Fake News: The Problem isn’t Russia or Social Networks
Facebook, Twitter and Google were grilled on Capitol Hill in late October over their parts in Russia’s meddling with the 2016 election. According to the New York Times, Russia “disseminated inflammatory posts that reached 126 million users on Facebook, published more than 131,000 messages on Twitter and uploaded over 1,000 videos to Google’s YouTube service.”
Russia was able to achieve this by:
- Coordinating the mass sharing of organic (unpaid) content tricking the social networks’ algorithms into adding the content to trending topic lists.
- Deploying (paid) social ads that were hyper-targeted to specific demographic groups.
There’s no question that both Russia and the social media companies deserve their share of blame for the spread disinformation or “fake news” during the election. However, there’s a third party that never gets mentioned, and I believe is equally — if not more — to blame.
Imagine a man running through town stopping to tell everyone he sees about a “300lbs invisible bat boy” on a murderous rampage across the country. When asked where he heard this, he says, “I read it in the National Enquirer waiting to check out at the grocery store.”
Most people wouldn’t think the store prominently displaying the Enquirer or even the Enquirer itself would be to blame for the man being so gullible. You’d just blame the man.
So I ask, why are we only blaming the social networks and Russians when we were the gullible ones?
It’s easy to blame Russia and the social networks. But, the government and tech companies can build better safeguards to ensure that foreign actors or governments can’t buy social or online ads aimed at influencing our elections. The social media companies can also do a better job identifying content that artificially goes viral and shutting it down for violating their terms of service.
The real problem isn’t the Russians. It isn’t the content posted or the ads they purchased. It isn’t the algorithms determining trending stories.
The problem is with we, the people.
Right and left, red and blue, as a people we need to be better informed and ask questions. One of the greatest qualities children possess is their curiosity (get passed the messenger in the video). Somewhere along the road to adulthood, most of us lose that. As a people, we need to correct this.
As communicators, it’s our duty to ensure we’re accurately educating and informing the public while calling out those in our industry who don’t.
