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I think many sane people can agree that the news media did not do their f-cking jobs in the lead up to Donald Trump becoming president. They treated him as a viable candidate, as a sensible person, as someone who has has not done and said the horrible things that come out of his mouth and which are on his Twitter feed constantly. They focused on Hillary’s minor errors of not using the right technology instead of Trump willfully screwing over just about every person with the misfortune of doing business with him, harassing and groping women, and lying repeatedly and openly. It’s maddening to think how this happened and where our country could be heading and there’s plenty of blame to spread around. Should some of that blame fall on Facebook though?

Facebook, as you know, is an echo chamber full of misinformation. Fake news often gets spread on Facebook, I’ve seen it on my friend’s feeds. It’s easier to read a headline, click “like” and assume it’s true than to read the article and figure out whether it’s misinformation, a parody, or simply misleading. Facebook has been blamed for the proliferation of clickbait slideshow-type websites with annoying popup ads and news that’s either untrue or an exaggeration. You won’t believe what happened next! People claimed that Facebook is responsible for Trump’s win. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that’s crazy though:

Mark Zuckerberg is forcefully pushing back against mounting criticism that Facebook enabled the Republican’s rise by failing to police an explosion of fake, pro-Trump news stories that went viral on the social network. “Personally,” he said onstage at a conference Thursday, “I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way—I think is a pretty crazy idea. Voters make decisions based on their lived experience.” He added: “Why would you think there would be fake news on one side and not the other?”

Yet it is not “crazy” to argue that the inability or refusal of Facebook, now the single largest media platform in the world, to contain the growth of hoax news posts may have aided Trump’s victory. Earlier this year, a BuzzFeed News investigation found that the most hyper-partisan right-wing publications’ Facebook pages published misinformation 38 percent of the time, while hyper-partisan left-wing publications published misinformation 20 percent of the time. These numbers would be less alarming if the least accurate pages studied by BuzzFeed weren’t also generating high numbers of shares and likes, outpacing mainstream political news sites’ Facebook pages. A host of hoax news sites sprung up over the past several months to capitalize on the phenomenon, making millions of dollars on the surge in election-year traffic.

[From Vanity Fair]

I don’t think you can blame Facebook, but you can also say that they should have done more to stop these sites from growing and capitalizing on their platform. Facebook is supposedly working to weed out clickbait sites with a new algorithm that buries misleading headlines. They should also try to punish sites with untrue headlines, scant content buried under slideshows and ads which are impossible to tell apart from content.

People who voted for Trump are not skilled at critical thinking, at understanding the consequences of their actions or at seeing the world beyond their myopic viewpoints. They shared news stories which confirmed their bias, as most of us do on Facebook. A Trump victory is a victory for ignorance, racism, fascism, bigotry, misogyny, xenophobia and bullying. Either those people are willfully ignorant or they’re actually ignorant, but it shakes out to the same thing. Trump would have won the electoral vote whether or not Facebook existed and whether or not Facebook worked to weed out fake news. The media should have gone much harder on Trump, the entire public narrative around him should have been skeptical and reality-based, but that’s a different issue.

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