Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to help reduce the spread of misinformation on Facebook has set of a “widespread panic” among some owners of the biggest hyperpartisan conservative pages.

Cyrus Massoumi, the owner of Mr. Conservative, which has 2.2 million fans, told BuzzFeed News he and his fellow publishers find Zuckerberg’s guidelines “terrifying” and “extremely wide open to interpretation.”

“To someone who was reading between the lines to understand what he meant, it didn’t really make any sense to a publisher,” Massoumi said. “It was terrifying to read.”

Massoumi spoke exclusively with BuzzFeed News with the blessing of a group of other major conservative page owners so he could raise their concerns with Zuckerberg’s post, explain why some hyperpartisan pages on the right published false and misleading content, and to share their proposal for solving the problem. Their goal is to land an audience with senior executives at Facebook to talk more.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/conservative-page-owners-in-fake-news-panic

How The 2016 Election Blew Up In Facebook’s Face

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. 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. It was a triumph for Twitter, a rare occasion when the little bird out-sang its big blue brother. At Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, it was an alarm bell ringing loudly in the middle of the night, a call to action.

Four years later, Facebook couldn’t be more relevant. The platform played a defining role in the 2016 election — but perhaps not for the reason it hoped. 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 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.

And 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. 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. In the process, Facebook, with its 1.79 billion monthly active users, grew to more than five times the size of Twitter.

The promise of tapping into this lightning enticed massive news organizations to go all in on Facebook. But those enhanced sharing and interaction mechanisms, coupled with changing platform dynamics, created a system that catered to reinforcing existing world views. 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. 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.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/2016-election-blew-up-in-facebooks-face

Trump asks for media 'reset,' but lashes out at execs

President-elect Donald Trump on Monday told a group of about 25 television executives and anchors that he wants a “cordial” and “productive” relationship with the media, according to one source in the room, but he still aired some grievances during the off-the-record gathering in Trump Tower.

The source said the meeting started with a typical Trump complaint about the “dishonest media,” and that he specifically singled out CNN and NBC News for example as “the worst.”

He also complained about photos of himself that NBC used that he found unflattering, the source said.

Trump turned to NBC News President Deborah Turness at one point, the source said, and told her the network won’t run a nice picture of him, instead choosing “this picture of me,” as he made a face with a double chin. Turness replied that they had a “very nice” picture of him on their website at the moment.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/11/donald-trump-media-transition-tension-231727

In late August, in a speech delineating white nationalist support for Donald Trump, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton unveiled a new title for Russian President Vladimir Putin: "The Grand Godfather of Extreme Nationalism. With the sinecure, Clinton sought to directly link the odious policies of her Republican counterpart — namely, mainstreaming a racialized, white supremacist discourse the United States had not seen at such levels in a generation — to those brought to bear under Putin’s third term.

The epithet built upon one of the pillars of Clinton’s campaign which, in turn, built upon the primary campaign of former GOP contender, and current Ohio governor, John Kasich. That is, in addition to Trump’s outright praise for Putin's leadership, as well as his murky, secretive financial ties to those close to the Kremlin, Clinton tied Trump to the Kremlin’s campaign of stoking hyper-nationalistic movements throughout the West.

As a rhetorical device, the title remains a flurry of brilliance. Not only does the terminology help highlight the Kremlin's kleptocratic coterie — with Putin as don, as mafioso — but it also further emphasized Clinton’s grasp of Moscow’s policies, and the motivations therein. As seen with Hungary’s Jobbik, with France’s National Front, with Greece’s Golden Dawn, those far-right movements sprouting throughout Europe have found a counterpart in Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party. And much as Trump has aped the rotted, regressive policies of Putin-friendly leaders throughout Europe — see: Hungary’s Viktor Orban — so, too, has he helped give a national platform to the groups and movements that have not only fueled a resurgence of white nationalism in the United States, but who have gone out of their way to praise, of all international leaders, Putin. These groups, as noted in Clinton’s speech, include the "alt-right," a gathering of fascists and white nationalists who would Balkanize the United States or who would return the country to a bygone era of white supremacy, but also extend to the secessionists and Christian fundamentalists further propping Trump’s campaign.

Of course, certain critics of Clinton, ranging from Trumpian outlets like Breitbart to lefty journalists with little grasp on post-Soviet developments, tabbed her speech as conspiratorial, or as baseless fear-mongering. But those voices overlook the breadth of evidence linking American far-right groups to Kremlin-friendly policies, and in certain cases directly to Kremlin financing. While the phenomena of fascistic, hard-right support for Moscow within Europe has been well-documented elsewhere, most especially by Anton Shekhovtsov and Alina Polyakova, among others, the parallel networks and linkages within the United States have seen depressingly little coverage. Indeed, while "praise of Putin by [Europe’s] far-right leaders" becomes "commonplace," as Polyakova wrote, so, too, has the pro-Kremlin fealty from far-right leaders in America, almost all of whom uniformly back Trump.

http://thediplomat.com/2016/10/beyond-trump-and-putin-the-american-alt-rights-love-of-the-kremlins-policies/

Ben Howe's short film "The Sociopath" is as much about the failures of the Republican Party and the conservative movement (whatever that means anymore) as it is about the terrifying prospect of Donald Trump becoming president.

On the eve of an election that has left Americans deeply divided, wondering how we managed to nominate two of the most loathed candidates in our nation's history, Howe, senior contributing editor at RedState, takes us back to the 2008 Wall Street bailouts and the genesis of the tea party movement. A review of the last eight years puts into context how a movement with the potential to be a real agent for change evolved into an angry nationalist populist movement that propelled Trump to the top of the GOP ticket, enabling him to become the unlikely conduit for the frustration that had been bubbling up in the populace for nearly a decade.

The name of the film, "The Sociopath," gives the impression that the viewer is about to watch 50-minute documentary about Trump's foibles and failures, but don't let the name (or the length of the film) deter you. While a fair amount of time is given to Trump's unfitness to be president—the compilation of his nuclear proliferation comments near the end should terrify anyone—those segments are woven throughout the compelling story of the last eight years of the conservative movement.

The narrative of the video makes it clear that Trump has been a destructive force, not only for the Republican Party, but for the conservative movement in general, in no small part because he has agitated—and in turn been buoyed—by the worst elements of the fringe right. This first became evident in 2012, when Trump flirted with a presidential run.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/2016/11/06/ben-howes-the-sociopath-explains-what-just-happened-to-your-country/1/

Donald J. Trump is not sleeping much these days.

Aboard his gold-plated jumbo jet, the Republican nominee does not like to rest or be alone with his thoughts, insisting that aides stay up and keep talking to him. He prefers the soothing, whispery voice of his son-in-law.

He requires constant assurance that his candidacy is on track. “Look at that crowd!” he exclaimed a few days ago as he flew across Florida, turning to his young press secretary as a TV tuned to Fox News showed images of what he claimed were thousands of people waiting for him on the ground below.

And he is struggling to suppress his bottomless need for attention. As he stood next to the breakfast buffet at his golf club in Doral, Fla., eyeing a tray of pork sausages, he sought to convey restraint when approached by a reporter for The New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/07/us/politics/donald-trump-presidential-race.html