Fact-Checking Facebook is like playing a doomed game of Whack-A-Mole

– News and commentary about elsewhere covered by Quincy Quarry News.

 

Whack-A-Mole
A Victoria Jones/PA Wire image

Fact-Checking Facebook is like playing a doomed game of Whack-A-Mole.

 

Trying to stem the tsunami of fake news was like battling the Hydra — every time we cut off a virtual head, two more would grow in its place.

 

Facebook has always struggled to comprehend the scale of its fake news and propaganda problem. 

 

Now, it’s struggling to retain the fact-checkers it paid to try and deal with the crisis.  Last week both Snopes and the Associated Press ended their partnerships with the social network, after a tense couple of years trying, without success, to tackle the epidemic.

 

It turned out that trying to fact-check a social media service that is used by a huge chunk of the world’s population is no easy task.  Trying to stem the tsunami of hoaxes, scams, and outright fake stories is like playing the world’s most doomed game of whack-a-mole, or like battling the Hydra of Greek myth.

 

Things soon got worse.

 

Often get the same story over and over again from different sites, which is to be expected to a certain degree because many of the most lingering stories have been recycled again and again.  This is what Facebook likes to call “engagement.”

 

But no matter how many times fake stories were marked them “false,” these stories would keep resurfacing with nothing more than a word or two changed.

 

A The Daily Beast graphic

 

There was a pattern to these repeat stories though: they were almost all “junk” news, not the highly corrosive stuff that should have taken priority.

 

Disinformation isn’t necessarily meant for you. It’s meant for the people who lean authoritarian, the fearful conformists and the perennially anxious.

 

And here we are today, with Snopes and the Associated Press pulling out of their fact-checking partnerships with Facebook within days of each other.  

 

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Such should not bee seen as a surprise because the underlying plan was never a sufficient solution to a crisis that still poses a real threat to our world.

 

If Facebook is truly serious about undoing some of the considerable damage it has done over the years, following is what it should be doing (Twitter, which is by no means innocent in this, should also follow suit).

 

First, Facebook must jettison the notion of influencing individual emotions or crowd behavior.  

 

Mass communication comes with a huge moral responsibility; so far they have shown themselves completely incapable of living up to it.

 

Second, Facebook should make the algorithms that select what shows up in our news feeds absolutely transparent, and require users to opt-in, not opt-out.  We need to see the forces that underpin our perception of the world.  We have been experimented on for far too long and these needs to change, and change now.

 

It may sound like dystopian science fiction to say this, or perhaps the ravings of an overworked person who has been swimming in the waters of conspiracy theories for far too long, but to the skeptics, note the following: Disinformation isn’t necessarily meant for you.  It’s meant for the people who lean authoritarian, the fearful conformists and the perennially anxious.  It’s for weapons hoarders and true believers and the scary uncle that no one in the family talks to any more.

 

It’s the reason why Americans are still relitigating the 2016 presidential election and Britons are still arguing over Brexit.  It’s why Kenya had to have an election do-over.  It’s why Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims were and still being ethnically cleansed.  It’s how people can look at the misery and suffering of children ripped from their parents and placed into detention camps on American soil, where they’re sexually assaulted and drugged, and simply shrug.  It’s redirecting every single important national and international conversation we’ve been having, for years now.

 

This needs to end.

 

Finally, and most importantly: Social media companies should establish a foundation for journalism to give back some of what they have taken from us.  This foundation must be open, transparent, and governed by reputable independent directors.  A portion of the stupendous profits earned by social media companies at the expense of the news industry should be dispersed across local newsrooms around world.

 

In today’s media landscape, Silicon Valley has vacuumed up the news industry’s revenue while simultaneously using its newfound power to push around what’s left of the newsrooms it’s destroying — just look at how Facebook’s wildly false metrics caused organizations to “pivot to video,” with predictable results.

 

Falling out of the Ethernet
A danieldervartanian.com image

There’s another way the stupendous windfall revenues of social media should be invested: hire moderators, armies of them. 

 

Facebook should have the capability to beat back the disinformation it spreads, and if it claims this is impossible at the scale it operates at, then it should not be allowed to operate at that scale.

 

Moderators should have the resources needed to get the job done — not hundreds of low-paid contractors given a few seconds per post to make assessments that can literally mean life or death. 

 

Thousands of journalists are currently looking for work; hiring them to enthusiastically root out the lies and propaganda that are ruining so much of public life — and identify who is deliberately spreading it — might be a good start.   

Adapted from: Opinion: Fact-Checking Facebook Was Like Playing A Doomed Game Of Whack-A-Mole

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