Fake news needs a more genuine response, Facebook
Facebook is having a rough week. Make that a rough year. If it’s not a privacy scandal, it’s a security crisis. If it’s not a hangover from hate speech complaints, it’s a flipflop on fake news.
SA is not immune, and local users last weekend found themselves having to log on afresh to mobile apps, as Facebook tried to plug the leak in its sign-in system.
This week, it was plugging holes left by the departure of the founders of photo-sharing platform Instagram. And then an outage as the service went down for a few hours.
And next week? Expect more of the same.
The problem for Facebook is that it has become too big not to fail, too complex to operate flawlessly. Most are small failures that don’t jeopardise its survival; but add up enough of these, and eventually users rebel.
The most important asset of an online service is not the platform itself, or even its user base, but rather the trust of its users. Abuse their trust too often, or for too long, and they will regard you as the enemy. No business can afford to go to war with its entire customer base.
Facebook was forcibly woken up to that reality by the Cambridge Analytica scandal last year, when it was revealed that users around the world were being manipulated to sway voting behaviour.
But its coming of age has been painful, marked by constant remaking of its policies, procedures and standards — and constant challenges to these.
Even in SA, where Facebook was used to drive the state capture agenda, the social network has come under attack for its failure to clamp down on disinformation.
On Thursday, Facebook called a media conference in Johannesburg to unveil its strategy for reducing the spread of fake news in this country.
It announced a partnership with fact-checking organisation Africa Check and news organisation AFP, which will assess the accuracy of news stories flagged as suspect.
However, rather than remove such stories, Facebook says it will “demote” the stories, meaning it will show them lower in a user’s newsfeed.
“We don’t want to be in a position of being arbiters of truth,” said Sarah Brown, Facebook’s head of media partnerships for Europe, Middle East and Africa.
That is close to its earlier stance on emotionally abusive content, until founder Mark Zuckerberg was forced into a humiliating climbdown regarding the vicious conspiracy site Infowars, now banned from the platform.
To its credit, Facebook fights a massive war against fraudulent accounts. Brown pointed out that it deletes one million accounts a day, mostly through the use of artificial intelligence that identifies a wide range of malicious behaviour.
Why not remove demonstrably false news content as well?
“We feel it’s better to reduce distribution but give people the opportunity to decide whether to distribute it themselves. This is a tightrope we have to walk a lot: we constantly have a tension between free expression and a safe community.”
For now, then, fake news will merely get Facebook’s equivalent of a slap on the wrist.
✼ Goldstuck is the founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Twitter on @art2gee
Zuckerberg was forced into a humiliating climbdown regarding Infowars