MUNICH — Government regulators shouldn’t blame social media companies for the so-called “echo chambers” that leave internet users vulnerable to disinformation campaigns, according to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
“And the content that shows up in your news feed is primarily — it's not determined by us. It's things that other people share,” Zuckerberg told the Munich Security Conference during a Saturday discussion. “You choose who your friends are and what pages and what businesses you want to follow, and then, that's the content that's eligible to show up there.”
Zuckerberg was center stage at the major international foreign policy conference, as a series of Russian disinformation operations against the 2016 U.S. presidential elections and elections in other countries left Western governments suspicious of his company. The Silicon Valley mogul maintained that Facebook exposes users to a wide array of ideas to an even greater degree than traditional media companies.
“Each media outlet has kind of their own editorial view and slant that they bring to things,” he said during a question-and-answer session. “So the data that we've seen is actually that people get exposed to more diverse views through social media than they were before through traditional media through a smaller number of channels.”
Conference organizers emphasized that “the internet plays a central role in breeding and amplifying extremist thought.” Zuckerberg disputed the idea that this process is accelerated by algorithms that promote stories or posts based on their similarity to the stories that users previously clicked, putting the responsibility back on the habits of Facebook users.
"There is the confirmation bias issue,” he said. “People are less likely to click on things and engage with them if they don't agree with them. So, I don't know how to solve that problem. That's not a technology problem as much as it is a human affirmation problem."
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'You choose who your friends are': Facebook's Zuckerberg rejects blame for online echo chambers - Washington Examiner
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