To take a page from history, I am not now, nor have I ever been a
member of Face Book.
Sometimes it's the silliest thing that turns me off...or on. In the
case of Face Book, it's that cute little two word statement, "Like
Me!" Like me? Like my ass! Are we really accepting baby talk as our
new level of expressing ourselves? Twitter? Tweet? Like Me? Well
Tooty Booty on you, Face Book. And a Twink my Dink to Twitter.
I'll admit, for the purpose of full disclosure, that I have never
looked at a Face Book page. But I have talked with friends and family
members who are deep into this strange world. Is it me, or is this
the ultimate of self centered behavior? My sister tells me that this
is how she shares with her children and a few friends the stuff that
is happening in her life. But some of the entries in her Page are
embarrassing. "I woke up at 7:32 this morning." Really important
stuff. "Sat around watching TV until lunch." I don't know how folks
survive without that important news.
So along with dumbing down our language, we are dulling down our brains.
And as far as Face Book influencing people's vote? Of course it does.
In bringing out the Stupid in us, we are set up to believe just about
any crap posted. Remember the words of Will Rogers? "I read it in the
newspaper, so it must be true!"
That's not so funny anymore.
Carl Jarvis
On 11/17/16, Richard Driscoll <llocsirdsr@xxxxxxx> wrote:
All:
It begins to appear that my general policy of not contributing to and
not subscribing to the various social communication systems has been a
good one and mentally non-contaminating.
Richard
On 11/17/2016 6:41 AM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
What has disturbed me is that everyone, including Truthdig and
Democracy Now, use Face Book in order to communicate with listeners
because it is popular. The rule should have been that the news media
stay away and make clear that it is solely for personal, subjective
communications.
Miriam
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*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.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-news-outperformed-real-news-on-facebook?utm_term=.drrx31brW#.bl4DJ2Qvw
