How Facebook Should Handle Its Fake News Problem

Depending on whom you believe, the problem of fake news on Facebook is either one of the most important issues facing mankind, or an over-blown controversy pumped up by the mainstream media. And in a way, that dichotomy itself points out the problem with defining—let alone actually getting rid of—”fake news.”

When someone uses that term, they could be referring to one of a number of different things: It might be a story about how Bill and Hillary Clinton murdered several top-level Washington insiders, or it might be one about how Donald Trump’s chief adviser is a neo-Nazi, or it might be one about how the most important election issue was Clinton’s emails.

A large part of the reason why people get their news from Facebook in the first place, or from alternative sources like Breitbart News or dozens of others sites, is that they don’t really trust mainstream outlets. Many seem to see them as gatekeepers, who pretend to know what the “real” news is. So replacing one gatekeeper with another isn’t likely to work.

Is there anything out there that could provide a model for how Facebook and the rest of the media could approach this problem? In a way, Mark Zuckerberg came close to a potential solution in his recent blog post, in which he talked about working with third-party verification services.

If Facebook itself starts to label or hide “fake news,” based on some kind of algorithmic filtering or quality measure, there are going to be inevitable accusations that the social network is deciding what people should read or believe. And the same problem would occur if the company hired a journalist, or even a number of journalists, to make those decisions. It also wouldn’t scale.

The best approach to this conundrum, I think, is to take advantage of the principles that make the Internet so powerful as a form of networked media (powerful in both a positive and a negative sense, it must be admitted). And that is to not just have one public editor or verification node, but to have thousands, or even tens of thousands of them.

There is an existing entity that takes this approach, and it’s called Wikipedia. It has a number of flaws, and it is rightly criticized for them, but it is also the best model we have when it comes to user-contributed information flow.

If Facebook could somehow either tap into or recreate the kind of networked fact checking that Wikipedia does on a daily basis, using existing elements like the websites of Politifact and others, it might actually go some distance towards being a possible solution.

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