CHRIS HAYES (HOST): People aren't living around each other with different views and across these sort of divides. Social media becomes the place they sort of experience it, and then social media, as you've written, I mean -- It is crazy to think about the most powerful platform for the dissemination of information in the history of the planet has no editorial standards. Like, you could get a -- 10 million views on an article that says Barack Obama was born in Kenya.
MAX READ: Yeah, absolutely. And because of the way Facebook works, because it has these sort of difficult to navigate privacy controls, and stuff sort of spirals off and you can't really chase misinformation and find ways to debunk it the way you might be able to do on other social media platforms, on Reddit or on Twitter. And you know, I think it speaks to this idea social media is a bad place to have these conversations, in part because they're being had underneath articles that are lies.
HAYES: Right, exactly, the comment thread of the article saying that, for instance, here's one from the -- there is a Macedonian town that just churns out fake Trump information because it gets them U.S. ad dollars and there are 17-year-olds who want to buy electric guitars, this is “How teens in the Balkans are duping Trump supporters with fake news,” I'm like, there's an article there that in the lede, is like “Hillary Clinton is about to be indicted.”
HEATHER MCGHEE: Yeah, well, but But Donald Trump said that from the stump.
HAYES: Right, which is why that was a viral story.
MCGHEE: Right. Well, and I do think that there is some responsibility here. I know it's kind of like interesting to think about it in Facebook, but it also really started in Fox News and right wing radio.
HAYES: Yeah.
MCGHEE: And the general narratives that are picked up by someone, a Macedonian teenager who doesn't even live here can pick up and sort of understand what the clickbait things will be --
HAYES: Yeah, he just knows what will get read.
MCGHEE: Because for the past ten years Fox News has been telling us, you know, four basic stories about the world that are now kind of understood deeply, like at a gut level by -- you could, the most -- excuse me --
MSNBC, it's the most watched cable news network in the country.
HAYES: Yeah, that's true.
MCGHEE: And I want to lay a little more blame on slightly bigger platforms.
[...]
READ: If Fox News is like a Super Soaker, Facebook is a fire hose. You know, so you've got a cable network and they're spraying disinformation everywhere, and then Facebook comes along and they dump a reservoir on top of people.
