France on the horizon…

With the French presidential elections just around the corner, and given the results of the recent US election, everything indicates that France is going to become a tech laboratory in which to test the influence of factors such as fake news and its impact on the electoral process.

Facebook has just announced the launch of a fake news filter just for France, while joining Google and eight major French media to try to launch news verification tools. The idea is that tools such as CrossCheck, developed by Google News Lab together with First Draft as part of an initiative with European media, can be used in conjunction with databases such as those developed by Le Monde, six hundred web pages directly identified as unreliable; by Libération, which compiles news positively identified as fake; or by other media in order to combine that information with user reports and other feedback, and to reduce the dissemination of such news in the algorithms of social networks and search engines. According to some of the media involved, it was precisely the commitment of online companies like Facebook to reduce the circulation of fake news in their recommendation algorithms that encouraged them to participate in the initiative.

In the United States, Facebook has solicited collaboration from third parties such as Snopes, PolitiFact or The Washington Post’s fact-checking tool to, combined with feedback from users, try to limit the spread of fake news and tag items as such.

The problem of fake news in networked environments is, on the one hand, the absence of valid references to judge their credibility. With newspapers in the midst of crisis, many online media have come to occupy a growing place in the public’s information diet, but together with media that are developing quality journalism, others are taking advantage of the few online entry barriers to poison, invent or disseminate fake news linked to political agendas, made worse by having incentives generated by the dissemination of this news on social networks and search engines. The exclusion of pages identified as fake news from the advertising mechanisms of Google and Facebook is an important first step because it reduces the economic incentive to generate them, but it is only the beginning of a long process. The study of patterns of diffusion of fake news items, for example, is another important tool in order to prevent their circulation, and presumably was one of the main reasons that led Facebook to acquire CrowdTangle, a social analytics tool, in November.

On the other hand, the social networks act as an echo chamber in which we tend to seek out other people who think like us, creating an environment that reinforces existing beliefs and generating radicalization we would normally avoid.

The problem, of course, is how to curb fake news without becoming a kind of arbiter of truth deciding what is true and what is false, an issue that has already brought Facebook criticism, prompting an emergency meeting with conservative politicians after some of its editors confirmed they had applied political bias when deciding trending topics. According to many, it was Facebook’s fear of being seen as hostile to conservative ideas which meant that the company did not do enough to stop the spread of fake news in the US election.

To what extent were the social networks responsible for the outcome of the US elections? Are we only reading what we want to read, that makes us feel good or matches our world view? Or is it a combination of both? While some news is clearly fake, in many other cases, the nuances are not so simple, and of course satire or humor has to be taken into account.

If mechanisms based on the performance of human editors can be arbitrary, and those developed from artificial intelligence algorithms are complex and can fail, the alternative appears to be to use different mechanisms along with mixed methodologies, in addition to user feedback and labeling, along with studying patterns of dissemination that target anything rapidly diffused.

This is a complex issue, and the indications are that the upcoming French elections are set to be, in many ways, a stage for many tests related to this topic.

(En español, aquí)