Carl, I think you are stereotyping based on a very limited example. Have
you never seen idiot posts in an email list? Like I said, Facebook has
become nearly another Internet in itself. You will find a lot of
stupidity there and you will find just the opposite too. With just about
anyone being able to set up a profile and then post just about anything
the noise to signal ratio is weighted on the side of the noise, but so
is the entire Internet. Just like you have to pick and choose On the
Internet as a whole you have to pick and choose on Facebook too. Right
now I have found a Facebook group that is for Christian/atheist debate.
It is entertaining enough to watch and participate in the atheist
shredding of the Christians, but I am thinking of unsubscribing from it
because the traffic is too high. That is one reason I have been getting
behind in my email lately. If I do quit it there are a lot of other
Facebook groups that are very tempting. But don't pick out the posts of
one drooling idiot and think that represents the billions who are there.
I assure you that not everyone on Facebook is a drooling idiot.
On 11/18/2016 10:23 AM, Carl Jarvis wrote:
Well I don't know about rating college women, but I personally find
Face Book to be self-aggrandizing.
"Didn't do much today except watch TV for about four hours, can't
imagine why so much junk is on the Tube, ate leftovers for breakfast
and then finished them off for lunch, no idea what to do when the kids
and Big Bob get home, like I mean for dinner."
That is a direct quote my kid sister sent me when I asked her what
sort of babble came over her Face Book. I worry about that girl. But
she'll turn 80 this January 1, so probably she's not going to
change...much.
Face Book, and even good old email, is an escape mechanism. But at
least email lists such as blind democracy offer exchanges that
stimulate the brain...you know? the brain? that stuff that keeps our
hair off our chins.
Carl Jarvis
On 11/18/16, Frank Ventura <frank.ventura@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Bob, I don't use facebook out of a one man's protest type of thing. I find
the origin of the site to be repugnant; essentially it was created to rate
women on a college campus.
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Bob Hachey
Sent: Thursday, November 17, 2016 2:04 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Real News or Fake FaceBook
Hi all,
I have heard it said that over 40 percent of Americans get their news from
FaceBook. IF true, this is very disturbing. I've never cared much for
FaceBook. The website is not designed well for screen reader users and I
have found Facebook to be rather plastic. Seems my gut reaction to Facebook
was and still is accurate.
Bob Hachey
Viral Fake Election News Outperformed Real News On Facebook In Final Months
Of The US Election
A BuzzFeed News analysis found that top fake election news stories generated
more total engagement on Facebook than top election stories from 19 major
news outlets combined.
posted on Nov. 16, 2016, at 5:15 p.m.
Craig Silverman
BuzzFeed Founding Editor, Canada
In the final three months of the US presidential campaign, the
top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more
engagement than the
top stories from major news outlets such as the New York Times, Washington
Post, Huffington Post, NBC News, and others, a BuzzFeed News analysis has
found.
During these critical months of the campaign, 20 top-performing false
election stories from hoax sites and hyperpartisan blogs generated 8,711,000
shares,
reactions, and comments on Facebook.
Within the same time period, the 20 best-performing election stories from 19
major news websites generated a total of 7,367,000 shares, reactions, and
comments on Facebook. (This analysis focused on the top performing link
posts for both groups of publishers, and not on total site engagement on
Facebook.
For details on how we identified and analyzed the content, see the bottom of
this post. View our data
here.)
Up until those last three months of the campaign, the top election content
from major outlets had easily outpaced that of fake election news on
Facebook.
Then, as the election drew closer, engagement for fake content on Facebook
skyrocketed and surpassed that of the content from major news outlets.
BuzzFeed News
"I'm troubled that Facebook is doing so little to combat fake news," said
Brendan Nyhan,
a professor of political science at Dartmouth College who researches
political misinformation and fact-checking. "Even if they did not swing the
election,
the evidence is clear that bogus stories have incredible reach on the
network. Facebook should be fighting misinformation, not amplifying it."
A Facebook spokesman told BuzzFeed News that the top stories don't reflect
overall engagement on the platform.
"There is a long tail of stories on Facebook," the spokesman said. "It may
seem like the top stories get a lot of traction, but they represent a tiny
fraction
of the total."
He also said that
native video,
live content, and
image posts
from major news outlets saw significant engagement on Facebook.
Of the 20 top-performing false election stories identified in the analysis,
all but three were overtly pro-Donald Trump or anti-Hillary Clinton. Two of
the biggest false hits were a story claiming
Clinton sold weapons to ISIS
and a hoax claiming the pope
endorsed
Trump. The only viral false stories during the final three months that were
arguably against Trump's interests were a
false quote
from Mike Pence about Michelle Obama, a false
report
that Ireland was accepting American "refugees" fleeing Trump, and a hoax
claiming
RuPaul said he was groped by Trump.
BuzzFeed News
BuzzFeed News
This new data illustrates the power of fake election news on Facebook, and
comes as the social network deals with criticism that it allowed false
content
to run rampant during the 2016 presidential campaign. CEO Mark Zuckerberg
said recently
it was "a pretty crazy idea" to suggest that fake news on Facebook helped
sway the election. He later published a
post
saying, "We have already launched work enabling our community to flag hoaxes
and fake news, and there is more we can do here."
This week
BuzzFeed News reported
that a group of Facebook employees have formed a task force to tackle the
issue, with one saying that "fake news ran wild on our platform during the
entire
campaign season." The Wall Street Journal also
reported
that Google would begin barring fake news websites from its AdSense
advertising program. Facebook
soon
followed suit.
These developments follow
a study by BuzzFeed News
that revealed hyperpartisan Facebook pages and their websites were
publishing false or misleading content at an alarming rate - and generating
significant
Facebook engagement in the process. The same was true for the
more than 100 US politics websites
BuzzFeed News found being run out of the Former Yugoslav Republic of
Macedonia.
This new analysis of election content found two false election stories from
a Macedonian sites that made the top-10 list in terms of Facebook
engagement
int he final three months. Conservative State published
a story
that falsely quoted Hillary Clinton as saying, "I would like to see people
like Donald Trump run for office; they're honest and can't be bought." The
story generated over 481,000 engagements on Facebook. A second false
story
from a Macedonia site falsely claimed that Clinton was about to be indicted.
It received 149,000 engagements on Facebook.
All the false news stories identified in BuzzFeed News' analysis came from
either fake news websites that only publish hoaxes or from hyperpartisan
websites
that present themselves as publishing real news. The research turned up only
one viral false election story from a hyperpartisan left-wing site. The
story
from Winning Democrats claimed Ireland was accepting anti-Trump "refugees"
from the US. It received over 810,000 Facebook engagements, and was
debunked
by an Irish publication. (There was also one
post
from an LGBTQ site that used a false quote from Trump in its headline.)
The other false viral election stories from hyperpartisan sites came from
right-wing publishers, according to the analysis.
Ending the Fed
One example is the remarkably successful, utterly untrustworthy site
Ending the Fed.
It was responsible for four of the top 10 false election stories identified
in the analysis: Pope Francis endorsing Donald Trump, Hilary Clinton
selling
weapons to ISIS, Hillary Clinton being disqualified from holding federal
office, and the FBI director receiving millions from the Clinton Foundation.
These
four stories racked up a total of roughly 2,953,000 Facebook engagements in
the three months leading up to Election Day.
Ending the Fed gained notoriety in August
when Facebook promoted its story about Megyn Kelly being fired by Fox News
as a top trending item. The strong engagement the site has seen on Facebook
may help explain how one of its stories was featured in the Trending box.
The site, which does not publicly list an owner or editor, did not respond
to a request for comment from BuzzFeed News.
Like several other hyperpartisan right-wing sites that scored big Facebook
hits this election season, Ending the Fed is a relatively new website. The
domain
endingthefed.com was only
registered
in in March. Yet according to BuzzFeed News' analysis, its top election
content received more Facebook engagement than stories from the Washington
Post
and New York Times. For example, the top four election stories from the Post
generated roughly 2,774,000 Facebook engagements - nearly 180,000 fewer
than
Ending the Fed's top four false posts.
A look at Ending the Fed's traffic chart from Alexa also gives an indication
of the massive growth it experienced as the election drew close:
Alexa / Via
alexa.com
A similar spike occurred for Conservative State, a site that was only
registered in September. It saw a remarkable traffic spike almost
instantly:
Alexa / Via
alexa.com
Alexa estimates that nearly 30% of Conservative State's traffic comes from
Facebook, with 10% coming from Google.
Along with unreliable hyperpartisan blogs, fake news sites also received a
big election traffic bump in line with their Facebook success. The Burrard
Street
Journal scored nearly 380,000 Facebook engagements for
a fake story
about Obama saying he will not leave office if Trump is elected. It was
published in September, right around the time Alexa notched a noticeable
uptick
in its traffic:
Alexa / Via
alexa.com
That site was only
registered
in April of this year. Its publisher disputes the idea that its content is
aimed at misleading readers. "The BS Journal is a satire news publication
and
makes absolutely no secret of that or any attempt to purposely mislead our
readers," he told BuzzFeed News.
Large news sites also generated strong Facebook engagement for links to
their election stories. But to truly find the biggest election hits from
these
19 major sites, it's necessary to go back to early 2016.
The three biggest election hits for these outlets came back in February, led
by a contributor
post
on the Huffington Post's blog about Donald Trump that received 2,200,000
engagements on Facebook. The
top-performing election news story
on Facebook for the 19 outlets analyzed was also published that month by CBS
News. It generated an impressive 1.7 million shares, engagements, and
comments
on Facebook. Overall, a significant number of the top-performing posts on
Facebook from major outlets were opinion pieces, rather than news stories.
The biggest mainstream hit in the three months prior to the election
came from
the Washington Post and had 876,000 engagements. Yet somehow Ending the Fed
- a site launched just months earlier with no history on Facebook and
likely
a very small group of people running it - managed to get more engagement for
a
false story
during that same period.
"People know there are concerned employees who are seeing something here
which they consider a big problem," a Facebook manager
told
BuzzFeed News this week. "And it doesn't feel like the people making
decisions are taking the concerns seriously."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
How We Gathered the Data
BuzzFeed News used the content analysis tool BuzzSumo, which enables users
to search for content by keyword, URL, time range, and social share counts.
BuzzFeed News searched in BuzzSumo using keywords such as "Hillary Clinton"
and "Donald Trump," as well as combinations such as "Trump and election" or
"Clinton and emails" to see the top stories about these topics according to
Facebook engagement. We also searched for known viral lies such as "Soros
and
voting machine."
In addition, created lists of the URLs of known fake news websites, of
hyperpartisan sites on the right and on the left, and of the more than 100
pro-Trump
sites run from Macedonia that were previously identified in BuzzFeed News
reporting. We then looked for the top performing content on Facebook across
all
of these sites to find false stories about the election.
We conducted our searches in three-month segments beginning 9 months from
election day. This broke down as February to April, May to July, and August
to
election day.
Even with the above approaches, it's entirely possible that we missed other
big hits from fake news websites and hyperpartisan blogs.
To examine the performance of election content from mainstream sites, we
created a list that included the websites of the New York Times, Washington
Post,
NBC News, USA Today, Politico, CNN, Wall Street Journal, CBS News, ABC News,
New York Daily News, New York Post, BuzzFeed, Los Angeles Times, NPR, The
Guardian, Vox, Business Insider, Huffington Post, and Fox News. We then
searched for their top-performing election content in the same three-month
segments
as above.
It's important to note that Facebook engagement does not necessarily
translate into traffic. This analysis was focused on how the best-performing
fake
news about the election compared with real news from major outlets on
Facebook. It's entirely possible - and likely - that the mainstream sites
received
more traffic to their top-performing Facebook content than the fake news
sites did. As as the Facebook spokesman noted, large news sites overall see
more
engagement on Facebook than fake news sites.
Craig Silverman is the founding editor for BuzzFeed Canada and is based in
Toronto.
Contact Craig Silverman at
craig.silverman@xxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:craig.silverman@xxxxxxxxxxxx>.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-news-outperformed-real-news-on-facebook?utm_term=.drrx31brW#.bl4DJ2Qvw
