Thursday, November 10, 2016

Facebook and Twitter Contend With Their Role in Trump's Victory - Bloomberg

I expect Facebook will be exonerated in this context, based on its substantive terms and policies; Twitter, not so much -- see, e.g., The Twitter Paradox: How A Platform Designed For Free Speech Enables Internet Trolls (NPR)

"Facebook Inc. will have to contend with mounting dissatisfaction over its role as the most widely used news filter in history. Forty-four percent of American adults get their media through the site, many consuming news from partisan sources with which they agree. The proliferation of fake news on Facebook has also been a problem: false stories about the Clinton family committing murder and Huma Abedin being a terrorist flew fast and furious despite refutations from responsible news organizations. Those stories shaped public opinion, said Ed Wasserman, the dean of the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

“This is a landmark,” he said. “Trump was able to get his message out in a way that was vastly influential without undergoing the usual kinds of quality checks that we associate with reaching mass public. You had a whole set of media having influence without really having authority. And the media that spoke with authority, the authority that comes after careful fact checking, didn’t really have the influence.”"
Facebook and Twitter Contend With Their Role in Trump's Victory - Bloomberg

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