Social media allows for faster distribution of news, and is a whole new way people write and read about what is happening. A major dilemma for social media platforms is how to prevent misinformation. It does not only cost a lot of money, it is difficult to find and remove such content. Also, it limits the freedom of speech, because it is difficult to state whether something is actually false information. Facebook, for example, has had a lot of problems with this issue mostly regarding the elections. As it is possible to have a very narrow target audience when advertising on Facebook, this makes it even easier to spread misinformation. However, Facebook does not limit most of these posts. People can report posts, but it still has to be checked before it gets removed. Twitter is now researching whether it helps to promt adding your own text before retweeting to prevent further distribution of unknown sources.
The question that arises is how responsible the social media platforms are for this problem. Should they be required to invest time and money to fix this issue, which will at the same time limit their ads and users because their posts get deleted, or should the government finance and check these posts? Currently, these platforms comply with preventing misinformation in order to not be shut down by governments, however the result of this is that there is a principal-agent problem.
One possible solution that would both limit fake news and prevent censorship would be to introduce the rating of posts and comments. These ratings could be done by professionals, other users, or using algorithms. This would allow people to see all posts without censorship. Of course, some problems with this are that people will rate posts based on their opinion and not on whether it is fake, but this is a better alternative because currently this is still happening and results in those posts being deleted.
Social media: misinformation or censorship?
9
October
2020
Hi Davey,
Thanks for your article! I enjoyed reading it. The question you are raising is one of a serious size. In my opinion, it is not necessarily the platform who should be held responsible for this problem. But who is then? The government also does not have the resources to support all the companies in counter-attacking this ethical issue. Therefore, I do think that social media companies have a moral duty to invest resources in solving this problem. Are you aware that a part of the fake news is already intercepted by artificial intelligence? It will probably take a while before the machine learning process is so advanced that almost all of the fake news will be immediately recognized, but I do have great hope that it will be there eventually. I also like your solution of counter-attacking this issue. To add to that, it could also be an option to rate the website where the info is coming from. Usually, a website mostly publishes or non-fake, or fake news, but not both. In this way, the fake news will be recognized even faster!
Hi Davey,
Thanks for your article! I enjoyed reading it. The question you are raising is one of a serious size. In my opinion, it is not necessarily the platform who should be held responsible for this problem. But who is then? The government also does not have the resources to support all the companies in counter-attacking this ethical issue. Therefore, I do think that social media companies have a moral duty to invest resources in solving this problem. Are you aware that a part of the fake news is already intercepted by artificial intelligence? It will probably take a while before the machine learning process is so advanced that almost all of the fake news will be immediately recognized, but I do have great hope that it will be there eventually. I also like your solution of counter-attacking this issue. To add to that, it could also be an option to rate the website where the info is coming from. Usually, a website mostly publishes or non-fake, or fake news, but not both. In this way, the fake news will be recognized even faster!