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They would be better off auto-blending articles at the other end of users' opinion spectrum into their news feeds (or comment threads) to try and burst the echo chambers. "Here are some articles at the polar opposite to your norms."
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You think CNN is 100% honest and credible? The same could be said of liberals or any arbitrary group of people.
I don’t think that was the point. The point is that even credible sources are going to be voted down as “idealogically biased“ no matter how neutral the story is. Headline says candidate Johnson lost by 15%? Better vote it down. After all, you hate candidate Johnson. Doesn’t matter if he actually lost.
Wonder if they included the part where they (Twitter) went to RT, which is pretty much Moscow's propaganda arm, and offered to sell them $200k worth of adds geared specifically for US elections crowd.
Slightly off-topic: are there any social networks out there not polluted by news -- fake or otherwise? Is there room for a new social network that's for, you know, people? Snapchat's a tabloid, Facebook is basically a news RSS feed, and I'm even starting to get news "stories" when browsing hashtags on Instagram. I just want to discover people and talk to people . Apart from dating apps (Tinder/Bumble/etc.), it seems…
That might be because "the news" isn't some abstract thing that has no effect on people's lives, so people want to talk to people about the news and politics.
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This is worse than that. Imagine your Trump-supporting extended family voting down CNN news stories as "not credible." Expect mass brigading by The_Donald.
This is worse than that. Imagine your Bernie-supporting extended family voting down Fox news stories as "not credible." Expect mass brigading by /r/politics.
Just cause you can write the words to sound the same doesn’t mean it is the same
They would be better off auto-blending articles at the other end of users' opinion spectrum into their news feeds (or comment threads) to try and burst the echo chambers. "Here are some articles at the polar opposite to your norms."
Instead we show people what they want to see with a number next to it that reinforces the popularity and legitimizes whatever it is. Part of how birtherism became a thing. You only see articles from a source you trust and you see that 100k people also approve of ever post on the topic. “Hmmm. Well, those 100,000 people must be into something!”
Future Republican candidates can put out FB ads only target Orange County Voters who dislike CNN's news article on Trump.
Democrat party can put FB ads asking for campaign contributions only from folks in SF that like CNN's news article on Trump.
This is the opposite of what they should have done. Shows just how much of an echo-chamber Facebook has become. This is just adding another metric by which garbage can be made legitimate and vice versa. Facebook would be a much better platform if they removed the like and comment count from every post. It’s those numbers that lead people to believe that garbage is legitimate in the first place. By hiding these number…
For almost all stories you can work out its popularity just by the number of comments. And you can determine the comment count (-/+ an order of magnitude) just by scrolling through the comments. The accurate number isn't important for most people.
None of this will prevent the dissemination of fake news. What will do is (a) not prioritising it and (b) detecting whether it's fake. Facebook just added solutions to do both.
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That might be because "the news" isn't some abstract thing that has no effect on people's lives, so people want to talk to people about the news and politics.
Not saying you're wrong, but I don't know, I was perfectly happy chatting with friends on AIM messenger a decade ago. Myspace was also super spammy, but never became a (literal) news feed. I don't mind stupid pro/anti-Trump memes or whatnot, but giving news distribution companies (from Breitbart to the Economist) a platform on your social network seems like an anti-pattern.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is worse than that. Imagine your Trump-supporting extended family voting down CNN news stories as "not credible." Expect mass brigading by The_Donald.
I suppose that's possible, but I expect that, like Google's attempts to address the same issue[0], the biggest loser in this change is going to be independent news sources. [0] https://medium.com/@evanpopp/google-changes-its-algorithm-to...
> However, in addition to AlterNet and other left-wing news sites, Rosenfeld said right-wing, alternative media outlets have also seen a reduction in viewership due to the change in Google’s algorithm.