A
moment of truth for Mark Zuckerberg
John Naughton
Sunday 20 November
2016 07.00 GM
Fake news might be
bad for democratic elections, but it’s big business for Facebook
Well, the election
is over; now we’re knee-deep in postmortems. Every mainstream
publication and every corner of the blogosphere is full of autopsies.
Many of these investigations have an anguished “How could this have
happened?” tone. American students in a university department
adjacent to mine have decorated the trees outside with hundreds of
distraught but determinedly forward-looking messages. “Love WILL
Conquer!” says one. “Knowledge not Ignorance,” says another.
I don’t propose to
add to this genre. If you want an informed, dispassionate analysis of
the campaign that has given Trump the keys to the kingdom, look no
further than an essay by Professor Charlie Beckett of the LSE on that
institution’s Polis blog. It’s worth reading in full, but for
those who are pressed for time, the gist is: “Trump had the better
politics. Tactically, strategically, personally, policy-wise. He won
partly because the Democrats and Hillary Clinton got most of that
wrong, but mainly because he did best what you are supposed to do in
an election: convince people to vote for you. They (and he) knew what
they were doing.”
Fact-checking would
be a tacit acknowledgement that Facebook is a publisher rather than
just a technology company
Unpalatable? Yes.
But I think accurate, provided you accept that by “politics”
Beckett means running for political office, not anything with a moral
overtone. But such a detached analysis hasn’t stopped people
looking for scapegoats and simpler explanations. And their baleful
glare has fallen upon the internet generally and social media in
particular. “For election day influence, Twitter ruled social
media,” fumed the New York Times. “Donald Trump won Twitter, and
that was a giveaway that he might win the presidency,” claimed
Business Insider. And “Donald Trump won because of Facebook,”
wrote Max Read in New York magazine.
Twitter was
castigated mainly because it was Trump’s favoured channel and his
tweeting provided a masterclass in how to exploit it. Facebook was in
the dock, though, for a different reason: it was claimed that fake
news stories that had spread virally on the service had inflicted
real damage on the Clinton campaign. Among these were stories that
the pope had endorsed Trump, that Hillary Clinton had bought illegal
arms worth $137m and that the Clintons had purchased a $200m house in
the Maldives. (There was probably worse stuff, but I didn’t have
the stomach to do the necessary trawl.)
In the end, the
finger-pointing got to Facebook’s boss, Mark Zuckerberg, who was
moved to offer a pained response. “After the election,” he wrote,
“many people are asking whether fake news contributed to the result
and what our responsibility is to prevent fake news from spreading.
These are very important questions and I care deeply about getting
them right.” He went on to point out that “of all the content on
Facebook, more than 99% of what people see is authentic. Only a very
small amount is fake news and hoaxes. The hoaxes that do exist are
not limited to one partisan view or even to politics. Overall, this
makes it extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this
election in one direction or the other.”
Nevertheless,
Zuckerberg says that he doesn’t want fake news on Facebook, but it
turns out that getting rid of it is very difficult because
“identifying the ‘truth’ is complicated”. Philosophers
worldwide will agree with that proposition. But you don’t need to
have a Nobel prize to check whether the pope did indeed endorse Trump
or whether Clinton conducted the supposed purchases of arms or a
Maldives house.
Zuckerberg’s
problem is that he doesn’t want to engage in that kind of
fact-checking, because that would be a tacit acknowledgement that
Facebook is a publisher rather than just a technology company and
therefore has some editorial responsibilities. And what he omits to
mention is that Facebook has a conflict of interest in these matters.
It makes its vast living, remember, from monitoring and making money
from the data trails of its users. The more something is “shared”
on the internet, the more lucrative it is for Facebook.
Just to put some
numbers behind that assertion, research by BuzzFeed journalists
discovered that “top fake election news stories generated more
total engagement on Facebook than top election stories from 19 major
news outlets combined”. The study found that over the last three
months of the election campaign, 20 top-performing false election
stories from hoax sites and hyper-partisan blogs generated 8,711,000
shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook, whereas the 20
best-performing election stories from 19 major news websites
generated a total of 7,367,000 shares, reactions and comments. In
other words, if you run a social networking site, fake news is good
for business, even if it’s bad for democracy.
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