Humans can help clean up Facebook and Twitter

Chennai

Half-truths and lies spread widely and quickly. On Facebook and Twitter, the most inflammatory, unreliable and divisive posts are shared and too often believed more readily than those with verifiable facts. Now that we’ve had time to survey the fallout from the election, it’s apparent that much more needs to be done to rapidly and more consistently stop the proliferation of bad info, year round and globally.

Leading up to last month’s election, Twitter and Facebook appended warning labels to numerous tweets and posts from Donald Trump and his supporters, and the sites have sporadically continued to do so as the president broadcasts unsubstantiated claims of voting fraud and ballot counting inconsistencies. It’s a start, but the evidence suggests the labels themselves didn’t stop the spread of the posts. Facebook, which allows politicians to post lies on its website, indicated in an internal discussion that the labels lowered the spread of the president’s objectionable posts by only about 8 percent. Twitter said its labels helped to decrease the spread of offending tweets by 29 percent, by one measure.

Worse, the labels contained squishy language, like calling the president’s assertions that he won the election or that it was stolen “disputed,” rather than simply false. Because the companies have not revealed how often users clicked through the labels to more reliable information, it seems safe to assume the those click-throughs were minimal. Cleaning up social media won’t be easy, particularly since banning or significantly throttling more prominent accounts even after repeated violations of policy or common decency would be bad for business.

Top accounts appear to be treated more leniently than the general public, forcing Facebook, in one recent episode, to explain why it wasn’t giving Steve Bannon the boot after he suggested that Dr. Anthony Fauci and Christopher Wray, the director of the F.B.I., should be beheaded. Facebook said Bannon hadn’t committed enough violations. It’s really about money. Divisiveness brings more engagement, which brings in more advertising revenue. Users should worry that Facebook and Twitter won’t maintain the same level of vigilance now that the election has passed. (Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said as much, according to BuzzFeed.) And the incentives for posting misleading content didn’t disappear after Nov 3. If the companies truly care about the integrity of their platforms, they’ll form teams of people to monitor the accounts of users with the most followers, retweets and engagement. That includes those of Trump, both today and later as a private citizen, but also of President-elect Joe Biden and President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, and other influential accounts, like those of Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Taylor Swift. Facebook says it has software tools to identify when high-reach accounts may violate rules, but they clearly are not catching enough quickly enough.

Think of these frontline moderators as hall monitors whose job is to ensure that students have a pass, but not necessarily to issue penalties if they don’t. The monotony of refreshing Justin Trudeau’s social media feed is worth it for the preservation of democracy and promotion of basic facts.

Ideally, social media companies would ban public officials, media personalities and celebrities who consistently lie or violate policies. Adding simple modifications like stronger language in warning labels, moving the labels to above from below the content and halting the ability of users to spread patently false information from prominent accounts could go a long way toward reforming the sites. It’s worth noting that Facebook and Twitter are actually exercising their own free-speech rights by policing their sites. Until social media companies care more about fact than fiction, their sites will be nothing more than an accelerant for the lies our leaders can and do tell every day.

Bensinger is a member of the editorial board for NYT©2020

The New York Times