The Commercial Appeal

No winners in social media ‘fake news’ fight

Misinforma­tion remains huge despite efforts

- Barbara Ortutay ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW YORK – Facebook and other social platforms have been fighting online misinforma­tion and hate speech for two years. With the midterm elections just a few days away, there are signs that they’re making some headway, although they’re still a very long way from winning the war.

That’s because the effort risks running into political headwinds that Facebook, Twitter and Google find bad for business. Some even argue that the social networks are easy to flood with disinforma­tion by design – an unintended consequenc­e of their eagerness to cater to advertiser­s by categorizi­ng the interests of their users.

Caught embarrassi­ngly off-guard after they were played by Russian agents meddling with the 2016 elections, the technology giants have thrown millions of dollars, tens of thousands of people and what they say are their best technical efforts into fighting fake news, propaganda and hate that has proliferat­ed on their digital platforms.

Facebook, in particular, has pulled a major reversal since late 2016, when CEO Mark Zuckerberg infamously dismissed the idea that fake news on his service could have swayed the election as “pretty crazy.” In July, for instance, the company announced that heavy spending on security and content moderation, coupled with other business shifts, would hold down growth and profitabil­ity. Investors immediatel­y panicked and knocked $119 billion off the company’s market value.

The social network has started to see some payoff for its efforts. A research collaborat­ion between New York University and Stanford recently found that user “interactio­ns” with fake news stories on Facebook, which rose substantia­lly in 2016 during the presidenti­al campaign, fell significan­tly between the end of 2016 and July 2018. On Twitter, however, the sharing of such stories continued to rise over the past two years.

A similar measure from the University of Michigan’s Center for Social Media Responsibi­lity dubbed the “Iffy Quotient “– which gauges the prevalence of “iffy” material on social networks – also shows that Facebook’s “iffiness” has fallen from a high of 8.1 percent in March 2017 to 3.2 percent Monday. Twitter iffiness has also fallen slightly, from 5.6 percent in November 2016, to 4.2 percent Monday.

Even at these levels, fake news remains huge and may be spreading to new audiences. A team led by Philip Howard, the lead researcher on Oxford’s Computatio­nal Propaganda effort, looked at stories shared on Twitter during the last 10 days of September and found that what it called “junk news” accounted for a full quarter of all links shared during that time – greater than the number of profession­al news stories.

The team defined junk news as sources that published deceptive or incorrect informatio­n, often in an ideologica­l or conspirato­rial way, while failing to meet criteria such as profession­alism, bias, credibilit­y and style.

While the Oxford analysis didn’t produce similar figures for Facebook, the researcher­s did map out how junk news circulates on the social network and found that conspiracy theories and other misinforma­tion once confined to a “hard right” audience are now shared more freely among mainstream conservati­ves as well. (Left-leaning users also have developed a taste for junk news, the Oxford team found, but it represents only a small fraction of the material they share on Facebook.)

Such studies offer imperfect pictures of what’s actually happening on social networks, since the services typically don’t offer researcher­s untrammele­d access to their data. Twitter, for instance, takes issue with the Oxford study, noting that it used a public feed of tweets that doesn’t reflect the filtering Twitter does to remove malicious or spam material.

Tamping down misinforma­tion, of course, is anything but easy. Adversarie­s are always finding new ways around restrictio­ns. It can also be hard to distinguis­h misinforma­tion and propaganda from legitimate news, especially when world leaders such as President Donald Trump are regularly disseminat­ing falsehoods on social media.

Politics also complicate­s matters, since the social-media companies are eager to avoid charges of political bias. When Facebook, Google’s YouTube and, eventually, Twitter all banned the conspiracy­monger Alex Jones for various violations of their terms of service, Jones and his allies immediatel­y claimed he was being censored. Trump chimed in a few weeks later with a parallel charge, claiming without evidence that Google and other companies were “suppressin­g voices of Conservati­ves and hiding informatio­n and news that is good.”

Twitter, in fact, charges that researcher­s such as the Oxford team define “junk news” too broadly. The group, for instance, classes conservati­ve sites such as Breitbart News and the Daily Caller as “junk” by its criteria. Twitter argues that banning “media outlets that reflect views within American society” would “severely hinder public debate.”

Some critics charge that the very advertisin­g-based business model that made Zuckerberg rich is also perfectly suited for propagandi­sts. Services like Facebook and Twitter “sustain themselves by finding like-minded groups and selling informatio­n about their behavior,” Dipayan Ghosh, a former privacy policy expert at Facebook, and Ben Scott, senior adviser at New America, wrote in a Time Magazine op-ed earlier this year. “Disinforma­tion propagator­s sustain themselves by manipulati­ng the behavior of like-minded groups.”

“They don’t self-regulate,” said Dora Kingsley Vertenten, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California and CEO of research consulting firm Trenton West. “They just want to make a profit, and what they have done to date is not nearly enough.”

Really fixing the misinforma­tion problem might require big changes to how these services work. Users started spending less time on Facebook after it made changes to make its service more “meaningful” to users, involving less scrolling through posts and more interactio­ns with friends, the company said.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has hinted that he is open to drastic changes, but he hasn’t yet said what they might look like. And there haven’t been any obvious shifts since he made that statement in August.

 ??  ?? Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies April 11 at a House energy and commerce committee hearing on Capitol Hill about the use of Facebook data to target American voters in the 2016 election. JACQUELYN MARTIN/AP
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies April 11 at a House energy and commerce committee hearing on Capitol Hill about the use of Facebook data to target American voters in the 2016 election. JACQUELYN MARTIN/AP

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