How Facebook fueled right-wing politics, navigated Trump presidency - Business Insider

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How Mark Zuckerberg's competitiveness and attempts to keep Facebook politically neutral turned it into a haven for misinformation and conspiracy theories that can swing elections

. The claims — promptly denied by Facebook — stoked right-wing suspicions of the liberal tech industry's burgeoning power over online communication, providing an easy and enduring bogeyman that Facebook has never shaken off since.In a letter to a US senator later that month,, and that the most popular topics on "Trending" were in fact "Donald Trump" and "#GOPDebate.

A few months after the meeting, Facebook fired most of Trending's human curators, replacing them with automated algorithms — the result was a flood of fake news, much of it promoting right-wing narratives,A former Facebook employee says that the decision to automate the news curation wasn't so much about conservatives versus liberals as it was about the benefits of "humans versus algorithms.

A BuzzFeed report detailed how fake news regularly outperformed legitimate news on the social network in the closing months of the electionZuckerberg was publicly dismissive of the idea that content on his site — especially "fake news" — influenced the election,Behind the scenes, though, Facebook began "Project P," an investigation into the spread of misinformation amid the election.

A flood of problematic content - from Russian trolls to medical misinformation to climate change denial posts - were now wrapped in a political tripwire that Facebook needed to carefully factor in to its decisions. Every ruling Facebook made about allowing or removing posts was now under the public microscope.

"This is actually a concern that I have and that I try to root out in the company, is making sure that we do not have any bias in the work that we do, and I think it is a fair concern that people would at least wonder about."To some Facebook insiders though, Zuckerberg's promises of even-handedness felt like a false-equivalency that left the social network kowtowing to the right.

 

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Blocking pple every now and then !

techinsider And bullys.

Huh? Politically neutral by banning conservative voices? Or by liberal moderators? Or by announcing they will suppress Trump victory posts if it happens? Facebook has become a political tool.

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