Facebook Fact-Check
We can all agree that Facebook should do much more to make sure that blatantly fabricated claims that Donald J. Trump won the popular vote or received the pope’s endorsement don’t spread and are, at a minimum, labeled fakes.
Facebook admits, and my sources confirm, that it can do a better job of this by helping users flag dubious articles and predicting fakes based on data it has for search. This doesn’t have to involve humans: Facebook could decide to label content as suspected as fake if it was flagged a certain number of times and if it displayed other questionable attributes. Such a move would not mean Facebook’s taking broad responsibility for what’s true.
But did the F.B.I. reopen the Hillary Clinton email investigation? That’s a little tougher. Although major news outlets like CNN said that it had, the agency did not in fact reopen the inquiry, which would have been a far more significant move than what it did do (which was to take a look at newly discovered emails to see if it should reconsider its decision to close the case). Erroneous reporting by established organizations is a bigger threat than fabricated stories, and far more rampant.
If you don’t believe that Facebook’s policies could sway the news industry, you haven’t been paying attention over the past five years. Publications have been suckered into tweaking their content and their business models to try to live off the traffic Facebook sends them. They’ve favored Facebook clicks over their core readers, and are no closer to addressing plummeting print revenues. What would happen if the distribution of their articles on Facebook was tied to submitting data about their sources or conforming to some site-endorsed standards about what constitutes a trustworthy news source?
My fellow reporters and editors will argue that I am letting Facebook off too easy. While my husband did work there for a brief period, my position isn’t a defense of the company, which I have covered critically for years. I simply don’t trust Facebook, or any one company, with the responsibility for determining what is true.
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