Mark Zuckerberg Is in Denial

We are all in denial.

As a non-FB user, I hit every day a Facebook captcha to test if I'm a bot, each time I land near a Facebook site. When it's not a captcha, a panel hides a third of the Facebook page.

I have a "shadow" empty FB account that I sometimes use: if I'm logged in, anything I watch online ends up polluting recommendations and suggested sites. I looked up information on Syria and Trump the other day - I now have creepy sites displayed on my suggested sites. I also get giant "YOU ARE NOW QUITTING FACEBOOK" alerts anytime I try to click a link to, yes, go to this address.

We all obsess on Google/Apple for privacy and yet do not hold Facebook to any standard regarding an open, honest web.

I feel we're all getting slowly conditioned by Facebook (and others) to stay siloed. To fear that the web we browse will have "consequences" and that we should avoid being curious altogether.

It's by now clear that the entire purpose of FB is to build a "unified profile" that advertisers can track on- and offline.

We're all in denial on the consequences of this unified tracking. If we were in the Renaissance, anonymous publications like Spinoza's would be impossible. Free speech and opinion _requires_ freedom to change mind, wander around.

This has to stop.

It doesn't matter whether the fake stories actually had any effect on people's political leanings, because the media narrative is that they did. Ultimately, the mainstream media are in denial. Every single media organisation backed Clinton, including ones that had never backed a presidential candidate before, they published articles pointing to this as reason to vote for her whilst insisting that it was ridiculous to believe they could in any way be biased towards her. They were absolutely certain she would win, mocking those who though otherwise. They were wrong. Rather than look inwards, they found a scapegoat.

That's why they don't care about the 130,000 retweets for a fake claim that people were chanting "We hate Muslims, we hate blacks, we want our great country back" at a Trump rally from a known British hoaxer, or the quarter of a million for a photoshop of Trump's parents in KKK outfits, or any of the other fakes that don't fit the narrative.

>> I think it's too early to tell if these fake stories had any effect on people's political leanings

Facebook isn't the only place people get 'fake news'. Just look at their peer groups. My cousin is a member of a labor union and they tell all kind of goofy tales about what will happen is candidate X gets elected or candidate Y gets elected. You should hear the coffee shop rambling the old men do at Tim Horton's in the morning. And you should heard the rambling the young kids do at the independent coffee shop at night. All of it is just FUD.

This is more than a little bit ironic coming from the New York Times, which just issued an apology for its blatantly biased, divisive, and disappointing coverage of the entire election cycle: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/us/elections/to-our-reader...

That will be one of the issues that Facebook will need to deal with, if they're serious about this.

From the article:

>Worse, Facebook doesn’t flag or mark credible news websites

Okay, so who's judging what is a credible news website/source? Is CNN a credible news source, is The Huffington Post, how about the National Enquirer? People can argue that CNN get so many facts wrong, that they aren't a credible news source.

If you're an expect in a field, you tend to notice that the media often make massive mistakes or gross misinterpretations when dealing with news regarding your field. Now realise that they make the same mistakes for pretty much any other field. Are ANY mainstream media actually credible, given the knowledge that they misunderstand and misrepresent an incredible amount of topics every single day.