Week 10 - 'Facebook’s failure: did fake news and polarized politics get Trump elected?'

'Facebook’s failure: did fake news and polarized politics get Trump elected?'
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/10/facebook-fake-news-election-conspiracy-theories

• Company accused of abdicating responsibility to clamp down on fake news stories and counter echo chamber that defined the election
• Facebook could be dividing world instead of bringing it together
• Truth of a piece of content is less important than whether it is shared, liked and monetized. "These 'engagement' metrics distort the media landscape, allowing clickbait, hyperbole and misinformation to proliferate"
• The Pew Research Center found that 44% of Americans get their news from Facebook
• 'Yet fake news is not a uniquely Republican problem. An analysis by BuzzFeed found that 38% of posts shared from three large rightwing politics pages on Facebook included “false or misleading information” and that three large leftwing pages did the same 19% of the time'
• Trump himself has routinely repeated false news and identifying conspiracy theories 
• "There is a cottage industry of websites that just fabricate fake news designed to make one group or another group particularly riled up,” said Fil Menczer, a professor at Indiana University who studies the spread of misinformation.
According to Menczer’s research there’s a lag of around 13 hours between the publication of a false report and the subsequent debunking.

This article reveals the problems with social networking and the manipulation of the media. Facebook is a digital echo chamber, therefore when we as users resonate with a particular ideology or piece of content online, we find it difficult to ignore it as we share the same ideologies; this confirmation bias therefore reveals the issues with new and digital media as we are unable to filter what is valid or not. This therefore means that the news we receive on sites such as Facebook, cannot be trusted even if we want to trust the source and the content - however the biggest problem with this is the fact that this would be globally shared if a large amount of people share similar views and values; this creates a chain of false news being spread all over the internet in a matter of seconds, making it misleading and invalid.