In the dim corner, we have Trump! In the dictator corner, we have Kim! Or is that mixed up?

[TheClaws]

....aand we're expecting a dirty, unfair fight.

Old thread: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/3015872-Trump-yes-we-have-no-Steve-Bannon

Ha! Didn't see your post perking before I too joined in saying "ooh gosh, not sure what to do"

We're good at agreeing there's a problem, aren't we?

Although naming and scoping the problem is an essential first step, so not completely useless.

There is a problem! This seems to be along the same lines: yes we've identified an issue (although it's also approaching it from a business/monopoly-averse perspective) but all attempts so far to control it have failed.

fortune.com/2017/03/09/facebook-google-regulated/

bigly It is easy to say they should remove fake news, but when they know doing that will mean flack from the current ruling party I can understand why they may hesitate.

I can understand why they'd hesitate but I think they should've done it anyway, if it was along the lines of "Clinton runs a child sex shop on the planet Mars". Fear of political backlash shouldn't be a reason not to fact check and/or remove the most obvious stuff I think, although I could be convinced there were greater principles at stake.

A while back Facebook were, IIRC, denying they were a "news organization" - while providing a newsfeed onto people's pages

Yes, but they don't produce the content as such, do they?

Not good news regarding Irma for Florida, Georgia or South Carolina.

www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/07/where-is-hurricane-irma-heading-mapping-the-path-of-destruction

btw, next week I'll be where these storms start off, across the Atlantic. The weather forecast is humidity, heat, thunder and rain

With the main concern now for the islands, of course.

"On Barbuda, the prime minister, Gaston Browne, said 90% of buildings had been destroyed and 50% of the population was homeless.
The French part of St Martin was “95% destroyed”"

Next: Turks and Caicos and the southern Bahamas
Hopefully, it will not hit directly the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

Yes, Facebook don't write the content, they just select and distribute it. And have mechanisms (human or automated) for selecting which news is fed to which people - as opposed to merely being "the whole internet".

So, is something a news organization when part of its business is distributing news?

What about when an organization's advertising revenue depends on clicks, and it's using newsfeeds to drive those clicks? And therefore, just like the front page of the Daily Mail or Times or Elle, will get more clicks for baity fear-shock-sleb headlines?

There's such a huge overlap in business model that organizations like Facebook start having many of the same issues as organizations which actually employ journalists (and even orgs with journalists don't produce all their own content: they too select a lot of material from agencies).

I'm looking at my FB "newsfeed" and it's not news. It's stuff friends posted or from pages that I've chosen to follow. Sometimes I get suggestions of pages.

Not sure how FB can control (or that it should control) either of those.

Or they'd have to stop Trump's weekly address too.

Fuck, this is a bit frightening

Carole Cadwalladr‏ @carolecadwalla

Incredible new paper from man whose Facebook research Cambridge Analytica weaponized for Trump & Brexit. Think of ramifications of this...

hal‏Verified account
@halhod
.@michalkosinski has shown that AI can distinguish between gay and straight faces with superhuman accuracy (by me)

www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21728614-machines-read-faces-are-coming-advances-ai-are-used-spot-signs

The spat last year about Facebook's human editors (subsequently ditched):

Facebook news selection is in hands of editors not algorithms, documents show
Exclusive: Leaked internal guidelines show human intervention at almost every stage of its news operation, akin to a traditional media organization
www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/12/facebook-trending-news-leaked-documents-editor-guidelines

The Atlantic again.

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/

And a few bits from an organization that news organizations pay to place their stories on social media:

Publishers’ paid content distribution on Facebook more than doubled in the past 18 months
keywee.co/publishers-paid-content-distribution-facebook-doubled-past-18-months/

About Keywee
At Keywee, we make stories relevant and powerful for the world’s best storytellers — like The New York Times, The BBC, National Geographic, Forbes, and Red Bull.

Today, people aren’t coming to websites to search for content — stories find their audiences in feeds and apps. The upshot? Distribution is now the key for effective storytelling.

Keywee’s platform unlocks audience insights using AI and data science, and infuses them into every step of the storytelling process: from topic selection, to story creation, to distribution and optimization.

Keywee is backed by leading investors such as Google’s Eric Schmidt and The New York Times, and has been a fast-growing, profitable startup since its inception.

keywee.co/for-publishers-archive/

No matter your goals, Keywee improves your results by making sure you get the right content in front of the right people.
...
Expand your readership
Keywee cost-effectively finds highly-targeted and interested audiences for your content.
...
Keywee partners with you to deliver, measure and report the results your advertisers seek.
...
How it Works
1. Scans your content to understand what it is about
2. Finds audiences on Facebook, Instagram and Yahoo that will act on the content, in line with your business goals
3. Automatically generates numerous variations of paid posts, recommending optimized bids for each selected audience
4. Measures and reports on the performance of your content across channels

Social media 'outstrips TV' as news source for young people
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-36528256

I'm not passing moral judgement on any of this - just saying we ain't in Kansas any more.

The next stage of the spat re the Facebook editors last year:

Facebook fires trending team, and algorithm without humans goes crazy
www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/29/facebook-fires-trending-topics-team-algorithm

Facebook announced late Friday that it had eliminated jobs in its trending module, the part of its news division where staff curated popular news for Facebook users. Over the weekend, the fully automated Facebook trending module pushed out a false story about Fox News host Megyn Kelly, a controversial piece about a comedian’s four-letter word attack on rightwing pundit Ann Coulter, and links to an article about a video of a man masturbating with a McDonald’s chicken sandwich.

OK, own up - which one of you is a bot/spoddy Russian influencer? I seem to be getting a lot of highly interesting content on this thread. (I do idly wonder about this with MN newsy/informative threads BTW. However, as thread is full of stuff that confirms my anti-Trump biases, I'm sticking with it.)

badbadhusky

I wish I was a bot. I'm starving and have to head off for lunch.

Whatever lweji, we know you're plugging yourself into a charger

DON'T EAT THE MCDONALD'S CHICKEN SANDWICH!

I was just thinking that, Perking. I didn't realise they were a 'thing'.

I don't get the chicken sandwich thing - am I missing a meme?

I've created an Irma thread

Read the last line of my post at 13:46:09, badbadhusky I'm not repeating it.