Is Facebook really going to "help" us deal with lies on the internet? Or is Facebook going to restrict what we have access to?
Facebook, a "dust cloud of nonsense", says Barack Obama after seeing the false information spread on FB during the recent presidential elections. Apparently, Zuckerberg didn't take the issue too seriously at the time and was heavily criticized, such as being "tone deaf" by Business Insider.
This is a chart by BuzzSumo that alleged the importance of fakenews during the electron period. I don't know how accurate it. How do they determine what is "fake news" int he first place?
FB Response
What's odd, is that Facebook has officially vowed to tale the fake news problem, while Zuckerberg says it's such a small percentage that it doesn't have an impact. But then, why bother even dealing with the issue?
The influence of "fake news" as insignificant also goes against FB's own study last 2 years ago about influencing the mood of users with positive stories. Emotional contagion works with negative or any story. Even Zuckerberg put his foot in his mouth saying how FB actively influences coting behavior by helping them register. So either Facebook can influence people to vote with the posts it makes or users make, or FB can;t influence what people do. Choose Zuckerberg.
No one can verify Facebook's claims about their data, because all of their data is kept in-house, as if a tobacco company controls access to all medical records, so we can't know what's going on.
Is it that hard to resolve finding and removing fake news? It turns out, it isn't. A hackathon team of 4 college students created a solution for Chrome in just 36 hours. The extension is called FiB: Stop living a lie. It's also an open source project. It checks malware and phishing databases, searches google, matches text, and recognizes text in images to find.
Concerns
This isn't a real solution, since the fake news issue would need to be dealt with on Facebooks end for it to be an overall solution.
My issue with all of this, is why is Facebook taking it upon themselves to manage what people read? None of this is helping people learn how to learn better, learn how to read better, learn the need to verify information. It just keep everyone a lazy non-thinker who believes whatever they want. Secondly, it allows Facebook to choose what you can and can't see.
To me, this "Fake news" issue is not about fake news at all. It's all about the control of what posts end up being allowed to be seen by others because an algorithm determines it to be so. If it says something is "fake", even if it isn't, then down it will go in visibility and popularity. People already don;t check things for themselves. They will repeat this behavior, and simply trust Facebook as the "fake news police". Our ability to think will never self-correct, as we don't have a need to. The "correcting" would all be done by Facebook, not us.
Control
People who are so concerned about "fake news" don't want people to think about things for themselves. They want to have the alleged "Fake news" completely removed from FB so no one is even exposed to the possibility.
An example was of a post called "Marijuana Kills Cancer Cells", which the FiB extension labeled in "NOT VERIFIED". They want the post to be gone, not simply labeled "NOT VERIFIED". They want to restrict what you have access to, these hyper-sensitive control freaks. Misinformation is such as issue for them, that instead of getting you do think better and do it yourself, they want to control what information you get access to.
Why is Facebook controlling posts important? Because millennials rely on social media for news and info, no longer mainstream news sites or TV. Even 44% of all Americans got their political news from social media. Facebook, and it's controlling advocates, and championing for censorship of information based on how it's a "social responsibility" to ensure people's aren't being duped. Forget about making people more responsible themselves, no... let's just keep people dumbed down more by filtering the information for them, rather than have them filter it themselves.
For many, all this information control, preventing new information from being accessed if it isn't "officially" "verified", is "good" and the work a real socially responsible hero... Facebook... our hero!
It's not the "fake news" that will make "Facebook" into "Fakebook". Facebook is doing that themselves by being "fake and false representatives of truth, trying to prevent people from judging for themselves. I'm all for spam blocking and shit trash content, but how can FB say some post is "false" or "fake" just because it's "NOT VERIFIED" from a "trusted" government-approved source? Orwell... here we come!
I just can't trust Facebook for "allowing" me to have access to what they deem to be "truth".
@krnel
2016-11-22, 7:27am
Good article!
I joined gab.ai and steemit, and main reason is because i believe in freedom, doesn't matter if i agree or not with author opinion.
I have accounts here and in facebook. I do not like how steamit develops and moves discussions though they would benefit from integrating an API for images and videos and also include 360 degree content. Steamit has to be a platform that has to be different than twitter. In twitter one minute you post something and the next it is gone because of some other guys post or maybe robots are used and bring your comments down. I think steamit should also have forums besides the chatroom. Chatrooms are things of the past no one wants to use an interactive engaging platform where you write your stuff and you see it go down real fast and do not know what the heck is going on. Regarding facebooks fake news policy i really think that the tool could be used by scriptkiddies and politically moved junkies to flag content as fake news with badly written urls, heck, it can happen. There are annoying people that use the report tool just to take content down that they do not agree with. I honestly think people should autoregulate themselves before uploading content and make sure if they are copying content to put the links to avoid plagiarism and possibly defamation. My 2 cents.
Facebook was always fake for many reasons, mostly for not telling what they really are: one big spying machine. But now it seems they don't really know what they are themselves. They are not a news site with an editorial board, but a simple snooping sharing site. Trying to take the role of societies pillar would just increase the on-site censorship.
I will bet people stays anyway. The ones that care have left a long time ago.
Thanks for the feedback. A new market-place is required, coughSteemitcough. Then people have an alternative for their attentional desires. The bandwagon effect works for popularity and things that die. Twitter is dying, Facebook will follow suite, as a new popular platform emerges: Steemit. As more people join Steemit, more people will want to follow. It cascades. Then it cascades for FB, like it did for MySpace.
:) yes, lets hope the days of FB are numbered..
You have the option to use tor, protonmail or tutanota instead of regular gmail,yahoo or hotmail accounts and you also have the option to not associate your phone number so facebook will not have access to your phone's data or whatsapp account data. I never associate it precisely to avoid what you say, period.
Yes, because I lately have tried to promote my webcomic, I considered to make an anonymous account on twitter and facebook with the remedies you mention: Tor, protonmail etc. But I kind of gave up. I thrive on open decentralised networks like this and Diaspora, where the users decide what they get to see.
But right now Facebook is where it all happens so I have been dependent on people sharing it there anyway. In the end I guess that because of my hatred towards centralised, censored media I stand in the way of myself. But nothing new there :)
I think the bigger issue is why was the fake news was believable over the "mainstream" news.
People don't trust the "mainstream" news because they have proven to be too one sided and fail to share all the facts they have.
People chose to believe the fake news because it wasn't mainstream.
The bigger issue is mainstream media has failed us and people turned to anything else.
I agree, completely. where do we turn now?
thats the scary part. where do we go now?
The scary part of this process, is how easily influenced people are by "fake news". How opinionated people become, how many arguments start with misinformation. Its absurd! I found this video, which kind of proves my point
I think we all have the duty to report the fake news facebook site or webpage. If it is a webpage then we have the duty to report it to the hosting account to take it down because of posts of misleading information or violations of TOS. Cheers.
Disclaimer: I am just a bot trying to be helpful.