Facebook undermines its own effort to fight fake news
The recent admission of accepting $150K from a &quot;Russian fake news entity&quot; hardly scratches the surface of the massive influence that Facebook&#x27;s algorithm had on Trump&#x27;s victory.<p>It is the algorithm itself that made Trump&#x27;s victory possible.  By amplifying content that shows early signs of virality, the algorithm gave Trump a way to dominate the news cycle whenever he wished.  He then used this tactic and shrewd timing to control the narrative, even when a large percentage of the stories were about him and contained broadly negative coverage.<p>The other major factor in Trump&#x27;s riding the Facebook news feed algorithm to victory is the way people form friendships on Facebook.  If someone has 800 friends, then even if most of those friends share political beliefs, there will be some small percentage who hold different beliefs.  Trump created controversial stories that were designed to read differently based on political affiliation, which is why many of his remarks sounded so utterly stupid to people who likely opposed him in the first place.<p>For example, by generalizing immigrants as criminals and rapists, Trump alienated people who would likely not have voted for the less immigrant-friendly of the two candidates under any circumstances, while reassuring those who fear and&#x2F;or resent immigrants that he &quot;gets it&quot; and is willing to offend people to speak the truth about an issue they care about.<p>He used the same tactic with many permutations, and kept repeating the ones that worked again and again.  When the WaPo or NYT would write a story harshly criticizing his brashness or insensitivity and someone would share that with their 800+ friends, even if 750 were like-minded, the rest of those friends were being effectively &quot;reached&quot; by Trump with the message that he wanted them to take away. Once reached, they could share the same post and editorialize it with their own framing, targeting their own like-minded friends. In a very literal sense, when using this tactic, no publicity was bad publicity for Trump.<p>The strategy is partly a feint and partly a trojan horse.  Everyone who kept Trump in the news when he was mind-bogglingly starting to gain votes during the GOP primary helped him become the only story worth reporting for all news outlets.  The other candidates seemed boring and un-newsworthy in comparison.<p>The tactic only worked for Trump because of the the demographic layout of the US, but it was (as is obvious in hindsight) the only strategy that could possibly allow someone who was outspent by at least 4:1 by a candidate who was expected to win by a landslide, to have any chance at all of winning.<p>Zuck should not be targeting fake news.  The damage was not done by the many hundreds of different domains that hosted blogs styled like newspapers touting conspiracy theories that were often among the most shared Facebook articles during the election.<p>The damage was actually done by the major news organizations for taking the bait and letting Trump become the story far too early and letting him control the narrative, keeping it about scandal and frivolity and keeping the focus away from policy and issues.<p>While I think Zuck may be a truly great leader and visionary, I find it fairly disappointing that he&#x27;s so nakedly getting involved in politics by decrying fake news (instead of actually taking the blame for his algorithm being so easily expoited by Trump).  It seems likely that the next election will lead to significant human-vetting before an article can trend significantly on Facebook, and some sort of ideological litmus test being imposed by Facebook when screening that content.  This shows a knee-jerk technocratic response that devalues free speech and the marketplace of ideas.<p>One other reason Trump was able to so effectively hijack the algorithm was that news organizations are essentially trying to create viral articles, and their own internal metrics are heavily linked to data about social shares and virality rather than traditional, longer-term metrics like subscriptions, pulitzer prizes, etc.<p>This means that all Trump had to do was get a story about something he said going viral, and he could pretty sure that no matter who wrote that original story, the big players (NYT, WaPo, etc.) would soon follow with their own version of that story, like arbitrageurs trying to get in on a winning trend and reap some ad revenue from the clicks.<p>Ironically the things that would help make Facebook a force of good would be exactly the things that the heavily partisan &quot;my team is better than your team&quot; major party loyalists want -- it would be mechanisms to help like-minded people find holes&#x2F;flaws in articles that say good things about their candidate, and help people appreciate and respect exposure to diversity of opinion as a way of offering insight into their own convictions.<p>Sadly, Facebook has shown no signs of wishing to truly improve the marketplace of ideas, its response seems likely to end up as censorship or propaganda embedded so deeply into the algorithm that people keep using it naively thinking that it is somehow fair.