Last Friday night, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg described the company’s possible directions in combating false news stories peddled to consumers. It was, at the least, an admission of the omnipresent problem.
[F]ake news — and specifically, Facebook’s role in spreading it — became a story of wide interest just after the elections, when critics accused the platform of influencing voters by allowing political hoaxes to regularly go viral — particularly those favorable to President-elect Donald Trump. Zuckerberg has strongly denied that this was true, saying last week that the idea that Facebook influenced the elections in this way is “pretty crazy,” and that fake news “surely had no impact” on the outcome.
Zuckerberg did not contradict this denial Friday, but his post reflects Facebook’s growing acknowledgment that it’s going to have to do a lot more about the plague of hoaxes and fake stories on the platform.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2009—The Fox, the bow-gate poll, and the crickets:
So Fox conducts a poll on whether or not Americans approve of President Obama's bow while meeting the Emperor of Japan. Given that they attacked President Obama mercilessly over the bow on Monday, it's likely they wanted to excoriate him once again, this time using poll results showing how much America hated the bow.
But there's a problem for Fox: it turns out their very own poll shows Americans don't have a problem with bow-gate. Indeed, 67% said they think it is appropriate for the American president "to bow to a foreign leader if that is the country's custom" and only 26% felt it was "never appropriate for the president to bow to another leader."
Perhaps the most notable thing is not just that Fox failed to manufacture outrage over bow-gate, it's that as I can tell, Fox never put their poll on the air. I've searched through their transcripts and watched much of their coverage since the poll was released in a PDF on their website, seen by approximately 5 people from their target audience of conservatives.
Perhaps Fox should change their slogan: we report and you decide, but only if it's something that we think will make you hate President Obama.
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