Posted on 12/16/2016 9:17:08 PM PST by VictimsRightsPro2a
To protect Americans against “fake” news, Facebook will now use filters so that only “reputable” articles can appear at the top of users’ trending news stories. And Facebook is going to media fact checkers for help (initially ABC News, The Associated Press, FactCheck.org, Politifact and Snopes). But guess what? These fact checkers have their own biases — usually the same liberal biases that we see in the rest of the mainstream media.
Before the 1990s, the mainstream media had a monopoly on the news. Then came the rise of talk radio, Fox News, and the internet. This was a wonderful thing for freedom of information.
Facebook has already faced a scandal for having “filtered out stories on conservative topics from conservative sites.”
But to get an idea of how bias also affects fact checkers, just consider a few evaluations from Politifact.
— "We’re the highest taxed nation in the world. Our businesses pay more taxes than any businesses in the world. That’s why companies are leaving.” Donald Trump on "Meet the Press" on May 8, 2016
Donald Trump was clearly talking about tax rates for businesses. But in rating the claim as “False,” Politifact focuses on total federal tax burden as a share of GDP. Trump was correct that the U.S. has the world's highest corporate income tax rate (combined federal and state). In 2016, that rate was 38.9 percent France came in second with 34.4 percent. But Politifact conveniently overlooks state taxes, which are really what put the U.S. over the top compared to so many other countries.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
All the "reputable" sources have been shown to be propaganda media - hand selected by FakeBook !
Go figure !!
He’ll soon find out what the other left wing media knows, they don’t sell. He wants to censor his site, fine. Let him see what happens when people just leave his site. It’s stupid now anyway.
This is an attempt by Progressive media outlets to take control of the social media platform.
Snopes has been thoroughly discredited as a reliable source. This is a slippery slope toward censorship!
Fascistbook has been altering peoples’ newsfeed and wall content for years.
They do it based on pay-for-play (payola, sometimes tagged as “sponsored” content) basis, ideological basis, and for psychological reasons (e.g. to measure a user’s response to heavily sad, depressing, or angry news).
They do it to control discussion (only Big Media pop stars, Bollywood Hindi pop stars, and NFL + British Soccer stars trend, all Trump news apart from cabinet nominees is negative, details of allegations against Hillary never trend, only the background of those raises alarms...)
Doesn’t matter what sources and topics you thumbs down or hide or report as offensive or unfollow. Also doesn’t matter what posts 80 of your friends all share.
And now even when you opt into following a source, the posts will trend downward (suppressed) and not appear in your newsfeed if Snopes/ABCDisney give it the scarlet letter of FakeNews (Hollywood’s new blacklist).
An impossibility for me ;-)
I’ll predict that by July 2017...Facebook notes in some public statement that viewers (clicks) are down a minimum of 10-percent. Advertising profits are affected. By the end of 2017...viewers will be noted by 25-percent down from the norm....with a high number who simply quit Facebook.
Gab? It will become the new platform and receive all of the frustrated Facebook users.
By the end of 2018....I think the Z-man of Facebook will put the business up for sale and walk away....taking the profits while it still has some value.
This is the year Facebook jumps the shark and he knows it. He’s dumping tens of billions of dollars of his own stock.
A Potential Hitch in Zuckerberg’s Stock Plan for Facebook
Deal Professor
By STEVEN DAVIDOFF SOLOMON DEC. 13, 2016
Mark Zuckerberg wants to give away nearly all his stake in Facebook, and yet still keep control of the company he helped found. What’s a tech billionaire to do?
The neat solution to this problem — creating a new class of shares — is par for the course for Silicon Valley, but often gives other shareholders short shrift.
With the birth of his daughter last year, Mr. Zuckerberg wanted to transfer 99 percent of his wealth to a company he controls with his wife, which would later donate that money to charity. In giving away his shares, however, he would have to confront the issue of giving up his voting control over Facebook.
Continue reading the main story
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
Mr. Zuckerberg currently owns about 15 percent of Facebook, but because most of his stock is Class B shares with 10 votes apiece, he has voting control of the company with 53.8 percent of the votes, a number brought up to about 60 percent of the votes since he also has the ability to vote the shares held by Dustin Moskovitz.
If Mr. Zuckerberg fulfilled even part of his giving pledge, which included the donation of $1 billion a year over the next three years, it would mean coming close to losing his control of the company he founded.
So he turned to a tried and true strategy: Follow Google...
People vacated MySpace within a year. They could up and leave Facebook if the crowd moves. Too much hassle to follow multiple social networks to share calendar events and news (national, local, and personal).
Perhaps you're not following my gist. It's impossible for me to leave Facebook because I never would go and never have gone anywhere near the thing.
...... There needs to be a new Conservative and extremely thorough “Fact Checking” Website created that would become the new standard of trusted Fact Checking sites. Making the others look like amateur hour in comparison.
The only thing that gives Snopes credibility is that they stole the texts from Jan Brunvand’s books on the garden variety “cement in the convertible” urban rumors. He’s been doing the research on these things for half a century and many newspaper editors would routinely run such “interesting” space fillers in newspapers as FACT (which helped them spread) knowing that they would generate talk even though they were fake news.
Reading an urban legend in the newspaper or seeing it told on the couch of the Tonight Show did not make it any more credible.
Facebook can censor major news references, but it can’t do much, if anything, about references to localized material, because there is simply too much for Facebook’s censors to keep up with, and they WOULD see a walkout en-masse if everybody’s birthday party had to receive the imprimatur before friends saw it. That localized material, in turn, can talk about just about anything it wants to.
Do you ever wonder where all your “friends” went? People are already dropping Facebook like mad. The real live humans just are not there to the extent they used to be. Which is why there are so many ads, recipes, and political opinion pieces off sites you’ve never heard of.
The biggest “fake news” story is the “fake news” story. This has nothing to do with “fake news” and everything to do with the establishment media controlling the narrative on every story. They can’t do that when the alternate media tells the truth.
Once in office Trump is going to have to take action against Silicon Valley to prevent this. Granted that is in conflict with the property rights of private corporations. But the First Amendment is more important.
I came to FR because that’s what it was.
Now the fact-checkers often get trolled. When you have a reputation of solid fact-checking the regime knows to put plants there, to spoil the place. I don’t know how you get around it.
Often the bad guys find a way to “buy” (with sticks and/or carrots) the reputation of a host while infiltrating it with lying hacks - like Saddam Hussein did with CNN.
Soros, Axelrod, and Rahm Emanuel threatened the “conservative” media in October of 2008 to get them to avoid Obama’s eligibility/documentation problem and his Muslim leanings. They allowed Fox (for instance) to keep reporting on non-critical, non-actionable things so that conservatives would still feel good about the place and it would keep its credibility with conservatives, so that conservatives could be steered away from the topics that could have exposed the regime and those who criminally put Obama into our White House.
It was very effective. By threatening the premier “conservative” site and getting it to either ignore or (eventually) mock the truth-tellers on those issues as if they were “too extreme” and an “embarrassment to conservatism”, they got all the wannabe’s to do likewise, as if truth is a popularity contest. An evidentiary epistemology was the casualty, and now Americans largely have to choose between one viewpoint’s propaganda or another’s, rather than simply hearing genuine evidence. The society as a whole has what the Bible calls “itching ears” - ears that only the hear what they want to hear. So there are two camps that believe what they want to, truth be damned, and never the two shall meet.
When HotAir censored the evidence regarding Obama’s documentation issues I came to FR because it was the one place where in-depth analysis could happen. Amazing investigators. A lot of them have left now and I miss them.
There are still many good investigators here. It’s just harder to do real collaborative investigation because the threads get hi-jacked by regime operatives.
“News” is persuasion:The natural disposition is always to believe. It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing.The man whom we believe is necessarily, in the things concerning which we believe him, our leader and director, and we look up to him with a certain degree of esteem and respect. But as from admiring other people we come to wish to be admired ourselves; so from being led and directed by other people we learn to wish to become ourselves leaders and directors . . .
The desire of being believed, the desire of persuading, of leading and directing other people, seems to be one of the strongest of all our natural desires. - Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)
Or maybe they are just people who think your fan-fiction is stupid.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.