
Silicon Valley needs to get to the bottom of the fake news controversy post election and answer the question — what effect, if any, did fake news on its internet sites play in the outcome of the presidential race?
I agreed with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg that the inquiry into fake news’ influence is “a pretty crazy idea.” It has struck me as part of the effort by supporters of Hillary Clinton to try to explain why Donald Trump won the election.
But then Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, said that fake news likely had an effect at the margins in a tight race, according to the BBC.
I have to admit that I’ve been hopping over to Snopes.com, the rumor fact-checking site, to see whether it has tackled questionable stories I’ve seen popping up on Facebook. The site is hopping!
“There’s so much to fact-check,” Brooke Binkowski, managing editor of Snopes.com, the fact-checking site, told me. “At least half of all stories you read now are aggregated from other sites. People have lost a lot of trust from mainstream news.” Since the election, traffic to Snopes has spiked, she said.
As for Facebook and other internet companies taking steps, Binkowski said, “it’s a Band-aid solution to a much deeper problem.”
“I’m worried about that the problem isn’t just fake news but the mentality that breed people’s belief in fake news,” she said. “There’s the erosion and loss of credible media….Many of the fake news sites are predicated on fear of the other.”
Recently, I called on Facebook to set up an independent ombudsmen or group of outside experts that have access to Facebook’s data and focus on its news practices. The group would represents the interests of Facebook’s users and report back to them in a regular way, without fear of hurting the social network giant’s business.
That need became even more urgent this week.
On Tuesday, Facebook updated its ad policies to “spell out that its ban on deceptive and misleading content applies to fake news,” according to Reuters. The company denied a Gizmodo report that it had not implemented a tool that would have rooted out fake news because it feared a conservative backlash, reported Slate.
Meanwhile, a secret task force at Facebook is working on the issue, BuzzFeed says.
Why is it secret?
Facebook isn’t alone in its fake news troubles. Google said it would not let fake news sites use its ad network, as the Mercury News’ Ethan Baron reported.
But as Reuters pointed out, neither company appears to have recently addressed the issue of targeting actual fake news, whether it is shared by Facebook users or pops up in Google search results.
Zuckerberg has said he doesn’t see Facebook as a media firm and there will be some problems if Facebook has to become the arbiter of truth in journalism.
But as Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina, wrote in the New York Times, companies such as Facebook may have to sacrifice some “engagement” in order for more truth. And a lot is at stake:
This should not be seen as a partisan issue. The spread of false information online is corrosive for society at large.
What is likely is that fake news or not, Facebook’s role in this election will be studied for years:
The more we process the election, the larger a role I think Facebook played in it. Not just the fake news, but the way people interact.
— Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) November 15, 2016
Photo: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (Kirstina Sangsahachart/ Daily News)
Tags: Alphabet, Donald Trump, election 2016, facebook, fake news, Google, Hillary Clinton, mark zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai