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jbenton's profile
Joshua Benton
Joshua Benton
Joshua Benton
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@jbenton

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Joshua BentonVerified account

@jbenton

Senior writer + founder of @NiemanLab at @Harvard. I write about (a) digital journalism, (b) southern history, mostly. Proud Cajun. Takes mine, not Harvard's.

Greater Boston
joshuabenton.com
Joined December 2006

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    1. Joshua Benton‏Verified account @jbenton 18 Feb 2018

      It’s a well-known phenomenon that researchers spend more time studying Twitter and less time studying Facebook than would seem to be reasonable. The reason: Twitter’s more-open API is a lot easier to work with than FB is. (1/x)

      10 replies 162 retweets 478 likes
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    2. Joshua Benton‏Verified account @jbenton 18 Feb 2018

      I think we’re seeing the same sort of thing happen in “fake news” analysis, both academic and armchair. The focus on parts of the problem that are more easily quantifiable is making those pieces seem more significant than they are.

      1 reply 17 retweets 88 likes
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    3. Joshua Benton‏Verified account @jbenton 18 Feb 2018

      For instance, fake news exposure analysis tends to be about pageviews for URLs at known fake-news sites, because we have ways to count those.

      1 reply 3 retweets 45 likes
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    4. Joshua Benton‏Verified account @jbenton 18 Feb 2018

      Meanwhile, we have plenty of reason to think that FB-native image/video/page-based memes were at least as big a factor — but there’s no good way to estimate that sort of scale. (Note the scale of Russian investment here that Mueller found.)

      2 replies 6 retweets 74 likes
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    5. Joshua Benton‏Verified account @jbenton 18 Feb 2018

      So an external URL saying Clinton murdered FBI agents: measurable. A Facebook-hosted image meme that says Clinton murdered FBI agents: very hard to measure. But similar impact.

      3 replies 9 retweets 69 likes
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    6. Joshua Benton‏Verified account @jbenton 18 Feb 2018

      Similarly, the news that only about $100K in Facebook advertising was sold to Russians was a quantifiable number that was easy to grab onto — and to encourage a “eh, not that big of a deal” conclusion.

      1 reply 4 retweets 35 likes
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    7. Joshua Benton‏Verified account @jbenton 18 Feb 2018

      But there’s no similarly quantifiable way to measure the impact of all the other Russian activity native to FB, the stuff that doesn’t have a hard price attached. Which now appears to have been a far larger area of Russian investment.

      5 replies 8 retweets 63 likes
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    8. Joshua Benton‏Verified account @jbenton 18 Feb 2018

      Anyway, I’m not criticizing those who are working to research or analyze these harder numbers. Quantifiable data is super important and an excellent place to start!

      1 reply 2 retweets 24 likes
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    9. Joshua Benton‏Verified account @jbenton 18 Feb 2018

      However — just as a finding made using the Twitter API shouldn’t be broadened out to “this is true across all social media,” just because Twitter activity is easier to research —

      2 replies 5 retweets 31 likes
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      Joshua Benton‏Verified account @jbenton 18 Feb 2018

      I think we should be *very* cautious about hanging a “fake news didn’t really change anything” conclusion just because the areas where it’s easier to get hard numbers might push us in that direction. /end

      9:19 AM - 18 Feb 2018
      • 25 Retweets
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      7 replies 25 retweets 109 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. Aviv Ovadya  🥦‏ @metaviv 18 Feb 2018
          Replying to @jbenton

          This is right—and I'm saying this as someone who creates metrics to track the impact of social media on news as my day job. Actually measuring the activity that matters requires measuring things that are very expensive to track, evaluate, and quantify.

          1 reply 2 retweets 12 likes
        3. Aviv Ovadya  🥦‏ @metaviv 18 Feb 2018
          Replying to @metaviv @jbenton

          Though to be precise—it's not that hard to do much of this measurement/monitoring. But one off studies are not enough. Might cost 5M$/year. I tried to raise money for this *before* 2016 US election. No dice. Only now are we starting to get resources even a fraction of that scale.

          0 replies 0 retweets 6 likes
        4. End of conversation
        1. Roger Wilson‏ @civicdec 18 Feb 2018
          Replying to @jbenton

          Agreed especially when you track the footnotes e.g. A & G "back of the envelop" numbers cited here to draw conclusion specifically denied by original authors; and oh-by-the-way the numbers could imply a much larger impact.pic.twitter.com/BJEHoBDtSn

          0 replies 0 retweets 2 likes
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        2. Brendan Nyhan‏Verified account @BrendanNyhan 18 Feb 2018
          Replying to @jbenton

          fair points on limits of our measurement, but we know from broader set of evidence that persuasion is hard https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/upshot/fake-news-and-bots-may-be-worrisome-but-their-political-power-is-overblown.html …. having better exposure data won't change that fact unless there's something magic about facebook content/ads or whatever (i'm dubious).

          3 replies 0 retweets 4 likes
        3. Justin BanTheNazisPlz Reedy‏ @justinsreedy 18 Feb 2018
          Replying to @BrendanNyhan @jbenton

          Good point about persuasion, but boosting or suppressing voter turnout is more attainable, isn’t it?

          1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
        4. Show replies
        1. I Brake 4 Ants‏ @ibrake4ants 18 Feb 2018
          Replying to @jbenton

          Also it's disconcerting that we have to trust Facebook to analyze that data and tell us the impact. And they've not proved to act in very good faith when it comes to this topic so far.

          0 replies 0 retweets 3 likes
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        1. Morten Bay, Ph.D. and stuff‏ @mortenbay 19 Feb 2018
          Replying to @jbenton

          I think the participatory nature of social media might (!) mean that we only have 6-7 yrs of evidence and data on how elections function now. The introduction of social media into political persuasion might (!) mean our previous models either need revisions or are obsolete.

          0 replies 0 retweets 1 like
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        1. Ernesto Priego  😷‏Verified account @ernestopriego 19 Feb 2018
          Replying to @jbenton

          Privacy is another concern. Twitter has fewer settings- collecting FB data without consent is a straight-forward 'no' from most Ethics boards.

          0 replies 0 retweets 1 like
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