By Robert Laurie —— Bio and Archives May 3, 2018
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday that the company has already begun to implement a system that ranks news organizations based on trustworthiness, and promotes or suppresses its content based on that metric. Zuckerberg said the company has gathered data on how consumers perceive news brands by asking them to identify whether they have heard of various publications and if they trust them. “We put [that data] into the system, and it is acting as a boost or a suppression, and we’re going to dial up the intensity of that over time,” he said. “We feel like we have a responsibility to further [break] down polarization and find common ground.”
Zuckerberg said the company will invest “billions” of dollars in a combination of artificial intelligence and tens of thousands of human moderators to keep both fake news and deliberate propaganda at bay, especially in elections. “We’re essentially going to be losing money on doing political ads,” he said of the investment the company is making to avoid a repeat of the spread of Russian propaganda in the 2016 US election.How very brave and altruistic. A man who has billions in the bank is telling you that his company – not him personally, mind you – will be forgoing a bit of money in a crusade to tell you the proper way to think. If you don’t see the potential problems here, you’re not looking very hard. The AI is suspicious since you know who’s behind it. Does anyone seriously doubt that it will be programmed to favor a certain political viewpoint? Also, who will be selecting the “tens of thousands of moderators?” Why should we believe that this group will be anything other than an army of left-wing enforcers? What does “deliberate propaganda” mean? Will opinion sites face further attacks because they hewed to a certain set of beliefs? We all know who Zuckerberg is, and we’ve already learned not to trust him. So why should we believe that this effort will turn out to be anything other than an extension of what he’s already done?
Robert Laurie’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain.com
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