CREDIT: ThinkProgress/Dylan Petrohilos.

Lauren C. Williams has a very good article up at Think Progress: The internet in Trump’s nation: White nationalist sentiments could force tech companies to finally decide how much unfettered free speech matters online. I highly recommend reading it.

There has been so much written about media lately, from mainstream to social, we’ve hit a saturation point, to say the least. Still, there are important areas to cover. PZ has a post on Pharyngula about the proliferation of fake and bad news sites; I’d like to focus on facebook. Two recent articles focused on Facebook’s problem with fake news, and their need to bow down to conservatives. Facebook has, in many ways, become the Fox News of social media.

In the first article:

Facebook could put an end to fake news, according to sources — but chose not out of fear of conservative backlash.

The social media company and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, have come under heavy criticism for promoting bogus and hoax articles as “Trending Topics,” and some critics have suggested that fake news on Facebook helped get Donald Trump elected.

Zuckerberg has twice addressed the issue since the election, saying that 99 percent of Facebook content was “authentic” — and he denied claims that conservative sites were more likely to promote phony stories

“Only a very small amount is fake news and hoaxes,” Zuckerberg said. “The hoaxes that do exist are not limited to one partisan view, or even to politics.”

But two sources with direct knowledge of Facebook’s decision-making told Gizmodo the social media company decided not to roll out changes to its News Feed because it would have disproportionately targeted right-wing news sites.

The changes would have downgraded or removed hoax content, making Facebook users less likely to see those stories.

“They absolutely have the tools to shut down fake news,” one source told Gizmodo. “There was a lot of fear about upsetting conservatives after Trending Topics, (and) a lot of product decisions got caught up in that.” [Full story here.]

In the second article:

A group of employees at Facebook have accused founder Mark Zuckerberg of being aware that the social media giant was pushing fake and deceptive news during the 2016 presidential election that may have influenced the results, BuzzFeed News reports.

Zuckerberg has denied the claim that Facebook’s fake news problem played any role in the election outcome. “I think the idea that fake news on Facebook — of which it’s a very small amount of the content — influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea,” Zuckerberg said at a conference last week.

Now, employees are joining together and establishing an unofficial task force to seriously look into whether or not Facebook actually did have an impact on the 2016 election results.

One employee who spoke with BuzzFeed anonymously told the outlet, “It’s not a crazy idea. What’s crazy is for him to come out and dismiss it like that, when he knows, and those of us at the company know, that fake news ran wild on our platform during the entire campaign season.”

[…]

Goodlatte added, “As we’ve learned in this election, bullshit is highly engaging. A bias towards truth isn’t an impossible goal. Wikipedia, for instance, still bends towards the truth despite a massive audience. But it’s now clear that democracy suffers if our news environment incentivizes bullshit.” [Full story here.]

In the Think Progress article, it’s noted that Facebook allowed Trump’s posts to remain, even though they clearly violated the company’s ban on hate speech. They did this while not allowing a post which included a screenshot of an emailed death threat, for violating standards. Facebook’s complete lack of correctly applied decent standards is not news. Unfortunately, their constant shifting, double standards, and weakness in the face of conservatives and white supremacists may have had quite the effect on the election. I think that’s a fair speculation, if not a conclusion, as what is really disturbing is that more than 40 percent of U.S. adults primarily get their news from Facebook. Yep. There’s a big old world right at peoples’ fingertips, but it seems a great many people don’t care to leave their facebook bubble much. There are plenty of good news sources, with reputable reporting. Facebook is not one of them. It is good for sharing items, but people should be willing to click links and check things out, past what you see on your FB feed. Yes, that’s more work, but do you really want to believe everything you see without engaging your thought process? Find a news source which is reputable, bookmark it, and check it at least once a day, especially if you’re looking at inflammatory content on FB which does not reference a reputable source, or any source at all. Want to check the veracity of a story? You can go right to Google news, and search. There’s always Snopes. This is important not only because of blatantly fake news, but because of the plethora of parody and satire which is written, and passed on by people who see no need to note that it’s satire.

If there’s one thing which can be relied on, it’s that FB will never correctly implement its policies, and the double standard is most likely a permanent feature. So please, if your main source of news is facebook, be more diligent about checking things out, especially before you pass them on. This is only a matter of clicks, and perhaps a tiny bit of typing, and it’s good to exercise your brain every day.

Also, beware any newsource under Liftable Media. They have a large FB presence, and are known for publishing fake news.