Facebook's tentative plans to crack down on fake news and hoax sites is being met with the usual conservative ire.
Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to help reduce the spread of misinformation on Facebook has set off a “widespread panic” among some owners of the biggest hyperpartisan conservative pages.
The problem, according to the conservative acting as intermediary, is that conservatives sites were pushed into publishing fake news because They Like Money. It’s not their fault they wrote that stuff.
Massoumi acknowledged that during the election his and other big pages did publish some misleading and false information, though he said they removed the latter once they realized their mistake. He said they began to push the boundaries after new players, such as sites run from Macedonia or others such as Ending the Fed, entered the market, copied their approach, and then began reaping huge Facebook engagement by publishing false and misleading content.
“We strayed because of the competitive nature of the algorithm in the News Feed and we do need to be brought back,” he says. “But the problem is I operate in an environment where sites like Ending the Fed and these unknowns are going to beat us unless we go from tilted to misleading.”
Yeah, well. You could act responsibly anyway and get cut a smaller check, like Legitimate News Outlets do, but I suppose that thought does go against the entire conservative mindset. Touché.
Anyhoo, the central worry is that conservatives sites thus "pushed" into generating crooked hoaxes will be unilaterally punished before they have a chance to "clean up their act."
Massoumi said he and his fellow big conservative page owners want to cooperate with Facebook to “create an environment where the news is legitimate and there is way less fake news.” They agree there are bad actors who need to be warned to clean up their act or face a permanent ban.
Which is a good thing, and more along the lines of what we had before conservatives complained in the first place and demanded Facebook remove all editorial discretion, but oh well. Sometimes these things need to actually crash and burn before the conservative side will acknowledge the point the not-conservative side had been making all along.
A bit of good news is that the threat of action is already having some impact.
Some small publishers who scored big viral hits with false stories are now removing them from their sites. Ending the Fed’s false story about the pope endorsing Trump and it’s false story about Obama cutting money from the military to spend it on Syrian refuges are both no longer online. (Its Facebook page is still active as of this writing.)
All that said, let's not kid ourselves here. Facebook has been incompetent at news curating since the beginning of this episode and there's nothing that would suggest they're going to stop being incompetent now. The company bowed to conservative demands that more conservative news be displayed on Facebook by eliminating the editorial group responsible for vetting news before it got posted. The result was, predictably, a flood of viral fake news and hoaxes, upon which the Facebook response has been to insist that they can solve the problem algorithmically, eventually, someday, if the rest of us are really going to get that upset about it.
Now Facebook and Google both are barring hoax news sites from their ad networks, but aren't explaining how they're doing that or what happens if and when legitimate sites get caught up in that mix—it seems an effort aimed mostly at the hoax sites that got recent publicity and which are therefore generating the most humiliation for the two companies. Zuckerberg in particular seems enamored of an approach where Facebook users "flag" fake news and an algorithm will trundle off to bar the offending sites, and if you can't immediately deduce how that particular feature would be immediately abused to hell and back by the internet's various ideological cretins and troll farms you haven't been around very long.
So that's an update on where we are. Facebook is moving to restrict hoax sites, conservatives are upset about it again, and nobody gives a damn whether non-conservatives are upset about it because we do not get private ideological meetings with the founder of the company to proclaim our Itemized List of Grievances. If we did, we'd probably say "put the damn human editors back, you louts. You and we both know damn well you can't determine the credibility of a news story based on how many likes it gets or who complains. By the time you develop an artificial intelligence capable of doing that on its own we’re all going to be hiding from the robot uprising in caves and bunkers and nobody will have any damn wi-fi connection anyway."
So let's all watch what happens, I guess. Forgive us if we’re not feeling terribly optimistic these days, but … well, look around.
