Current Events > Is Facebook complicit for Russian fake news? They literally put it in your feed

(+) Yeah! (+)

Facebook has algorithms that give you what you see on your feed. If your feed is full of Nazis and Russian propaganda, Facebook literally decided to feed you all that (pun).

People have tested this by starting a new facebook, liking a few things here and there, say maybe a few conservative posts, next thing you know the feed is full of Nazi Alt-Right propaganda.

They also filter out stuff THEY think you don't like. So if you keep liking conservative slant stories and dislike a few liberal ones, you won't see any liberal stories anymore.

I read an article about this awhile ago and am looking for it. Meanwhile there are plenty articles on this that agree, I just liked that one better.
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they were hacked dude, is not their fault
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Joeydollaz posted...

they were hacked dude, is not their fault

Facebook was not hacked

don't spread fake news
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welp, haven't found the article I saw half a year ago yet

meanwhile here is a good one

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/11/facebook-censorship-news-feed-trending-topics

With the news feed, theres no such luck. The algorithm that drives it makes just as many editorial choices as the trending topic curators, but you cant interview it to ask why. It will never be fired and decide to speak out about its decisions under the cloak of anonymity. Instead, it just sits there, day in day out, totally dictating the content seen by more than a billion users of the biggest social network in the world.

Perhaps because of that, the majority of Facebook users dont even realise that the news feed is edited at all. A 2015 study suggested that more than 60% of Facebook users are entirely unaware of any algorithmic curation on Facebook at all: They believed every single story from their friends and followed pages appeared in their news feed, the authors wrote.

The news feed algorithm takes in so many signals when deciding what should be promoted and what should be buried that its likely the case that there is no one person at Facebook who can list them all. But we know some choices the algorithm makes: it promotes live video as much as possible, and pre-recorded video almost as heavily although in both cases, only if the video is delivered through Facebooks own platform.

It pushes articles that you spend a long time reading, as well as links posted by your closest friends, over the alternative. If you run a business page on the site, it will show your posts to a tiny fraction of people whove subscribed, and then ask for cash to show it to anyone else.

These decisions dont feel outrageous, because Facebook sells them under the veneer of neutrality. Articles with a longer read time arent shown because Facebook made an editorial decision that you shouldnt read short pieces; instead its because the time people choose to spend reading or watching content they clicked on from news feed is an important signal that the story was interesting to them. And so Facebook promotes stories with a high read time, because it wants the news feed to be full of interesting stories.

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From my understanding, they sold ads to (russian) companies that would then use the algorithm to only service inflammatory ads to certain sects of people.

I.e. show violent BLM propaganda to white, racist conservatives in WV in order to fuel the divide in America by making them believe that BLM was ready to be violent
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https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/14/facebook-advertising-jew-hater-antisemitism
You could buy ads in a "hates jews" category.
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https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/30/facebook-news-feed-filters-emotion-study

Facebook is secretly filtering my news feed? I'm outraged!

Not so secretly, actually. There is controversy this week over the social network's research project manipulating nearly 700,000 users' news feeds to understand whether it could affect their emotions.

But Facebook has been much more open about its general practice of filtering the status updates and page posts that you see in your feed when logging on from your various devices. In fact, it argues that these filters are essential.

Essential? Why can't Facebook just show me an unfiltered feed?

Because, it argues, the results would be overwhelming. "Every time someone visits news feed there are on average 1,500 potential stories from friends, people they follow and pages for them to see, and most people dont have enough time to see them all, wrote Facebook engineer Lars Backstrom in a blog post in August 2013.

With so many stories, there is a good chance people would miss something they wanted to see if we displayed a continuous, unranked stream of information."

Bear in mind that this is just an average. In another blog post, by Facebook advertising executive Brian Boland in June 2014, he explained that for more intensive users, the risk of story overload is greater.

"For people with lots of friends and page likes, as many as 15,000 potential stories could appear any time they log on, he explained.

Why is this emotion study controversial?

Facebook has the right to filter your news feed, including for research: it's right there in the terms of conditions that very few of us read when signing up to the social network.

There is a debate about whether agreeing to these Ts and Cs counts as "informed consent" to take part in a research study if not, the study has breached US ethical guidelines on human subjects research.

There is also unease at the thought of Facebook deliberately manipulating our emotions, rather than simply using its filters for its traditional goal of making sure we see the stories that are most interesting to us.

One of the researchers, Adam Kramer, has posted a defence of the work, claiming Facebook had users' interests at heart: "We felt that it was important to investigate the common worry that seeing friends post positive content leads to people feeling negative or left out. At the same time, we were concerned that exposure to friends' negativity might lead people to avoid visiting Facebook."

Basically the idea is to get you coming back to facebook as much as possible

even if that means reading fake conspiracy stories written by Russian spys lmao

but the real kicker is some old person doesn't realize facebook censored out the content that might give an alternative voice and shed light that such stories are fake

they just consuming what facebook puts on their feed thinking this is really what their friends are buzzing about
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Foppe posted...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/14/facebook-advertising-jew-hater-antisemitism
You could buy ads in a "hates jews" category.

wow

so the robot made this category
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