Facebook is in denial.
Donald J. Trump’s supporters were probably heartened in September, when, according to an article shared nearly a million times on Facebook, the candidate received an endorsement from Pope Francis. Their opinions on Hillary Clinton may have soured even further after reading a Denver Guardian article that also spread widely on Facebook, which reported days before the election that an F.B.I. agent suspected of involvement in leaking Mrs. Clinton’s emails was found dead in an apparent murder-suicide.
There is just one problem with these articles: They were completely fake.
The pope, a vociferous advocate for refugees, never endorsed anyone. The Denver Guardian doesn’t exist. Yet thanks to Facebook, both of these articles were seen by potentially millions of people. Although corrections also circulated on the social network, they barely registered compared with the reach of the original fabrications.
This is not an anomaly: I encountered thousands of such fake stories last year on social media — and so did American voters, 44 percent of whom use Facebook to get news.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief, believes that it is “a pretty crazy idea” that “fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of content, influenced the election in any way.” In holding fast to the claim that his company has little effect on how people make up their minds, Mr. Zuckerberg is doing real damage to American democracy — and to the world.
He is also contradicting Facebook’s own research.
In 2010, researchers working with Facebook conducted an experiment on 61 million users in the United States right before the midterm elections. One group was shown a “go vote” message as a plain box, while another group saw the same message with a tiny addition: thumbnail pictures of their Facebook friends who had clicked on “I voted.” Using public voter rolls to compare the groups after the election, the researchers concluded that the second post had turned out hundreds of thousands of voters.
In 2012, Facebook researchers again secretly tweaked the newsfeed for an experiment: Some people were shown slightly more positive posts, while others were shown slightly more negative posts. Those shown more upbeat posts in turn posted significantly more of their own upbeat posts; those shown more downbeat posts responded in kind. Decades of other research concurs that people are influenced by their peers and social networks.
All of this renders preposterous Mr. Zuckerberg’s claim that Facebook, a major conduit for information in our society, has “no influence.”
The problem with Facebook’s influence on political discourse is not limited to the dissemination of fake news. It’s also about echo chambers. The company’s algorithm chooses which updates appear higher up in users’ newsfeeds and which are buried. Humans already tend to cluster among like-minded people and seek news that confirms their biases. Facebook’s research shows that the company’s algorithm encourages this by somewhat prioritizing updates that users find comforting.
I’ve seen this firsthand. While many of my Facebook friends in the United States lean Democratic, I do have friends who voted for Mr. Trump. But I had to go hunting for their posts because Facebook’s algorithm almost never showed them to me; for whatever reason the algorithm wrongly assumed that I wasn’t interested in their views.
Content geared toward these algorithmically fueled bubbles is financially rewarding. That’s why YouTube has a similar feature in which it recommends videos based on what a visitor has already watched.
It’s also why, according to a report in BuzzFeed News, a bunch of young people in a town in Macedonia ran more than a hundred pro-Trump websites full of fake news. Their fabricated article citing anonymous F.B.I. sources claiming Hillary Clinton would be indicted, for example, got more than 140,000 shares on Facebook and may well have been viewed by millions of people since each share is potentially seen by hundreds of users. Even if each view generates only a fraction of a penny, that adds up to serious money.Photo
Mark Zuckerberg, chairman and chief executive of Facebook. CreditEric Risberg/Associated Press
Of course, fake news alone doesn’t explain the outcome of this election. People vote the way they do for a variety of reasons, but their information diet is a crucial part of the picture.
After the election, Mr. Zuckerberg claimed that the fake news was a problem on “both sides” of the race. There are, of course, viral fake anti-Trump memes, but reporters have found that the spread of false news is far more common on the right than it is on the left.
The Macedonian teenagers found this, too. They had experimented with left-leaning or pro-Bernie Sanders content, but gave up when they found it wasn’t as reliable a source of income as pro-Trump content. But even if Mr. Zuckerberg were right and fake news were equally popular on both sides, it would still be a profound problem.
Only Facebook has the data that can exactly reveal how fake news, hoaxes and misinformation spread, how much there is of it, who creates and who reads it, and how much influence it may have. Unfortunately, Facebook exercises complete control over access to this data by independent researchers. It’s as if tobacco companies controlled access to all medical and hospital records.
These are not easy problems to solve, but there is a lot Facebook could do. When the company decided it wanted to reduce spam, it established a policy that limited its spread. If Facebook had the same kind of zeal about fake news, it could minimize its spread, too.
If anything, Facebook has been moving in the wrong direction. It recently fired its (already too few) editors responsible for weeding out fake news from its trending topics section. Unsurprisingly, the section was then flooded with even more spurious articles.
This June, just as the election season was gearing up, Facebook tweaked its algorithm to play down posts from news outlets and to increase updates shared by friends and family. The reasonable explanation is that that’s what people want to see. Did this mean less reputable stories spread quickly through social networks while real journalism got depressed? Only Facebook knows. Worse, Facebook doesn’t flag or mark credible news websites: The article from The Denver Guardian, a paper that doesn’t even exist, has the same format on the platform as an article from The Denver Post, a real newspaper.
In addition to doing more to weed out lies and false propaganda, Facebook could tweak its algorithm so that it does less to reinforce users’ existing beliefs, and more to present factual information. This may seem difficult, but perhaps the Silicon Valley billionaires who helped create this problem should take it on before setting out to colonize Mars.
Facebook should also allow truly independent researchers to collaborate with its data team to understand and mitigate these problems. A more balanced newsfeed might lead to less “engagement,” but Facebook, with a market capitalization of more than $300 billion and no competitor in sight, can afford this.
This should not be seen as a partisan issue. The spread of false information online is corrosive for society at large. In a 2012 opinion essay in The Times, the Obama campaign’s successful social media and data strategy to warn about the potential dangers of polarization and distasteful political methods, like misinformation on social media.
And the dangers of Facebook’s current setup are not limited to the United States. The effects can be even more calamitous in countries with fewer checks and balances, and weaker institutions and independent media. In Myanmar, for example, misinformation on Facebook has reportedly helped fuel ethnic cleansing, creating an enormous refugee crisis.
Facebook may want to claim that it is remaining neutral, but that is a false and dangerous stance. The company’s business model, algorithms and policies entrench echo chambers and fuel the spread of misinformation.
Letting this stand is not neutrality; it amplifies the dangerous currents roiling the world. When Facebook is discussed in tomorrow’s history books, it will probably not be about its quarterly earnings reports and stock options.
Donald Trump’s Scandals and Insults: A Scorecard
Ironically, it is the insults that are likely to do more damage than the scandals.
It is hard to keep track of all of Donald Trump's almost daily legal and personal scandals as well as the many people and groups he's insulted. For those who like keeping score, I've provided a list. Both the scandals and the insults pose liabilities for Trump’s campaign, but perhaps ironically, it is the insults that are likely to do more damage than the scandals.
Supporters of Hillary Clinton seem to believe that each Trump scandal adds to voters’ negative assessment of his fitness to be president, like a snowball that gets bigger and bigger as it rolls downhill. But that doesn’t seem to be happening. Instead, each day’s scandal seems to push the previous one out of our collective memories. There are so many of them—and the details are so complicated and bizarre—that it is hard to keep track of them. The most recent scandal involves the Trump Foundation, which, according to an investigation by the Washington Post, Trump has illegally used to avoid taxes, pay business expenses, and create the misleading impression that he’s a generous philanthropist. Each day, the Post seems to discover yet another way that Trump has misused the foundation to feather his nest. But no sooner have we started to understand the magnitude of Trump’s misdeeds with his foundation than we are confronted with another scandal—his illegal business dealings with Cuba during the U.S. embargo, which Newsweek just uncovered.
Trying to remember the scandals surrounding the Trump Foundation and Trump’s dealings with Cuba leaves us little room in our brains to recall the U.S. Justice Department’s lawsuit against Trump for discriminating against blacks in his apartment buildings; or the illegal con job he foisted on the unwitting “students” of his bogus Trump University; or the many employees (waiters, dishwashers, and plumbers, among others) and contractors he stiffed in his business dealings by failing to pay them for services they rendered; or the several women who have charged Trump of raping them as well as many others who have accused Trump of being a sexual predator; or the many stories that have linked Trump to the mafia in his hotel and casino business activities; or his misuse of at least four business bankruptcies to avoid paying his creditors and his taxes; or Trump’s failure to pay federal income taxes despite his wealth; or his hiring of undocumented workers for one of his real estate projects and his failure, as a federal judge found, to pay them or to provide safe working conditions, as required by law; or Trump’s repeated fines for breaking rules related to his operation of his casinos; or the Federal Trade Commission’s $750,000 fine against Trump for failing to disclose his purchases of stock in two rival casino companies, which flouted the nation’s anti-trust laws; or Trump’s misuse of his $55,000 of campaign donations to purchase copies of his book, Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again, from which he receives royalties—a violation of Federal Election Commission rules; or the foreign models who worked for Trump Model Management in this country without having proper visas and permits. And this is just a partial list!
One might think that all these scandals would lead voters to view Trump as a corrupt, irresponsible law-breaker unfit to be president. But there are so many of them that it is difficult to keep Trump’s crimes and calumnies straight. Most of us only have a big enough attention span to remember the most recent scandal.
On the other hand, most Americans have a pretty good memory for names and faces, so it is easier to remember at least some of the long list of people whom Trump has insulted, in part because we can identify with these individuals. We are all aware of Trump’s steady use of mockery, bullying and belittlement against people with whom he disagrees, who have criticized him, or whose looks or handicaps he finds troubling.
So while Clinton’s supporters might not gain much ground reminding voters about Trump’s multiple business and personal scandals, they are on firmer ground calling attention to the people who have been targets of Trump’s demeaning insults. That’s why Hillary Clinton scored big in the first debate Monday night when she brought up Trump’s history of calling women “pigs,” “slobs,” and “dogs,” and, in particular, the insults he hurled at former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, including calling her “Miss Housekeeping” and “Miss Piggy.” Unable to let Clinton’s comments pass, Trump has spent the last few days continuing his defamation of Machado for having gained weight while she was Miss Universe.
But voters might have some difficulty retrieving the specific epithets that Trump has used against people over the years. So here is a very partial list of the people he’s insulted and the words he’s used to attack them.
Khizr and Ghazala Khan: After Khizr Khan—the father of Humayun, a U.S. Army captain who was killed in Iraq and was awarded the Bronze Star Medal and the Purple Heart—gave a speech at the Democratic convention condemning Trump for his comments about Muslims and pulled out a pocket-sized copy of the Constitution to asked if Trump knew about the right to equal protection, Trump struck back. Trump not only said that Khan had “viciously attacked” him but also erroneously claimed that Khan’s wife Ghazala was not allowed to speak because she was Muslim. “She probably, maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say,” Trump said on ABC News.
Judge Gonzalo Curiel: Trump attacked Curiel, a judge who is presiding over a trial brought by people who were scammed by Trump University. Trump accused Curiel of having “an absolute conflict” that should prevent him from presiding over the Trump University case because Curiel, a United States citizen who was born in Indiana to immigrants from Mexico, is “of Mexican heritage.” Trump said that Curiel could not be fair because “I’m building a wall” on the U.S.-Mexican border. At a campaign rally, Trump claimed that “I have a judge who is a hater of Donald Trump, a hater. He’s a hater,” despite the fact that Curiel has ruled in favor of Trump on most of his lawyer’s requests.
The Central Park Five: In 1989 five teenage men, four African Americans and one Latino, were wrongfully convicted of raping a 28-year-old white woman who was jogging in New York City. The media quickly labeled them the “Central Park Five.” As soon as they were arrested, Trump led the charge against them. He paid a reported $85,000 to take out advertising space in four of the city’s newspapers, including the New York Times, under the headline “Bring Back The Death Penalty. Bring Back The Police!” In those ads, Trump wrote: “I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes. They must serve as examples so that others will think long and hard before committing a crime or an act of violence.” Trump’s words were hardly subtle—he was calling for the boys to die. All five boys pleaded not guilty at the trial but despite the lack of DNA evidence linking any of them to the crime scene, the jury found all five boys guilty. The judge sentenced them to serve five to 15 years in prison. Michael Warren, a respected New York civil rights lawyer who later represented the Central Park Five, said that Trump’s ads “poisoned the minds of many people who lived in New York and who, rightfully, had a natural affinity for the victim. Notwithstanding the jurors’ assertions that they could be fair and impartial, some of them or their families, who naturally have influence, had to be affected by the inflammatory rhetoric in the ads.” In 2002, Matias Reyes, a violent serial rapist and murderer serving a life sentence, confessed to the Central Park rape, stating that he had acted by himself. When the DNA evidence was re-examined, it showed that Reyes’ semen alone was found on the rape victim’s body. That year, New York’s Supreme Court vacated the convictions against each member of the Central Park Five, whose lives had been shattered by their prison terms and who, had Trump had his way, would have been given the death sentence for a crime they did not commit.
Serge Kovaleski: At a campaign rally, Trump flailed his arms and mocked the disabled reporter Kovaleski, a New York Times reporter who suffers from a chronic condition that limits the movement of his arms. Kovaleski had challenged Trump’s claim that after 9/11 Muslims in New Jersey had celebrated the attacks.
Megyn Kelly: After the Fox News anchor asked Trump about his many anti-women comments over the years, Trump said: “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever.”
Senator John McCain: At a candidate forum in Ohio, Trump mocked McCain, who spent more than five years as a prisoner in North Vietnam. “He’s a war hero
because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured, OK? I hate to tell you. He’s a war hero because he was captured, OK?”
Carly Fiorina: “Look at that face!” Trump told a Rolling Stone reporter on his private plane when Fiorina, then his Republican rival for president, appeared on a television screen. “Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?
Pope Francis: After the pope criticized Trump’s proposal to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border, Trump said that the pope’s comments were “really not very nice.” But then he went further, claiming that that the Islamic State (ISIS) wanted viewed the Vatican as its “ultimate trophy” and that the pope would “would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been president because this would not have happened.”
This list doesn’t even include Trump’s wholesale insults against Muslims, Mexicans, and Jews, or his nasty and misinformed comments about rivals Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, John Kasich, and others.
Trump has spread his insults so far and wide that there are few Americans who are unaware of his penchant for impulsive rants and invective against powerless and innocent people as well as against his competitors in business and politics.
