Facebook’s news filtering and distribution of fake news
In the article “From Hate Speech to Fake News: The Content Crisis Facing Mark Zuckerberg”, author Aarti Shanani discusses the current problem circulating around the web in regards of Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook news. After the elections this year, Donald Trump won and many people believe that him winning the swing-states that were supposed to be won by Hilary was due to the many fake news circulating around on Facebook days before the actual election. In the article, he discusses the contradictory rules that Facebook has set: there is “a bias toward restricted speech for regular users, and toward free speech for “news” (real or fake).” In the article, Shanali explains just how the filtering of the content works: according to experts, there are thousands of people hired to go through each post, however the allotted time to make a decision whether a post is relevant and non-offensive is just 10 seconds, “you have to use judgment, in a system that doesn’t give you the time to make a real judgment.” As a result, many posts leak into the system and are spread fast due to the concept of information cascades. This is where we can connect the article to what we have learned in class.
An information cascade is when people make decisions sequentially, with later people watching the actions of earlier people, and from these actions inferring something about what the earlier people know, eventually spreading the information around. On Facebook, we can imagine that most users are connected in some way. Through close friends (strong ties) dense clusters form. Each cluster is connected to other clusters through weak ties and local bridges. Once a fake news article enters a dense cluster, it will spread across all members of that cluster, based on the threshold for that information. This means that people will be willing to believe the information, because they have strong ties with other people who already have believed it. As a result, those people are more likely to agree on it. And as people tend to be friends with people who share similar values, we can see how easily we can believe others if they already believe something. However, those cascades can lead to false information being spread out, which many people believe happened right before the elections in Facebook.