Study: YouTube's recent efforts to fight misinfo by cutting recommendations to fringe channels worked but made Fox News the most recommended for election videos
and boosted Fox News at the same time, new research has found Rob Beschizza / Boing Boing : Oopsie! Facebook's Instagram is telling users the election is tomorrow Axios : Facebook to rely on election results from 6 news outlets, AP, Reuters Sean Hollister / The Verge : Before the votes are fully counted, Trump falsely claims victory Whitney Kimball / Gizmodo Australia : How Social Media Platforms Are Preparing for the Election, And the Aftermath CNET : How Facebook, Twitter and Google aim to combat election misinformation New York Times : How Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter plan to handle Election Day and the subsequent days, clamping down on falsehoods and highlighting accurate information Tweets: Oliver Darcy / @oliverdarcy : Per @crowdtangle, these are the Facebook news pages with the most interaction on Election Day so far. Fox News & Breitbart account for 38% share of voice. https://twitter.com/... Jack Nicas / @jacknicas : New data shows that YouTube has cut its recommendations of fringe channels, helping reduce its spread of disinformation. The changes have also had a knock-on effect: Fox News is now YouTube's most recommended channel alongside election-related videos. https://www.nytimes.com/... @twittersupport : We may label Tweets, starting on election night, that make claims about election results before they're officially called. We'll be prioritizing the presidential election and other highly contested races where there may be significant issues with misleading information. https://twitter.com/... Nicholas Dawes / @nicdawes : If Facebook's newsfeed algo designed an electoral system, it would be the electoral college. And we get the TV coverage to match. @winter : @RadioFreeTom It's generational narcissism to presume that ignorance, propaganda and apathy are specific to ‘now’ and not timeless problems. Arvind Narayanan / @random_walker : YouTube and Facebook are so large that creators and publishers dance to the tune of their recommendation algorithms. When the majority of your views are mediated by these gatekeepers, there's no alternative. Platform dominance creates problems even if there's no abuse of power. Jack Nicas / @jacknicas : Fox News also far outperforms other news outlets on Facebook. Here are the top Facebook pages ranked by their share of total interactions with posts that mentioned the election, Biden or Trump over the past week. (Interactions are the only such data FB makes available.) https://twitter.com/... @berinszoka : Yet further proof that social media, far from being biased against conservatives, actually favor them The real question: is that because tech companies, under relentless GOP attacks, have actively skewed content to favor the GOP? That'd be actual censorship by intimidation https://twitter.com/... Madhura Prasad / @ladyquixotic : Even with this explanation I dont understand why Fox News keeps getting boosted on Facebook & YouTube. Is it just naked algorithm science, the culture of these platforms, is our country more conservative, or is it that international audiences know the Fox brand, boost engagement? https://twitter.com/... Brooke Binkowski / @brooklynmarie : Hope all the “engagement” was worth it, @Facebook https://twitter.com/... Tom Nichols / @radiofreetom : People need to stop blaming Facebook for everything. The reason Facebook has so much power is because Americans are such a bunch of zombies who will spend hours on Facebook but won't spend 30 minutes reading a newspaper. https://twitter.com/... @slpng_giants : On what planet other than @facebook does Breitbart have more engagement than every network but Fox News? https://twitter.com/... Arvind Narayanan / @random_walker : YouTube's algorithm change to boost authoritative sources and cut down on misinfo is probably a good thing. But it has a subtle second-order effect: incentivizing mainstream channels to produce more polarizing and clickbaity content to fill the gap left by the banished fringe. https://twitter.com/... @blackamazon : Because misinformation and racism go hand in hand and “radicalization” was a terrible measure of what to measure This will have to be done again https://twitter.com/... @diakayyali : I think I'm just going to spend the next 48 hours retweeting all the ways content moderation has failed in this election- despite having tons of resources thrown at it. There's unfortunately a lot of stuff for me to share. https://twitter.com/... Mike Masnick / @mmasnick : Why do you think Tucker Carlson has spent the last year whining about “anti-conservative bias” by internet companies? Easier than doing SEO work... and puts his videos up top. https://twitter.com/... Jason Koebler / @jason_koebler : NEW: We obtained Facebook's internal content moderation guidelines on voter suppression. They are highly confusing. Here's an example: https://www.vice.com/... by @daithaigilbert https://twitter.com/... Josh Constine -SignalFire / @joshconstine : It “worked”? That's like saying a gun control policy worked because it replaced children's pistols with knives https://twitter.com/... Jack Nicas / @jacknicas : “The channel most recommended in our data set in 2016 was Alex Jones,” he said. “Now it's Fox News.” https://www.nytimes.com/... Casey Newton / @caseynewton : “In several analyses of YouTube's recommendations on popular news and election videos over the past month, Fox News was consistently the most recommended channel, sometimes by a wide margin.” 🤮 https://www.nytimes.com/... @iheartmindy : I used to reach 12 million people a month on my Facebook page...then the election ramped up. This month it's down to 3 million, and this week it was knocked down to half a million. Totally not biased media censorship and blatant election meddling though, amirite? 👌🏻 https://twitter.com/... Daniel Kreiss / @kreissdaniel : Exactly. Render unto @Facebook the things that are @Facebook's. But American illiberalism and disinformation is primarily the product of the president and the contemporary @GOP. https://twitter.com/... Rep. Jennifer Wexton / @repwexton : Misinformation and disinformation isn't just a problem with this election—it's going to be here long after, no matter who wins. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... It's an issue I'm tackling in Congress with my new Task Force. Check out our work so far 👇🏼 https://wexton.house.gov/... Alex Heath / @alexeheath : And now here are Facebook's contested election labels, built internally for the first time for this election https://twitter.com/... David Kaye / @davidakaye : the threat of violence seems greater then any modern US election. today twitter, facebook, youtube should clearly warn that election disinformation, a potential form of incitement in this context, will lead to account suspension. https://www.nytimes.com/... Alex Heath / @alexeheath : Facebook has not released mockups of what its contested election label for posts will look like, though a spokesperson told me over the weekend they will read like: “<Name> is the projected winner of the 2020 US Presidential Election. Sources: Edison Research/Reuters, others” https://twitter.com/... @alexisohanian : We should be asking all the major social media platforms what they're doing. https://twitter.com/... Rich Greenfield / @richlightshed : Fascinating how much anger is directed toward Facebook and Twitter, while YouTube allowed the Trump campaign to buyout its homepage for the two days before the election months before there was even a clear democratic nominee — @nytimes @ceciliakang https://www.nytimes.com/... See also Mediagazer