tech

Meta trims election misinformation efforts as midterms loom

9 Comments
By AMANDA SEITZ

The requested article has expired, and is no longer available. Any related articles, and user comments are shown below.

© Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

©2024 GPlusMedia Inc.


9 Comments
Login to comment

So when politicians make misleading claims and rile up partisan extremists, it's OK. Just not when anyone else does?

Politicians are blaming the hate they stir up, the lies they spread and their electoral failures on social media. It's pathetic.

quote: the platform magnifies hate and misinformation.

Not as well as the British press have been doing for decades. But the freedom of the press is supposedly one of the foundations of civil society. So why the desire to censor the rest of society, now they too have a voice? Because they are less easy to manipulate and control? Because they are not owned by vested interests?

The internet is not a distorting mirror, it is just a mirror. Blaming a mirror for the way your society appears in it is ridiculous. That's what humanity is like. Deal with it. Social media gives people a voice. If you don't like what they say, improve the quality of your education system and of your parenting, so the voices of the next generation are more civil. And maybe improve the quality of your politicians too, because for some time it has been fearsomely low.

2 ( +2 / -0 )

So if a laptop at a repair shop turns up with incriminating emails that suggest that a candidate is corrupt, Facebook will not block reports on the contents of the emails?

1 ( +3 / -2 )

Election misinformation? Don't you mean censoring everything that doesn't fit the leftist narrative? Yep get'em trimmed.

2 ( +5 / -3 )

Zuckerberg said, "...if we keep trying to do what’s right..." Hmm. Who decides what's right? Him, obviously. Watch out for that boy. He's the metaverse reincarnation of Hitler.

3 ( +4 / -1 )

So during the last election Zuckerberg deliberately targeted Republicans and anyone not left of the left. Now, Republicans and their voters have decided to use Meta less, spend less time and money on Meta and pay for less ads. Meta's stock has tumbled from $380 to $160. Go woke, go broke. When will companies realize that being politically biased will lose them 50% of their customers or stock or interactions? Young people in general are not using Meta and young conservatives try to avoid it where possible!

1 ( +3 / -2 )

Meta / Facebook are fundamentally Democrat aligned, so it is hard not to think, that there may be some hint of bias here. Anyway, US Politics is very divisive, so much so, that you wonder why one half of the Country doesn't take up arms and attack the other ...

-1 ( +0 / -1 )

Since last year, Meta has shut down an examination into how falsehoods are amplified in political ads on Facebook by indefinitely banishing the researchers from the site.

It's going to take dare I say it, 'an insurrection' for democracy to regains its effectiveness, because just about every media company 'protected' by government because of their usefulness to them at election time. Amplification of political message is nothing new, it's how traditional media players gain leverage, by using their editorial power.

But Meta is not alone, look at Twitter who doesn't even need algorithm, they have bots.

https://slate.com/technology/2018/01/twitter-admits-there-were-more-than-50-000-russian-bots-confusing-u-s-voters-in-2016.html

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/04/twitter-bots-were-more-active-than-previously-known-during-2018-midterms-study.html

-1 ( +0 / -1 )

Meta trims election misinformation efforts as midterms loom

Ah, our ministry of truth. Somebody should remind our tech oligarchs that 1984 was supposed to be a fiction book, not an instruction manual.

-1 ( +0 / -1 )

That’s funny because I seem to recall that FB made a rather large amount of money selling space to Russian disinformation firms. Seems it might have had an effect on the election. Doesn’t seem very “leftist” to me....

0 ( +0 / -0 )

Login to leave a comment

Facebook users

Use your Facebook account to login or register with JapanToday. By doing so, you will also receive an email inviting you to receive our news alerts.

Facebook Connect

Login with your JapanToday account

User registration

Articles, Offers & Useful Resources

A mix of what's trending on our other sites