*Fact-checker trying to lay down some truth here.
I'm going to link to this even if Buzzfeed is going broke
(...)
In case you’re curious, here’s what it was like to be an official Facebook fact-checker. We were given access to a tool that hooked into our personal Facebook accounts and was accessed that way (strike one, as far as I was concerned) and it spat out a long list of stories that had been flagged for checks. We were free to ignore the list, or mark stories as “true,” “false,” or “mixture.” (Facebook later added a “satire” category after what I like to call "the Babylon Bee incident", where a satirical piece was incorrectly labeled false.)
It was clear from the start that that this list was generated via algorithm. It contained headlines and URLs, and a graph showing their popularity and how much time they had been on the site. There were puzzling aspects to it, though. We would 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 we marked them “false,” stories would keep resurfacing with nothing more than a word or two changed. This happened often enough to make it clear that our efforts weren’t really helping, and that we were being directed toward a certain type of story — and, we presumed, away from others.
What were the algorithmic criteria that generated the lists of articles for us to check? We never knew, and no one ever told us.
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. We’d be asked to check if a story about a woman who was arrested for leaving her children in the car for hours while she ate at a buffet was true; meanwhile a flood of anti-semitic false George Soros stories never showed up on the list. I could never figure it out why, but perhaps it was a feature, not a bug.
And here we are today, with Snopes and the Associated Press pulling out of their partnerships within days of each other. It doesn’t surprise me to see this falling apart, because it was never a sufficient solution to a crisis that still poses a real threat to our world. If Facebook is serious about undoing some of the damage they have done, here is what they should be doing (Twitter, which is by no means innocent in this, should follow suit):
First, Facebook must jettison this idea 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, it should make the algorithms that select what shows up in our news feeds absolutely transparent, and require users to opt-in, not opt-out. Let us all see the forces that underpin our perception of the world. We have been experimented on for far too long at this point, and it needs to change, and change now. It may sound like dystopian science fiction to say this, or perhaps the ravings of an overworked woman who has been swimming in the waters of conspiracy theories for far too long, but to the skeptics I will say this: 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 2016 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 are were 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. It 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....
