Posted on 10/21/2016 6:03:43 AM PDT by Kaslin
Despite the fact that I own a 3.3 million follower page, I can tell you that I have a love/hate relationship with Facebook. Because of Facebook, I’ve been able to get a conservative viewpoint in front of tens of millions of people I couldn’t have reached any other way. On the other hand, Facebook is a cruel mistress. Every page owner dreads the next “algorithm change” that may send his traffic plunging off a cliff for indecipherable reasons. You can have “penalties” that dramatically impact the traffic of your page for whatever reason Facebook decides, without even having a way of knowing what you did wrong. If there’s any kind of technical problem or you get a FALSE “community standards” violation that knocks you off Facebook (This is not uncommon), it’s nearly impossible to reach them through normal channels available to the general public.
Yet and still, nearly 40% of Americans get news off Facebook and another 22% receive news through other social media sources. Just to give you an idea of how big that number is, only 38% of Americans read a newspaper daily and that percentage seems to drop every year.
Is this change? Yes. Is it change for the better? In some ways, ABSOLUTELY. We no longer have a handful of biased media gatekeepers who control which information everyone sees. Different viewpoints and opinions can get out much more easily. Choice is more prevalent. All these things are important. So, to be clear, I AM NOT saying social media is a bad thing. Let me repeat that: I AM NOT saying social media is a bad thing. What I am saying is that minuses of social media are also enormous and they’re seldom discussed.
Meanwhile, if you run a political Facebook page, you are competing with cute kitten videos, the latest music video from Adele, and Kim Kardashian’s butt. If you can’t do headlines that can reel people in, they’re not going to read a story even if it’s fantastic. This is what led to so many clickbait headlines on Facebook before it cracked down. So why did Facebook pages do clickbait headlines? For the simplest reason imaginable: their audiences click on them. If there are a hundred people complaining in the comments section and 50,000 are clicking on the article, the message that page owners hear is, “Do more of this.” The more brazen the headline, the better it does. This is true across other platforms as well. The more outrageous you are, the more attention you get. Nowhere on Planet Earth does being crazy, hyper-obnoxious or arguing with people like a crazy homeless guy pay off like it does on Twitter.
Because the newspapers, magazines and cable TV networks are competing with social media for readers, this sort of thinking has bled over to them as well. TV shows are not quite as militant about it as social media websites because we’re evaluated by our audience on every post while they’re just evaluated on their show as a whole, but it still has a huge impact. So if you’re wondering why James O’Keefe’s latest blockbuster video isn’t breaking through on TV while a “Corgi vs. the Stairs” video is, that has a lot to do with it.
Additionally, Facebook rewards pages heavily for being the first to get news out. The same story that gets 100,000 views at 8 A.M. may get 3,000 at 10 A.M. Since there are a lot of pages that are on the ball and constantly updating their websites, even a hot story may produce relatively limited traffic if enough other pages move fast. In and of itself, this isn’t a problem. The real issue is that some unethical people have realized that there is an easy way to get around that.
Simply put, if they can’t find a story that’s new, they’ll either make one up, juice up the headline so much that it’s unrelated to the story or treat extremely questionable sources as trustworthy. We are to the point where some dodgy guy on twitter who claims to “have sources” is now considered to be a legitimate basis for a news story. To give you a real world example, earlier this week some goofball with an odd sense of humor tweeted out, “i love working at the post office in Columbus, Ohio and ripping up absentee ballots that vote for trump” and it ended up becoming the basis of a story on Gateway Pundit. Both Rush Limbaugh and Drudge apparently consider his website to be solid enough that they didn’t feel the need to check out the story. So both of them ran the story which turned out to be entirely based on some random guy’s mediocre attempt at humor in a tweet. This sort of thing regularly happens on both the Left and the Right because on social media, you are often rewarded for being wrong. Get a story horrifically wrong in an exciting way and you’ll get a huge surge of traffic and followers. Maybe a few people will be turned off or unfollow, but percentage wise, you’ll very seldom ever lose more than you gain. The only thing that stops people from churning out pure garbage is their conscience and not everyone seems to have one.
On top of all this, because social media is so centered on grabbing your attention, even if it’s for a brief time, “short and catchy” beats long and informative almost every time. It’s difficult to sum up a long, informative piece in 140 characters and no matter how good your 10,000 word article may be, nobody is going to read it on Facebook if the title isn’t eye catching. Even if people do click through, it’s debatable whether they’ll read through to the end. Just to give you an idea of how bad things have gotten, roughly 50% of your audience on a YouTube video will have tuned out by the 2-3 minute mark.
What social media does is give people the illusion of being immersed in information, but it’s just that – an illusion. Sure, social media gives people a more diverse group of news stories, but getting a majority of your news via social media makes about as much sense as getting most of your news through the Daily Show. The type of news you’re getting in that situation gives you such an incomplete picture that you may know less than when you started. That doesn’t mean you should tune out social media news because as I noted earlier, it does have value as an alternative to the bias in the MSM (For example, the James O’Keefe video I referenced earlier has almost 4 million views on YouTube). However, it also means that social media sources should be a balanced part of your news diet. Read some longer form pieces, check out some people you disagree with, absorb some books and you’ll know far more than the people who rely on social media to tell them what’s going on in the world.
I’ve reported numerous “community standards” violations but apparently hateful Democrats are permitted to slur all people of faith, post KKK memes about Trump voters, and post assassination jokes about Donald Trump.
social media sources should be a balanced part of your news diet...
Since almost no other outlet prints conservative news/views, I TOTALLY and UTTERLY disagree that it is making us all dumber.
I see MANY blacks and puerto ricans on conservative trending hashtags.
I see people saying “i didn’t know that” or “I didn’t know this” about hillary’s misdeeds and Trump’s great remarks.
Is it perfect? No.
Show me what is besides God.
This is interesting, regarding newspaper readership. I stopped reading the daily paper in the mid-1990’s, when I started using the internet with a mainframe browser called Chameleon.
The only exposure I’ve had to newspapers since then is when someone leaves one in a bathroom stall. And I have not come across one of those in many years.
I’m in complete agreement. Places like Freerepublic tend to be echo chambers. But facebook is not. At least not for me.
I have a lot of “friends” that support Hillary. It’s always fun to comment on their hillary meme posts. But I’m always polite, though direct. I will call out ignorance but VERY rarely use words like “stupid”. I prefer “poopyhead”.
With regards to pools of actual data, Facebook readers are like cats.
Cats have been known to fall into a bathtub full of water and escape without getting wet!
lol. That’s a very mild word on twitter. :)
I’ve seen conservative hashtag trends reach millions over the past 3 months.
I tried twitter a few years ago. About the only thing you can do with 140 characters is get in trouble.
I abandoned it after less than a month.
We used to subscribe to the Clarksville LeafCronicle which is our local newspaper and was just the right size. I hate those big news papers. But when the paper got in with Gannet the quality went south. They don’t even print it anymore here in Clarksville but is instead printed in Nashville and than send to Clarksville. So most of the news are a day old.
Same here. I stopped before the Clinton Impeachment and have never regretted it. My local paper was then a liberal rag and from what I hear it's only gotten worse.
We do get a daily delivery here at work...I collect them for a few days when I'm planning to buy crabs, that's about all The Virginian Pilot is good for.
“The only exposure I’ve had to newspapers since then is when someone leaves one in a bathroom stall. “
The paper hanging on the roll works better...
lol. You’d be surprised at how good i’ve gotten at getting Trump’s points across in 140 characters. And hillary’s sliminess. Sometimes just posting a website like O’Keefe’s and short statements about wikeleaks are enough.
But it CAN lead to a lot of trouble!!
I stopped the LATimes in the 90’s when a story on Whitewater slammed Starr’s attorneys for using ‘desperate tactics’, while praising Clinton’s attorneys with ‘sophisticated maneuverings’. This was nearly 20 years ago. And the Media bias has become exponentially worse.
What I would like to know is how can I format my text on Facebook to give more emphasis? How can I post with italics and bold print? How can I change the font? Also, when I post a photo, sometimes all it has is the image location information, with no photo. Why is that?
I am not on facebook and I don’t know how it works.. Does it act something like youtube in the way that having a lot of views or followers pay’s you back real money? Has it been monetized in that way?
I would never refer to FR as an echo chamber. It provides in depth information and analysis on every topic FReepers seek to disseminate. While anti conservative commentary is frowned upon there is a plethora of articles posted from every liberal venue.
The notion that this or any site needs to offer the widest possible range of opinion without ostensibly espousing a position is bereft of reason. We are here because of who we are and what we believe.
It is our deepest conviction to further and deepen the reach and impact of conservative thought. We do precisely that.
That's because it becomes readily apparent in most YouTube videos that the video's editor(s) have completely failed and included 3 minutes of crap in what should have been a 30 second video. I find myself wading through a whole bunch of junk to get to a single, simple point that I was looking for.
Not to mention the $$%^##$@@ ads.
I was temp-banned twice simply for making lucent arguments about Trump. And the “other side” was slamming me like a bunch of DU members.
The comedy is that the second time I was trying to make the case for why, although I WAS a never trumper, I had changed my position and was not supporting him.
I didn’t get the chance.
And it’s worse than that. I’ve made mile comments about some negative things he’s done, and I’ve gotten subtlely threatening responses from others implying I had better be careful if I don’t want to be banned (and some not so subtle in their including Jim in the “to”). I’ve seen it happen to a lot of others as well.
This election is really messing a lot of things up.
One big problem I see with You Tube is the contributors using high definition video when a significant portion of the viewers (myself on ocassion) are accessing the video at the expense of the data allotment ($$$) of their cellular plan. And, you can’t turn down the video quality on many mobile devices. So, you better be very compelling in your You Tube intro or people will be leaving at the 2-3 minute mark -simply to save their data.
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