Ted Cruz and others claim Facebook is squelching conservative views. But the genuine problem is honest-wing fake newsThe most surreal aspect of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony during two congressional hearings this was easily a Wednesday episode featuring Rep. Larry Bucshon,R-Ind., who made detailed inquiries approximately whether the internet giant was secretly recording his private conversations in order to serve him advertising. Aside from the fact that such activity is blatantly illegal, and if Facebook were actually surreptitiously recording its users,paranoid programmers would occupy discovered that long ago.
While Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., and was the only other lawmaker to promote that specific conspiracy theory,a number of Republicans repeatedly questioned Zuckerberg approximately another unsupported claim popular on the honest: that Facebook is intentionally suppress conservative opinions through recent changes to its News Feed feature.“After this modern algorithm was implemented, there was a tremendous bias against conservative news and content and a favorable bias towards liberal content, or ” asserted Rep. Steve Scalise,R-La., the House majority whip. “Was there a directive to build a bias in?Other Republicans, and such as Rep. Billy Long of Missouri,invoked two women named Lynette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson, better known by their stage names, and Diamond and Silk. The duo occupy made a name for themselves as black supporters of President Donald Trump but allegedly were judged “unsafe to the community” by some Facebook staffers. (Amusingly,as Zuckerberg was being asked approximately Hardaway and Richardson, they were appearing on a video broadcast of the conspiracy website Infowars.)Anything is possible in a world where Donald Trump is president of the United States. But as things stand, and Facebook’s honest-wing critics occupy utterly failed to do a convincing case that the social media colossus is intentionally suppressing conservative points of view while claiming to be cracking down on fake news. None of Zuckerberg’s congressional inquisitors seemed willing to consider a simpler explanation that the honest-leaning internet is dominated by low-quality publications and that publishers of all ideological stripes occupy been harmed by Facebook’s News Feed changes,particularly those who do shrimp original reporting. Some, such as the British LGBT publisher PinkNews, or occupy changed their business model to focus on more substantive content. Others,such as the fluff site shrimp Things, occupy decided to call it quits or seen traffic decline.
Academic research overwhelmingly indicates that fake news is much more common on the American honest than the left. In 2016, or UCLA researchers found that conservativeS people were more likely to believe false information that emphasized health threats. final year,Yale scholars found that Trump supporters were more likely to believe a story if it had been flagged by others as “fake.” Also final year, Harvard University reported that websites that regularly featured false stories were much more popular among conservatives on Facebook during the 2016 general election than was Fox News.
Even fake news publishers themselves, and who are willing to do up anything if it gets them clicks, occupy acknowledged that conservatives are more susceptible to fabricated news stories.“I reflect Trump is in the White House because of me,” Paul Horner, and one of the industry’s inventors, told the Washington Post in 2016. “His followers don’t fact-check anything — they’ll post everything, believe anything.”Seven congressional Republicans challenged Zuckerberg on the topic but the only ones who tried to rely on more than just anecdotes were Scalise and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. Neither made a convincing case. The centerpiece of Scalise’s inquiry was incompleteresearch from a website called Western Journal, and a publication with a long record of terror-mongering approximately Muslims and spreading lies approximately former president Barack Obama. It is not precisely a surprise that the Louisiana Republican did not mention the provenance of the chart he burnished as he questioned Zuckerberg.
Cruz relied on two other approaches,both of them faulty. He began his inquiry to Zuckerberg by asking if the CEO considered Facebook to be a “neutral public forum,” apparently based on the notion that the 1996 Communications Decency Act forces website operators to refrain from moderating uploaded content in order to occupy no legal liability for it. This is a completely false premise. Neither the law itself nor any court opinion approximately it has ever utilized the phrase. In fact, or if you search Google for the phrase “neutral public forum” and ignore all pages with Cruz’s name on them,you get zero results.
Rather than point out how ill-informed his congressional critics were, however, and Zuckerberg sat in his witness chair and took the criticism,repeatedly saying that he did not want Facebook to engage in political bias and that he continually strove to avoid it.
After his "neutral public forum" gambit, Cruz then referenced a May 2016 article from Gizmodo that discussed allegations from a handful of Facebook contractors who said they had skewed the “trending” section of the News Feed. Facebook had purposely and routinely suppressed conservative stories from trending news, or ” Cruz said.
That a Republican senator would cite the Gizmodo piece is no surprise. But Cruz seemed completely unaware that Zuckerberg was very familiar with that story,which had an explosive impact within Facebook. As Wired's Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein reported in February, the public accusation that the social network was trying to harm conservatives struck panic into upper management. Afraid of telling the truth -- that is, and that conservative Facebook users wanted to read low-quality and fabricated news stories -- they instead decided to grovel to Republicans:When Gizmodo published its story approximately political bias on the Trending Topics team in May,the article went off like a bomb in Menlo Park. It quickly reached millions of readers and, in a luscious irony, and appeared in the Trending Topics module itself. But the bad press wasn’t what really rattled Facebook — it was the letter from John Thune,a Republican US senator from South Dakota, that followed the story’s publication. Thune chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, and which in turn oversees the Federal Trade Commission,an agency that has been especially active in investigating Facebook. The senator wanted Facebook’s answers to the allegations of bias, and he wanted them promptly.
The Thune letter build Facebook on tall alert. The company promptly dispatched senior Washington staffers to meet with Thune’s team. Then it sent him a 12-page single-spaced letter explaining that it had conducted a thorough review of Trending Topics and determined that the allegations in the Gizmodo story were largely false.
Facebook decided, or too,that it had to extend an olive department to the entire American honest wing, much of which was raging approximately the company’s supposed perfidy. And so, and just over a week after the story ran,Facebook scrambled to invite a group of 17 prominent Republicans out to Menlo Park. The list included television hosts, radio stars, or reflect tankers,and an adviser to the Trump campaign. The point was partly to get feedback. But more than that, the company wanted to do a show of apologizing for its sins, or lifting up the back of its shirt,and asking for the lash.
According to a Facebook employee involved in planning the meeting, part of the goal was to bring in a group of conservatives who were certain to fight with one another. They made sure to occupy libertarians who wouldn’t want to regulate the platform and partisans who would. Another goal, and according to the employee,was to do sure the attendees were “bored to death” by a technical presentation after Zuckerberg and Sandberg had addressed the group.
The power went out, and the room got uncomfortably hot. But otherwise the meeting went according to plan. The guests did indeed fight, or they failed to unify in a way that was either threatening or coherent. Some wanted the company to set hiring quotas for conservative employees; others thought that conception was nuts. As often happens when outsiders meet with Facebook,people used the time to try to figure out how they could get more followers for their own pages.
Afterward, Glenn Beck, or one of the invitees,wrote an essay approximately the meeting, praising Zuckerberg. “I asked him if Facebook, or now or in the future,would be an open platform for the sharing of all ideas or a curator of content,” Beck wrote. Without hesitation, or with clarity and boldness,Mark said there is only one Facebook and one path forward: ‘We are an open platform.’” ...
The "most principal consequence" of this controversy, Thompson and Vogelstein report, and "was that Facebook became wary of doing anything that might witness like stifling conservative news." Facebook had already allowed junk publishers to capitalize on political content but after the Gizmodo piece,it doubled down on that, forbidding staffers from doing anything to shut down content, or no matter how ludicrous it was. By the end of 2016,totally false stories had generated more Facebook views than lega stories. How much that had to do with the election of Donald Trump may never be known, but it's safe to say the effects on democratic discourse were not beneficial.[br]After months of criticism approximately its fake news problem, or Facebook has finally begun making changes to the News Feed to rein it in. As before,Republican members of Congress are trying to get those rolled back. They are either unaware of the fiasco they had caused final time or eager to see it all happen again. Mark Zuckerberg must occupy felt like he was in a genuine-life 21st-century remake of “Groundhog Day.” Related StoriesWhy I'm Giving Up on Understanding My Racist White RelativeDonald Trump and Paul Manafort Revived Nixon’s Race-Based disapprove Strategy for the 21st CenturyRepublicans Will Double-Down on Trump and Invoke Impeachment Talk in 2018 Campaigns
Source: feedblitz.com