Not long after Bill Clinton became president, rumors began circulating that he had covered up the existence of a cocaine-smuggling operation in Mena, Arkansas, when he was governor. It wasn't true, of course. But the Clinton conspiracy theorists—yes, they have ever been among us—began badgering newsrooms and demanding to know why this galactically important story wasn't being investigated.
Now there are growing concerns about the rise of fake news on the internet, and especially on Facebook. I think we all need to be worried about the effect that false information has on our democracy. And there's no doubt that Facebook, with its 1.8 billion users, has weaponized the spread of conspiracy theories in a way that wasn't possible previously. But the Mena craziness, which lives on to this day, shows that the internet is not now and never was a necessary precondition for the spread of politically motivated falsehoods.
Complaints about fake news on Facebook are not exactly new. But they gained new currency last spring when it was revealed by Michael Nunez of Gizmodo that members of the Trending Topics team had messed around with the formula—at least in part, supposedly, to remove topics of interest to conservatives. The company's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, met with conservatives and promised not to do it again. The results were not encouraging. With no human intervention whatsoever, Trending Topics pumped out false stories such as a report that Fox News had fired Megyn Kelly for supporting Hillary Clinton.
But the real gold on Facebook is the all-important newsfeed, the mysterious, algorithmically determined list of updates from friends, relatives, groups you follow, and news sources you have "liked." And, at least when it comes to journalism, the newsfeed is a wreck.
One of the most fascinating insights regarding fake news on Facebook came in August in the form of a piece in the New York Times Magazine on meme farms. As described by reporter John Herrman, those over-the-top, falsehood-filled messages from right-wing groups such as The Angry Patriot and left-wing counterparts such as Occupy Democrats (fake news is one of the few remaining bipartisan political phenomena) are nothing more than low-budget sweat shops desperately trying to get you to click so that you'll view their ads. Just before the election, BuzzFeed's Craig Silverman and Lawrence Alexander revealed that a group of teenagers from Macedonia had been duping Trump supporters with the "news" that Clinton was about to be indicted—again, for clicks and ad revenue.
As the complaints have reached a crescendo, Zuckerberg has denied that fake news promulgated on his platform was responsible for affecting the results of the presidential election, calling such an assertion "a pretty crazy idea." But as Emily Bell, a former top editor for the Guardian, wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review earlier this week, it's time for Zuckerberg to grow up and accept responsibility for what he has created. Bell put it this way:
The line of argument that says we need better journalism to combat fake news is appealing. However, it conflates two different crises. Having a larger number of good journalists is an indisputable goal for any functioning democracy. Wiping out the malicious falsehoods that carpet swaths of the social Web should be a high priority too. But the former will not be an adequate antidote to the latter.
There are signs that the situation may change for the better. Google, followed by Facebook, announced this week that they are going to cut off known purveyors of fake news from their advertising networks, which should wreak well-deserved havoc on meme producers who are in it solely for the money.
There are other steps Facebook could take as well. The algorithm could be adjusted so that content from legitimate news outlets is favored over the bad stuff. Some sort of a labeling system could be instituted; imagine how useful that would be the next time your racist Aunt Gertrude is tempted to share something horrible about Michelle Obama. Tweaks could be made so that liberals see more material from legitimate conservative sources and vice-versa.
As the Mena story shows, conspiracy theories have a way of spreading regardless of technology. Indeed, Mena made it all the way to the Wall Street Journal's editorial page. But Facebook is responsible for an exponential increase in both the quantity and the velocity of misinformation. My Beat the Press colleague Joshua Benton put it this way at the Nieman Journalism Lab: "Our democracy has a lot of problems, but there are few things that could impact it for the better more than Facebook starting to care—really care—about the truthfulness of the news that its users share and take in.”
Zuckerberg needs to move away from his absurd position that Facebook isn't a media company. He may wish otherwise, but his platform has become our single most important distribution system for news. It's time he began acting like he understands that.
