I’m Sorry Mr. Zuckerberg, but You Are Wrong

https://shift.newco.co/im-sorry-mr-zuckerberg-but-you-are-wrong-65dbf8513424#.1hsi9bwqp

by CssPaulrowlyk • 10 years ago

51 53 10 years ago

shift.newco.co

scotty79• 10 years ago

When you look at the numbers Trump got same number of votes that previous republican candidate got. Hilary got significantly less votes than Obama. So if there's any role of social media it's not about giving Trump supporters a voice. It's about poisoning Hilary and election in general for people who would otherwise go and vote against Trump.

leereeves5• 10 years ago

Have they finished counting yet?

They counted 100 million votes in one day; I don't understand why they haven't counted 7 million in more than a week.

ptaipale2• 10 years ago

The 100 million votes are in easy reach and clear to read. The 7 million are scattered all over the place and includes all the difficult cases where you need to decide whether the vote is eligible or not, and is clearly readable or not, etc.

sschueller• 10 years ago

I think facebook (or better its users) is more responsible for the misinformation of both candidates which is causing this deep hate between fractions.

We can't agree on everything and that is actually a very good thing but we need dialog not outright dismissal of the 'other' side. You can not label an entire group crazy, you need to understand why they have a certain opinion or view. Only then we can find common ground and solve problems. In fact you may be surprised how similar people from opposed sides actually are when you remove this pile of garbage blocking everyones view.

warlox9• 10 years ago

While you preach about listening to both sides, Trump's Chief Strategist Steve Bannon wants to ethnically cleanse Silicon Valley.

https://i.redd.it/3tx94qwvixxx.jpg

Full Article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-bannon-flattered...

tomp3• 10 years ago

ethnically cleanse Silicon Valley

That's a gross misrepresentation of the article you posted. Congratulations, you chose the most appropriate thread!

croon3• 10 years ago

Regardless of political views I think Bernie Sanders talked very well about the overlap in Bernie voters and Trump voters in the Colbert interview [1] [2]. (Yes, I know, liberal media)

And in a rare moment of actually being funny, SNL managed to also poke fun at both/neither side, making what I think was good political commentary about the American working class and the issues never addressed by campaigns (prior to this one) [3].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyTwoBIo8kQ

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf_XrfpdOsM

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ly0X2XmEf1s

myf01d• 10 years ago

"Sorry Mr. Zuckerberg, you didn't collude enough with the government and main stream media to get Hillary elected."

notinreallife• 10 years ago

Seems easy to blame Facebook for this. I don't like how he called out their algorithms, probably not even knowing how they work. Meanwhile Twitter is just banning alt-right accounts openly, and no one gives a shit.

croon3• 10 years ago

I'm still not sure what "alt-right" means, but all I've seen is them banning racist or otherwise abusive accounts. Can you link some unfair bans?

hyperdunc• 10 years ago

Azalea Banks

johansch• 10 years ago

I take a fundamental issue with the core thinking behind this post. It seems to be: "the voters should not be allowed free communication between themselves - it needs to be policed and curated for them. They should preferably get most/all of their information and political opinion from big media.

Some telling parts from the post:

"Facebook’s viral and social mechanisms allow the amplification of content well beyond its original media budget, thus exacerbating the issue."

"A thousand “Hillary Clinton is a crook” “opinion pieces” probably don’t fall into your count of fake news per se (even though, it’s worth pointing out that their very title would constitute libel and is a lie). And opinion pieces are much, much harder to police. "

waspleg• 10 years ago

I've been sick for weeks and done nothing but read news stories when able most of the day.

One of them said 170 million Americans read Facebook every single day.

How does that not have a massive influence?

waskosky• 10 years ago

Zuckerberg also addressed some of these criticisms in responses to comments on his original post https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10103253901916271

pg314• 10 years ago

From that post: "Our goal is to show people the content they will find most meaningful, and people want accurate news."

People might say they want accurate news, but what many really want is news that supports their views, i.e. confirmation bias.

Traditional papers try to give you a balanced mix of news. Of course, they don't always get it right. Before the TV and the internet, they used to enjoy stable monopolies: one newspaper per city (see the section "We Buy Some Newspapers ... Newspapers" in Warren Buffet's 2012 letter to the shareholders http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2012ltr.pdf). To get to that monopoly, it helped to have good independent journalism. Once they had established their monopoly, the culture often remained (e.g. the board of editors defends its independence). That culture is still largely intact today, even though their margins are under heavy pressure from the internet.

Facebook has a commercial incentive to feed you posts that you will click on. With their detailed user profiles and immediate feedback, the result is predictable: in the case of the election, you will get positive stories of your candidate, and negative stories of the opposite candidate.

Facebook faces some big ethical challenges, and I'm not sure how to fix them. In the mean time, I think we should cherish existing newspapers. If they disappear, without being replaced by something as good or better, we will miss them badly. The president-elect has been bashing them during the election, and is continuing to do so. If you don't have a subscription yet, I suggest you seriously consider subscribing to the NYT or WaPo.

ManlyBread• 10 years ago

Hilarious. The "wrong" candidate gets elected and suddenly half of the Internet is involved in a debate about media and news sources and apparently huge amount of them are "fake news sites".

ryporter2• 10 years ago

Exactly. I detested both candidates, but it's ridiculous to frame this situation as one in which the "wrong" candidate won, and shows true bias.

ryporter2• 10 years ago

Facebook can't win here. When they have humans more in the loop of selecting news stories, they get blamed for bias. When they remove the humans, they are blamed for AI which isn't perfect. Yes, Facebook can improve how it selects news stories, and they are working to do that.

natch• 10 years ago

What happened to the "vouch" button? This seems like an interesting, non-spam, somewhat tech related (well and politics, but something about the role or perceived role of tech companies in politics) article. Not sure if I agree with it, but it doesn't seem deserving of a flag.

jarcane• 10 years ago

Thou shalt not question the Holy Algorithm in the halls of Hacker News.

sctb• 10 years ago

The vouch button appears when a story is flagged to the extent that it's killed, but [flagged] can appear before then.

dredmorbius3• 10 years ago

HN has been one of the more civilised corners of the Web, and I've commented on that specifically.

In the past days and weeks, but most especially since November 8's election, the tone as soured considerably, and I'm seeing active and non-derailed discussions such as this getting flagged.

(I'd submitted the link myself, only to learn it was a dupe.)

HN relies on the wisdom of crowds -- my suggestion would be to consider crowds only a first approximation of wisdom. The site Advogato -- an old-school online forum from the late 1990s -- had the idea of a trust graph. I'm not sure that's an ultimate solution either, but the idea that you exercise specific judgement, overriding user actions, seems to be coming back into vogue.

egeozcan2• 10 years ago

Technology does amplify problems, yes. But it also amplifies the solutions. If your problem didn't have a decent solution in the first place, then yes, you will just have a bigger problem.

I'm not sure how this is something directly related to Facebook. I think misinformation spread has been a problem that was amplified with the easier access to the information in general.

Maybe this is like the problem of modern warfare. Modern bombs tend to affect people en masse (citation needed, yes, please bear with me) and with nuclear weapons, the problem of civilians getting hurt/killed got amplified. The problem was (hopefully) solved by understanding the consequences of using extreme force over time, especially the chain reaction that can be triggered.

What I'm trying to say is, maybe, we need to create a solution which we can "amplify" with the technology, and that is not just Facebook's responsibility. However, them being the "nuclear weapon" of the social media, yes, they do share the burden.

dredmorbius3• 10 years ago

You might want to look at Techno-Fix: why technology won't save us or the environment. There's the problem of unintended consequences, a/k/a "bite-back".

http://www.worldcat.org/title/techno-fix-why-technology-wont...

Joel Mokyr also looks into this problem in his new book The Culture of Growth:

http://www.worldcat.org/title/culture-of-growth-the-origins-...

egeozcan2• 10 years ago

Thank you for the links, I'll have a look over the weekend.

EJTH• 10 years ago

Under any circumstance I really don't like the idea of a huge corporation like facebook to begin censoring private conversations and beginning to shadow ban people based on their naivity in regards to what they share etc.

Facebook is not a company that should indulge in what is truthful and what is not. It should preferably be a medium to keep in contact and discuss links with friends and not much more. I already think that there is too much filtering of what ends up in my facebook feed.

dredmorbius3• 10 years ago

How about the idea of limiting the scope of those private discussions then?

Every uninformed, misinformed, bioted, and/or intentionally disinformational screed needn't be spread to millions of readers.

Information and media systems have always had profound impacts on society, frequently highly disruptive.

starf• 10 years ago

If i understand correctly, Trump became president because of the Dunning-Kruger effect? Apparently the people responsible for these false stories first tried anti-Trump stories and they weren't shared that much. Then they tried Anti-Hilary stories which were shared more so became more popular.

sparkpeasy• 10 years ago

Mark Zuckerberg built the worth of Facebook convincing advertisers it can influence people to buy their brand, yet why all the sudden does Facebook's influence not apply to deceptive news?

Remember Upworthy? It had misleading clickbait headlines and within one week it was gone from the Newsfeed. Facebook has the skills to fix this.

It has been said the media has a liberal bias. Conservative media denies that global warming exists. Liberals and the overwhelming majority of scientists accept it does. Can you name one issue where conservatives and scientists refute liberals?

jlj2• 10 years ago

Fake news is just a nicer word for propaganda. Maybe what we saw happen on Facebook was a reflection of our society and the US political system? Even if Facebook changes something, 4 years from now we are still facing a 2-party oligarchy with a strong grip on control. I had hopes for a better 3rd party showing with all of the negative campaigning, but it turns out that America can't get enough of the major party candidates. It's like a reality TV show played out on social media. Life imitating art?

I deleted (vs deactivated) my personal facebook account in the run-up to the election. The cost/benefit math wasn't worth it anymore. Too much wasted time and energy with little room for critical thinking or diversity of opinions. I doubt I'll rejoin anytime in the foreseeable future. No judgement to folks who are still on it, it's just not for me.

I feel much less anxious and more at peace without facebook than I ever did with it. I'm encouraged to make more time for face-to-face and phone conversations.

If someday I am responsible for marketing or customer service, I would consider using facebook for business purposes to communicate with customers. But I'd let someone else manage it who enjoys social media.

I am left wondering if facebook just had its myspace moment? Was that peak facebook? If so, what's next in line?

basch2• 10 years ago

some fake news doesnt care about changing your mind OR reinforcing your opinion. it's just pandering for a click, for ad revenue.

jlj2• 10 years ago

That's a good point, though it could be an AND too. Push an agenda and make money. We can't easily know the actors, but the motivation is similar to grab power or its surrogate money.

akytt• 10 years ago

Fb makes all if its money by separating people into neat little echo chambers and making them feel warm and cozy and in possession of the Truth. Basically driving a number of wedges into the society. A _little_ blame would be in order, I'd think.

I’m Sorry Mr. Zuckerberg, but You Are Wrong

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