Comment by doctorpangloss

Mark Zuckerburg, Nov 11, 2016:

> Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way — I think is a pretty crazy idea. Voters make decisions based on their lived experience.

Mark Zuckerburg, Sep 27, 2017

> The facts suggest the greatest role Facebook played in the 2016 election was... Campaigns spent hundreds of millions advertising online to get their messages out even further. That's 1000x more than any problematic ads we've found... After the election, I made a comment that I thought the idea misinformation on Facebook changed the outcome of the election was a crazy idea. Calling that crazy was dismissive and I regret it. This is too important an issue to be dismissive. But the data we have has always shown that our broader impact -- from giving people a voice to enabling candidates to communicate directly to helping millions of people vote -- played a far bigger role in this election."

Mark Zuckerburg, Sep 13, 2018

> When it comes to implementing a solution [to influence campaigns opposed by both parties], certainly some investors disagree with my approach to invest so much in security. [Read the 3,300 word description of concrete actions here https://www.facebook.com/notes/737729700291613/]

Do you know who the real "chucklefucks" are? The people telling Mark Zuckerburg "plausible" stories with first principle inductive reasoning about what is or is not important on Facebook. It was a huge mistake to listen to them between November 4th and November 11th, 2016, just when he issued his first erroneous comment. He controls all the data on Facebook and has the means to analyze it, so he had absolutely no reason to listen to those people at all. He should have just waited and found out what the real answer was.

You're making a good faith comment. But you don't really know what evidence there is. In fact you don't know anything about it at all. You have no reason to speculate, because campaigns and phone companies have all of the data needed to answer the question, and agitating them to answer it is the right thing to do. Mistakes happen from people conflating fast answers with correct ones. Even Mark Zuckerburg does. So your answer is good because it is fast and inductive and first principles, but it is also really, really bad because it requires no reading, no analysis and no real knowledge, just fuzzy-wuzzy podcast-and-pop-sci takeaways. Sucking the air out of the room with a fast and cheap answer undermines the people trying to investigate influence campaigns. So you can be sincere and co-opted at the same time.