Facebook as a "news source"? Help me out...

First off, this thread is for people who actually use Facebook, not for bitching about Facebook or crowing about how you don’t use it, or disparaging people who do. I have a legit question about Facebook and the discussion is really only best served by people who regularly use the site.

On to my question…There’s a lot in the news about Facebook and “fake news,” including Facebook deciding to make changes to “the newsfeed” and what content it shows to people.

Thing is, I’m a regular FB user (like, all day long) and have been for about 10 years, and I’ve never had Facebook push any news to me. I don’t get news stories on my feed that weren’t shared, liked or commented on by my friends. There’s nothing that I see on Facebook that is produced by Facebook or even really written FOR Facebook - in that, if I see a news story, it’s a link to a story accompanied (hopefully) by a comment by the person who posted the link. It’s a post with a link, just like we see here on the SDMB.

Granted, I do see a lot more posts from non-friends now, but those posts are all by businesses/movies/shows/artists I deliberately chose to follow, and who are advertising their stuff to their followers. I see ThinkGeek posts, PetCo posts, Late Show posts, etc. I see posts by Elizabeth Warren because I follow her. I see posts by Schwebel’s Bread cuz I follow them, even! The only news I see on my newsfeed is from the one newspaper I follow, the local Cleveland indie paper.

And of course piles of junk shared memes and shit from my friends. And their occasional shared news stories.

I do see some “news” on Facebook. When I’m on the desktop version, there will be a list of trending news stories on the right hand side. If any headline grabs me, I can click through and see a feed of all the people who are talking about the headline, and links to outside news sources with stories. But that’s far from front-and-center and it’s far from being pushed to my newsfeed. And in fact when I am in the FB app on my phone, I don’t even see it. The app is just my feed, with all the people and things I follow.

My question is, why doesn’t my experience line up with what Facebook is accused of and admitting to doing with regards to news? How is Facebook controlling any narrative, when my friends are controlling what I see? Even if Facebook banned pages that are putting out “fake news,” that doesn’t stop the entire Web from publishing “fake news” and my friends from sharing links to this “fake news.”

What the heck is going on? What exactly has Facebook done that I’m not seeing?

They already preferentially show you links from your friends (and news stories, etc.) that they think you are interested in. Once they have this in place, it’s not (or wouldn’t be) that hard to make links they identify as “fake news” either not show up on your feeds or severely “downvote” them so you’ll need to go way down on your feed to see them.

Same questions I used to have. I still can’t figure it out, other than the LACK of all viewpoints in the news stories that show up on the right hand side.

Of course, I don’t use Facebook as a news source, so maybe that is the problem.

Every so often I click through, and get a page of Facebook posts with comments about the stories. A lot of the time the comments are cut & pasted duplicates of each other, seemingly posted by regular Facebook users and often starting with “I don’t like to be political on here but…” heh But anyway, the posts are all linking to a handful of the same 5 or 6 news stories (same topic, different outlets), and a quick glance lets me see see if the sources are all baloney blogs or if there’s some legit news outlets. If there’s legit news outlets, I might click through to read more. If it’s all bogus outlets, I just ignore the whole thing.

But still, this is ONLY on the desktop version and ONLY if I choose to look at the headlines and then click through, and I ONLY get to the news stories if I click through once more.

So I’m not sure how this equates to “Facebook pushing news” to me.

Me neither. But how are other people actually using Facebook as a “news source” anyway?

I agree with everything you’ve posted. I don’t know either.

OK, so let’s say that you’re in the right wing Brietbart/conspiracy bubble. Most of your friends agree with you, and they share lots of crazy-ass stories from dubious sources and Russian bots.

To you, this IS news. This is what these people take for news. They’ve been told, over and over, by their heroes, that normal “mainstream media” cannot be trusted.

If I have a FB friend who espouses these same views and I haven’t unfollowed them, I probably still won’t see these stories because I’ve blocked certain outlets from showing up on my news feed, and also my FB habits show FB that I’m a liberal, and am not going to respond positively to that crap. Since FB doesn’t want me to leave the site, they don’t show me things they know I won’t like. Likewise, my crazy racist uncle isn’t seeing stories from the Washington Post, because they’re going to piss him off.

I think this is basically all there is to it.

The main thing that I use facebook for is groups. There are groomer’s groups and equipment maintenance groups and community groups that are useful to follow.

I think I have visited my own page maybe a dozen times since I set up the account.

There are also people that share stories and news articles on these groups. Sometimes, the stories shared were very political and/or inciteful.

I would think that if you are in a political group, it would be worse.

It’s not so much that people are using FB as a “go to” news source, I suspect that there’s a hell of a lot of people whose only exposure to current affairs is whatever turns up in their news feed.

I think I don’t technically fit the criteria for answering this, but this was my experience. And it happens even if you have good intentions. I was constantly inundated with news on Facebook, but I think it also depends on what articles you’re clicking ‘‘like’’ on. Facebook’s algorithms are pretty fascinating. This article sort of explains the phenomenon I encountered of an unintentional, self-perpetuated echo chamber.

I subscribed to several different news sources including ones that didn’t fit my views in an attempt to even things out. But it never worked for me. I always ended up stuck in a stream of biased everything. I genuinely tried to break out, more than once, but I felt like I was trapped in a bubble.

I think if your friends aren’t very politically minded or not constantly posting news articles, maybe it doesn’t affect you as much. What it comes down to is that you decide the content that you see, but you’re often deciding it unconsciously. If you’re in a situation like mine, with lots of like-minded and highly political friends, you are, in effect, creating your own echo chamber whether you mean to or not.

I get a “Trending” list on the upper right corner of my feed with multiple news links, which can be expanded even further. This is what’s in my Trending right now:
Google Home
Google Home Devices Programmed to Recognize Muhammad… ‑ www1.cbn.com
Walmart
Walmart to Face Discrimination Suit Over Hair Products: Atty ‑ nbclosangeles.com
Joe Kennedy III
In step to national stage, a young Kennedy to rebut Trump address ‑ rawstory.com
University of Washington
Swatting away a mosquito prevents bites - even if you miss ‑ uk.news.yahoo.com
Fairfax County, Virginia
Body of Missing Virginia 16-Year-Old Girl Found ‑ nbcwashington.com
Hillary Clinton
HUGE! New Report Shows Hillary Shielding A Top Campaign Aide… ‑ dailycaller.com
US International Trade Commission
Feds decide Delta importing Bombardier jets from Canada won’t hurt… ‑ usatoday.com
Mark Hollis
Michigan State athletic director Mark Hollis steps down in wake of Larry… ‑ freep.com
FedEx
Memphis-based FedEx Corp. announces multibillion-dollar… ‑ bizjournals.com
Nutella
Nutella fans brawl for discounted hazelnut

I also get news articles from the websites and Facebook pages I like or subscribe to.

I don’t even bother with the “Trending” stuff. I get my news from either the source itself or from the source’s app. I also watch the news on TV whenever possible.

I’m surprised no one mentioned that yet. I believe that’s what all the concern is about. That’s the only news that I’ve ever seen served up by facebook. But now that I think about it, I don’t think that shows up on the mobile app. So if you’re spending all day on facebook, on your phone, you might not be aware of it.

Now, this is a good time to mention a browser extension called FBPurity. I picked it up because it was the only thing I could find to get rid of the ads, but it also can change up just about anything on your facebook page (the way it shows up on your screen, that is). It rearranges your feed priority to your liking, changes what see and what you don’t see in your feed, and in both the right and left column and a ton of other stuff.

Earlier this year my brother posted an update, “looking forward to my mother-in-law’s birthday party tonight”.

I know for a fact that was fake news.

I talk about “trending” items in my OP in the 6th paragraph. My point about “trending” is that it’s just headlines, takes some clicking to read, and is only on the desktop version. It’s not in my newsfeed.

My Avast antivirus is alerting me to a concern on this page (I couldn’t screenshot the popup box telling me about the HTML Facebook Phish, blah, blah).

I turned my antivirus off to post this.

Last night, I was trying to do a facebook game with a friend and get our accounts linked so I could help power level him.

When I was on his timeline was the first time I noticed this.

I don’t know if I saw it before and it just didn’t register as irrelevant spam, and I only noticed it now because of this thread, but most of the places I visit on facebook do not have it.

You have to click to bring up the whole article, but if you hover, it brings up a box that has a summary or first few lines of the article.

Yeah, I forgot to point out that you can hover over that to get a sentence or two, but if you click on it you get pages upon pages upon pages of every news outlet in the world covering (or copying) the same thing. One could certainly see how facebook could “influence” what they call trending and/or what they show you on the page when you click through and call it curating.

You also have to remember, they’re a private (public, I know) company and can do whatever they want. They’re not even a news outlet. I understand people get frustrated because they feel it leans this way or that but don’t look at it.

And no, they’re not restricting freedom of speech because they showed a whole bunch of news stuff that you didn’t like and not enough that you did like. That’s not how that works.

I always assumed all of this was talking about the Trending tab, which previously was a News tab or similar, with actual full on headlines. That’s the news that Facebook actually vets.

I guess I do occasionally see some articles that my friends have commented on, and I of course see what people choose to share. But I’ve only seen articles with “So and so liked this” so rarely that I assumed it was just Facebook trying to give me content.

I do remember a lot of people sharing political stuff in the past, but I went through a wizard marking such posts as unwanted. I also block any clearly politically leaning “news source.” So I guess that stuff was there. But I don’t really consider that Facebook’s fault.

Your wall is just a place for personal stories and rumors and gossip, not any source for real information. Well, unless you subscribe to it, as my mom does to the local news.

I always assumed it was based on these “reports” that I’ve seen shared by a few very nice, but very gullible, friends. They have a “breaking news” banner or something similar that make it look like a legitimate and important news story (and usually includes a misleading headline of some sort) and if you click on the meme to get to the story, it is inevitably a bogus news site with some ridiculously slanted “story” that wouldn’t be believed by a whole lot of people - but enough to get it shared frequently. It literally is “fake news” but most of the people sharing it don’t click on it to find that out (or don’t recognize the site as bogus) and just pass the misleading headline around. I’ve hidden/blocked enough of those sites that I don’t seem to see much of it any more and one friend, in particular, seems to have caught on after asking how to tell if it’s “fake news” and getting good responses to that question, to the point that she no longer shares stuff like that, thank goodness!