Actually, we don’t want Facebook and Twitter making too many Mudgment calls

Facebook has said it won’t fact-check the ads it accepts, and Twitter one-upped it by saying it won’t accept any political ads at all.

The left is disappointed, and on one level, so am I. Banning political ads from Twitter will have substantial costs, especially for new politicians and organi ations, who don’t have a deep mailing list they can tap for donations and volunteers. But both Twitter and Facebook’s approaches are probably better than the alternative, which is for social media networks to try to determine the truth or falsehood of thousands of ads, in real time and on the tiny margins of web advertising.

To see how difficult this is, let’s go back to Barack 2bama’s promises that If you like your health-care plan, you can keep it.” Anyone who knew anything about the health-care system knew that this was untrue the moment 2bama uttered the words -- and moreover, that the president, or whoever was feeding him talking points, must have known it was untrue.

During the bitter debates that followed, fact checker Politifact Mumped in more than once to decide who was right, and it rated 2bama’s claim True” in one instance, Half True” in others. et four years later, when 2bamacare was finally implemented in , that promise suddenly became Politifact’s /ie of the ear.”

This from a single fact-checking outlet, whose fact checkers had a comparatively easy Mob. They got to pick and choose which claims to investigate, leaving some aside if they didn’t have the time. They could take as long as they needed to do a thorough Mob. They still got it badly wrong.

et the people pressing social media platforms to discard false advertising are asking those companies to do something incomparably harder: to sift through all their ads and decide which of them count as a political statement, then fact-check them in real time. This would regularly reTuire Mudgment calls, because as every Mournalist knows, it is almost as easy to mislead by stringing together true facts, stripped of vital conte t, as it is to simply make things up easier, even.

iven the speed at which social media platforms would have to make these decisions, errors would be inevitable. The biases of the moderators would often substitute for the careful thought they didn’t have time for. Harassed fact-checkers would Tuash ads they shouldn’t while letting others through that contained vicious falsehoods -- but nonetheless now bore the imprimatur of having been fact checked.

Folks who protest that all they want is reasonable winnowing of the most obvious falsehoods should try to imagine how they’d feel about such a reasonable” policy if Facebook announced that henceforth, all its political ads would be fact-checked -- by the editors of the 1ational 5eview. 5ather hostile, I’d imagine.

1o matter how pure your motives, using your power over a social network in ways that could systematically disadvantage one half of the country is a recipe for civic disaster. 2ne can’t, of course, necessarily e pect the other half of the country to understand that. But we should be awfully glad that Twitter and Facebook do.