{"id":1535,"date":"2016-11-11T07:28:09","date_gmt":"2016-11-11T07:28:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/zuckerberg-denies-facebook-news-feed-bubble-impacted-the-election.html"},"modified":"2016-11-11T07:28:09","modified_gmt":"2016-11-11T07:28:09","slug":"zuckerberg-denies-facebook-news-feed-bubble-impacted-the-election","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rbsitsoftwaresolution.in\/blog\/zuckerberg-denies-facebook-news-feed-bubble-impacted-the-election.html","title":{"rendered":"Zuckerberg denies Facebook News Feed bubble impacted the election"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

In the aftermath of the U.S. Presidential election, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg took the stage at Techonomy16 to address concerns that the company\u00a0didn\u2019t do enough to stop the proliferation of fake news on News Feed.<\/a><\/p>\n

Zuckerberg insisted that more can always be done to improve the quality of the News Feed experience<\/a>, but that Facebook could not have influenced the outcome of the\u00a0election.<\/p>\n

\u201cPersonally, I\u00a0think the idea that fake news on Facebook, of which it\u2019s a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea,\u201d\u00a0Zuckerberg said.<\/p>\n

He continued by saying people are looking for a narrative to explain the election. However, he believes that a narrative that implicitly assumes Trump supporters are dumb enough to be manipulated by Facebook is insulting to those voters. In his view, It was just as likely for News Feed to highlight\u00a0fake news about Clinton \u2014 but the media remains steadfast in\u00a0ignoring that Trump supporters ultimately believed their candidate can bring them a better life.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople are smart and they understand what\u2019s important to them,\u201d noted\u00a0Zuckerberg.<\/p>\n

Rather than placing blame on the\u00a0accessibility of facts, he pointed to content engagement as the problem. Zuckerberg noted that Trump\u2019s posts got more engagement than Clinton\u2019s on Facebook.<\/p>\n

Facebook research shows that nearly everyone on the platform is\u00a0connected with at-least someone\u00a0that has\u00a0opposing ideological beliefs. The real question for Zuckerberg is\u00a0how to influence the way people react when they see a post they disagree. The key is to stop them from brushing it under the rug.<\/p>\n

To get there, Facebook is making efforts to involve humans more deeply in the\u00a0creation of the\u00a0ranking algorithms\u00a0the company\u00a0uses for content.\u00a0News Feed now has a human quality panel that is used\u00a0to hone in rankings. Humans are given stories and asked to rank them to get a better idea of what makes a particular story fulfilling for the user.<\/p>\n

Zuckerberg had previously only addressed the election in a Facebook\u00a0post featuring a photograph of his daughter Max. He\u00a0noted at that time that, \u201cWe are all blessed to have the ability to make the world better, and we have the responsibility to do it,\u201d but didn\u2019t elaborate on what that meant specifically for him and his company.<\/p>\n

Adam Mosseri, VP of Product Management for NewsFeed, echoed much of what Zuckerberg said\u00a0earlier today in a statement to TechCrunch<\/a>, though his brief comments were\u00a0notably less skeptical of the importance of removing propaganda.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe understand there\u2019s so much more we need to do, and that is why it\u2019s important that we keep improving our ability to detect misinformation,\u201d\u00a0Mosseri noted.<\/p>\n

Despite all of the global concern\u00a0about Trump\u2019s win,\u00a0Zuckerberg did take a moment to make\u00a0it clear that he doesn\u2019t believe any single person can fundamentally alter the arc of technological innovation.<\/p>\n

The following transcription has been edited slightly for readability. It contains the largest chunk of\u00a0Zuckerberg\u2019s commentary about the role of News Feed in the election. If you want to see the entire talk, you can watch it in its entirety here.<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

So when it comes to News Feed ranking, I actually think we are very transparent. Every time we add a new signal or make a change we publish that, right? We explain why we are doing it and what signal we are adding and we bring people in to talk to them about it. You know that stuff is out there and we will continue to do that and that\u2019s a big part of what we do and we take that seriously.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve seen some of the stories you are talking about around this election and personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, of which it\u2019s a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea.<\/p>\n

You know voters make decisions based on their lived experience. We really believe in people. You don\u2019t generally go wrong when you trust that people understand what they care about and what\u2019s important to them and you build systems that reflect that.<\/p>\n

Part of what I think is going on here is people are trying to understand the result of the election, but I do think that there is a certain profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is because they saw some fake news. If you believe that then, I don\u2019t think you have internalized the message that Trump supporters are trying to send in this election.<\/p>\n

The quickest way to refute the fact that this surely had no impact is why would you think there would be fake news but not on the other. We know we study this, we know that it\u2019s a very small volume of anything. Hoaxes are not new on Facebook. There have been hoaxes on the internet and there have been hoaxes before. We do our best to make it so that people can report that and so that we can as I said before share people the most meaningful content that we can.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve studied this a lot because as you can imagine I really care about this, I want what we do to have a good impact on the world. I want people to have a diversity of information. So this is why we study this stuff to make sure we are having that positive impact. For whatever reason, all the research suggests that this isn\u2019t really a problem and I can go into that in a second but for whatever reason we have had a really hard time getting that out.<\/p>\n

But here is the historical analogy that I think is useful on this. If you go back 20 years and look at the media landscape, there were a few major TV networks in any given local area. There were a few major newspapers that had an editorial opinion and those were the opinions that you got all your news filtered through.<\/p>\n

Regardless of what leaning you have on Facebook politically, or what your background is, all the research shows that almost everyone has some friends who are on the other side. Even if you\u2019re a Democrat and 90 percent of your friends are Democrats, 10 percent of your friends are Republican. Even if you live in some state or some country, you\u2019re going to know some people who live in a different state or a different country.<\/p>\n

So what we found, and you can go through everything, you can go through religion you can go through ethnic background, just all of these different things. In a lot of cases, the majority of someone\u2019s friends might fit their beliefs, but there are always some outliers. That means that the media diversity and the diversity of information you are getting through a social system like a Facebook is going to be inherently more diverse than what you would have gotten through watching one of the three news stations and sticking with that and having that be your newspaper or your tv station 20 years ago.<\/p>\n

The research also shows something, which is a little bit less inspiring, which is that we study not only people\u2019s exposure in News Feed to content from different points of view, but also what people click on and engage with.<\/p>\n

By far, the biggest filter in the system is not that the content isn\u2019t there, or that you don\u2019t have friends who support the other candidate, or who are from another religion, but that you just tune it out when you see it. So, you have your world view, and you go through and I think we would all be surprised how many things don\u2019t conform to our world view that we just tune out. We just don\u2019t click on them and you know I don\u2019t know what to do about that. We should work on that.<\/p>\n

Presenting people with a diversity of information is an important problem in the world, and one I hope we can make more progress on. But right now, the problem isn\u2019t that the diverse information isn\u2019t there, it\u2019s actually, by any study, more there than traditional media in the last generation, but we haven\u2019t gotten people to engage with it in higher proportions.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

Featured Image: Paul Sakuma Photography<\/small><\/p>\n

Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunch\/social\/~3\/YbgUhnShJbw\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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