinions that spun off every time Trump posted or said something stupid.
Perspective has no place in twitter world.
If people go crazy about every stupid thing someone says on Twitter and then the press goes and makes real news articles about the reaction then what do you think is going to happen?

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Facebook and Twitter may not be essential, but I’m pretty sure they’re accelerants. Sure, everyone’s crazy uncle or hate-filled cousin used to spread this sort of stuff by e-mail or even Xerox meme, but those things, especially the pre-email methods, were less efficient by far. Now, we’re just bathed in the stuff. That has consequences. For instance, many of the “hold your nose and vote for Clinton” people I knew mixed legitimate criticisms with old right-wing smears that they had simply heard so many times that they became ingrained. Those people seemed to me to be doing a lot to suck the enthusiasm out of the Democratic side.[quote=“Richard_Kirk, post:17, topic:89189”]
So, what’s the deal with Zuckerberg, Fox News, Murdoch, et hoc genus omne? They are rich people, and I expect they all like the way things are going. However, they can claim to just be representing the political scene as they find it. But, in doing so, they reduce every argument to a face-to-face confrontation with soundbytes. They make Brexit and Trump happen, and say ‘it wasn’t me’, and ‘the constitution says I can, so there’.
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I’m guessing that Zuckerberg is in the same full freakout mode as most of the tech folks; the smell of rationalization is strong in his comments. Unfortunately, unlike the non-new-media tech folks, who have good reason to fear what’s coming next, he’ll likely be able to glide through. He may come to believe this stuff.

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Coming from the empathy-challenged Zuckerberg, there is a certain profound sense of irony here. His use of the word in this context shows that he doesn’t even grasp the concept.

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So the fake “Vote online for Hillary” ads or the “Come to the polls November 9th” or “Your polling station has moved” ads didn’t suppress at least one vote?

Voter intimidation, vote suppression, and voter discouragement is real.

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He probably considers a vampire like Thiel as one of his more empathetic friends.

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But surely the very nature of Facebook means it depends on your friendship circle and who you follow, no? Pre- and post- US election my feed’s been nothing but hatred, disgust and sadness about Trump. Likewise, before and after the EU referendum I was seeing posts from likeminded Remainers.

Isn’t the bigger issue more that FB’s algorithms work too well and only show you thinks you’re likely to be interested in, thus confirming your views?

(That said, I’m not familiar with whatever “fake news” has apparently been a feature of FB lately.)

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Fuck Zuckerberg, Thiel and anything associated with Breitbart. Fuck cable television. Fucking fuck everything.

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Well - yes and no. The way we group up and communicate on the internet has lead to the way we engage with “discourse” about various topics. It is used as an echo chamber, bolstering our beliefs. Do I need to post that CGP Grey video again or are you sick of it? Because what he shows you is EXACTLY what is happening on every “side”.

Facebook is actually different than most places as you will at least have an EXCHANGE with someone different - though usually not a productive one. Where as a niche site will just have people sitting around bitching about how bad the other side is.

So yes, Facebook is part of it, but they aren’t really any more or less responsible than the rest of the internet.

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Please stop defending facefuckingbook, really it’s a paralytic pimple to Humans.

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He might also be displeased by the fact that Facebook appears to have achieved all the influence of a major media outlet or propaganda operation(and an amount that many attempts could only dream of); but, unlike most media outlets or propaganda operations, Facebook Inc. and Mark Zuckerberg appear to have pretty limited control over the direction of the influence.

Facebook presumably does reap some economic benefit, the urgent churn of bullshit leads to some additional ad impressions and juices the monthly-active-user numbers; but (despite their various surprisingly feeble and controversy-mired attempts) Facebook HQ appears to have very little control over what is echoing in the echo chamber.

Historically, much of the fun of having an influential media operation was in putting that influence behind your message. Facebook certainly offers a lot of influence; but the message is mostly provided by 3rd parties over which facebook has little control.

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Well, it may not be in theory, but it certainly was in this case. Facebook is currently being used as the homepage for a large percentage of the US population - it’s their launching pad/filter for the whole internet. The big phenomenon this election was that writers of click-bait found that writing pro-Trump fake news was the easiest way to get eyeballs from Facebook users, so it proliferated, wildly.

Yeah, definitely. This seems like a real Silicon Valley nightmare - and one that technologists are frequently in denial about - the possibility of creating a technology that inherently has a negative impact. The standard line is, “We’ll create this [technology] and use it for good!”, as if only a particular use of a technology could be problematic and not a necessary outcome of the system itself. So what’s Zuck going to do? Destroy Facebook to stop this? Even if he admitted the impact of Facebook, I’m sure he’d justify its continued existence with “Someone else who’s less scrupulous than me would create a replacement,” as if that mattered to the outcome.

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My gods like Hillary. I wouldn’t have created them any other way.

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Team Silicon Valley also has a somewhat dysfunctional relationship with ‘disruption’.

In broad terms, and when doing it to other people, the idea receives more obsequious veneration than most deities; but this …rarely…translates into graceful acceptance of the glorious inevitability of Disruption when it comes back and happens to you.

A year ago, he probably would have been happy to produce a few pages of navel gazing narcissim on Medium about how cool it is that Facebook is dis-intermediating communication and bringing the social graph to upend legacy broadcast media and so on; but he is probably slightly less pleased by the “Yeah, turns out that this also means that you’ve built the world’s most efficient mechanism for mouthbreathers from flyover country to revel in epistemic closure and desire the destruction of you and your technocratic golden boy buddies. Nice job breaking it.” implications.

I imagine that(both because they would prefer to capture the revenue themselves; and because of poor cultural fit), the plan was not for Facebook to end up having massive influence; but ceding control of it to whoever could spam Breitbart links the fastest. That has to sting.

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I agree that the underlying sentiment exists, but platforms such as Breitbart and InfoWars via channels such as Facebook and Twitter certainly act as force multipliers.

To wit: they both took credit and patted themselves on the back after the “Arab Spring” revolutions.

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What we have now is info-Balkanization. One of Daddy Trump’s new hobbies will be info cleansing.

We’ve already had a whiff of it with his “very unfair” criticism of the student election protests. I’m afraid he may need to take away some rights to “preserve” them.

Here’s an interesting, data driven read on the Facebook/social media aspect of this election: https://shift.newco.co/what-i-discovered-about-trump-and-clinton-from-analyzing-4-million-facebook-posts-922a4381fd2f#.wy6ufdri4

“Every time a new communications medium achieves scale, the political narrative shifts to keep up and take advantage. FDR (radio), JFK and Reagan (TV), Obama (Internet), Trump (Social Media).”

With as close as this election was, Trump’s decisive social media advantage quite easily could have been significant enough that it tipped the balance.

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As I recall the subject for my first year college essay competition was “A good god is the noblest creation of mankind. Discuss.”

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But…surely those easily manipulated brown people aren’t the same as no-nonsense down to Earth Americans?

I’m sorry…a misunderstanding there. So Facebook and Twitter can only affect people in the direction of greater democracy and transparency, but not in the direction of right wing populism? That should keep a few PhD students going for a while - assuming you can find anyone to fund them.

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At what point is it the individual’s responsibility to recognize the dopamine-blast of an echo chamber, and remove themselves from it?

Instead of “Kill Your Television”, it should be “Kill Your Feed”.

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