Facebook Fights Fake News - Badly
Facebook says on its website, “When it comes to fighting false news, one of the most effective approaches is removing the economic incentives for traffickers of misinformation... We've found that a lot of fake news is financially motivated. These spammers make money by masquerading as legitimate news publishers and posting hoaxes that get people to visit their sites, which are often mostly ads”.
However, some experts say that the social media giant has been completely ineffective in dealing with a barrage of misinformation
From complaints over fake news propagated by extremist groups over the US Presidentila elections, to ant-vaccine campaigns. Facebook seems to be repeatedly accused of being too slow in identifying then removing disinformation from its platform.
"Facebook was basically caught flat-footed, even though anybody who studies American politics would have known that one of our two political parties would do everything it could to de-legitimise the process,"says Siva Vaidhyanathan, professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. In his book Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy Prof. Vaidhyanathan argues that the nature of the platform itself makes it impossible to stop misinformation spreading.
Facebook itself says that what users see on the platform was not about politics - suggesting Facebook is really all about photos of babies, not election conspiracy theories, but Prof. Vaidhyanathan compares Facebook to car ownership - great for individuals, but hugely damaging for the planet. "It's good for almost all of those 2.7 billion people individually or they never would have signed up and they would have resigned long ago. The problem is that collectively Facebook is a disaster for us."
But getting people to give up Facebook may be even harder than persuading them to abandon their cars.
Facebook has vowed to keep fighting fake news on its platforms, even as it threatens to remove all credible local and international news sources from its users' feeds. In August it took down 7 million posts pushing Covid-19 misinformation from its main social media site and Instagram between April and June as the company tried to combat the rapid spread of dangerous information about the virus.
The company removed about 22.5 million posts with hate speech on its flagship app in the second quarter, a dramatic increase from 9.6 million in the first quarter. It attributed the jump to improvements in detection technology. It also deleted 8.7 million posts connected to “terrorist” organisations, compared with 6.3 million in the prior period. It took down less material from “organised hate” groups: 4 million pieces of content, compared to 4.7 million in the first quarter.
Facebook: Reuters: AFR: Washington Post: BBC:
You Might Also Read:
Coming Soon: Regulation Of Social Media:
