Misinformation after the Las Vegas massacre
In the hours after a tragedy, “accuracy matters,” said in the Los Angeles Times. “Facts can help catch the suspects, save lives, and prevent a panic.” But in the aftermath of the Las Vegas massacre, “the world’s two biggest gateways for information,” Google and Facebook, repeatedly spread lies about the shooting, steering users toward fake news and conspiracy-laden fringe sites. Google’s Top Stories box linked to a discussion on 4chan, a notoriously noxious online message board frequented by internet trolls, identifying the wrong assailant and falsely claiming he was an anti-Trump liberal. Facebook “perpetuated the same rumors,” linking to a site called “AltRight News” on its official Crisis Response page and promoting a story that the shooter had been linked to ISIS. Google-owned YouTube promoted conspiracy videos suggesting the massacre was a staged “false-flag” operation, said Sam Levin in The Guardian. Even after family members of those killed complained, YouTube argued that the videos “did not violate its standards.”
The platforms’ broadcasting of lies about Las Vegas is “no oneoff incident,” said Kevin Roose in The New York Times. Over the past few years, extremists and conspiracy theorists have repeatedly “swarmed major news events, using search-optimized ‘keyword bombs’ and algorithm-friendly headlines” to manipulate results that users of Google and Facebook see. Even when these fake-news campaigns are spotted and stopped, “they often last hours or days— long enough to spread misleading information to millions of people.” And the tech companies themselves often hesitate to step in, having “largely abrogated the responsibility of moderating” their content in favor of algorithms that pick and place headlines and posts. This “automation of editorial judgment,” combined with the companies’ unwillingness to draw a distinction between, say, CNN and fringe news sites, “has created a lopsided battle between those who want to spread misinformation and those tasked with policing it.”
“Blaming the algorithm has gotten pretty common,” said William Turton in TheOutline.com. Tech companies want to pretend that their code for scraping the web behaves as an “autonomous force.” That’s absurd. These algorithms “are doing what they were designed to do. The problem is that they are not designed to exclude misinformation or account for bias.” It’s not enough for Google and Facebook to say that they will tinker with their code to avoid this mess in the future, said Alexis Madrigal in TheAtlantic.com. They have “to take responsibility for their active role in damaging the quality of information reaching the public.” That means hiring more human moderators who will instantly know that 4chan simply doesn’t qualify as a reliable source of facts. “There’s no hiding behind algorithms anymore.”