Facebook has come out on the defensive against the criticism being directed toward its News Feed in the post-election landscape. With reports blaming the company for the spread of misinformation on its social network, and the adverse affect that has on its users, the company had no choice but to respond.
On Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed the accusations directly during his talk at the Techonomy conference. “I’ve seen some of the stories around this election,” he remarked. “Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way … is a pretty crazy idea.”
He continued: “There is a certain profound lack of empathy in asserting that someone voted the way they did … because they saw some fake news. If you believe that then I don’t think you have internalized the message Trump supporters in this election are trying to send.”
Even before election night, reports had surfaced claiming misinformation was rife on Facebook’s largely automated trending topics feed. Then, earlier this week, BuzzFeed uncovered a fake news empire that had infiltrated the platform’s user-led forums (known as “Groups”), tracing its origins to Macedonia. Following the election result, and Donald Trump’s ascendancy to the highest seat in the land, the criticism only grew louder.
For his part, Zuckerberg claims the issue is being blown out of proportion: “All the research that we have suggests that this isn’t really a problem. We study this, we know that it’s a very small volume of anything,” said the Facebook founder.
“Hoaxes aren’t new on Facebook. There have been hoaxes on the internet and there were hoaxes before, and we do our best to make it so that people can report that,” he added.
All the same, Adam Mosseri, vice president of product management at Facebook, released a statement on Thursday noting that “there’s so much more we need to do [at Facebook]” in order to quell the rise of erroneous information. This is particularly salient given that the Pew Research Center reports that more than 40 percent of American adults use Facebook as a primary news source.
Facebook puts the onus on its users to flag content as inappropriate. Taking the action to report a News Feed item brings up several options in a pop-up window that asks you to describe whether the content is, for example, spam.
Over the past several months, Facebook has made a number of changes to optimize content on its News Feed, taking steps to combat what it terms clickbait, and to serve up more “newsworthy” items to its users.
Zuckerberg also attempted to turn the tables on his accusers in the media by claiming that Facebook is in fact more diverse than traditional news outlets. Dismissing the idea that the News Feed algorithm creates an echo chamber (or filter bubble) of corresponding views, he argued that Facebook’s networking system exposes users to more opinions from both sides of the political spectrum. The real problem, according to Zuckerberg, is how to get people to engage with content that does not conform to their worldview.
“The content from both sides is there but the people who use the network … tune it out. I don’t know what to do about that,” he admitted. Zuckerberg concluded the topic by noting, “Well we have a lot of work to do. But that would have been true either way.”
Updated on 11-12-2016 by Lulu Chang: Added reports that Facebook executives admitted that there is “work to do” when it comes to combatting fake news on the social media platform.
Discord is trying to push more visibility on the internet for some of its biggest communities, and there's a good chance your messages could end up in a Google Search. The platform is preparing to make conversations from certain public servers searchable on the web, so there's a privacy setting you might want to check before the rollout begins.
According to Discord's official announcement, the changes will roll out in two stages. Starting November 16, qualifying servers will have public web pages featuring automated summaries of conversations. By mid-December, individual messages from eligible public channels could also appear word-for-word in Google and other search engines.
You just opened X and started typing your thoughts. Imagine the jump scare when a hand suddenly pops up on your screen, pointing at the promote button. It doesn’t say a word and simply points. For a growing number of X users, this isn’t a made-up scenario but something they have been seeing since yesterday, and very few of them are amused.
Most of us have learned to tune out the usual in-app upsells, whether it’s a glowing upgrade banner or a pop-up about a premium plan. A floating hand hovering over your draft is much harder to ignore, and that’s probably the whole point.
Scroll through any app for five minutes, and you’ll find someone maxxing something. Their skin, their sleep, their protein intake, even their Friday night on the couch. That little suffix has been everywhere this year, and now it has a trophy to show for it. In a recent announcement, Dictionary.com named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year.
What are people actually doing when they’re maxxing?