That Liberal Bias

The "fake news" controversy is amazing. Here's the problem: Twitter and Google and especially Facebook get flooded with viral fake news. These are sometimes plausible-sounding narratives that look and sound like real news stories, but they are pure fictional bull-oney. There was enough of it this year that it might have been a factor in the election.

Some form of this has been around for a long time, BTW. You didn't really think Brad Pitt and Cher had secretly married and adopted an alien baby, did you?

Why would somebody post fake news, you ask? They post fake news because it fits their world-view, especially their political world-view. It is absolutely plausible to someone that Hillary Clinton is a lesbian who has personally called for the assassination of twenty-three innocent beautiful women in jealous rages. And so totally fictional stories get circulated widely, they go viral and become a part of the background of our thinking. We see it and realize rationally that Hillary probably isn't a murderous jealous lesbian, and so we move on but the garbage leaves a residue, a smell, and that can add up to political points in the long run.

And I would say that the smell was what caused her to lose the election. The most investigated person ever, in history, never charged with anything -- how could she be "a criminal," or even "corrupt?" You say it over and over and people accept it. Wouldn't one of those Republican committees have found something, if there was a crime or corruption? Her big scandal, an email server -- it didn't matter how trivial it was. Nobody could tell you what she had done wrong, but it smelled like she had done something after decades of false accusations. That's why she lost, if you ask me. Even if you know it's wrong, the smell gets to you.

For a long time, people have been calling on Facebook and Twitter and Google, but mostly Facebook, to clean up their act. At least don't put fake news into the "trending" box. How hard could it be?

Well it is harder than you'd think. I think you can imagine the outcry if Facebook suddenly "banned" or de-emphasized the story about Hillary's murderous lesbian rages. That would be anti-conservative censorship!

Facebook used to have human beings manage the trending list, but it became a little scandalous when they actually used -- gasp -- human judgment to add or remove stories. For instance, the Charlie Hebdo attack and the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 did not trend immediately on Facebook, so employees added them. The company was accused though of "manipulating" the news, biasing what Facebook users would see. To fix this, they developed an algorithm for selecting trending topics. They had developed a program to identify and remove fake news, but never implemented it.

According to C-NET:

The software update would have been used in "downgrading and removing" fake news stories from people's Facebook feeds, according to Gizmodo. The update was apparently shelved because it would have disproportionately blocked out supposed stories from right-wing news sites, and Facebook didn't want to give the impression it was politically biased.

So by trying not to be politically biased, did Facebook actually end up favoring the Republican nominee?

I know what you're thinking right now: "Reality has a liberal bias." It's like shooting fish in a barrel.

So why would Facebook even be worried that it looked biased? That reportedly stems from a controversy earlier this year, in which Facebook was accused of encouraging its human staffers to hide conservative news from its "trending stories" feature. After that, Facebook did a review of all its products to make sure there wasn't any appearance of political bias, according to Gizmodo.

"They absolutely have the tools to shut down fake news," one source told Gizmodo.

That bogus news includes a story that claimed an FBI agent associated with the Hillary Clinton email leaks was found dead in a murder suicide (didn't happened). Another fake story said the Pope endorsed Trump (again, nope).

I think we have been consistent here at the Vigilance blog. We're not against people with conservative values, not against Christians or straight people or Republicans. We are opposed to people who decline to use facts and logic to draw conclusions. The fake news situation is exactly what we have been talking about. These are stories that someone would post because it supports their side and makes the other side look bad, even though there is no truth to it.

That is deplorable.

I am not at all impressed by someone who has strong beliefs and has to call on made-up evidence to support them. I can hardly imagine the mind that justifies that.

The denial comes after Zuckerberg last week defended Facebook and its role in the election. He said it took a "profound lack of empathy" to think someone would choose how to vote based on fake news. Over the weekend, he posted a lengthy note on his Facebook page, reiterating that fake news is just a small part of Facebook content. He did say, though, that Facebook still has work to do.

"We have made progress, and we will continue to work on this to improve further," he said.

By "profound lack of empathy," I thnk he is saying that people who rely on logic and facts tend to think that people who prefer fake news are stupid. Is "lack of empathy" really the best term for that?

This story is not going away. A group of Facebook employees have formed a secret task force to address the issue and the outcome is really going to be interesting.

Oh, and Crooks & Liars has an unbelievable story. It turns out that half of the "fake news sites to watch out for" stories are actually fake themselves. C&L discovered that they and Think Progress and Raw Story are on some of the lists. Clickbait fake news providing fake lists of fake news sites. Sad! Use your judgment, people, it is easy to google around and see if a story holds up.

And even more from the HuffPo UK:

Facebook is vouching for the ‘authenticity’ of pages which have distributed false and misleading news to millions of users on its platform, The Huffington Post UK has found.

The firm’s official verification of six pages analysed by HuffPost UK shows the extent of the problem facing the company, as it battles accusations that false news on its network contributed to Donald Trump’s stunning US election victory.

And remember as we are hurled into The Near Future, the mainstream media do the same thing. During the Iraq war, I'd say there was a fake news story every other day in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the cable networks. Cyanide in the Euphrates River, Saddam throwing people into a plastic shredder, WMD launchers discovered, aluminum tubes for refining uranium, it seemed like every day there was fake news tossed into America's driveways. It will be like that now, too, and it is up to us to be vigilant and watch for it, and to speak out against it when we see it.

Maybe "fake news" will lead to a populist epistemological epiphany, where the people have to decide, communally, what is truth, what is knowledge. It has to be something everybody can accept, so nobody loses the revenue from misdirected mouse-clicks. The cool question is, how do you write a computer algorithm that reliably distinguishes valid or true text from text that is false and misleading and propagandistic? This might be the place where AI becomes smarter than people.