Discussion

• @sheeraf Sheera Frenkel on x

  NEW - A look at how the top superspreaders of misinformation are responsible for a disproportionate amount of the false posts about voter fraud. Please share! I had to do a lot of math for this story and I HATE math. https://www.nytimes.com/...

• @datajacob Jacob Silver on x

  It is hard to overstate the degree and consistency with which rigorous, thorough reporting is outperformed by the laziest, thrown-at-the-wall disinformation. Powerful piece by @sheeraf, fully of juicy data bits and proud to have supported on it. https://twitter.com/...

• @nicoleperlroth Nicole Perlroth on x

  Must-read @sheeraf deep dive on disinformation super spreaders. “Just 33 of the 95,546 posts were responsible for over 13 million of those interactions.” https://www.nytimes.com/...

• @propornot PropOrNot ID on x

  What this means is that there are a relatively small & easily targetable number of propaganda super-spreaders. When you take them out of the equation, you quickly reduce the spread of their propaganda lies. https://twitter.com/...

• @davetroy Dave Troy on x

  There is massive overlap between the people identified here (Diamond + Silk, Presler, Straka, Bongino) and the “Charter Class” of Parler users from Oct-Dec 2018. We need to stop taking these people at face value and look at their funding and origins. https://www.nytimes.com/...

• @juddlegum Judd Legum on x

  “Of the 20 most-engaged Facebook posts over the last week containing the word ‘election,’ all were from Mr. Trump...All of those claims were found to be false or misleading by independent fact checkers.” https://www.nytimes.com/...

• @daveyalba Davey Alba on x

  everyone ratio'ing this tweet can go and get lost, @sheeraf is an incisive, hard-working reporter delivering crucial information to the public, and just because you don't like what her reporting reveals it does not give you the right to pile on in replies. i'm so sick of this. ht…

• @avaaz @avaaz on x

  Superspreaders of misinformation are attacking democracies all over the world & @Facebook is their weapon of choice because it helps them boost their lies to millions. Read this important piece from @sheeraf @nytimes that highlights research from @2020Partnership and @Avaaz. http…

• @rashadrobinson Rashad Robinson on x

  What is shared on Facebook isn't happening in a vacuum. Conspiratorial content is being shared to and by people who have a role in shaping our democracy. It's deathly serious and Facebook needs to act like it. https://twitter.com/...

• @rmac18 @rmac18 on x

  This is a big get from @alexeheath. More than 110,000 government government officials and candidates were on a Facebook whitelist that prevented them from being factchecked — and subsequently have their reach reduced — for spreading misinformation. https://www.theinformation.com/…

• @deblebrown Deborah Brown on x

  Important story here: Facebook maintains a list of 112K US gov officials & candidates whose posts can't be fact-checked & whose reach can't be limited if they spread misinformation. Who's on the list? We don't know. Does Facebook maintain such lists in other countries? 🤷🏻‍♀ ️ htt…

• @amir Amir Efrati on x

  New: *Facebook has political “whitelist” of 112,000+ accounts it doesn't fact check. *Facebook found users trust misinformation from those accounts more than others. ⁦@alexeheath⁩ walks through the previously unreported internal data here: https://www.theinformation.com/ ...

• @jason_kint Jason Kint on x

  I think we need to stop carrying Facebook's water about the need for political speech to be scrutinized. As long as Facebook microtargets advertising and organic posts while failing to include this targeting data in their ad library then they don't really believe what they say. h…

• @jeffbercovici Jeff Bercovici on x

  Zuck's insincerity aside, one read is Facebook (and prob Twitter) users are deluded. We recognize content that's bad bc it persuades dumb gullible people but keep logging on bc we don't think we're the dumb gullible people being persuaded

• @mcn42 @mcn42 on x

  @RMac18 @alexeheath Most appropriate use of the term “whitelist” ever

• @cahlenhu @cahlenhu on x

  @RMac18 @alexeheath lol, facebook better pray this isn't true. Even the optics of having a “political whitelist” are terrible.

• @markos Markos Moulitsas on x

  Facebook is evil. https://twitter.com/...

• @rmac18 @rmac18 on x

  Facebook's own rationale is that political speech should be “subject to public scrutiny.” If you truly believe that, why not disclose those political accounts that you've whitelisted to spread misinformation so that the public and press can scrutinize them? https://twitter.com/..…

• @davelevitan Dave Levitan on x

  Facebook is always worse than you think https://twitter.com/...

• @brchastain Blake Chastain on x

  how is it always worse than we expected at facebook? https://www.theinformation.com/ ...

• @theinformation @theinformation on x

  A group of internal researchers, citing research that misinformation is more powerful when shared by politicians, were unsuccessful in convincing Facebook leadership to dissolve the list. https://www.theinformation.com/ ...

• @jeffbercovici Jeff Bercovici on x

  And now this! It's almost impressive how willing Facebook is to study problems it patently lacks the political will to address! https://www.theinformation.com/ ...

• @elijsanders Eli Sanders on x

  Huh. Maybe someone's hunch (or private tip) that something like this must exist was behind all those demands for secret Facebook “lists” at last week's Senate hearing? https://wildwest.substack.com/ ... https://twitter.com/...

• @digiphile Alex Howard on x

  So, @facebook had a secret whitelist of Trump administration& regime officials that exempted them from civic integrity policies & enforcement, & an algorithm that penalized progressive news outlets, & conservative Pages lead traffic lists? Tell us more about “bias,” Senators. htt…

• @nickwingfield Nick Wingfield on x

  Great get by @alexeheath about a secret Facebook list of 100k+ gov official/candidate accounts that FB designated as off limits for fact checking https://thein.fo/...

• @evelyndouek Evelyn Douek on x

  “It isn't clear how many political accounts are on Facebook's list now or how it is maintained.” The politician loophole is stupid. But even on its own terms, it exists in the ‘public interest’ and so the lack of transparency around it is doubly nonsense. https://twitter.com/...

• @alexeheath Alex Heath on x

  That didn't happen, but FB did start applying fact-checking and associated content demotion to hoaxes from other sources that politicians re-share (happened to Trump last week with a mail-in ballot video). But fact-checking still doesn't apply to what politicians post themselves.

• @alexeheath Alex Heath on x

  Last year Facebook's researchers asked to end a “whitelist” of over 100K politicians exempt from fact-checking, arguing that it was “protecting content that is especially likely to deceive.” https://thein.fo/...

• @kevinroose Kevin Roose on x

  Facebook also ran tests this year to figure out if “bad for the world” content could be demoted in users' feeds. It could, but there was a problem: it decreased the number of times users opened Facebook. https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/...

• @kevinroose Kevin Roose on x

  Facebook employees also developed a slate of tools to combat misinformation and “hate bait.” But they ran into opposition from policy executives who feared they would disproportionately impact conservatives. https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/...

• @binarybits Timothy B. Lee on x

  According to the NYT, Facebook knows perfectly well how to slow the spread of misinformation on its platform. It has mostly chosen not to do so because the company is run by a sociopath. https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/...

• @kevinroose Kevin Roose on x

  A few days after the election, amid a flood of misinformation, Facebook dialed up a publisher quality score known as NEQ to make authoritative news more prominent. Now, employees wonder if the “nicer news feed” can stay. https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/...

• @justinhendrix Justin Hendrix on x

  Facebook developed but did not implement tools for reducing disinformation and “hate bait” content because it determined the measures mostly impacted right wing users and publishers, reducing engagement, report @kevinroose, @MikeIsaac and @sheeraf: https://www.nytimes.com/...

• @kevinroose Kevin Roose on x

  New by me, @MikeIsaac and @sheeraf: a post-election look inside Facebook, where internal battles are raging about how to balance the sometimes-incompatible goals of growth and goodness. https://www.nytimes.com/...

• @monteiro @monteiro on x

  It is difficult to get a billionaire to understand something when remaining a billionaire depends upon his not understanding it. https://twitter.com/...

• @econ_marshall Marshall Steinbaum on x

  Every tech platform has set out to show why we regulated the industries they each “disrupted” with regulatory arbitrage in the first place. https://twitter.com/...

• @timjacobwise Tim Wise on x

  So basically Facebook is afraid to let right wingers know they lie more than other people, or fall for bullshit because their brains are broken...so they (meaning Facebook) allow lies and bullshit to spread all because they're afraid of being called liberal... https://twitter.com…

• @jessesingal Jesse Singal on x

  Don't worry guys if Facebook chosses to adjust its secret weighting system, based in part on a secret internal indicator of news-outlet quality, in a manner that might harm its own bottom line, fewer conspiracy theories will be spread. It's a good system! https://www.nytimes.com/…

• @electproject Michael McDonald on x

  Related, why Republicans will likely fare better in the 2022 midterms under President Biden: complacent Democrats will more often think all is well https://twitter.com/...

• @monteiro @monteiro on x

  BTW: Props to the workers who actually TRIED here. But you are trying to fix a product that management doesn't see as broken. https://twitter.com/...

• @drvox David Roberts on x

  The fundamental & unsolvable dilemma facing any institution, public or private, that seeks to maintain epistemic standards: enforced neutrally & dispassionately, any real standards will fall disproportionately on the right, which lies more. It's politically untenable. https://twi…

• @zachdcarter Zach Carter on x

  from now on, when I say “break up” facebook, i mean physically break up every piece of machinery the company owns or operates with a sledgehammer https://www.nytimes.com/...

• @can Can Duruk on x

  It's just possible that Zuck is as big a scourge on society as Trump ever was. https://twitter.com/...

• @benshapiro Ben Shapiro on x

  Not at all shocking. And perfectly predictable, given that the establishment media leveraged their pull in order to bully social media to re-establish their monopoly on informational distribution. https://twitter.com/...

• @hawleymo Josh Hawley on x

  .@Facebook throttling conservative outlets to decrease their readership ... #BigTech wants to control all news in America and soon will if we don't stop them https://twitter.com/...

• @mollyjongfast Molly Jong-Fast on x

  We don't spend enough time talking about how Mark Zuckerberg is an evil monster. https://twitter.com/...

• @nytimestech @nytimestech on x

  A debate about a temporary change to the news feed illustrates a central tension that some inside Facebook are feeling acutely these days: that the company's aspirations of improving the world are often at odds with its desire for dominance. https://www.nytimes.com/...

• @ekp Ellen K. Pao on x

  We always knew it was possible to combat hate and misinformation—nowhere near as hard as Facebook made it seem. Now we know that Facebook actually has built a whole set of tolls for dealing with hate and misinformation but chooses not to use it https://twitter.com/...

• @politicussarah Sarah Reese Jones on x

  Facebook policy execs thought combatting hate bait would disproportionately target conservatives. Because it would. And what does that say. https://twitter.com/...

• @mcclure111 Mcc on x

  The reason why Ted Cruz keeps dragging social CEOs into hearings to yell at them is to produce exactly this kind of effect https://twitter.com/...

• @schwanksta Ken Schwencke on x

  Something we intuitively know, but good to see so plainly: Facebook monetizes your anger, and removing content that materially makes the world worse is a threat to its bottom line. https://twitter.com/...

• @alexhern Alex Hern on x

  Something I think is under-discussed is how America's toxic politics harms the rest of the world through nonsense like this. https://twitter.com/...

• @alexhern Alex Hern on x

  The largest social network in the UK has ineffectual tools to combat misinformation despite huge cross-partisan support for them because the extremist ruling party in the US gets to define the “centre ground”

• @ekp Ellen K. Pao on x

  Advertisers should refuse to buy Facebook ads shown next to “bad for the world” content, especially since Facebook has a whole metric that measures it https://twitter.com/...

• @blackamazon @blackamazon on x

  So again the racism is couched in “right wing” and the reports about how targeting Black women and how that metastasized out, but we're ignored for years ? Keep getting shrouded in “left right” . Facebook was RACIST because racism is misinformation and it's still here https://twi…

• @mattzeitlin Matthew Zeitlin on x

  Facebook essentially uses disparate impact analysis for adjustments to the news feed with conservatives as a protected class https://twitter.com/...

• @adamserwer Adam Serwer on x

  Perfectly happy to throttle traffic to liberal outlets for being liberal though. So it's not that they are trying to be neutral. https://www.wsj.com/... https://twitter.com/...

• @natesilver538 Nate Silver on x

  One thing that's striking here is the extent to which Facebook is maximizing for short-term, measurable gains as opposed to long-term brand equity. A better news feed could result in more trust from readers, more partnerships with news organizations, higher internal morale, etc. …

• @jacknicas Jack Nicas on x

  Another change would've retroactively told users that they had shared misinfo but execs rejected it because they feared it would disproportionately affect people who shared posts from right-wing pages. There are plenty more examples in the piece. https://www.nytimes.com/...

• @jacknicas Jack Nicas on x

  A Facebook spokesman told my colleagues: “No News Feed product change is ever solely made because of its impact on time spent.” He said that people who spoke to my colleagues had no decision-making authority. Here's the story. Read it for yourself: https://www.nytimes.com/...

• @jacknicas Jack Nicas on x

  This is far from the only example of execs rejecting changes that were good for the world but bad for FB. A new algorithm that reduced the visibility of posts that users would consider “bad for the world” also lowered Facebook usage. So it was rejected. https://www.nytimes.com/..…

• @jacknicas Jack Nicas on x

  But then Facebook changed it back. Look at the results. Here are the top-performing posts on Facebook just before the election, about a week after the election, and three days after that. For a few days, the world got a tase of a “nicer news feed,” as some FB workers called it ht…

• @jacknicas Jack Nicas on x

  Facebook executives said the change was always intended to be temporary. But that decision upset some employees, illustrating a central tension inside the company: Facebook's goal of improving the world is often at odds with its desire for dominance. https://www.nytimes.com/...

• @davidakaye David Kaye on x

  facebook is not a state, nor a charity, but a corporate behemoth that should stick to basics: avoid causing harm, protect rights. excellent @sheeraf @MikeIsaac @kevinroose story abt a company seemingly always struggling, with itself, to get it right. https://www.nytimes.com/... h…

• @puiwingtam Pui-Wing Tam on x

  Inside the push-pull at Facebook over reducing misinformation and the effect on the amount of time people spend on the site. FB even surveyed users over what they might see as “bad for the world” posts. Fine work by @kevinroose @MikeIsaac @sheeraf https://www.nytimes.com/...

• @sheeraf Sheera Frenkel on x

  NEW- Remember after the election when Facebook's newsfeed suddenly seemed... nicer? That was no accident. It was Facebook cranking the levers and showing us what NewsFeed could look like if they tweaked their algorithms. Story with @kevinroose @MikeIsaac https://www.nytimes.com/.…

• @jeffhauser Jeff Hauser on x

  I wonder what role Facebook's Regulatory Policy Director played in this? https://twitter.com/...

• @colinjones Colin Jones on x

  This is an abject dereliction of responsibility from Facebook and should really piss people off https://www.nytimes.com/...

• @melissaryan Melissa Ryan on x

  Once again Facebook chose engagement over reducing hate and disinformation on the platform. #ShockedNotShocked https://twitter.com/...

• @marklittlenews Mark Little on x

  In which we glimpse “a vision of what a calmer, less divisive Facebook might look like” https://www.nytimes.com/...

• @jesselehrich Jesse Lehrich on x

  .@Facebook built tools to ‘correct the record’ on misinfo & limit ‘hate bait’ — but leadership nixed both to avoid angering the right. https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/...

• @cat_zakrzewski Cat Zakrzewski on x

  This article raises the key question: Why isn't Facebook penalizing repeat purveyors of misinformation? The company did not comment when @sheeraf asked. https://twitter.com/...

• @scottmaustin Scott Austin on x

  We need a better disinfectant for disinformation. https://twitter.com/...

• @jason_kint Jason Kint on x

  Good report. The kicker states one individual, a key source of unsupported election fraud claims, received 3x the Facebook interactions as Washington Post and The New York Times combined for the hashtag. https://twitter.com/...

• @shiraovide Shira Ovide on x

  Hello, this is why accounts with high engagement matter. https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...