![]() But he noticed that fringe political pages would pick up just about anything that helped them make their point, including fabricated news. And so he debuted National Report in February 2013.Ĭoler could have reported the news, or simply blogged. “I was seeing those sorts of sites all over the place with large followings and they were getting good traffic and I just thought to myself, Well I could do that,” Coler told BuzzFeed News. The California-based satirist watched in a bit of amazement as articles from fringe conservative news sites began booming across Facebook, and decided he wanted in on the action. ![]() It’s no coincidence that Jestin Coler started National Report, his wildly successful fake news site, only a few months after Facebook added the mobile share button. ![]() This would prove crucial in an unexpected but very important way not long down the road. The mobile share button would help links surpass text and photos as the fastest growing form of content shared on Facebook. But on mobile where typing is more of a pain, a Share button could encourage people to rapidly re-share link after link.” As the TechCrunch article astutely noted: “When people do use the Share button on the web, they often give their own description of a link. That in turn helped all forms of content boom across the network. The move, seemingly minor at the time, set the table for a behavior shift on Facebook, encouraging people to share quickly and without much thought. On November 14, 2012, a full eight days after the vote, a TechCrunch headline proclaimed: “Facebook Finally Launches ‘Share’ Button For The Mobile Feed, Its Version Of ‘Retweet.’” It Starts With The Shareįacebook’s transformation began almost immediately after the 2012 election. This in turn enabled a host of loose-with-the-truth upstarts to use it, at times, even more successfully than mainstream news organizations to go mega-viral.Įssentially, Facebook built a petri dish for confirmation bias, developing ideal conditions to grow news sources whose mission was to provide people with fodder that backed up their own beliefs. Facebook’s News Feed algorithm prioritizes sharing and time spent reading articles, but in a scroll-through world these measurements are prone to reward material that doesn't challenge you. But those enhanced sharing and interaction mechanisms, coupled with changing platform dynamics, created a system that catered to reinforcing existing world views. The promise of tapping into this lightning enticed massive news organizations to go all in on Facebook. ![]() In the process, Facebook, with its 1.79 billion monthly active users, grew to more than five times the size of Twitter. It made a huge push over the last four years to be a destination for news, indeed, to be your "perfect personalized newspaper." Since that Obama tweet, the company retooled its platform, creating a system designed to make it easier to share and promote timely and trending stories and to help them spread rapidly across its network. The company’s influence was so apparent that when CEO Mark Zuckerberg denied that the fake news coursing through its system influenced the election his own employees disputed him.Īnd while it was likely never the company’s intent to create a system that encouraged people to hear only what they wanted - whether or not it was true - Facebook didn’t get here by accident. In the days after the vote, it’s come under fire for creating an infrastructure that played to confirmation bias and allowed political-meme-makers, sensationalists, and fake news purveyors to thrive - and perhaps even alter the election’s outcome. The platform played a defining role in the 2016 election - but perhaps not for the reason it hoped. At Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, it was an alarm bell ringing loudly in the middle of the night, a call to action.įour years later, Facebook couldn’t be more relevant. It was a triumph for Twitter, a rare occasion when the little bird out-sang its big blue brother. Meanwhile, on Facebook, a network four times Twitter's size, the same photo had fewer than 100,000 shares - evidence the energy around current events was elsewhere. As midnight approached on November 6, 2012, a newly re-elected Barack Obama tweeted a photo of himself embracing the first lady, with the message “four more years.” The president’s election night tweet went unprecedentedly viral, racking up more than 500,000 retweets within a few hours and capping the most active day in Twitter history.
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