Nov. 24, 2016 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
11:15
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| So in the wake of Trump's victory, many left-wing activists have been demanding the head of Mark Zuckerberg, because Donald Trump said Facebook and Twitter helped him win. | |
| And many other left-wing outlets are also reinforcing that by saying, well, actually, this is how Facebook helped Donald Trump win the presidency. | |
| And naturally, Zuckerberg is trying to distance himself from this narrative. | |
| But he couldn't do it, and it seems to have stuck. | |
| So he released this statement. | |
| A lot of you have asked what we're doing about misinformation, so I wanted to give an update. | |
| The bottom line is, we take misinformation seriously. | |
| Our goal is to connect people with stories that they find most meaningful, and we know people want accurate information. | |
| Okay, Mark, I'll just hold you there. | |
| I actually don't think they do. | |
| I think that the reason the media can accurately describe various political campaigns as post-factual is because people want their biases confirmed. | |
| They don't necessarily want the truth. | |
| He says, we've been working on this problem for a long time and we take this responsibility seriously. | |
| We've made significant progress, but there is more work to be done. | |
| I have to say, Mark, I think this was a bit of a mistake. | |
| You should never have accepted responsibility for what other people do with your social network. | |
| Your responsibility is to make sure that your site works within the bounds of the law of whichever countries are using it, not to police the quality of the content put on there by your users. | |
| But now you have accepted responsibility for it, you're going to find yourself with a Sisyphian task that simply will never be completed. | |
| Let's take a look at Mark's 7-point action plan in the order of least objectionable first. | |
| Stronger detection. | |
| The most important thing we can do is improve our abilities to classify misinformation. | |
| This means better technical systems to detect what people will flag as false before they do it themselves. | |
| Okay, maybe this isn't the least objectionable. | |
| I'm very curious how they're going to figure out what people will flag before they even do it, but stronger detection is, in principle, not a bad thing. | |
| Easy reporting. | |
| Making it much easier for people to report stories as fake will help us catch more misinformation faster. | |
| Well, that's probably true, and I don't see why reporting false information should be difficult. | |
| That's fine. | |
| Related articles quality. | |
| We are raising the bar for stories that appear in related articles under links in news feeds. | |
| Okay, well, I'd no objection to raising the bar and improving quality, but as with all of the points so far, Mark, this appears to really be a matter of opinion. | |
| Warnings. | |
| We are exploring labelling stories that have been flagged as false by third parties or our community, and showing warnings when people read or share them. | |
| Okay, now I am starting to get a little bit suspicious, Mark, as in who will these third parties be, and which particular moral busybodies will be entrusted with deciding what is false and what is not. | |
| Disrupting fake news economics. | |
| A lot of misinformation is driven by financially motivated spam. | |
| We're looking into disrupting the economics with ad policies like the one we announced earlier this week and better ad farm detection. | |
| Well again, on the surface I see nothing wrong with trying to avoid ad farms and trying to disrupt the economics of fake news. | |
| It just depends on what is classified as fake news. | |
| Listening. | |
| We will continue to work with journalists and others in the news industry to get their input, in particular to better understand their fact-checking systems and learn from them. | |
| Well Jesus Christ Mark, I'm not sure that's a wise idea. | |
| Have you not been paying attention to what mainstream media journalists have been doing and saying and the nonsense they've been trying to pass off as truth? | |
| I mean, maybe that's the sort of thing you might want to take a few precautions with. | |
| Third-party verification. | |
| There are many respected fact-checking organizations, and while we've reached out to some, we plan to learn from many more. | |
| Right, okay, Mark, I really am having trouble believing that this is going to be a non-partisan, impartial, unbiased method of detecting what is, quote, fake news. | |
| I have a very funny feeling this is going to be useful for people's agendas. | |
| And let's be honest, Mark, where the fuck are you thinking about finding these noble, impartial journalists? | |
| What are you going to do? | |
| Call up the New York Times and take lessons from them? | |
| I wouldn't bother. | |
| They recently said that they were planning to re-dedicate themselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism, and that is to report America and the world honestly. | |
| Because up until that point, they weren't. | |
| And this is their admission of that. | |
| What do you do? | |
| Phone up MSNBC and ask them how exactly journalism is done. | |
| Because I think I'd save yourself the time and effort and not waste the money on the phone call. | |
| The Clinton campaign believed until 9 o'clock that they had a lock on this, that they were going to win. | |
| The fault of that actually lies with the media. | |
| And there is some self-reflection. | |
| Jim Rutenberg today writes a fascinating article where the New York Times, editor, and others basically come to terms with the fact that they stopped being journalists over the past month and began being cheerleaders and began being people who had a conclusion that they reached and then searched for facts to show that Hillary Clinton was a 92, | |
| 93, 99.999% chance winner of winning this campaign. | |
| Probably shouldn't come as any surprise then that only 6% of Americans actually trust their media. | |
| A survey done this year found that 41% hardly have any confidence and another 52% they have only some confidence in the press to accurately portray and translate the actual events to them honestly. | |
| And this is down from a survey from last year which only 7% of Americans trusted the media. | |
| And they think this because the media constantly lies to them by their own admission. | |
| Why you think talking to the mainstream media and professional journalists about what is and what isn't fake news sounds particularly ill-advised to me. | |
| But, you know, don't take my word for it. | |
| I only deal with the media on a daily basis. | |
| I only do this all the fucking time. | |
| What would I know about this subject? | |
| I mean, I could give you a list as long as my fucking arm of stories that are simply fabricated. | |
| The amount of times both left and right wing media have found an unreliable witness to give them a story that feeds into a larger narrative that they are trying to spin is just despicable. | |
| I'm not going to waste my time listing them. | |
| Anyone could Google Jackie UVA. | |
| Anyone could look at George Zimmerman's edited tapes. | |
| Anyone can just Google this for themselves and I'm not wasting my time. | |
| There are just too many examples of this. | |
| It is too categoric. | |
| And again, they have admitted all of this themselves. | |
| They know that they were out of touch and they were out of touch because they bought into their own lies. | |
| Because it made them feel good. | |
| It made them feel morally superior. | |
| So who are you going to trust, Mark? | |
| I mean, you could, let's be honest, let's go to the last bastion of real rigor and honesty. | |
| Academia. | |
| Massachusetts professors' list of false, misleading news sites goes viral. | |
| With as much help as possible from the mainstream media. | |
| Why do you think that was? | |
| Because this list was a list of websites that was simply pulled out of this professor's asshole. | |
| As you can see by these categories, this is not actually a list of false news sites. | |
| This is a list of sites that this professor simply doesn't agree with. | |
| And naturally, the list included any of the new, more popular right-wing sites that are exactly as credible as the left-wing mainstream media news sites. | |
| This obvious bias in this list caused people to have a look into the quote-unquote professor who wrote it. | |
| And it turned out to be an assistant professor who'd been in their job for 15 months who was a radical left-wing feminist activist. | |
| This was bullshit. | |
| And it was then retracted by the assistant professor because it was bullshit. | |
| You have to understand, Mark, you are all fake news to the general public. | |
| The problem with the mainstream media is that it is full of activists first and journalists second. | |
| These people care more about their ideological causes and they are more than willing to distort or fabricate the truth in order to push their agenda. | |
| I personally do not use Facebook anymore. | |
| I'm actually far more attached to minds.com these days. | |
| It's like a kind of Facebook-Twitter hybrid, but with the strengths of each. | |
| It's still in development, so there are probably more changes to come down the pipeline. | |
| But overall, I'm finding it much better. | |
| And I've started doing some exclusive video content there because you can upload videos there like you do to Facebook and YouTube. | |
| And I'm quite enjoying it. | |
| And I figured it was nice to have a little something. | |
| So I'm putting just general ideas and rambles on there that don't make it onto my YouTube channel. | |
| So if you want to follow me, a link will be in the description. | |
| But seriously, I think Facebook is terrible. | |
| Ever since they started throttling the number of views, depending on how much promotion you did on Facebook itself, I've really been turned off by the entire site. | |
| I mean, that for me was the major issue. | |
| If 5,000 people are subscribed to me on Facebook, and for some reason, when I post something, Facebook only serves it to like 30 or 40 of them, Facebook is not fit for purpose in my mind. | |
| And now if Facebook is going to start censoring things based on what they quote-unquote decide is fake news, then I don't trust their ability to be impartial and accurate when deciding what is going to be fake news. | |
| Especially when Zuckerberg says that he's going to go and ask the mainstream media, the very same mainstream media that just had a catastrophic failure in the US presidential elections. | |
| And this is in addition to Twitter censoring political opinions that they don't agree with. | |
| I mean, these are political opinions that I don't agree with, but I believe they should have a platform just like everyone else. | |
| And then it becomes for the public to decide. | |
| I would definitely recommend using a social media platform that wasn't politicized in this way. | |
| Facebook and Twitter are not these platforms. |
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