Facing the facts about fake news

Revelations about how Russian propaganda used Facebook against America are worrying

Winning hearts and minds is one of those bizarre terms that was popularised during the Vietnam war. Originally used by a French general in then Indochina in 1895, it characterises propaganda designed to convince a local population that the menacing outside military force in their country is on their side.

How deeply and profoundly ironic it is then that the greatest propaganda campaign of the modern age appears to have been run in the US, against Americans, using the social media that has come to dominate the world.

Facebook will tell a senate hearing into the role of Russian propaganda during last year’s US election that 126m Americans were exposed to Russian-backed content.

Fake news, and Facebook’s inability to do anything meaningful about it, is destroying our online democracy by spreading misinformation.

It doesn’t help that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg immediately called the unfolding revelations that fake news might have propelled Donald Trump into the Oval Office “crazy”.

What is more crazy is that Facebook so naively allowed patently incorrect content to be added so easily and then shared. The same appears to have happened on Twitter and through Google. But Facebook is the most worrying because of its size and reach — it has 2bn global users — and because 44% of Americans get their news via the social networking site, according to the Pew Research Center and Knight Foundation.

Facebook allowed those in small online echo chambers to find news they agreed with, but which wasn’t necessarily true. It ushered in our current “post-truth” era.

US magazine The Atlantic —ina widely shared article called “What Facebook Did to American Democracy” — detailed, through a long list of academic papers and articles, how

“the potential for Facebook to have an impact on an election was clear for at least half a decade before Donald Trump was elected”.

The issue is that Facebook shows you what you like — literally. The more you “like” posts from a specific friend or on a specific topic, the more of those it shows you. Sharing content is even more valuable than comments and “likes”; it allows Facebook to better tailor its algorithm to show you more of what you are interested in.

For the purveyors of fake news, it spreads the message. Home in on what a particular community is interested in (anti-hillary Clinton sentiment, for example) and tailor your misinformation to suit those prejudices, and your targets will spread your propaganda for you.

Ironically, Facebook is eating up the digital marketing spend of media organisations that produce real news. About US$8 of every $10 spent online goes to Facebook and Google.

And, just as ironically, the war for hearts and minds has gone against the very country that popularised the term. And it’s just beginning.

Facebook allowed those in small online echo chambers to find news they agreed with, but which wasn’t necessarily true