[HN Gopher] Facebook News is filled with stories too mainstream ...
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Facebook News is filled with stories too mainstream to do well on
the rest of FB
Author : elsewhen
Score : 102 points
Date : 2020-06-13 17:30 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.niemanlab.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.niemanlab.org)
| yters wrote:
| It's funny that mainstream now means what most people don't care
| about.
| netsharc wrote:
| Well, it's what most FB users aren't reading. My theory/hope is
| that they visit normal news stories outside of Facebook, so
| when they see the same headline on FB, they think "ah I've read
| that already". Meanwhile when the user sees a click-baity title
| on FB, they haven't heard about that on mainstream sites, so
| they end up clicking on it...
| ForHackernews wrote:
| > A few other things I noticed scrolling through:
|
| > There are very, very few politics stories
|
| What? This is contradicted by the list of top stories given just
| above!
|
| 1. "'It's a lot of pain': George Floyd's brother tearfully
| demands police reforms during emotional hearing" (NBC News)
|
| 2. "Jon Ossoff wins Georgia's Democratic Senate primary" (NPR)
|
| 3. "Trump will return to campaign trail with rally in Tulsa" (New
| York Times)
|
| 4. "Coronavirus is making a comeback in Arizona" (NBC News)
|
| 5. "2020 is the summer of the road trip. Unless you're black."
| (New York Times)
|
| 6. "Starbucks is closing up to 400 stores in shift to takeout
| strategy" (CNN)
|
| 7. "Amazon bans police from using its facial recognition
| technology for the next year" (The Verge)
|
| 8. "J. K. Rowling doubles down in what some critics call a
| 'transphobic manifesto'" (NBC News)
|
| 9. "The protests come for 'Paw Patrol'" (The New York Times)
|
| 10. "Upcoming Nintendo Switch exclusive canceled" (ComicBook.com)
|
| 2 & 3 are explicitly political, 1, 5, 7, 8 and 9 are perhaps not
| about electoral politics, but still focus on hot-button political
| issues of the day.
|
| In what world are these "very few politics" stories?
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| War is Peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
| [deleted]
| WhatIsDukkha wrote:
| In the world of people that finished the author's sentence -
|
| """There are very, very few politics stories -- almost nothing
| about the Trump/Biden race, for instance."""
|
| They explicitly bounded what they meant by politics.
| [deleted]
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Grammatically "for instance" is a non-restrictive clause in
| that sentence. It adds information, but it doesn't narrow the
| meaning of what preceded it.
| surround wrote:
| Number 3 from the Facebook News list is "Trump will return to
| campaign trail with rally in Tulsa"
|
| Whereas the Facebook popular list has _nothing_ explicitly
| about the Trump /Biden race.
| [deleted]
| jakeogh wrote:
| OT-ish: There was just a political story on the FP, about a open
| letter from a college that starts with B. It disappeared, which
| makes sense considering that political stuff is strongly down
| rated on a tech site, so I went into /newest and went back many
| days looking for the [flagged] and or [dead] item, and I dont see
| it. So I used the search interface, but it does not show flagged
| or dead stories, if logged in, is it possible to have the search
| interface include those too?
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| You can search and limit to the last 24 hours
| jakeogh wrote:
| No results. The story is very likely flagged or dead, I'm
| trying to find out of there is a query string to showdead in
| the search results.
| gurumeditations wrote:
| So clearly from that list, the proliferation of social media is
| what has led to the radicalization of the right wing.
| sugarpile wrote:
| It's likely responsible for radicalization of both sides. I
| really doubt it's a coincidence pressure for social movements
| intensified more between 2009-2020 than it has for any time
| prior.
| Jonanin wrote:
| Clearly? That's quite a big logical leap you took there. I
| don't think it's clear at all.
| Gabriel_Martin wrote:
| Seems pretty clear to me. Breitbart is an official Facebook
| news partner last time I checked, what have you seen that
| contradicts what OP said?
| Touche wrote:
| Correlation != Causation
| Gabriel_Martin wrote:
| Not a terribly strong argument against why hosting and
| platforming reactionary rightwing rags can lead to more
| radicalization. To quote: "Correlation doesn't imply
| causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively
| and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'."
| charlchi wrote:
| White supremacist propganda and neonazi recruiting is
| what causes radicalization. Deplatforming those people is
| a good idea, yes.
|
| Unlike what leftwing youtube and a few researchers from
| liberal universities would like you to believe though,
| Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Stefan Molyneux and
| conservative news sites are not radicalising people.
| There's no evidence for that.
| remexre wrote:
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.08313
| stass wrote:
| More like radicalization in general. Left wing got similarly
| radicalized, if not more so. When everybody lives in their own
| bubble people get pushed to the extremes :-(
| teunispeters wrote:
| There are no communist activist violent groups, so no not to
| the same extent. At least none visibly active anywhere
| reported. That argues that the radicalisation has been
| predominantly right wing, as there are many active violent
| fascist groups now, and weren't a few years ago.
| m0zg wrote:
| Have you not heard of Antifa somehow? It's a communist
| activist violent group.
| klyrs wrote:
| You mean guys like this?
|
| https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/06/11/santa-cruz-and-
| oaklan...
| metrokoi wrote:
| Are you equally concerned about left-wing activist
| lawyers trying to murder four cops with a molotov
| cocktail?
| tarkin2 wrote:
| Just to clarify, antifa became an issue after trump
| started quoting a twitter antifa account, which was run
| by a right wing, white supremacy guy.
|
| It is a good example of social media being used to
| radicalise the right wing, in fact.
| perl4ever wrote:
| That was very recent and people have been talking about
| antifa for years. Not to suggest it was the first false
| flag or whatever. But I distinctly remember people
| ranting about them around the time of the Virginia
| protests.
| arcseco wrote:
| I vaguely remember a story a few years ago about a guy
| receiving a blow to the head from a bike lock and
| requiring therapy for potential brain damage from said
| blow.
| m0zg wrote:
| I vaguely remember the leftists cheering, too.
| klyrs wrote:
| Let's be clear, that sucks, but it's nowhere near the
| radicalization we've seen on the right. Boogaloos
| shooting cops, neo-nazis responsible for numerous
| synagogue / church / mosque shootings, driving cars into
| crowds, etc. aren't really comparable to a bike lock to
| the head.
| Gabriel_Martin wrote:
| In what way does anti-fascism imply anything other than
| anti-authoritarian, least of all pro-communism? This guy
| I linked below when trying to understand your comment
| even questions if it can be considered a "group" at all (
| "I also question whether antifa can be considered to
| constitute a "group" at this point in time"), and I
| agree. Either way, equating far-right violence (which was
| responsible for every extremist death in 2018) and
| violence associated with antifa, for example against
| people like those at Charlottesville, Neo-Nazis, Neo-
| fascists, and white supremacists, just seems deeply
| disingenuous to the point of trolling.
|
| https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12115-018-0246
| -x
| m0zg wrote:
| You don't really understand what this is about. The
| original antifascist movement was about using communism
| to fight fascism (also known as national socialism, BTW).
| That is, communist totalitarianism vs capitalist
| totalitarianism. It was a Stalinist movement. The current
| "Antifa" pretty much quote The Internationale [1] as
| their position, without even knowing what it is, or that
| they are quoting it. This ignorance would be humorous,
| were it not so dangerous.
|
| To quote wikipedia: Antifa (German: ['antifa:]), was a
| militant anti-fascist organisation in Weimar Republic
| started by members of the Communist Party of Germany
| (KPD) that existed from 1932 to 1933. They flew hammer
| and sickle over their headquarters too [2]. Many of the
| current members are commies also.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internationale
|
| [2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/B
| undesar...
| Gabriel_Martin wrote:
| Also: Here is an account of anti-communist anti-
| authoritarians singing The Internationale in 1989 when in
| police custody. Odd they would sing that when you
| characterized the song as a singularly communist anthem.
| One possibility is that every anti-authoritarian member
| of Capitalized Antifa isn't a communist after all.
|
| https://books.google.com/books?id=so474D6P9LsC&pg=PA22&lp
| g=P...
| m0zg wrote:
| Yes, there are people who subscribe to it without
| understanding what it really means. I think I pointed
| this out a couple of posts upward. Such people are often
| called "useful idiots" by those who really understand
| what's going on and have an actual goal. 1917 revolution
| in Russia was mostly carried out by useful idiots, tens
| of millions of whom have died afterwards of famine and
| repressions.
| Gabriel_Martin wrote:
| So only the people who "have an actual goal" is who
| Antifa consists of? Or just Antifa "leadership" I'm just
| not totally understanding why anti-X necessarily has to
| shoot past center to pro-Y.
| Gabriel_Martin wrote:
| Can you point out where this purported capitalized Antifa
| posts their updates? Because right now it seems like you
| have so many "understandings" about capitalized Antifa
| that it would be easiest to just get the fundamental
| things like exactly who you're speaking of instead of
| asking you to necessarily have to explain it all here.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Anti-fascist action has a strong tradition all the way
| back to 1936 when the fascist getting punched was Oswald
| Mosely.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cable_Street
|
| It's not exactly recent, but it _is_ pretty much purely
| reactive.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| It wasn't right wing extremists who were burning churches
| and police stations and taking over city blocks.
| dvtrn wrote:
| But they sure as shit were shooting up black churches. Or
| do we not want to talk about it?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylann_Roof
| arcseco wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Allen_Muhammad
|
| ^Also a racially motivated murder that people don't like
| to confront "Muhammad's goal in Phase One was to kill six
| white people a day for 30 days (180 per month).". The
| media is partially responsible for these attacks by
| stoking racial divisions in the US.
| jatone wrote:
| you mean protesting local government not being responsive
| to the fact people are literally being killed by cops? I
| don't see any issue with that.
|
| its just a building. rebuild it later once you fix the
| problems.
| klyrs wrote:
| Show me the mass murders by leftists in this decade. Because
| that's what we're seeing on the right. If not mass murders,
| what's the substance behind your "if not more so"?
| chance_state wrote:
| Your leap from radicalization to "show me the mass murders"
| is strange.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Not based on the list shown in the article. The closest to a
| radical left article is the lowest ranked; and it's about a
| petition to declare the KKK a terrorist group, which is
| hardly an exclusively left-wing position.
| intopieces wrote:
| Is that a laughing reaction to George Floyd's brother tearfully
| calling for police reform? Christ Facebook is even more toxic
| than I thought it was.
| djaque wrote:
| Reading through the list of top news stories on Facebook scared
| me. It is clear that news can't be chosen based on engagement and
| that Facebook can't change.
|
| Related: Wikipedia's current events portal [1] acts like a user
| sourced news feed which is a pretty good representation of
| reality. I wonder if you could commercialize a similarly
| moderated aggregator.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
| metrokoi wrote:
| >It is clear that news can't be chosen based on engagement and
| that Facebook can't change.
|
| Why can't news be chosen on engagement? That's what people want
| to read. Must Facebook control what news people are reading?
|
| Wikipedia's current event portal may have a more even
| representation of what events are happening, but Wikipedia also
| has users that are interested in a wider range of topics. Most
| people mainly care about sports and politics. Scientific
| discoveries, economics, and international relations are simply
| not as interesting to as many people. Why shouldn't Facebook
| just have news based on engagement and a separate list with
| equal representation of events from many different topics?
| pfraze wrote:
| Technically we can choose news by any metric we want
| depending on what we want, but I'd prefer the results reflect
| some combination of accuracy, reputability, importance, and
| interest. Whatever Facebook's current algorithm is doing,
| it's not that.
|
| > Must Facebook control what news people are reading?
|
| No, only what news they promote to their network. I don't
| care if FB manual curates the list or uses an algorithm,
| they're involved in the design and so they're making an
| editorial decision here.
| OminousWeapons wrote:
| > Why can't news be chosen on engagement? That's what people
| want to read. Must Facebook control what news people are
| reading?
|
| They can optimize only for engagement with no curation, but
| they shouldn't. It shouldn't be done that way because people
| won't understand that this is the mechanism for content
| selection. They will think that because content shows up in a
| news section it has factual merit, and that the content being
| presented is an accurate representation of the current world
| context. If you only prioritize engagement, what you will
| create is a propaganda section masquerading as a news section
| because the most inflammatory, baseless, bullshit content is
| what draws the most engagement. That is in no one's best
| interest long term and it undermines the credibility of news
| media in general. If they want to create this, it should be
| labeled as entertainment, not news.
| seesawtron wrote:
| Social Media works by curating content that you like and
| building a safe bubble around you by showing the user the
| content that will positively reinforce their belief systems.
| Thereby keeping them shielded from views that are challenging
| or contradictory to their belief systems. Creating a positive
| reinforcement loop for the user to depend on it even more.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| >Why can't news be chosen on engagement?
|
| Because what most people engage with can't be accurately
| described as "news".
|
| >That's what people want to read. Must Facebook control what
| news people are reading?
|
| Much more likely Facebook is trying to hide from the world
| just how vapid and dim most of its users are.
| mhagmajer wrote:
| This is often the case with top social media companies that they
| deal with a ton of content sponsorship requests.
| mhagmajer wrote:
| Most of these requests I would assume would be for the most
| visited one - the front page
| seesawtron wrote:
| Social Media works by curating content that a user like and
| building a safe bubble around the user by showing them the
| content that will positively reinforce their belief systems.
| Thereby keeping them shielded from views that are challenging or
| contradictory to their belief systems. Creating a positive
| reinforcement loop for the user to depend on it even more.
| surround wrote:
| Popular news stories on Facebook: mostly right wing.
|
| Stories on Facebook news: mostly New York Times.
|
| Does the title really fit the article?
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Facebook needs to have separate feeds for politics and news
| sharing vs original content and family photos.
|
| In general, being able to let people filter and control the
| parameters of the algorithms defining their experience.
| Super_Jambo wrote:
| Why would they do that? Thanks to network effects they have an
| effective monopoly & clearly they make more money from their
| current user hostile design.
| angott wrote:
| Sure, very good idea, but it will never happen. It would lead
| to a dramatic drop in user engagement, and ultimately a
| decrease in revenue.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Why would it drop engagement?
| [deleted]
| saltedonion wrote:
| The reason fb wont do this is because there is so little to
| show on the friends and family front, it will do nothing but
| drive users away and solidify its market positioning as a
| political news reader.
|
| To pull off separate feed fb needs to fix trust so people
| actually posts friends and family content as much as before.
| evolve2k wrote:
| Anyone have references to this effect occurring? My sense was
| that friends and family personal posts were down but I've
| never seen any research or articles on it specifically.
| jjeaff wrote:
| I thought I remembered Zuckerberg announcing they would be
| deemphasizing news over personal content a few years ago.
| [deleted]
| austincheney wrote:
| Why on Earth should this be a surprise to anybody?
|
| Social media news is really a polite way of saying
| unsubstantiated rumors, gossip, and bullshit. Tabloids are higher
| quality stories. The new FB News is journalism, which is about as
| similar as TikTok videos to Harvard Law textbooks.
| gridlockd wrote:
| ...except all of the popular stories were from reputable
| journalist outlets as well.
|
| They were simply different stories from those that FB news
| wanted users to see.
| perl4ever wrote:
| You know what's weird?
|
| I discovered that the following link shows my FB feed in
| chronological order:
|
| https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr
|
| I thought, oh, great, this is the key to making FB decent again.
|
| _But_ after a while of using it, it usually shows almost
| nothing. Sometimes literally nothing. People are still posting
| stuff though that I can see with the default view. I almost think
| I may have triggered some sort of adversarial logic that is
| trying to force me to use the engagement-driven ordering.
|
| Edit: In fairness, it could be that they are hostile to uBlock
| origin, either deliberately or as emergent behavior. I wouldn't
| mind ads in principle, normal ads like you used to have in print
| media, but I often get ones that are very unpleasant if I don't
| use the blocker.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| I'm not looking for Facebook to be _great_ , just _useful
| enough_.
|
| And I reckon I've got it doing that by only following people
| and groups that serve my interests and don't rile me.
|
| That means I generally tried to avoid what my individual
| friends have to say, as it's mostly the usual things which
| aren't really worth engaging with.
| rozab wrote:
| To be fair, the kind of ads social media companies have been
| most criticized for (those masquerading as real posts) are
| exactly the sort adblockers don't effect.
| geraldcombs wrote:
| I've been experiencing the same behavior here lately and take
| it as a hint to go do something else.
| timbit42 wrote:
| If you use FBPurity you can block all kinds of garbage on FB.
| It can also ensure sk=h_chr is always enabled, if you want.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Yep, this has happened to me for years. Occasionally it will
| show me days-old posts from friends and then say that there are
| no more stories. If I switch back to the regular view, it will
| show me many new stories.
|
| My guess is they aren't ruining this experience on purpose, but
| they aren't keen to fix it because they don't want you using
| this mode.
| blululu wrote:
| I have experimented with Chronological order in the past, and
| it almost invariably provides a worse feed. It's like email
| with no spam filters. The grim reality is that most of the
| content that is uploaded to Facebook is repetitive and
| uninteresting. In my personal experience the friends who used
| to post the most interesting things have mostly stopped, and
| all that remains is the chaff.
| saltedonion wrote:
| The key question here is how will the recommendation engine
| behave.
|
| If they go down their previous path as using engagement as the
| sole KPI then it will be no different than news feed.
|
| To reestablish trust and shake off the regulatory scrutiny fb
| will need to nudge people to more mainstream content, at the
| detriment of engagement.
| curiousllama wrote:
| The issue is if there's two sections, one "very engaging" and
| one "somewhat engaging," then we won't solve anything. "Very
| engaging" will far outpace "somewhat engaging" because, well,
| that's what people want to engage with.
|
| I think you're right about the need to shift people but in
| order to do so, engagement is key. They should maintain
| engagement as the primary KPI, and instead nudge the content
| towards less inflammatory. Engagement is, IMO, a primary
| measure for if they going to be able to reestablish trust.
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(page generated 2020-06-13 23:00 UTC)