Facebook: Fake News
A big tech company like Facebook with an exponential growth record of 2.45 billion users as of Q3 2019 on the Facebook app itself can be extremely difficult to manage. Especially when the CEO and Founder is big on giving people the “power to share in order to make the world more open and connected”; he is constantly facing scandals and criticism over the exchange of “false news” across the platform among other issues. Should Facebook be held liable as a platform even though they are not a publisher?
It has been a trend during crucial times e.g. elections, pandemic etc. to have fake news spread on Facebook which ends up causing and fueling more chaos and panic among people in addition to putting enormous stress on governments trying to combat and carefully address the fake news rather than addressing the issue at hand. With technology being accessible widely by almost the entire world, you will understand the frustration when you end up getting lectured during a family gathering by your grandmother over false news exchanged on Whatsapp (which has a big fake news problem in our region) and when you trace the origin of it, it almost always lead you back to Facebook. In the 2016 elections, there were news circulating about the Democratic candidate running a paedophilia ring out of a pizzeria basement in Washington D.C.; Comet Ping Pong. Nearly a million tweet were exchanged with the term “Pizzagate” and one man have traveled a long distance with a gun and opened fire at the pizzeria claiming he was there to self-investigate (Wendling, 2016).
In addition to the IRA (Internet Research Agency); the Russian government funded group that purchased digital ads and organized political rallies in the United States. This group was accused of propaganda that reached 150 Mn Americans on social media and therefore members of the IRA group were charged by the US Department of Justice of sabotaging the 2016 election and supporting Trump’s campaign (Bloomberg, 2018). Facebook at that time did not have a policy related to misinformation although it was already considered a big company and one would think it is a natural part of governing the company to have a misinformation policy set in place. Facebook was exploited due to the lack of policy, proper mechanisms, content filtration and Zuckerberg is ultimately accountable for allowing it to happen which is why he have taken the decision to introduce viral content review systems aka circuit breaker. A circuit breaker is a form of pausing algorithmic promotion before a post does damage, it was recently used on the Hunter Biden news which was published during the recent presidential race in a suspicious manner (Roberts, 2020).
Hopefully as further regulations would be introduced by the government in addition to the effort from Facebook’s CEO, false news could controlled to a certain extent.
