False news travels faster

Steve Lorhr's  “Why we are easily seduced by false news” recalls an old adage: It takes two to tango.

Yes the IRA attacked America in the soft underbelly known as the Facebook newsfeed, but what made that tummy so flaccid? It was not just the broadcaster - the broadcaster found receivers - many of them. Oafs, retired and semiretired; students, part time and less; nightwatchmen and nightwatchwomen, clicking on their smart phones.

They danced with the Ruskie night riders. And they danced on the winds of false news, which, Lohr reports, follows a unique trajectory. He focuses on an the MIT study that found false news travels faster than true news - that false claims were 70% more likely than the truth to be shared on Twitter

It took true stories about six times longer than false ones to reach 1500 people the MIT study disclosed.

The research was published in Science magazine. It examined stories posted to Twitter from 2006 until 2017, tracking 126,000 stories tweeted by roughly 3.0 million people more than 4.5 million times. News was defined broadly.

What is it about people that makes them more likely to share the false news? It's said here that true news inspired more anticipation, sadness and joy - while false claims elicited greater surprise and disgust. I guess you can say what is false is more visceral.

Should journalism classes be required of citizens in the 21st-century democracy? As I recall, the 20th century journalism teachers told us -- first day of class -- that you did not have to go to journalism school to be a journalist. We're people different then? Was the environment different than today's? - Jack Vaughan


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I remember in the run up to the election losing my temper with all the false things I was seeing - cant say really understood what was going on but I really wailed away on Facebook . Visceral, one night. Yes, yes. Take this y'all who is reposteth Breitbart, I railed too.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/08/technology/twitter-fake-news-research.html

Facebook faces breach

Bannon at the controls of the
Cambridge Analytica voter vaporizer.

Gonna tell you a little story that'll make The Man From Uncle sound like Howdy Doody. Bear with me.

THere is a train coming down the track.One is Cambridge Analytca - which is a big data operation HQ'd in Britain. The other is the IRA, the Internet Research Agency, a Russian social media hack.

Cambridge Analytica comprises a bunch of statisticians and programmers who found some warm fuzzy US political venture money and joined forces with an impish devil.

They set up a data gathering project, “thisisyourdigitallife,” that offered a personality prediction, and billed itself on Facebook as “a research app used by psychologists.” (I'd add a bit more on the brains and funding of thisisyourditigallife if I get the chance.) The test could go something like: Do you like Manfred Mann AND Joni Mitchell? You are a precious introvert. What about Ted Nugent AND Deep Purple? You are outgoing extrovert. I digress.

thisisyourditigallife paid users small sums to take a personality quiz and download an app, which would scrape some private information from their profiles and those of their friends - activity that Facebook more or less kinda permitted at the time.

That profile helped them to figure out if you were a conspiracy buff, and that in that case you could be pitched posts that fed that inclindation, which you could have shared, and so on.

This resulted in 50 million raw profiles that were forwarded to Cambridge Analytica... A principle officer in Cambridge Analytica was Steve "The Imp of the Perverse" Bannon. (It should be noted that their VC backers originally sought to help Ted Cruz - it took a while to find the right potion or carrier.)

Here comes the second train: The Internet Research Agency aka Glavset, the Trolls from Olgino or kremlebots. It has been charged by US DoJ with criminal interfrence with the 2016 election. These trolls thrived on hacked data like such drawn from innocouous personality tests you might take online.

As far as I am aware, a link between IRA and Cambridge Analytica has not been established - I stand before you today to sibmit that it seems like a distinct possibility. (It is all dark and complicated - not like the good old days where the president had a tape recorder rolling while he plotted nefariously, and there was a fully functioning congress and opposition party also by the way.)

If you read the attached Facebook press release you get some of the gist of what is afoot in the convoluted James Bond scenario called Cambridge Analytica.

Since the first release there has been an amendment. One press account described what happened as a hack or a hijack, so Facebook responded. What Facebook asks you to do is to not think of all this as a hack of your data but to instead understand that their policies were insuficient 2-4 years ago but have been updated. Democracy in America at Facebook HQ today is about covering its hinder.

See Facebook release March 16, 2018 - Suspending Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group from Facebook
https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/03/suspending-cambridge-analytica/


Facebook spurred GDPR, in only in small part. Let's tune into a recent podcast I did on that topic.