Facebook, Twitter shouldn’t make our judgment calls
Lest I be accused of the dreaded false equivalence, let me get this out of the way: President Trump’s relationship to the truth is approximately the relationship between an elephant and an ornamental hedge — which is to say, there really isn’t one. At best, he has but a dim understanding of its purpose and value. At worst, when the truth seems to stand between him and something he wants, he will happily trample it.
All politicians lie, of course. But most politicians know not to make false assertions that are easily checked and inarguably wrong. If they don’t know this when they attain office, they quickly learn. Yet, Trump doesn’t merely ignore those wise precepts; he actively shuns them. He says things that are indisputably false, not to mention often bizarre. If you are among Trump’s many opponents, this is very frustrating; even more frustrating is the fact that he gets away with it. Which is one reason the left has been pressing the media, including social media, to get more aggressive about pruning falsehoods from the public square.
The media has responded to this pressure, which is why you now see more hostile headlines about Trump, or stories that follow the president’s statements with some variant of “This is false,” than any outlet would have countenanced a decade ago. But social media has resisted. 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 organizations, who don’t have a deep mailing list they can tap for donations and volunteers. But both Twitter’s 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 Obama’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 Obama 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 jumped in more than once to decide who was right, and it rated Obama’s claim “True” in one instance, “Half True” in others. Yet, four years later, when Obamacare was finally implemented in 2013, that promise suddenly became Politifact’s “Lie of the Year.”
This from a single fact-checking outlet, whose fact-checkers had a comparatively easy job. 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 job. They still got it badly wrong.
Yet, 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 require judgment calls because, as every journalist knows, it is almost as easy to mislead by stringing together true facts, stripped of vital context, as it is to simply make things up; easier, even.
Given 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 quash ads they shouldn’t while letting others through that contained vicious falsehoods — but nonetheless now bore the imprimatur of having been fact checked.
Center-left 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 National Review. Rather hostile, I’d imagine.
No 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, and arguably an even bigger one than Donald Trump. One can’t, of course, necessarily expect the other half of the country to understand that. But we should be awfully glad that Twitter and Facebook do.