This is astonishing to me, the fact that Russian-based agents could have impacted as many as 126 millions Americans with content uploaded during the election brings fake news to a new level. In a blog post Facebook said; "It is important to understand how foreign actors tried to sow division and mistrust using Facebook before and after the 2016 election"
Following the 2016 election Zuckerberg and many other people realized the enormous impact social media, in particularly Facebook; had on the out come of the election. This was an unintended consequence of the evolution of mass media and the availability of mass media. Zuckerberg has been trying to make improvements to the programming of his site so his users are not exposed to fake news.
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An article by BBC News was published yesterday (Nov. 23, 2017) covering new findings in Zuckerberg's quest to stop fake news. What really caught my eye about these news findings is that they involved Russian sites. Facebook is now trying to expose these Russian fake news pages. According to the article "Facebook plans to let people see if they had liked pages created by foreign actors to spread propaganda during the US presidential election."
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Of course Russia has denied these allegations.
I have previously written about Facebook taking a stand against fake news. However, after these facts were uncovered it is even more important for all social media sites to take action. Social media is so influential and present these days. If foreign counties are interfering in our elections this is a direct threat to the American Democracy and it needs to be addressed.
According to Facebook this tool will be launched in December
This new tool that Facebook is releasing sounds like a step in the right direction in preventing the type of damage that occurred in last year’s election. After reading a little more about why the tool is necessary through the article you cited, as well others about this issue, I really find it chilling how sophisticated and accurate the analytics behind the Russian ads were at targeting the right groups of people in order to influence just enough suspicion about each presidential candidate. I hope this tool will be one of many more measures that Facebook and other social media corporations will take to educate their users so that this sort of mass con job does not happen again.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with your proposal that other social media platforms should follow in Zuckerburg's footsteps. With this incident, we have all seen how easily fake news can be spread. It is important that other social media platforms tighten up on rules and regulations because many individuals rely on these platforms to gain their news information. It is absolutely crazy that as many 126 million Americans may have run into this fake news.
ReplyDeleteThis move is definitely a move in the right direction. I always wonder how the creators of platforms feel when their platform is abused on a grand scale such as this. I also understand trying to tighten the programming that makes up your platform is a never ending job. There are always new ways to crack into the source coding that get discovered hourly. I can only imagine how this new innovation in the site would help to improve the filter on the information that we continually see everyday.
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