NDM: Weekly News Article - W/C 21st November (22)

Facebook’s failure: did fake news and polarized politics get Trump elected?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/10/facebook-fake-news-election-conspiracy-theories

Summary

Facebook accused of abdicating its responsibility to clamp down on the spread of fake news stories. Many Guardian readers are likely to have heard the following quote “If I were to run, I’d run as a Republican. They are the dumbest group of voters in the country. They believe anything on Fox News. I could lie and they would still eat it up. I bet my numbers would be terrific” attributed from a 1998 interview with Donald Trump. However, this is a fake quote Donald Trump never said it! however, it was not caught in the Facebook filters. This quote is just one example of misinformation that has plagued the 2016 election. In the wake of Donald Trump, being elected there is now pressure on Facebook to tackle this fake news problem but also encourage a healthier interaction between those with different political views. Rather than connecting people like Facebook, claim to do in their mission statement they have actually done more over the last 18 months to divide the world. Facebook accidently got into the news business without any editorial framework and now its trying to ‘course correct’.

Key Statistics

• The Pew Research Center found that 44% of Americans get their news from Facebook
• Analysis by Buzzfeed found that 38% of posts shared from three large rightwing 
• politics pages on Facebook included ‘false or misleading information’
• Three large leftwing pages did the same 19% of the time
• According to Menczer’s research, there is a lag of around 13 hours between the publication of a false report and the subsequent debunking

My Opinion

I think that yes, Facebook should have done more to stop the spread of fake news on their social networking site as it caused friction between their users with different political views. However, they are a quite a big organisation so there is no guarantee that they can catch everything and check if it is fake. Having said that they probably aren’t the only networking site to have had fake news spread on it others probably have but it just has not been picked up. In terms, of the fake news getting Trump elected I think that this is only partially true because some people believe what they read on social media more than others so I do not think anybody was overly influenced by social media to vote for Donald Trump, his election is just the way that the election worked out.