During the past presidential US election my entire Facebook wall was flooded with questionable stories about both candidates. As later investigation revealed some of these Facebook stories were funded by companies with ties to the Kremlin. That they spend around $100.000,- on Facebook ads during the campaign. This is nowhere near what both the DNC and GOP spend on Facebook ads, but it could count as foreign interference in an election nonetheless.
After the election Facebook announced that it would try to combat these fake stories and earmark them as such. So, what has Facebook done an was it effective in preventing unsubstantiated news from spreading?
One of the things Facebook did was establishing a partnership with media companies that could determine whether or not a story was factual on Facebook. If it is determined that the article is incorrect, Facebook will place a warning below the post. This is to inform people that the news article is incorrect in the hopes that people will stop believing the content.
However, a recent study from the Yale university showed that this method only has a very limited effect (Pennycook, 2017). Most people still believe the article even if such a banner is placed below the post, according to the study. In addition, there is also a reverse effect. Fake news that has not been checked by fact checkers is more often believed by Trump supporters because they believe it has been checked, according to the study. This is why the end result does not lead to a substantial improvement
Facebook disagrees with the study and states that their approach does get results (nu.nl, 2017). However, no statistics have been published to substantiate that claim. Maybe we will only be certain when the next presidential election comes along and the new methods are put to the test.
References
Pennycook, G. and Rand, D. (2017). Assessing the Effect of ‘Disputed’ Warnings and Source Salience on Perceptions of Fake News Accuracy. SSRN Electronic Journal.
Nu.nl. (2017). ‘Aanpak nepnieuws op Facebook heeft beperkt effect’ | NU – Het laatste nieuws het eerst op NU.nl. [online] Available at: https://www.nu.nl/internet/4918838/aanpak-nepnieuws-facebook-heeft-beperkt-effect.html [Accessed 22 Oct. 2017].
Hi Tim,
Thank you for sharing this good piece of thought!
I read Mark Zuckerberg’s response to both the allegation of “fake news” and Donald trump’s claim that “Facebook is always against him”. In his response, two points are mainly conveyed. First of all, false news does exist, but in terms of the volume, only a very small amount was posted among other true news. Followed by the allegation, Facebook set up a editorial team to manually review posts related the presidential election in the effort to detect and remove fake new. But then, Facebook was still accused of that the editorial team would secretly exert their own political tendencies in the post when reviewing. At last, Zuckerberg reiterated that Facebook is a technology company, not a media company.
Tracing to its source, the source of global fake news is not from social media platform. Often fake-news websites pretend to be authoritative news media, so that these small- to medium-sized websites can attract substantive traffic to their embedded advertisements and even some authoritative news media will release fake news due to lack of censorship on the news source which is an important evidence of the flooding fake news. According to the study from Stanford university researchers of economics, they surveyed more than 700 news sites, and fake news site accounted for 64, These new sites create similar names of domain to those high-profile new site, like Huffington Post, Wall Street Journal and New York Times etc., so that news reader on the internet would easily mistake these fake new website with the real ones. So in my opinion, social media platform, like Facebook and twitter should not take the most blame, since these social media attracts the largest amount of traffic which is being exploited by fake news website and also the main channel for users to get information and news.
Recently, I came across this paper “Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election” on the study of fake news might be interesting for you.
https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf
Hey Tim,
When you look at Facebook as a network where the money side is the paying publishers for ads and the subsidy side is its people (users), I sometimes think their lack of substantial results in filtering out for fake news has to do with lack of incentive to discourage the money side of their company. As you can see, people (users) are engaging with the content they are seeing otherwise these ads would not be shown. I’m curious with all this government pressure for Facebook to better police their advertising content, what kind of influence this would have on their network effects if they did efficiently filter out this content. And whether that is really in the best interest of Facebook as a company.