Facebook’s Lacklustre New ‘Fake News’ Rules
Why weaponised racism and lies still plague the platform
Even before Covid-19 prevented most of us from leaving our homes, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter had become society’s main public square. We gather online in Facebook and WhatsApp chats and average two and a half hours a day on social media, trawling through never-ending feeds of updates and information. This has changed political life as well as the social fabric — for instance, even civil activism like the mass support of the Black Lives Matter movement is (at least in part) conducted online.
With these technology platforms becoming increasingly central, the way in which these online spaces have been designed by their overlords in Silicon Valley has come under heightened scrutiny. Facebook’s annus horribilis in 2016, from Cambridge Analytica to the invasion of Russian troll bots, has driven the company into taking steps to prevent the degradation of its platform. After initially trying to bluster through the criticisms, Mark Zuckerberg eventually conceded “we made mistakes, there’s more to do, and we need to step up and do it.”
This is the context in which Facebook’s recent announcements about political advertising in New Zealand should be understood. As part of a stated effort to “fight the spread of…
