UPDATED— Facebook can’t judge what is true. But what if we all did?
Edit: This is a post that I wrote just last week, but my thinking has evolved some. See my response to Tim O'Reilly for now:
“Truthrank” can’t be transparent enough for this job.
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What if Facebook put “Probably False” in red letters around fake news?
Think it’s crazy to let them?
Well, you’re right. It shouldn’t be them.
44% of Americans get news from Facebook according to Pew Research Center.
Any attempt to fix this needs to abide by three principles. It must be transparent to the public, respect diverse opinions, and be impartial as to the news source.
Mark Zuckerberg’s response minimized the problem, and he’s rightly taking some heat for that. But he also wrote, “we must be extremely cautious about becoming arbiters of truth ourselves.”
That’s absolutely right. No single company should have that kind of power over journalism.
But what if it wasn’t done by any company?
We’ve seen that internet users can do a solid job of objective editing. Wikipedia isn’t perfect, but it is good, even on controversial subjects. It achieves this by a lot of hard working volunteers, but also by being transparent. Every edit is public, as is the discussion about those edits.
Diversity of fact checkers is just as important as transparency. As Zuckerberg wrote, “it’s important to try to understand the perspective of people on the other side.”
Impartiality is of course important. You can’t just say: “this site is terrible.” The LA Times published a list of “fake news sites” that generated a lot of backlash. That backlash is right. News should be judged on the content, not the source. Many of the sites on the list publish pieces that may be inflammatory, but not really false.
In general, tech company employees lean liberal. Facebook is no exception. Wikipedia has its own diversity problem, as Jimmy Wales admits. Any crowd-sourced fact-checking effort would need to do better. But I don’t think it’s impossible to achieve.
The solution also has to scale. And it has to respond quickly to new viral stories. Ok. How could we do it?
Fact Checking as a Service
I’m imagining a “Fact Checking as a Service” non-profit. Let’s call it WikiChecked.org. Volunteer editors would work to verify the top viral news of the day. Oversight and leadership could come from journalists on the left, right, and center.
Platforms would use an API to get quality scores on stories. They could warn users that stories might be false, with a link to more detail on the reasons.
Here’s that quick mockup of what it might look like on Facebook:
The goal is for users to see a warning that this image probably isn’t accurate. If they disagree they’d be directed to a public discussion at WikiChecked. Facebook support staff would not need to weigh in. Facebook could also let users opt out of the fact-checking.
Can this scale? Can our volunteers keep up with all this news? It wouldn’t be easy. But just getting the most viral stories would go a long way. There’s a power law to the spread of most online content, and news is no exception.
Can it be done quickly? Good question. But again, Wikipedia does it. If I write some unattributed facts on Trump’s Wikipedia page, they will be gone in a matter of minutes.
The problem with bad journalism goes beyond outright fake news. There’s also a lot of distorted partisan clickbait, on both sides. WikiChecked would focus on just the truly fake news.
This is still not an easy decision for Facebook and other platforms. Even the best independent fact-checkers will make mistakes. Some users will still see bias, and Facebook will be the ones taking the heat. And, of course, fake news is engaging.
It’s not an easy business decision, but I think it’s the right one. In the long term, trust is important.
As Abraham Lincoln once said, “I enjoy social media, except when my boss posts dozens of pictures of his ugly-ass dog.”
Ok, he didn’t say that. He did say, “I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.”
Let’s bring them some real facts.
Jim Greer (Founder, Kongregate & CounterPAC)
PS — While my proposal here is very specific, it is meant to be a starting point for a conversation.
Maybe all the fact-checking should really be done by professional journalists. Volunteers would focus on identifying re-bloggings, headlines embedded in images, etc.
Maybe we should do something else entirely. But we need to do something.
