Facebook: Going To Bat For Bots And Battling Fake News

While the election of Donald Trump has been good for the markets in general, tech stocks have not exactly been enjoying what analysts are calling the “Trump bump.” Tech stocks in the benchmark equity gauge slumped 3.1 percent over the four days following, trailing the S&P 500 Index by 4.2 percentage points, the most since May 2009.

And the biggest players have seen the biggest hits. The FANG block (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google) each managed to notch at least 2 percent losses in the four days that followed the election and managed to collectively shed 8 percent for the worst retreat since February.

That tech bleed-off did slow some yesterday (Nov. 15). The Nasdaq managed to pack on 1.3 percent by the end of the day, and though that did not quite come into the same 5+ percent range the Dow notched up, it did manage to cut the Nasdaq’s overall losses to a mere 1.8 percent by the closing bell. Facebook was one of the stocks that saw some of its losses erased.

But Facebook has nonetheless had fairly rough few days. As millions of Americans are looking for someone or something to blame for an election with an outcome they didn’t understand, Facebook has become a favored locus for rage — particularly in its ability to let consumers live with curated news bubbles full of news that is fake.

But never let it be said that the house that Zuckerberg built is not a resilient place. Facebook is on a hiring binge and says that the bots it introduced to the world six months ago are officially ready to really rock our consumer experiences. For real this time.

 

And Now For The Fake News 

Weekend Update has been a “Saturday Night Live” staple — and one that many, many modern imitators owe a big debt of thanks to. When Norm Macdonald sat behind the desk, he used to introduce the segment every week with: “And now for the fake news” — or some variation thereon.

And since Weekend Update (and “The Daily Show” and “Last Week Tonight”) viewers all know they are watching the fake news, no one gets mad.

But if people think they are getting the “real” news and they aren’t, then people get really, really mad.

Hence the soup Facebook finds itself in this week, because stats show about 25 percent of Americans use Facebook as their main news source, and Facebook’s primary concern has not been hooking up readers with the most factual news stories out there — just the most engaging ones. In 2016, the following “facts” have made the FB rounds this year: The pope endorsed Donald Trump (he didn’t), a Democratic operative was murdered after agreeing to testify against Hillary Clinton (nope), Bill Clinton raped a 13-year-old girl (not so much). And that’s just a very few number of examples. Facebook, in the course of a week, can provide enough news stories with no basis in fact to power an entire alternative reality.

Which started bothering everyone in America right about the moment they realized that perhaps a quarter of the population taking their news cues from an algorithm focused on engagement rather than accuracy could be a pretty big problem for an informed electorate tasked with picking its own leaders.

So, Facebook decided to get out of fake news by cutting fake news sites off from access to its vast advertising network — thus damaging its revenue. It was not exactly a unique idea. Google made the same announcement, and Facebook followed suit.

Perhaps a bit reluctantly.

CEO Marc Zuckerberg noted that it was a “pretty crazy” idea that Facebook had tipped the election one way or the other and that, while some vigilance about “fake news” might be merited, there are obvious problems with Facebook getting overly involved in curating content.

“We must proceed very carefully,” he said, noting that Facebook must be “extremely cautious about becoming arbiters of truth ourselves.”

 

Bring On The Bots 

The problem with making a big entrance is that, once you’ve caught the eye of the whole room, now everyone is watching. This means that, if a grand entrance is planned, it is always best to have a “grand something else” to follow it with. There is a reason Cinderella enters the ball and immediately waltzes with the prince — wandering to the buffet table after stopping the room with her arrival would have been a bit anti-climatic.

And this, in a nutshell, has been Facebook’s bot problem since launching last spring. Big entrances, lots of articles about the bot being about to strangle the app in its crib and then … lots of growing pains.

Bots have a lot of potential, but the actually practical uses for them are not quite all there yet. The interfaces are choppy, the AI is stilted and consumers can’t really quite get what they want. They could chatbot their way to a bouquet of flowers, but the question mark hovering has been why would they when tapping an app, going to a website or even making an old-fashioned phone call all actually work better.

But that is changing, according to Head of FB Messenger (home of the bots) David Marcus. He admits that the opening road was bumpy but that bots are fast evolving to the commerce solution of the new millennium.

“The same things happened with the first apps and websites,” Marcus said. “The first couple of bots on Messenger were really bad. But six months in, we’re really starting to see good experiences on Messenger.”

And now that the bots are working better, Facebook is making it easier for users to get at them. Developers can now purchase ads that run in the main Facebook news feed and open threads with chatbots in Messenger.

The bot converations still must be initiated by consumers.

 

So, what is the Facebook forecast for this week?