Facebook Goes Easy on Right-Wing Misinformation

[lpetrich]

Trump Disputing Election A Worry For Facebook Employees - "Facebook employees collected evidence showing the company is giving right-wing pages preferential treatment when it comes to misinformation. And they’re worried about how the company will handle the president’s falsehoods in an election year."

“I do think we’re headed for a problematic scenario where Facebook is going to be used to aggressively undermine the legitimacy of the US elections, in a way that has never been possible in history,” one Facebook employee wrote in a group on Workplace, the company’s internal communication platform, earlier this week.

then
Craig Silverman on Twitter: "SCOOP: Facebok employees collected evidence showing preferential treatment of right wing figures. ..." / Twitter

SCOOP: Facebok employees collected evidence showing preferential treatment of right wing figures. FB policy ppl removed misinfo strikes from Breitbart, PragerU, and Diamond & Silk, according to internal docs. And FB fired a key employee who gathered info: (link)

FB’s policy says publishers must contact a fact checker that gives the rating if they want to dispute it.

But the docs show that people such as VP of global public policy Joel Kaplan have intervened on behalf of conservatives like Charlie Kirk. In some cases checks were removed

In one case, Diamond & Silk appealed a “false” rating directly with the checker. It was downgraded to “partly false” on merit.

But then someone in “Policy/Leadership” at Facebook intervened and removed it and a previous rating on their page, according to internal convos.

A Facebook employee also posted about what internal data showed about Breitbart:

“A Breitbart escalation marked ‘urgent: end of day’ was resolved on the same day, with all misinformation strikes against Breitbart’s page and against their domain cleared without explanation."

Facebook told us the compay applies it fact checks from partners BUT it reserves the right to overrule them when it comes to actually handing out penalties like removing a page’s ability to advertise. So it can remove “strikes” from Diamond & Silk, Breitbart, PragerU as it likes

Diamond & Silk - Zirconia & Polyester?

 

[lpetrich]

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "Remember when I asked Zuckerberg why he allowed a white supremacist-linked org to be an official fact checker for Facebook and he wouldn’t give a straight answer?
Maybe this is why: Facebook’s right-wing radicalization funnels are looking increasingly intentional & designed " / Twitter
(my previous post's Twitter thread on FB giving special treatment to right-wingers)

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "The incentives are certainly there.
Dems believe in antitrust, reigning in monopolies, and checking abuse of corporate power.
Zuckerberg himself said he’d go “to the mat and fight” against these points.
Could that include weaponizing FB’s platform to influence our elections? https://t.co/Z5tPm9D52W" / Twitter

Zuckerberg: I'll 'go to the mat and fight' Warren over plan to break up Facebook | Technology | The Guardian - "Leaked recordings published by the Verge show Zuckerberg fears ‘existential threat’ if Democratic contender becomes president"

 

[ruby sparks]

If true, this is just terrible.

 

[Worldtraveller]

The bias is definitely there.

I don't understand the basis for it, but it has been apparent for years.

 

[ruby sparks]

My guess would be money.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

My guess would be money.

Yup. Right wing sources are going to be more interested in spewing garbage on Facebook.

 

[lpetrich]

Craig Silverman on Twitter: "NEW w/ @RMac18: Mark Zuckerberg intervened to reduce penalties for Alex Jones and Infowars. His decision weakened FB's policies and prevented it from acting earlier against right wing groups like the Oath Keepers that stormed the Capitol, sources say: (link)" / Twitter
noting
Joel Kaplan’s Policy Team Sways Big Facebook Decisions Like Alex Jones Ban

Jones had gained infamy for claiming that the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre was a “giant hoax,” and that the teenage survivors of the 2018 Parkland shooting were “crisis actors.” But Facebook had found that he was also relentlessly spreading hate against various groups, including Muslims and trans people. That behavior qualified him for expulsion from the social network under the company's policies for "dangerous individuals and organizations," which required Facebook to also remove any content that expressed “praise or support” for them.

But Zuckerberg didn’t consider the Infowars founder to be a hate figure, according to a person familiar with the decision, so he overruled his own internal experts and opened a gaping loophole: Facebook would permanently ban Jones and his company — but would not touch posts of praise and support for them from other Facebook users. This meant that Jones’ legions of followers could continue to share his lies across the world’s largest social network.

...
In December, a former core data scientist wrote a memo titled, “Political Influences on Content Policy.” Seen by BuzzFeed News, the memo stated that Kaplan’s policy team “regularly protects powerful constituencies” and listed several examples, including: removing penalties for misinformation from right-wing pages, blunting attempts to improve content quality in News Feed, and briefly blocking a proposal to stop recommending political groups ahead of the US election.

...
Throughout 2020, the “fear of antagonizing powerful political actors,” as the former core data scientist put it in their memo, became a key public policy team rationalization for forgoing action on potentially violative content or rolling out product changes ahead of the US presidential election. They also said they had seen “a dozen proposals to measure the objective quality of content on News Feed diluted or killed because … they have a disproportionate impact across the US political spectrum, typically harming conservative content more.”

...
“In the US it appears that interventions have been almost exclusively on behalf of conservative publishers,” they wrote, attributing this to political pressure or a reluctance to upset sensitive publishers and high-profile users.

...
In 2018, the Wall Street Journal revealed that he helped kill a project to connect Americans who have political differences. The paper said Kaplan had objected “when briefed on internal Facebook research that found right-leaning users tended to be more polarized, or less exposed to different points of view, than those on the left.”

...
Policy executives also reportedly helped override an initiative proposed by the company’s now-disbanded civic integrity unit to throttle the reach of misleading political posts, according to the Information.

That's the way that the right wing gets news media and social media biased in their favor - by screaming "Bias!!!" at anything negative about them.

It's also interesting that right-wingers live in more of a media bubble than left-wingers. News outlets can be divided into roughly three ideological categories: left, center, and right, though these are splits of a continuum. Left would be (say) the Daily Kos, center would be (say) the New York Times, and right would be (say) Breitbart. The left tends to trust the left and the center, the center tends to trust the center, and the right tends to trust the right.

Political Polarization & Media Habits | Pew Research Center

U.S. Media Polarization and the 2020 Election: A Nation Divided | Pew Research Center

The second one has (lib dem, mod dem, mod rep, con rep):

• +0-- Vice, Fox, HuffPost
• +++- NPR ABC, CBS, NBC, Time, USA Today
• +++0 PBS, BBC, WSJ
• ++00 Business Insider, The Hill
• ++0- Politico, Newsweek
• ++-- NYT, CNN, WaPo, The Guardian, MSNBC, Univision
• ---- Washington Examiner, BuzzFeed
• -0-- New York Post
• ++00 The Daily Caller
• --++ Fox News
• ---+ Hannity (radio), Limbaugh (radio), Breitbart

 

[Gospel]

Facebook profits from the number of account holders. They don't care whether the account holder is hard left or right and only address a situation if legal repercussions justify doing so. We need to stop with these theories of bias as they are more financially sound earning money from both sides of the political spectrum. It's the law of all wars if you ask the financial sector.

 

[ronburgundy]

I am guessing this is not a deliberate desire to promote the right by FB, and just a byproduct of their tendency to give a "pass" to misinformation that comes from well funded, national, or known media outlets. There are more such major outlets on the far right willing to put out lies and conspiracies than there are on the left. As the "stop the count" cult showed there is a very little regard for principles of integrity or honesty on right wing media consumers. That creates a highly profitable market for outlets to just sell bald face lies that support right wing dogma. The right often has no choice but to lie, given the facts so rarely support what they want people to believe. Part of it is that despite alt-right hysteria about "the woke left", there are way more delusional extremists on the right than the left within the US. Most of 'the left' is still just moderate Liberals who can and sometimes do lie, but it's less neccessary most times since the facts tend to favor their goals. Thus, even if an outlet has a liberal agenda, they are more constrained in their misinformation b/c their consumers place more value on truth, even if it's only partly b/c lying isn't neccessary.

 

[Swammerdami]

Jones had gained infamy for claiming that the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre was a “giant hoax,” and that the teenage survivors of the 2018 Parkland shooting were “crisis actors.” But Facebook had found that he was also relentlessly spreading hate against various groups, including Muslims and trans people. That behavior qualified him for expulsion from the social network under the company's policies for "dangerous individuals and organizations," which required Facebook to also remove any content that expressed “praise or support” for them.

But Zuckerberg didn’t consider the Infowars founder to be a hate figure, according to a person familiar with the decision, so he overruled his own internal experts ...

In my opinion, Facebook is more dangerous than nuclear weapons. Mark Zuckerberg is the most evil man on the planet. Here are two opinion pieces about this disgusting company and its vile amoral leader:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politic...d-like-digital-gangster-say-mps-accuse-firms/
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/12/facebook-doomsday-machine/617384/

I especially recommend the Atlantic link, but not just because it quotes an e-mail from the very early days of Facebook:

“I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses … People just submitted it. I don’t know why. They ‘trust me.’ Dumb fucks.”

 

[Gospel]

I am guessing this is not a deliberate desire to promote the right by FB, and just a byproduct of their tendency to give a "pass" to misinformation that comes from well funded, national, or known media outlets. There are more such major outlets on the far right willing to put out lies and conspiracies than there are on the left. As the "stop the count" cult showed there is a very little regard for principles of integrity or honesty on right wing media consumers. That creates a highly profitable market for outlets to just sell bald face lies that support right wing dogma. The right often has no choice but to lie, given the facts so rarely support what they want people to believe. Part of it is that despite alt-right hysteria about "the woke left", there are way more delusional extremists on the right than the left within the US. Most of 'the left' is still just moderate Liberals who can and sometimes do lie, but it's less neccessary most times since the facts tend to favor their goals. Thus, even if an outlet has a liberal agenda, they are more constrained in their misinformation b/c their consumers place more value on truth, even if it's only partly b/c lying isn't neccessary.

Facebook has around 2.8 billion users. At the end of 2019 roughly 330 million people live in the US. Do you really think it's about the US' left & right wings and our media outlets?

 

[Patooka]

I am guessing this is not a deliberate desire to promote the right by FB, and just a byproduct of their tendency to give a "pass" to misinformation that comes from well funded, national, or known media outlets. There are more such major outlets on the far right willing to put out lies and conspiracies than there are on the left. As the "stop the count" cult showed there is a very little regard for principles of integrity or honesty on right wing media consumers. That creates a highly profitable market for outlets to just sell bald face lies that support right wing dogma. The right often has no choice but to lie, given the facts so rarely support what they want people to believe. Part of it is that despite alt-right hysteria about "the woke left", there are way more delusional extremists on the right than the left within the US. Most of 'the left' is still just moderate Liberals who can and sometimes do lie, but it's less neccessary most times since the facts tend to favor their goals. Thus, even if an outlet has a liberal agenda, they are more constrained in their misinformation b/c their consumers place more value on truth, even if it's only partly b/c lying isn't neccessary.

Facebook has around 2.8 billion users. At the end of 2019 roughly 330 million people live in the US. Do you really think it's about the US' left & right wings and our media outlets?

Yes. You are on the inside looking out. I'm not sure you can fully appreciate how much right wingers try to emulate their US counterparts. Rupert Murdoch helps with this.

 

[lpetrich]

Inside the Macedonian Fake-News Complex | WIRED
About the young men of Veles, North Macedonia who made a lot of money by running fake news sites back in 2016. Their money came from the advertising that these sites ran.

Boris developed a routine. Several times a day he dredged the internet for pro-Trump articles and copied them into one of his two websites; if JavaScript prevented an easy copy-paste, he opened a Notepad file and typed the articles out. After publishing a piece, he shared the link in Facebook groups with names like My America, My Home; the Deplorables; and Friends Who Support President Donald J. Trump. Trump groups seemed to have hundreds of thousands more members than Clinton groups, which made it simpler to propel an article into virality. (For a week in July, he experimented with fake news extolling Bernie Sanders. “Bernie Sanders supporters are among the smartest people I’ve seen,” he says. “They don’t believe anything. The post must have proof for them to believe it.”) He posted under his own name but also under the guise of one of 200 or so bogus Facebook profiles that he’d purchased for this purpose. (A fake profile with a Russian name cost about 10 cents; for an American name, the price went up to 50 cents.) The most shares one of his posts ever aggregated, across various Facebook groups, was 1,200; Boris dimly recalls only that the post had something to do with Trump’s proposed wall on the Mexican border. Boris learned tricks to better monetize his websites: big ads breaking the text up, for instance, so that one in five visitors to a page would end up clicking on an ad. His RPM—revenue per 1,000 impressions—hovered around $15, he says. He fed the beast with diligence. “At night I would make four or five posts to share the next day. When I woke up, I shared them. I went to drink coffee, came back home, found new articles, posted those articles on the website, and shared them. Then I went out with friends, came back home, found articles, and shared them to Facebook.”

In particular,

(For a week in July, he experimented with fake news extolling Bernie Sanders. “Bernie Sanders supporters are among the smartest people I’ve seen,” he says. “They don’t believe anything. The post must have proof for them to believe it.”)

But much of the right wing seems much less skeptical.

 

[lpetrich]

Right-wing content has an advantage on Facebook, exec says - 9/26/20 7:55PM

Even though right-wing elites repeatedly tout claims of anti-conservative bias on Facebook and other online platforms, in reality, the bulk of data shows the opposite to be true. Per a weekend Politico report, as we near the 2020 presidential election, some of the most engaging posts on Facebook come from conservative voices outside the mainstream media, including Ben Shapiro, Dan Bongino, and David Harris, according to the Facebook-owned traffic analysis tool Crowdtangle. Engagement on Facebook is defined as likes, comments, shares, and reactions.

Though Facebook officials maintain that their platform has no political bias, favoring the right wing is a result of how it works:

“Right-wing populism is always more engaging,” a Facebook executive told Politico. They added that conservative content caters to “an incredibly strong, primitive emotion” by referencing concepts like “nation, protection, the other, anger, fear.” Essentially, the right-wing finds so much success online because it leverages the same fearmongering tactics on which early 20th-century dictators rose to power.

“That was there in the [19]30's. That’s not invented by social media—you just see those reflexes mirrored in social media, they’re not created by social media. It’s why tabloids do better than the [Financial Times], and it’s also a human thing. People respond to engaging emotion much more than they do to, you know, dry coverage. ...This wasn’t invented 15 years ago when Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook.”

There is also some neurological evidence that people inclined toward political conservatism tend to be more fearful: Conservatism and the neural circuitry of threat: economic conservatism predicts greater amygdala–BNST connectivity during periods of threat vs safety

 

[lpetrich]

Right-wing misinformation on Facebook is more engaging than its left-wing counterpart, research finds - CNN - Updated 10:27 AM ET, Wed March 3, 2021
noting
Far-right news sources on Facebook more engaging | by Cybersecurity for Democracy | Cybersecurity for Democracy | Medium
They found:

• Sources of news and information rated as far-right generate the highest average number of interactions per follower with their posts, followed by sources from the far-left, and then news sources closer to the center of the political spectrum.
• Looking at the far-right, misinformation sources far outperform non-misinformation sources. Far-right sources designated as spreaders of misinformation had an average of 426 interactions per thousand followers per week, while non-misinformation sources had an average of 259 weekly interactions per thousand followers.
• Engagement with posts from far-right and far-left news sources peaked around Election Day and again on January 6, the day of the certification of the electoral count and the U.S. Capitol riot. For posts from all other political leanings of news sources, the increase in engagement was much less intense.
• Center and left partisan categories incur a misinformation penalty, while right-leaning sources do not. Center sources of misinformation, for example, performed about 70% worse than their non-misinformation counterparts. (Note: center sources of misinformation tend to be sites presenting as health news that have no obvious ideological orientation.

In agreement with Boris of Veles. He found that Bernie Sanders followers were too skeptical to have much interest in fake news.

One has to ask why so many right-wingers are so credulous.

 

[lpetrich]

Facebook documents show inner turmoil over approach to conservative content | Engadget - October 24th, 2021 - "Staff accused the site of making 'special exceptions' for some publishers."

Facebook has long been accused of playing favorites on multiple sides of the political spectrum, and it's now clear just how much of that uproar extends to the company's ranks. A Wall Street Journal report based on internal Facebook documents shows the social network's leaders and staff have reportedly clashed numerous times over its approach to conservative content, particularly from outlets like Breitbart. Rank-and-file employees have accused Facebook of making "special exceptions" from policies for right-wing outlets, while senior-level staff warned of potential pitfalls.

Workers argued that Facebook kept Breitbart in a second tier of the News Tab, a section meant to focus on reliable news, despite very low trust and quality scores as well as misinformation violations. Facebook was not only making exceptions, one employee said, but "explicitly" endorsing outlets like this by including them as trusted partners. Staff claimed Facebook was "scared of political backlash" if it enforced policies equally, and believed the site let conservative influencers Diamond and Silk lobby fact checkers to avoid punishment for spreading misinformation.

Higher-ups countered with justifications for those decisions. They argued that booting a news outlet for trust scores would risk booting more mainstream outlets like CNN, for instance. When staff asked Facebook to intervene over Breitbart's alleged attempts to dodge sites' advertising blocks, a director said Facebook had to resist the urge and "rely on our principles and policies."

 

[lpetrich]

Meta: Facebook changes its company name - CNN

Facebook is changing its company name as it shifts its focus to the "metaverse" and confronts wide-ranging scrutiny of the real-world harms from its various platforms after a whistleblower leaked hundreds of internal documents.

Founder Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday that Facebook will change its corporate name to Meta, effectively demoting Facebook's namesake service to being just one of the company's subsidiaries, alongside Instagram and WhatsApp, rather than the overarching brand.

The company formerly known as Facebook also said in a press release that it plans to begin trading under the stock ticker "MVRS" on December 1.

As if that will make a difference.

What's the metaverse? Just a distraction from Facebook's real-life nightmare - CNN

The Facebook Company Is Now Meta | Meta

In short, the metaverse is a dream of a future internet straight outta science fiction. No one has a set definition of yet, because, well, it doesn't exist. But Facebook describes it as "a set of virtual spaces where you can create and explore with other people who aren't in the same physical space as you."

The presentation showed a series of concept videos that highlighted Facebook's Meta's vision for a sort of augmented reality — one where you can send a holographic image of yourself to a concert with a friend attending in real life, or sit in a virtual meeting table with colleagues. Like, a more intense version of Zoom...and who doesn't want more of that?

From the company itself:
The Facebook Company Is Now Meta | Meta
Welcome to Meta | Meta

 

[lpetrich]

The Recount on Twitter: "“I am proud to announce that, starting today, our company is now Meta.”
— CEO Mark Zuckerberg announces Facebook’s new name. (vid link)" / Twitter

Then
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "Meta as in “we are a cancer to democracy metastasizing into a global surveillance and propaganda machine for boosting authoritarian regimes and destroying civil society… for profit!”" / Twitter

After a recent Facebook outage,
José Caparroso on Twitter: "Latin America lives on WhatsApp. I am surprised by so many people underestimating how catastrophic this downfall has been." / Twitter
then
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "It’s almost as if Facebook’s monopolistic mission to either own, copy, or destroy any competing platform has incredibly destructive effects on free society and democracy

Remember: WhatsApp wasn’t created by Facebook. It was an independent success. FB got scared & bought it " / Twitter

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Instagram: “While we’re at it …”

While we’re at it, it’s also why Facebook pushed out the Reels feature in an attempt to kill the clock app the same way they used Stories to nerf the app and it’s also why I feel a need to use code words and emojis to describe their competitors so this post doesn’t get immediately nerfed by FB’s algorithm

What she said:

If your life was disrupted by the Facebook outage today and say you couldn't communicate with loved ones because WhatsApp was down or maybe your career or small business took a hit because Instagram was down and Facebook and both of these frankly were successful independent apps until Facebook identified them as a competitive threat and decided to purchase them due to monopolistic and anti-competitive behavior. Maybe we should be asking ourselves why one company is trying to monopolize the Internet, communication platforms, and digital commerce and maybe we should break them up.

 

[lpetrich]

60 Minutes on Twitter: "“Facebook has realized that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they'll click on less ads, they'll make less money,” says Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. (links)" / Twitter
noting
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen details company's misleading efforts on 60 Minutes - CBS News

Frances Haugen: The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money.

...
Frances Haugen: I've seen a bunch of social networks and it was substantially worse at Facebook than anything I'd seen before.

...
She secretly copied tens of thousands of pages of Facebook internal research. She says evidence shows that the company is lying to the public about making significant progress against hate, violence and misinformation. One study she found, from this year, says, "we estimate that we may action as little as 3-5% of hate and about 6-tenths of 1% of V & I [violence and incitement] on Facebook despite being the best in the world at it."

...
Frances Haugen: When we live in an information environment that is full of angry, hateful, polarizing content it erodes our civic trust, it erodes our faith in each other, it erodes our ability to want to care for each other, the version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world.

Then
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "100%" / Twitter

 

[prideandfall]

In my opinion, Facebook is more dangerous than nuclear weapons. Mark Zuckerberg is the most evil man on the planet.

this is a derail and just an aside, but i find this kind of fascinating - you see this sort of opinion a lot and i just have a hard time fathoming this, if taken at face value.
"random guy gets lucky enough to stumble into something that makes him obscenely wealthy. the thing itself is fairly innocuous, but since humans are pants-on-head retarded as a species they utilize it in a horribly stupid way that makes their lives and society worse. therefor, the random guy is the most evil person on the planet."

i just don't really get it... everything evil about facebook is 100% the fault of humanity being a shitty cesspool of dumb fucks. all facebook does is show the truth behind the lie that humans are fundamentally decent and smart... is that why you and others hate it so much? is this some kind of knee-jerk rejection of a reality that you don't like?
if not, what is that all about? i really just don't understand it.