Month: November 2016

There’s plenty of blame to go around when it comes to the problem of “fake news,” and some of it quite rightly falls on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. It’s not that these platforms don’t care about the truth, however. The problem goes deeper than that. It’s more of a structural problem, and it doesn’t come with an easy solution.

Social networks like Facebook and Twitter started out primarily as ways to connect with friends and other people with similar interests, and they did so by making it easy for you to share bits of text, along with hyperlinks to content worth reading on the web.

Eventually, however, text gave way to photos, with both Twitter and Facebook restructuring their news feeds or streams to allow for larger pictures. Then came video — both in the form of video clips (many of which auto-play because advertisers like it that way) and animated GIFs. Hyperlinks, which social networks noticed were rarely clicked on anyway, started to become less important.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Here’s one reason why social networks are not a good place for news”

When Donald Trump was seen by many in the media as a side-show with no real chance of becoming president, his behavior on Twitter was an amusing distraction. But now that he is on his way to the White House, figuring out how to handle that behavior has become a critical challenge.

A classic example of this occurred on Sunday night, when the President-elect unleashed a tweet-storm about how he won the election in spite of “millions of people who voted illegally.” As with most Trump tweets, these were re-shared hundreds of thousands of times within minutes.

In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016

The immediate problem posed by these tweets is that there is absolutely no evidence that large numbers of illegal votes were cast, let alone millions of them. It’s a classic conspiracy theory promoted by fake-news and propaganda sites like InfoWars. Election-monitoring experts have said they have found no sign of any organized illegal voting whatsoever.

Continue reading “The challenge of covering a president who tweets fake news”

One of the themes that has emerged during the controversy over “fake news” and its role in the election of Donald Trump is the idea that Russian agents of various kinds helped hack the process by fueling this barrage of false news. But is that really true?

In a recent story, the Washington Post says that this is definitely the case, based on information provided by two groups of what the paper calls “independent researchers.” But the case starts to come apart at the seams the more you look at it.

One group is associated with the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a conservative think tank that says it has been researching Russian propaganda attempts since 2014.

The second group is something called PropOrNot, about which very little is known. Its website doesn’t name anyone who is associated with it, including the researchers who worked on the report. And the Post doesn’t name the group’s executive director — whom it quotes — because it says he is afraid of “being targeted by Russia’s legions of skilled hackers.”

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “No, Russian agents are not behind every piece of fake news you see”

Facebook may be a global behemoth with 1.7 billion users, but there’s one huge market in which it has virtually no presence: China. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has made no secret of his desire to enter the country, but so far his desire remains unrequited.

Now, the Facebook CEO appears to be planning to offer the Chinese government a gift, in the hope of winning its affections. According to the The New York Times, his team has developed a tool that will allow the state to censor content. But doing so will open a Pandora’s box that may be difficult to close.

Zuckerberg has reportedly said it is better to be “enabling conversation” even if some of the conversation is censored, and it’s not surprising he would feel that way. His goal is to turn Facebook into a global town square. But what happens when some of the townsfolk suddenly disappear in the middle of the night, and you were the one who gave away their location?

Knowing that this kind of tool exists will also make it more difficult to stop other countries from asking to use it. What will Zuckerberg say if Russia or Turkey wants the same power of prior restraint? What does the global town square look like then?

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

The rise of “fake news” is a topic that is getting a lot of attention lately, thanks to the role that Facebook and other social platforms play in news consumption for a growing number of users. But there are other problems as well, a recent Stanford study found.

According to researchers from the university, a majority of students—more than 80% of them, in fact—could not distinguish between a piece of sponsored content or “native advertising” and a real news article. They also had difficulty determining whether a news story shared on social media was credible, and based their decision on odd or even irrelevant factors.

One example asked middle school students whether they should trust an article about financial planning that was written by a bank executive, and sponsored by a bank. The researchers said that many students did not see the author or the sponsored nature of the piece as a reason to question its credibility or accuracy.

Another exercise asked students to look at the homepage of the news site Slate, and identify whether certain parts of it were news or advertising. They had no problem determining that a standard banner ad was advertising, but more than 80% believed a native ad—which was clearly labeled with the words “sponsored content”—was a real news story.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Most students can’t tell the difference between real news and fake news, study finds”

If you’re AT&T or Comcast, you might like the sounds of Donald Trump’s transition team, but if you are a small content creator or someone who likes a wide range of services being available through your ISP, you probably aren’t going to like it much at all.

That’s because the two advisers that President-elect Donald Trump named to help oversee his telecom policy agenda at the Federal Communications Commission are not friends of net neutrality. And they are likely to have a lot of sway over future FCC policy.

Jeff Eisenach is an economist who once worked for Verizon, and Mark Jamison used to be part of Sprint’s lobbying team. Both men have written about how they are not in favor of net neutrality rules, which keep Internet service providers from giving preferential treatment to certain forms of online content or services.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “President Trump could spell the end of net neutrality”

Donald Trump hasn’t even become President yet, but he has already given us a taste of how acrimonious his relationship with the media is likely to be, after a no-holds-barred meeting with cable executives and off-again, on-again meeting with the New York Times.

The existential problem this poses for the mainstream press is this: Do they accede to Trump’s demands in order to get access to him and his administration, so that they can better report on it? Or do they become even more antagonistic in their coverage, and give up any hope of a working relationship? Both of these options have significant risks associated with them.

The idea that Trump might have an adversarial stance towards the media won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has been following the president-elect on Twitter, or anywhere else for that matter.

Trump has routinely called out the New York Times for being a “failing newspaper,” and slammed both it and the Washington Post for their biased coverage of him during the campaign. At one point, he withdrew the Post‘s press accreditation, as he did for a number of other news outlets.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Trump puts the media between a rock and a very hard place”

Mark Zuckerberg has done his best to get around the problems that his giant social network has created in the form of viral fake news and hoaxes, a problem that many believe may have played a key role in the election of Donald Trump. But he can’t evade the issue much longer.

One of the arguments that the Facebook CEO started with when the fake news discussion first began was that the small proportion of fake news stories couldn’t possibly have affected the outcome of the election. This was “crazy talk,” he said.

But as a number of people quickly pointed out, Facebook’s entire marketing and advertising business — which is worth billions of dollars a year — is predicated on the idea that having your message on the platform can reach and influence hundreds of millions of people. He can’t have it both ways.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Facebook needs to act quickly on fake news”

Depending on whom you choose to believe, the problem of fake news on Facebook is either one of the most important issues currently facing mankind, or an over-blown controversy pumped up by the mainstream media. And in a way, that dichotomy itself points out the problem with defining — let alone actually getting rid of — so-called “fake news.”

When someone uses that term, they could be referring to one of a number of different things: It might be a story about how Bill and Hillary Clinton murdered several top-level Washington insiders, or it might be one about how Donald Trump’s chief adviser is a neo-Nazi, or it might be one about how the really important issue of the election was Clinton’s emails.

The first of these is relatively easy to disprove just by using facts. The second is somewhat more difficult to rebut, since a lot of it is based on innuendo or implication. And the third is almost impossible to respond to because it is pure opinion.

As John Herrman argued in a recent piece in the New York Times, part of the difficulty in solving the “fake news” problem stems from the fact that many people appear to have lost faith in the existing media. Therefore, much of the fact-checking and analysis that newspapers and others have done on Donald Trump wound up being largely irrelevant.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Facebook doesn’t need one public editor, it needs a thousand”

As Facebook struggles to respond to criticism about how much responsibility — if any — it bears for a wave of fake news that engulfed the social network during the U.S. election campaign, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been doing his best to deny that the company is a media entity.

There are a number of reasons why Facebook doesn’t want to describe itself as a media company, including economic ones. But one big reason is that being defined in such a way could open the network up to regulation, and impose a range of responsibilities.

Some senior members of the European Union, for example, are eager to treat Facebook the same way they treat media companies that own newspapers, or radio stations and TV networks.

German Justice Minister Heiko Maas said on Thursday that he believes social platforms like Facebook should be defined as media entities for regulatory purposes. “In my view they should be treated as media even if they do not correspond to the media concept of television or radio,” he said in Berlin.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Here’s one reason Facebook doesn’t want to admit to being a media company”

The rise of “fake” news, and the role that platforms like Facebook played in that rise, has become one of the defining issues of the 2016 election. Did hoaxes and misinformation help Donald Trump win? And if so, what — if anything — should Facebook do about it? Who is to blame?

What makes this issue so difficult is that hard answers to those questions are difficult to come by, if not impossible. And finding solutions is not likely to get any easier.

Let’s take the first of those questions: Did fake news help Trump win? We simply don’t know. Some believe that false stories about Hillary Clinton murdering people or similar hoaxes definitely swayed the electorate, while others believe all these stories did was confirm biases that voters already had.

Those who argue that fake news did play a role point to evidence that these kinds of stories were hugely popular on Facebook, and were spread far more widely than “real” news stories.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Here’s Why Fake News Is More Popular Than Real News”

Twitter appears to have blocked the accounts of several right-wing users, including some associated with white-power groups, as part of a move to respond to user frustration with hate speech and harassment. But it threatens to draw Twitter further into a quagmire over what is acceptable speech.

According to a number of news reports, users who have been banned include Pax Dickinson — a former Business Insider executive who was let go for making sexist and racist comments — as well as Richard Spencer, who runs a so-called “alt right” organization called the National Policy Institute, which advocates for racial separation.

As a matter of policy, Twitter doesn’t comment on actions taken with respects to specific accounts. But the company has taken a number of steps recently to try and rein in bullying and harassment on the service, including rolling out an expansion of its “mute” feature.

Twitter’s co-founder and part-time CEO Jack Dorsey said recently that abuse “has no place on Twitter” and he intends to stamp it out.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Here’s why Twitter banning “alt-right” accounts is a risky strategy”

Steve Bannon doesn’t look like a media mastermind, or the head of a sinister cabal of right-wing racists. He wears cargo shorts and rumpled dress shirts, and likes to call people “dude.” But the chairman of Breitbart News how has an unprecedented amount of influence over the new President of the U.S., and that has some people very worried.

Before Donald Trump became a contender for the Republican presidential nomination, most people had probably never even heard of Breitbart, the site Bannon took charge of in 2012. Others probably dismissed it as a haven for right-wing conspiracy theorists, like Alex Jones’ InfoWars.

Now, however, Bannon has been named chief strategist for the incoming president. And the rise of Trump, a candidate who Breitbart promoted unceasingly during the campaign, has lent a legitimacy to the site that the company is busy capitalizing on at breakneck speed. It recently announced plans to expand its operations both in the U.S. and in Europe.

A former Breitbart spokesman who left the company earlier this year said that the site “will be as close as we are ever going to have — hopefully — to a state-run media enterprise.”

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Breitbart News will be the closest thing to a state-owned media entity”

As critics slam Facebook for the role they believe it — and in particular its penchant for fake news stories — played in the election of Donald Trump, CEO Mark Zuckerberg continues to resist any attempt to pin some of the blame on his company. But in doing so, he misses the point.

Over the weekend, the Facebook co-founder took to the site to respond to some of those criticisms. He said he “cares deeply” about the fake news problem and wants to get it right. But he also said that he doesn’t believe fake news contributed to the election’s outcome.

“Of all the content on Facebook, more than 99% of what people see is authentic,” Zuckerberg wrote. And since only a very small amount of those hoaxes relate to politics, and an even smaller number related to Clinton specifically, he argued that “this makes it extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this election in one direction or the other.”

The Facebook CEO also scoffed at the suggestion that the company is actually a media entity, or that it should behave like one, something many have argued for some time.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Mark Zuckerberg continues to miss the point on Facebook and media”