Steve Kovach February 17, 2018 at 06:00AM
- The Big Tech platforms Facebook, Google, and Twitter have made several efforts to combat fake news and abuse.
- But they all operate from the standpoint that the open nature of their platforms means they can't be "arbiters of the truth." It's a phrase people working at those companies use often when talking about the problem.
- If Big Tech can't or won't work to determine what the truth is, then the abuse and fake news will only continue.
Within hours of Wednesday's school shooting in Florida, screenshots of fake tweets from Miami Herald reporter Alex Harris started to go viral. The tweets showed images of Harris' account that were fudged to look like she was asking people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School for photos of dead bodies and whether or not the shooter was white.
In response to a BuzzFeed story on the matter, Twitter said the fake tweets impersonating Harris weren't a violation of its policies, despite the fact that Harris said she was harassed by other Twitter users as the fakes spread.
(Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted that he would investigate the matter after BuzzFeed's story published Thursday. In a response to BuzzFeed editor Mat Honan on Twitter Friday, Dorsey said Twitter doesn’t have the technical capability to monitor that kind of impersonation at a large scale yet.)
Twitter also pointed to a section of its policy that says the real-time nature of the platform means that people can fact-check fake tweets like the ones that impersonated Harris — which is probably little comfort for anybody who's ever been impersonated, and seen "their" tweets go viral.
But there's another key phrase that stood out to me in the policy cited by Twitter:
"We, as a company, should not be the arbiter of truth."
I've heard that one before. Several times, in fact, over the last year or so as I've talked to people from Google, Facebook, and Twitter about their roles in today's media landscape. Sometimes they say it publicly. Often, they say it privately. But it's clear that Big Tech's default isn't to make sure the information they're spreading to billions is accurate, but that their platforms remain open and easy to manipulate.
If the platforms start from a position that the truth is subjective, the fake news problem will never get fixed.
Just because they don't view themselves as the arbiters of truth doesn't mean their billions of users aren't devouring news spread on those platforms, under the assumption that what they're seeing is true.
There's a reason media organizations go through a rigorous process of fact checking, research, and editing before publishing something. They have a responsibility to disseminate the truth as best they can. Mistakes happen, of course. But there are also consequences for those mistakes at responsible news organizations. Journalists get fired. Retractions are published. Credibility is always on the line.
By claiming they can't determine what the truth is, the messaging from tech platforms is that they don't feel they should be held to those same standards, despite the fact that the information they spread can reach millions of more people than any publication on earth can ever hope to reach.
You can see how that plays out in Big Tech's recent solutions to fix the spread of abuse and fake news on their platforms.
Facebook announced last month that it's tweaking the News Feed algorithm to start surfacing more news from "trusted" sources. But instead of choosing the outlets itself, it said it would ask Facebook users to determine where the truth should come from.
The survey is just two questions long, as BuzzFeed first reported. A user is presented with the name of a publication and asked if they recognize it. Then they're asked how much they trust the outlet with a range of options from "entirely" to "not at all." Facebook still hasn't provided a convincing answer for how it'll prevent the community from gaming those surveys.
Google and its subsidiary YouTube have also said they would promote "trusted" sources in search results for news topics, yet they haven't described their methodology for determining which outlets are trusted. All we know is that it's a mixture of some AI wizardry, and the promise to bring thousands more human moderators into the mix. And even then, the results have been mixed. YouTube was promoting conspiracy theories tied to the train crash involving Republican members of Congress just a few weeks ago, for example.
The problem isn't that Facebook, Twitter, and Google don't feel responsible for what happens on their platforms. I believe they're sincere when they say they want to fix abuse and fake news. Rather, the issue is the fact that they don't feel like they need to have a strong relationship with the truth, or that they have a responsibility to make sure it's the truth users see before anything else. In their view, the mob gets to determine what the truth is, and the lightning-fast speed of social media means that even when something false squeaks through, that same mob will work overtime to correct itself.
That sounds great in theory — but, as we saw in Florida this week, and countless other times besides, it's failed over and over and over again in practice.
Big Tech doesn't believe it has a responsibility to determine what the truth is, and the impact from that decision continues to show itself in the form of impersonations, fake news, and conspiracy theories promoted across their platforms. No action to fix those inherent problems will work until Big Tech realizes that the truth matters.
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The real reason fake news spreads is because tech companies don't believe in the truth (TWTR, FB, GOOG, GOOGL) from Business Insider: Steve Kovach
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