The appearance of numerous pieces declaring that, while there's still a way to go, FB has made great strides in handling misinformation, right after a perceived Democratic election victory, is really some impeccable timing.
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Put another way, a journalist these days uses
@crowdtangle to find dumb stuff going viral on Facebook, writes a story about it, and then goes to@crowdtangle to see how his piece on the topic is doing. The media snake eats itself, and doesn't even seem to realize it's doing so.Show this thread -
The temptation to tag here is *almost* irresistible, but I think I'm disliked enough as it is, and I've got SF daycare to pay for with all this scribbling. Even among the White Knights of Truth, you've got to go along to get along.
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Let’s get away from the handwaves and introduce
@kevinroose’s recent work as evidence, which I assume you are referencing. Here’s the article that seems most relevant:https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/07/business/facebook-midterms-misinformation.html … -
Right, one of many such takes. It was refreshing and well-reported. I also find it hard to reconcile with the tenor of the discussion that preceded it just the week before. Also, I'm going to be the FB skeptic here for once: how do we know that there's less misinformation now?
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In other words, how is this not a recursive feedback loop where things seem better because we all say they are? Getting data on FB is hard (they're no help there), but it seems that crappy stories still run riot on FB, as a brief glance at CrowdTangle reveals. What's changed?
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I agree with you here — my sense is that the only thing that changed is that we have evidence that when Facebook concentrates its resources to fend off misinformation on a particular election day, it can avoid obvious catastrophe (this time...)
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But how was this not a catastrophe (other than the result)? Did the metrics actually change vs. 2016? I haven't read a single piece that compares something measurable between then and now (and again, it's understandably hard to get hard numbers as an outside observer).
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Your skepticism is warranted — it’s too early to know, especially with so little data. I’d view an *obvious* catastrophe as an election-day hoax that reached liftoff to the point we all knew about it. But we may yet learn there were pernicious campaigns operating on a large scale
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Right. Here's what I think will happen: there might be another big disinfo blowup left, but mostly we'll consider the problem as fixed as it's going to be, and start wigging out over some other aspect of FB (as we once did about privacy, say).
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Reads like a journal entry ;)
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Dear diary....
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