Facebook fired those who blocked ‘fake news’
USA TODAY reporter’s book explores ‘erosion of truth’
EDITOR’S NOTE: This excerpt is adapted from USA TODAY reporter Nathan Bomey’s new book, After the Fact: The Erosion of Truth and the Inevitable Rise of Donald Trump, a non-partisan analysis exploring society’s increasingly tenuous commitment to the facts. Printed with permission from Prometheus Books.
Adam Schrader arrived for his secret job at Facebook one Friday morning in late August 2016 without realizing that his hours there were numbered.
Having completed his daily trek to his workspace in the former Wanamaker department store overlooking Broadway in lower Manhattan, Schrader took his place among a crew of contractors who had been sworn to secrecy over the existence of their jobs.
Their role? To authenticate and select “trending” news stories for display to hundreds of millions of Facebook users who encountered the items whenever they logged on. The team of about 25 news curators primarily consisted of journalists skilled in the art of determining source credibility, ascertaining truth and applying news judgment.
They had an early window into Facebook’s grisly underworld — a vortex of fabricated news stories and highly distorted partisan content.
“We had a backside view of what people are talking about outside of our own Facebook bubbles,” Schrader said.
Every day, the curators sought to contain the inferno of deception by dousing the blaze with journalistic sensibility, ensuring false and extremely skewed stories did not reach the trending topics list for the entire nation to see.
“The main thing that we had to confirm was that there was not a fake story that would go up,” said Benjamin Fearnow, another former Facebook trending-news curator.
Fearnow said the curators shielded the public from a “bombardment of fake news.”
Plans to hide the curators imploded in early May 2016 when tech blog Gizmodo published stories revealing the secret team’s existence and alleging that the curators “routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers.”
Facebook executives panicked. The accusations threatened their priority of keeping people of all political persuasions clicking, sharing, posting, scrolling, and commenting.
“There’s an email saying, ‘ Hey we’re going to have a meeting in the boardroom upstairs,’ ” Schrader said.
After gathering together, the curators were summarily informed that they had all been fired.
“They literally had security escort us out of the building,” Schrader said.
The bloodletting of the curators brought into full view the sharp cultural conflict between Silicon Valley and the news industry.
Whereas professional, mainstream journalists have historically taken responsibility for selecting, reporting, and presenting accurate information to the public — at least in the post–Vietnam War era — Facebook has delegated that responsibility to powerful algorithms and sterile digital platforms, retaining scarcely any hands-on role in discriminating based on legitimacy, meaning, quality, and impact.
Facebook has repeatedly pledged since the election to combat bogus stories. But the former curators were skeptical that much would change.
“People cannot function without Facebook. I’ve even tried,” Schrader said. “Facebook knows that they don’t really have to change. They’re so big now that nothing can touch them. They’re untouchable. So it’s easier for them to lay off 25 journalists than it is to acknowledge the problem and move forward appropriately.”
Facebook’s dismissal of the news curators was a microcosm of a much broader issue. It symbolized a transfer of trust from news professionals to secretive algorithms and ideologically motivated groups. The resulting upheaval has gravely undermined our collective grasp of reality.