When I started at Google back in 2011, one of my favorite ways to gauge the hot topic of the day among Googlers was to check out Memegen. One of the engineers I worked with in CAM had created the site, so our growing office had a special affinity for it. Sadly, just like many other social media platforms, it has since devolved into chaos so Google is working to implement a community moderation approach.
#techtopic
I joined the Facebook in May 2004, soon after it launched - so I’ve been on the platform longer than the vast majority of its 2.7 billion users. It started as a site to replace the paper directories (or “facebooks”) that we used to get in college to help us get to know one another. (I remember our freshman facebook being called ‘the menu’ by many upperclassmen at Princeton...but I digress.) It seemed like such a cool way to engage with students & alums at different universities. Then it evolved into a place to keep up with friends and family and to learn the news of the day. And then it too quickly devolved.
We’ve all heard the term ‘fake news’ - what is it & why is it a hard problem to solve?
‘Fake news’ is often defined as news stories that have zero basis in fact and/or have no verifiable sources. Seems like a clean distinction? Sure, removing propaganda should be easy. The challenge comes in when you add satire and partially true stories to the spectrum of ‘fake news.’ So for the tech companies, designing algorithms which can detect this nuance is really challenging (especially when many of the algorithms are designed to capture attention & keep you on the platform). An MIT study in 2018 showed that falsehoods on Twitter won out over the truth almost every time. When you then add in sophisticated deepfake videos (where tech manipulates & combines real videos with body doubles), it gets really hard for frequent and infrequent social media users to distinguish what’s real and what’s not. This continues to cause huge societal trust issues between individuals, families, communities and governments.
So what can we do about this? Encourage institutions and individuals to become more educated on this topic and force action. One, tech companies need to take responsibility for how their recommendation engines have been hijacked to spread lies. FB recently banned QAnon from their platform, but there is so much more they and other social media platforms can do. Two, the US federal government needs to develop informed regulation to combat misinformation. Three, individuals have personal responsibility to actually read items critically before sharing them. MediaWise from the Poynter Institute and libraries offer guides to help distinguish real from fake news, and even comedians have ways to teach readers to identify fake news.
