Fake news on Facebook
“Pope Francis shocks the world, endorses Donald Trump for President of America,” “WikiLeaks confirms Hillary sold weapons to ISIS,” “Hillary has been disqualified from holding any Federal Office,” “Bill Clinton raped a 13-year old girl,” and “A democratic operative was murdered after agreeing to testify against Hillary Clinton” are a few of the 20 or […]
“Pope Francis shocks the world, endorses Donald Trump for President of America,” “WikiLeaks confirms Hillary sold weapons to ISIS,” “Hillary has been disqualified from holding any Federal Office,” “Bill Clinton raped a 13-year old girl,” and “A democratic operative was murdered after agreeing to testify against Hillary Clinton” are a few of the 20 or so major fake news in Facebook that many people now believe might have helped sway the election toward Donald Trump. Although a few of the fake news were directed to hurt Donald Trump’s campaign, by far the large majority of the news was focused on destroying Clinton, and many believe it did.
Believe it or not, social media has drastically lowered the barriers to entering the news business, as news consumption is rapidly driven by social media sharing. With a website, it’s now a lot easier than ever for otherwise unknown sites to reach a huge audience. Timothy Leetim of vox.com observed in his 16 November 2016 online article that “a handful of big tech companies – Twitter, Google, and especially Facebook – have gained a huge and growing influence over what news people see.” He pointed out that 44 percent of US adults tell pollsters they got news from Facebook in 2016, which he says is “vastly larger than other news-focused social media sites like Twitter (9 percent) and Reddit (2 percent).” “And while many people get their news from television programs or newspapers, those media are divided among many competing news organizations. This means that Facebook has a larger influence over ordinary Americans’ media diets than almost any other news organization.”
While the extent to which fake news on Facebook affected the US Presidential election results cannot be ascertained, the influence might have been significant. Craig Silverman of Buzzfeed news saw the problem this way in his 17 November 2016 article: “In the final three months of the US presidential campaign, the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, NBC News, and others, a BuzzFeed News analysis has found.”
Silverman also pointed out that during the critical last three months of the campaign, 20 top-performing false election stories from hoax sites and hyper-partisan blogs generated 8,711,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook. Within the same time period, he said the 20 best-performing election stories from 19 major news websites generated a total of 7,367,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook. He concluded: “Up until those last three months of the campaign, the top election content from major outlets had easily outpaced that of fake election news on Facebook. Then, as the election drew closer, engagement for fake content on Facebook skyrocketed and surpassed that of the content from major news outlets.”
Political Science Professor Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College (USA) expressed his concerns regarding how little Facebook was doing to combat fake news. “Even if they did not swing the election, the evidence is clear that bogus stories have incredible reach on the network. Facebook should be fighting misinformation, not amplifying it.”
Nyhan was probably reacting to the attitude of Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg on the issue, which was basically one of minimization. In a lengthy post two weeks ago, Mr. Zuckerberg played down the prevalence of fake news on his company’s platform, saying that that Facebook’s role isn’t to be “arbiters of truth.”
It is interesting to note that, according BuzzFeed news, “some Facebook employees are frustrated by Zuckerberg’s blasé response to concerns about fake news on the social media platform.” “What’s crazy is for him to come out and dismiss it like that,” one anonymous engineer wrote, according to BuzzFeed. “He knows, and those of us at the company know, that fake news ran wild on our platform during the entire campaign season.” So it seems that Mr. Zuckerberg was basically lying to public.
Fake news appears on Google’s platforms as well – though to a smaller scale – but unlike Facebook, the company immediately took ownership of the problem, and started in earnest last week to find solutions. Google said it would ban purveyors of fake news on the web from using its online advertising service, AdSense.
Following Google’s lead, Facebook seems to now want to address the fake news issue. According to Mr. Zuckerberg, Facebook will rely on technology to more accurately classify misinformation and “detect what people will flag as false before they do it themselves. The company will also make it easier for users to report fake stories, and Mr. Zuckerberg pointed out that “Facebook has long relied on users to flag objectionable content, including fake news.”
Facebook is turning to outside groups for help in fact-checking, Mr. Zuckerberg wrote. It is also exploring a product that would label stories as false if they have been flagged as such by third-parties or users, and then show warnings to users who read or share the articles.