Posted on 10/10/2017 12:12:15 AM PDT by Olog-hai
Nearly a year after Facebook and Google launched offensives against fake news, they’re still inadvertently promoting it — often at the worst possible times.
Online services designed to engross users aren’t so easily retooled to promote greater accuracy, it turns out. Especially with online trolls, pranksters and more malicious types scheming to evade new controls as they’re rolled out. […]
Facebook and Google get caught off guard “because their algorithms just look for signs of popularity and recency at first,” without first checking to ensure relevance, says David Carroll, a professor of media design at the Parsons School of Design in New York. That problem is much bigger in the wake of disaster, when facts are still unclear and demand for information runs high.
Malicious actors have learned to take advantage of this, says Mandy Jenkins, head of news at social media and news research agency Storyful. “They know how the sites work, they know how algorithms work, they know how the media works,” she says.
Participants on 4chan’s “Politically Incorrect” channel regularly chat about “how to deploy fake news strategies” around major stories, says Dan Leibson, vice president of search at the digital marketing consultancy Local SEO Guide. …
(Excerpt) Read more at hosted.ap.org ...
Just like the ‘climate change’ models, GIGO
Garbage In Garbage Out.
It has almost come to the point these egg heads will be incapable of defecating without a computer model giving them instructions.
It sounds as if the public needs to use their own brains ... if they still can.
The original of this AP editorial said the shooting was on Monday, not Sunday. And that factual error was widely circulated before being corrected.
This demonstrates the idiocy of the article itself. “Popularity and recency” does seem to be true about google. (I have little FB experience.) I search google for health and IT topics. I will type in the exact spelling of a new hitech term. Google will return at the top articles from 8 and 10 years ago with words that are similar, but not the exact same spelling... because those old articles have more hits than recent articles.
So total hits regardless of time trumps recency in hitech, which seems ridiculous to me. However, more hits over time would be reasonable for a discussion of Greek mythology. So the same criteria cannot be used for everything, which is what Google seems to be using... a one-size-fits-all algorithm.
Our society needs to be aware of, and wary of, these one-size-fits-all algorithms. They make credit reports and policing and HHS/CMS/CDC decisions true for 55% but wrong for 45%.
You can make your searches more specific and restrict them to a particular time frame. There are ways to write search strings to return the exact results you are looking for.
Google makes predictions based on your searches as well as the totality of searches. So if you and I type in the same search string, we could get different results based on our search histories.
What concerns me is not the Google search algorithms so much as the targeted ads. I see ads for resorts where I have stayed in the past. I see ads for computer games of a particular genre. At one site, I saw an ad for a university promoting a degree program in a very specific major which it could have selected only if it knew my career history. And how it would have known that is a mystery, since I do not use social media much. I have accounts, but do not use them.
When Fakebook promotes Democrat Party talking points, they push fake news. And they know it.
I’ve hit the “fake news” button on a number of sidebar “trending” headlines that were fake.
Fakebook doesn’t do a “mea culpa” when a lib slam trends, only when something from a conservative site trends.
For instance the viral David Letterman tweet about white privilege and the Vegas shooting. It was a hoax tweet.
Suck it, Zuckerschmuck.
Some of the ads on fakebook come from ebay and other websites selling/sharing their tracking cookies to Zuckerberg. Your browsing history (ISPs, private accounts on different shopping websites, etc) are being shared.
I’ve looked at items on ebay and there is a fakebook ad asking me if I’m going to buy that item I looked at there.
To satisfy readers, Google needs to follow its algorithms to ensure that people are taken to sites that are high quality in the keyword subject. And quality is largely determined by the people returning to the same site for "authoritative" information.
I am amused that the AP, the fake news reporter for the majority of newspapers across the country -- the manufacturer of Trump hate and misinformtion-- would go out of its way to criticize its competitor Google.
Clean up your own cesspool of fake news first, Associated Press!
Fakebook was trying to influence the election going back to 2015. And they partnered with ABC News to do so.
They really need to stop selling the lie that $100,000 in ads elected Trump over Hillary.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/31/facebook-buzzfeed-politics_n_6082312.html
10/31/2014 01:40 pm ET Updated Oct 31, 2014
Facebook Will Share Users’ Political Leanings With ABC News, BuzzFeed
Facebook has begun digging through its users’ public posts for insight into their political views and will give the findings to ABC News and BuzzFeed to help their coverage of the 2016 presidential election.
The company confirmed the partnership with the two news organizations in an email to The Huffington Post on Friday. As part of the experiment, Facebook will categorize status updates about politicians and policy issues by adult Facebook users in the U.S. as positive, negative or neutral. The data will guide ABC and BuzzFeed’s reporting on the political leanings of certain demographics.
Facebook’s data will first be used by ABC News during its midterm election coverage next week, specifically discussing 2016 presidential candidates and issues. BuzzFeed News will use the data regularly for political analysis.
The partnership was first reported by Politico...
Sure, a hundred grand in ads on FB alone changed people’s minds, or hypnotized them into voting Trump. Disingenuous at best.
I’m in the web biz - and use Facebook for promotions/advertising. And you would astonished at the power you can wield with 20 bucks. The geometry of “Friends” is amazing. Example: A restaurant has 1000 Likes/Followers - and uses the Facebook “Boost Post” feature. A post that might be seen “organically” by 250 out of 1000 will now be seen by 2000+ people. The “Boost” puts your post in “Friends of Friends” feeds who haven’t Liked/Followed the restaurant page. When you use this system - you get access to the Facebook “Insights” that give you all sorts of metrics regarding the level of engagement and effect of your post. For 20 bucks - its one heck of a deal. It blew us all away when we first started using it. If you are in business - you’d be crazy NOT to use it. The next level of FB advertising is the “Ad” - these are the ads on the right sidebar - labeled as “Sponsored” - which are even more targeted and have objectives like: Traffic - Send more people to a destination on or off Facebook such as a website, app, or Messenger conversation. Engagement - Get more post engagements, Page likes, event responses or offer claims. App installs - Get more people to install your app. Video views - Get more people to view your video content. Lead generation - Drive more sales leads, such as email addresses, from people interested in your brand or business. Also inexpensive considering the bang you get for your buck. So - yes I can TOTALLY believe that a well-spent 100,000 could be VERY influential.
The whole thing about banner ads that follow you from site to site is something completely different. Ad buyers don’t often have as fine control of where an ad lands - it’s more of a nag system for stuff you already looked at. Much less effective and a bit old fashioned.
DESPITE??? How about “because”?
Not when it comes to elections. There would not be a single Hillary supporter that would be swayed to vote for Trump by any FB ad. Never mind the people that use ad blockers who see no ads whatsoever.
“Hillary Supporter” is only one demographic. There was more than one candidate running as a Democrat. More people voting for Bernie means less people voting for Hillary, right? So its not as cut and dried as being “swayed to vote for Trump” - Also - worth noting regarding your “Ad Blocker” remark - Facebook doesn’t work AT ALL with Script/Ad blockers - and will prompt you to enable Java. Ad blockers are mostly effective on banner type ads - on HTML sites.
Ad blockers are effective with FB. Partuclarly AdBlock and uBlock.
There would have been no Bernie supporters swayed by any pro-Trump ads. Those are hardcore left.
BTW, I saw the last of the locomotives of your handle namesake running in New Jersey back in the early 1980s. Sadly, they were all still in Penn Central’s black paint.
* “Partuclarly” = particularly.
Easy! Anything anonymously sourced is very very likely “Fake News” or as it used to be called propaganda. So Google, Facebook, WashCompost, MSM, etc apply that standard and you’ll be fine. What’s that you all say, “If we apply that standard we will have nothing to write about or say!”. My answer, ‘not my problem!’.
Nobody I know gets to see those. Must be a profile settings thing.
The ads don’t have to be “pro-Trump” to be effective. If you get somebody to vote for Bernie instead of Hillary - you have just helped Trump win - right? And ads would not be targeting “hardcore” people - plenty of folks who aren’t that engaged in political discourse - but still vote (or can be compelled to vote)
Yep the GG-1 is one interesting engine - I was surprised to learn how old they were and the extent to which we had the east coast electrified. Somehow I thought these were locos of the 1950-60s - had no clue they were made in the 1930’s!
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