Month: September 2018

Senate Social Hearings Do Little to Reassure Facebook Users

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg appeared in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee last Wednesday with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey in the latest hearing on Russian interference in the 2016 election. The leaders of the two largest social media companies in America testified about their process in determining which accounts are real, and which are potentially dangerous to mechanisms such as the American electoral system.

While Dorsey apologized, saying they were not prepared for the wave of troll armies, Sandberg stood defiant, saying, “We are more determined than our opponents, and we will keep fighting.”

Sandberg also updated Congress on Facebook’s progress on stopping fraudulent pages from surfacing and said they are working with other entities to stop the further spread of misinformation.

 

 

There was one key moment when Sandberg told the committee, “Our focus [when looking for foreign accounts] is inauthenticity.” Matt Binder, a reporter for Mashable made an important point on Sandberg’s statement.

“When asked to approximate just how many Facebook accounts are ‘inauthentic,’ Sandberg replied between 3 and 4 percent. At Facebook’s reported 2.23 billion active users, that would mean somewhere between 66,900,000 and 89,200,000 are inauthentic.”

That staggering number may have some users of the site concerned over viewing their content. However,

 

Both Dorsey and Sandberg were also grilled by Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) on hate speech on their respective platforms.  While both apologized and claimed to be on top of this issue, just this weekend, bots attacked users yet again.

 

Despite the updates, the hearings did little to re-assure the American people that leaders at both companies were on top of the situation, and with no clear way to determine which accounts are inauthentic, it will still be easy for hate and misinformation to slip through the cracks.
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Senate hearing draws united front on social media’s role in foreign influence

At a United States Senate meeting last Wednesday, members of both parties questioned social media executives about the scope of foreign countries’ ability to use social media as a weapon against democracy. First, I wanted to step back and share our view of Twitter’s role in the world. We believe many people use Twitter as […]

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Facebook’s World, One World

No matter how massive social media has become over time, we believed for a long time that we all could have the presence we wanted on our social media profiles. We believed for an extended period of time that what we wanted made public and private on our profiles remained this way. However, as we […]

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Gossip Magazines, Wikipedia, Facebook … What’s the Difference?

In middle school, I learned: 1. How to set up my Facebook account 2. Wikipedia was not a valid or reliable source. Now, the thought of using Wikipedia has vanished and yet the cite that I once used to communicate and connect with friends across the states — is now where we search for important news articles? Something doesn’t seem so right.

The biggest question I have is: when did we abdicate our responsibility for gathering, investigating, and verifying news sources to sites such as Facebook? Growing up with a with a renowned journalist as a mother, a stepfather who was editor in chief of a top magazine, an activist stepmother, and a father involved in local politics, I was taught the only fake news that affected our society came from magazines that I would see online at the grocery store, such as US Weekly or the National Enquirer. But now, years later, the topic of Fake News has taken over my dinner table conversation.

 

So what should we do? It’s time for us take back our responsibility. Marc Zuckerberg, said in a CNN interview “We need to make it so that trolls can’t spread fake news. We can get in front of this.” But I think, Facebook can make their changes, so can Twitter, so can whoever — but it’s up to the consumers to find the truth. Check the website an article is from. Find out who wrote it, search who it is, and determine whether or not the information and sources are reliable and accurate. When it comes to the generation I’m a part of, we love instant gratification. An article on our newsfeed becomes the quickest way to grab a story. But it’s time we take a step back, become more thorough in our investigations of news stories and opinions.

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