What doesn’t make sense to me is the level of concern about Facebook and the level of “fake news” that people get from that platform. Is that little “trending” box in the upper right is what has everyone concerned? I had never noticed it until this thread, and it sounds like others here overlook it as well. It just doesn’t add up.
It doesn’t even show up on the mobile version of Facebook. People are up in arms I think because a lot of the trending stories were anti-Conservative.
Sort of like why I keep hearing from certain people how SNL isn’t that funny this year, and wish they would stop with the political jokes.
Yeah that’s where I’m at. I mentioned in my OP that I am aware of “Trending” and I don’t think it’s the problem. The stories I’ve read about the problem literally say “Facebook puts stories in the newsfeed.” That is not the same as “Trending.” If people were going to get in a tizzy about 3 news headlines off to the side of a desktop Web layout, they’d have been with the torches and pitchforks years ago when “personalized homepages” were a big thing.
I think Spice Weasel may have uncovered it, actually. She basically says that Facebook will not put news stories from your friends up in your newsfeed that it thinks you won’t like. Or maybe that Facebook doesn’t like. So if I have 17 friends “liking” (clicking the “like” button of) 17 different news stories, I might only see that 4 of the “liked” news stories because those stories were agreeable to me/Facebook.
I’d like to think that this is all just people who yell about stuff being confused about how Facebook actually works, but with Zuckerberg up there saying “yeah, we’re doing a bad job, we’ll do better” I feel that I am the one who is confused.
The third post when I scroll down my feed is a “suggested post” and it’s unrelated to any of my friends and likes. Every five or so posts is like that and they’re currently all hawking some product, but I believe they used to include articles and videos.
I see those too, naita, but for me they’ve always been ads for products (usually products I’ve just looked at on Amazon!)
I didn’t recall seeing that, so I just pulled up Facebook and I don’t see anything like that.
Those are all ads. If it’s not something a friend put in your feed, someone paid to put it there.
It seems to come and go. I’ll see it for a while, to the point where facebook becomes unusable, then it’ll be gone for a while. I don’t know if they’re trying to find a balance or what, but it gets pretty bad. When it gets bad, as I scroll, I’ll report every.single.one of them. Hit the report post button, pick some random thing to report it for (offends me, fake news, scam etc), then go back, hit it again, and block it. I really don’t care the advertiser takes a hit from it. If it’s making FB unusable, it doesn’t matter to me.
In any case, as I said earlier, eventually, I installed FB Purity. So far as I know it only works on a regular computer, but no more of those ads.
FTR, I understand this is how FB makes money, but if it’s so intrusive I close the app, it’s not working.
Maybe that is it, I don’t know. I also wonder how many people are just jumping on the bandwagon. That is, the next time someone complained about this, if you could grab them, talk to them face to face and ask them, specifically what the problem is…could they tell you?
Be it not getting stories from their friends or getting the ‘wrong’ stories in the trending area, I still think a lot of people are getting really wound up. I have lawyer friends (religious right, mind you) screaming that this is a freedom of speech issue. These people know better, which tells me that for whatever reason they’re not thinking clearly about the issue and I don’t know why. It’s FB FFS.
ETA, I think it’s it’s more of a ‘liberal news is a lie and it must be crushed any time it pops up, regardless of the content’. If those headlines all came from Fox, but were made to look like they came from liberal sources, would all those people still be flipping out? That would show if it’s about the content or the source. Are they reading it or toeing the line?
My experience has been that my right wing friends will share anything that smears Obama, praises Donald, damns Democrats, blacks, Muslims, etc. These right wingers of course have tons of right wing friends and when one shares, they all share. So their news feeds are little more than right wing propaganda and they build their own realities around the memes shared by people they agree with. Many of these articles and memes were created in St Petersburg bot farms.
I can believe that what they are talking about is a result of the bubble effect, but then I wish they would just say that. Don’t say it’s just about fake news. The issue is how Facebook creates a bubble of things you like, since their only goal is to keep you on the platform. They want you to like the content. Even if it’s something that makes you angry, they want it to be a story about how bad that thing that makes them angry is.
I do constantly hear my parents bringing up stuff, and I remind them that Facebook is just a rumor mill, and even if it looks all news-like doesn’t mean it’s really news. I think that may be the problem: we’ve been conditioned to trust print as true. We’ve learned to trust news as true. Throw in some outrage, and we don’t think carefully and go by the instinct.
And while this selective skepticism is definitely a bad thing, I do think that maybe we are still going the right direction. We just need to push people to be more skeptical of stuff that affirms their biases, and to actually learn how to check if something is true.