kind of lived and died by ginning up their partisanship. it was also they re terrible people and we re the best. the facebook pages were getting tremendous engagement. the development of these hyper partisan sites, i think turned the comments into this trash fire. there s some kind of parable in that for the broader effects of facebook that the very things that divide us most cause the most engagement. which means they go to the top of the news feed, which means the most people see them. that is a new look at the frontline documentary the facebook dilemma. there are billions on the social media site. it has an outsized influence over the political conversation.
there s a twitter problem and there is the question of what the next website will be. we just saw gab taken down over the weekend by its internet hosting provider. facebook has not grappled with the fact that this is moving so quickly. the problem they have they don t want to be a sens censor. if they continue to be a host for things that are completely undermining lene inine ining le discourse, at some point congress is going to have to step in and regulate them in a way that they re not now. that s my biggest worry, that congress is going to act to
that really wasn t going on back in 2012. that s a much more recent development. as facebook has been sort of smacked in the face about this after the 2016 election and been publicly condemned, called before congress and everything else, what s changed fundamentally at facebook about the way they present news? well, they re grappling basically inside the company. there is a misinformation team for instance that s trying to figure out how to suppress false narratives on facebook. and there also is a lot of they call it an ongoing discussion with the news industry itself about whether they re going to promote or verify certain news organizations as verified news
james, let me begin with you. i know you talked to a bunch of former employees of fbi. were they ignorant of the problem that they had on their hands, or were they willing to look the other way because the company was growing so fast? the former employees that we spoke to, especially those that were there during the 2016 election, they were aware of the fact that these pages were proliferating on facebook and basically spewing out a lot of hyper partisan news articles, false news articles and things like that. interestingly they told us basically they didn t see it as anything different than mirroring the media environment in general that s gone to extremes. they really at that point in time weren t thinking it s their
.well almost anything. leave no room behind with xfi pods. simple. easy. awesome. click or visit a retail store today. one of the big factors that emerged in the election was what started to be called hyper partisan facebook pages. these were facebook pages that