The Ridgewood Blog Brings a Free Market Laissez-faire Point of View to Local, New Jersey State and National Issues.
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META) is making waves in the tech and political worlds with its decision to replace its third-party fact-checking program with a community-driven system inspired by Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter). CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the change in a video early Tuesday, signaling a shift in Meta’s approach to content moderation and free speech as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office.
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, in a significant move, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has distanced himself from the controversial relationship between his company and the Biden-Harris administration. In a letter addressed to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Zuckerberg candidly revealed the intense pressure Meta faced from the government to censor content related to COVID-19, including satire, humor, and the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Continue reading Zuckerberg’s Fallout: Meta CEO Distances Himself from Biden-Harris Administration
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, Google search results are dying as most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust. Most people now use Google to search through Reddit posts for answers. Serving ads creates misaligned incentives for search engines, SEO has resulted in poor quality sites surfacing to the top of search results, people lookup and AI now tries to figure out what the user wants rather than through only search terms. Reddit results are more authentic as people discuss what they think without the commercial aspect other websites have.
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, Board of Education candidate Dan Creed claims someone using “fake Facebook profiles ” has been attacking him and Board candidate Muhammad Mahmoud . Creed immediately called for you guessed it, “civility” .
Zuckerberg reveals plans to address misinformation on Facebook
Posted yesterday by Kate Conger (@kateconger)
Facebook’s fake news problem persists, CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged last night.
He’d been dismissive about the reach of misinformation on Facebook, saying that false news accounted for less than one percent of all the posts on the social media network. But a slew of media reports this week have demonstrated that, although fake posts may not make up the bulk of the content on Facebook, they spread like wildfire — and Facebook has a responsibility to address it.
“We’ve made significant progress, but there is more work to be done,” Zuckerberg wrote, outlining several ways to address what he called a technically and philosophically complicated problem. He proposed stronger machine learning to detect misinformation, easier user reporting and content warnings for fake stories, while noting that Facebook has already taken action to eliminate fake news sites from its ad program.
https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/19/zuckerberg-reveals-plans-to-address-misinformation-on-facebook/
Social media giant denies ‘systematic’ discrimination
By Stephen Dinan – The Washington Times – Monday, May 23, 2016
Facebook announced Monday it was sending employees out for retraining and would discontinue some of its practices as it sought to defend itself against charges of political bias against conservatives.
The online giant denied that it’s shown “systematic political bias,” but admitted employees played a bigger role than previously acknowledged in determining what news is highlighted in the trending topics section.
Facebook also acknowledged that rogue employees may have unintentionally discriminated against conservative stories or even acted with malice in “isolated improper actions.”
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/may/23/facebook-admits-rogue-employees-may-have-shown-bia/
Michael Nunez
Today 9:10am
Filed to: FACEBOOK ie… FAKEBOOK
Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.
Several former Facebook “news curators,” as they were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren’t trending at all. The former curators, all of whom worked as contractors, also said they were directed not to include news about Facebook itself in the trending module.
In other words, Facebook’s news section operates like a traditional newsroom, reflecting the biases of its workers and the institutional imperatives of the corporation. Imposing human editorial values onto the lists of topics an algorithm spits out is by no means a bad thing—but it is in stark contrast to the company’s claims that the trending module simply lists “topics that have recently become popular on Facebook.”
https://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-suppressed-conser-1775461006
You can only count on about four of your friends, and most don’t even care if anything bad happens to you
Andrew Griffin
Friday 22 January 2016
Most of your Facebook friends don’t care about you and probably wouldn’t even sympathise with your problems, according to a new study.
Many people have hundreds of Facebook friends. But people can only really depend on four of them, on average, according to new research.
Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary psychology at Oxford University, undertook a study to find out the connection between whether people have lots of Facebook friends and real friends.
He found that there was very little correlation between having friends on social networks and actually being able to depend on them, or even talking to them regularly.
The average person studied had around 150 Facebook friends. But only about 14 of them would express sympathy in the event of anything going wrong.
The average person said that only about 27 per cent of their Facebook friends were genuine.
Those numbers are mostly similar to how friendships work in real life, the research said. But the huge number of supposed friends on a friend list means that people can be tricked into thinking that they might have more close friends.