Dealing with fake news : putting theory into practise

I haven't found the time to watch that interview yet, but regardless of the magnitude of the effect of all this data-wrangling, it's abundantly clear that Facebook and CA have both been very naughty.

Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is facing intensified calls to appear in person at investigations into the social network's conduct. His company has been accused of failing to properly inform users that their profile information may have been obtained and kept by Cambridge Analytica, a data firm widely-credited with helping Donald Drumpf win the 2016 US presidential election.

Despite pledging that in 2018 he would "fix" his company, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has managed to avoid engaging with the site's growing number of critics - instead sending lawyers or policy bosses to various committee hearings. The 33-year-old's recent remarks on some of Facebook's controversies have been communicated in the relatively safe space of a blog post or video message published on his Facebook page.

Trouble is, since all those repeated denials as to how Facebook doesn't affect anything and isn't a news outlet, only for the massive u-turns as to how many users saw fake news, his credibility is near zero. Now that is not the same as saying that the influence of the propaganda was proportional to its prevalence : the point is he kept saying things he must have known weren't true.

This is a major breach that must be investigated," demanded Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. "It’s clear these platforms can’t police themselves. I've called for more transparency and accountability for online political ads. They say 'trust us'." She added: "Mark Zuckerberg needs to testify before Senate Judiciary."

The man in charge of Britain's investigation into Russian meddling in the democratic process said he too wanted to press Mr Zuckerberg on the issue. "I will be writing to Mark Zuckerberg asking that either he or another senior executive from the company appear to give evidence in front of the committee as part our inquiry," said Damian Collins MP. "It is not acceptable that they have previously sent witnesses who seek to avoid asking difficult questions by claiming not to know the answers."

If you remember this rather nice story :
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/9DkDWw1bnvG
... it's interesting to see some of the recommendations already being put into practise. First, we saw Facebook actually tell users that they'd seen false articles. Naturally it was widely reported that some users responded very badly idiotically to this (https://gizmodo.com/facebook-users-cry-censorship-after-being-told-which-ru-1822552451) but we still don't have any statistical data on whether this had an overall positive or negative affect. Without that we just have anecdotes, which are subject to strong selection effects.

So now we've got the second on the list - chief executives being hauled before politicians - being raised as a serious possibility. It'll be interesting to see how that one turns out, and even more interesting to see if the rest of the recommendations (limiting social media corporation acquisitions, labelling and/or removal of bots, transparency of algorithms selecting what's in users streams etc.) are followed.

But it bears repeating, yet again, that you wouldn't get a Trump or Brexit without pre-emptively bullshitting people into believing that a complete and utter cunt of a human being was better leader than a mildly dislikeable old lady because all politicians are the spawn of Satan, or that foreigners are responsible for making British bananas the wrong sort of bendy and therefore the EU is all about ze GERMANS (in Daily Mail random caps lock) eating your babies, for years and decades previously. People are just too damn stubborn to change their minds on such deep-seated ideological beliefs on a whim. Individuals can be capricious, but this is rarely the case for a whole population. You cannot possibly persuade people in a single year that a racist orange tiny-handed piece of human pestilence is more credible than a perfectly bog-standard politician... not in one year. Even then, Donald lost the popular vote and lost it badly. Conversely, no-one except the Brexiteer fringe cared much at all about the EU before the referendum : they were given a voice they should never have had, but it seems pretty clear now that the fault lies with the people least vulnerable to social media manipulation.

So again, social media : important, yes. Facebook : villainous, yes. The crucial factor in the shitty state of the world ? Nope.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43456390