Facebook: Cracking the Code Page #4

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they know if some of those

independent voters

have actually liked

Republican pages

or liked the Bernie Sanders page

or like a Donald Trump page.

So you can go to them

to spend money,

to target advertising

specifically to those voters

and it is a much more reliable

ultimately form of targeting

than many of the other

online vehicles out there.

Political strategist

Patrick Ruffini

runs a company that mines big

data for the Republican Party.

He produces social media maps

that help them make sure

their political messages

hit their targets.

What it does give us is

much greater level of certainty

and granularity and precision

down to the individual voter,

down to the individual precinct

about how things

are going to go.

It used to be we could survey

eight hundred,

a thousand registered voters

nationwide,

but you couldn't really

make projections

about understanding from that

an individual State would go

or how an individual voter

would ultimately go.

I Donald John Trump

do solemnly swear

that I will faithfully execute

the office

of President

of the United States.

It is one thing to know

your voters of course,

and quite another to get them

to change their minds.

Facebook can help with that too.

The ability to take the pools

of big data that we've got

and do really deep

analysis of it

to understand small groups

of customers' preferences,

can be applied

in a political setting

in a way that is

potentially worrying

because it allows politicians

to potentially lie better.

For instance,

you can't make a political

statement on television,

without it being disclosed

who it was being paid for.

Those same controls

on the web are very lax.

For instance,

I could see a story about

a certain XYZ politician

has done a great thing,

produced on a completely

different third party news site.

I cannot know that

that ad was placed

by a political operation who

have specifically targeted me,

because that information

is not disclosed, anywhere.

I am understanding yet troubled

by the data driven advertising

and targeting ads that occur,

but I'm even more uncomfortable

by the reality

that our elections and

how our elections are structured

and configured

can be hijacked by these forces

that are not transparent to us.

One of the most important parts

of any democracy is news -

almost half of all Americans

get theirs from Facebook.

But the last US election

also saw the explosion

in fake news,

turbocharged by sharing

on Facebook.

These things look like news,

they function like news,

they're shared like news,

they don't match up

with traditional ideas

of what news is for

and what it should do.

Facebook is in the middle

of this,

they are the company

that can see all of this

and make judgements about it,

I think they would prefer

not to have to do that.

Adam Schrader is a journalist

who used to edit stories

for Facebook's Trending News

section.

Part of his job was

to filter out fake news.

Essentially, we operated

like a newsroom,

it was structured

like a newsroom,

copy editors would make sure

that the topics met standards,

make sure that they were

unbiased, checked facts.

There were often times that

a fake articles would appear

and present themselves

as possibly being

a legitimate trending topic.

And our job was

identifying those

and the original term

was blacklisting.

In the heat of the campaign,

right-wing commentators

accused the team of bias.

Facebook sacked it and

handed the job to an algorithm.

An algorithm cannot do the job

of a trained journalist.

They don't have

the ability to reason,

artificial intelligence

hasn't gotten to the point

where it can really

function like a human brain

and determine

what has news value

and what is good for the public

and what is not.

Schrader says

after the team was sacked,

fake news really took off.

Yeah after the trending news

team was let go,

there was a big problem

with sensational

or factually incorrect

or misleading news sources

and trending topics.

It was just a disaster.

The more partisan

news sources you consume,

the less likely

you are to believe

fact checkers or experts.

And so, this can create

some really dangerous

divisive believers

of alternative facts.

During last year's

election campaign,

a news site published a story

alleging that Hillary Clinton

and her campaign chairman

John Podesta

were running a child sex ring

out of the Comet Ping Pong

Pizza restaurant

in Washington DC.

The story was widely shared

on Facebook.

It was utterly fake,

but it gained so much traction

that a 28-year-old man

finally went to the restaurant

armed with an assault rifle,

a revolver and a shotgun

to find and rescue the children.

One of the hosts runs up

and he's like

"Did you seee that guy?

He had a big gun".

He fired several shots

into the restaurant

before police arrested him.

The story still circulates

on line and on Facebook.

I don't think that I trust

the general public's ability

to identify fake news,

real news, anything like that.

One study found that

in the closing months

of the US election,

Facebook users shared

the top 20 fake news stories

over a million times more

than the top 20 stories

from major news outlets.

Fake stories are often written

either for political advantage,

or to make money.

There are a lot of people out

there who aren't journalists

and aren't publishers

who are publishing.

They don't have the same

sense of obligation

so we are really

in uncharted territory.

I think one of the most

important things

is that we actually need

a big public debate about this

because it's changed

the nature of news,

and in doing so it's changed

our reality as a society.

If you suspect a news story

is fake, you can report it.

Mark Zuckerberg initially

dismissed the notion

that Fake News somehow

skewed the election,

but he is rolling out a system

that allows

the Facebook community

to flag suspect stories.

Mark Zuckerberg has said that

he's not in the news

publication business, right?

That they're not

a media company.

But I think that's a mistake,

kind of a denial, right?

So, they're definitely

a media company

and I think that they should try

and treat themselves

more as one in the future.

As more and more consumers get

their news from digital sources

and Facebook in particular,

the old-fashioned world

of newspapers

and TV stations is collapsing.

Like most news businesses,

the New York Times

is struggling.

Facebook sends plenty of readers

to their stories,

but most advertising dollars

go to Facebook.

Newsrooms are shrinking

along with the resources

for serious journalism.

You'll hear this from small

publications and large ones

that their absolute audience

is larger than it's ever been

and that surely

has to mean something

but it certainly

hasn't meant profits.

I don't think there's a major

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