How Effective are Social Media Platforms in Fighting Misinformation?

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geppettoio

6 min readMay 7, 2020

The information age (also known as Digital Age) has brought many innovations, updates and changes to our lives. The way we live, interact, learn and even the way we think have changed significantly that we could not have predicted these changes twenty years ago. Now, we live in a world where the only need to share one’s opinion is to have an internet connection. Everybody can generate information, comments, share their opinions which are great for the freedom of speech. Social media platforms like Twitter, Reddit, Facebook etc. have been the facilitators that made all this possible. We are grateful for this, but the fact that everyone has the right to produce information has a serious consequence: misinformation.

The Rise of Social Networks

The traditional media platforms have been in demand until the beginning of the 21st century. Today, as younger generations taking the helm, and as they adapt themselves to the innovations of the new information age, they no longer use, follow or trust traditional media platforms. Hence, people began to use social networks where everyone can be independent and free to share their opinions and to follow what they are really interested in. Let’s have a look at statistical data to better understand the rise of social networks and how they affect our lives nowadays.

Social Networks by Numbers

More than 3.5 billions of people use social media platforms, each of Facebook, Youtube and Whatsapp have over 2 billions of users. [1]
90.4% of Millennials, 77.5% of Generation X, and 48.2% of Baby Boomers are active social media users. [2]
The average time that 16–24s spend on social networks and messaging is 3 hours on a daily basis. [3]
Every second, on average, 6,000 tweets are tweeted on Twitter which corresponds to 500 million tweets per day and around 200 billion tweets per year. [4]
At least 50 percent of internet users hear about the latest news via social media. [5]

Thus, social networks are now a part of our lives. We have access to latest news, initially, through social media. Influencers share their lives and their products, politicians share their ideologies or opinions, sports fans support their teams, criticize if they perform bad. New information that may interest or affect us is being produced continuously and in this huge pile of information stack we lose the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff, to detect if the news or politicians are misleading.

How Misinformation Spreads via Social Networks

Before we understand how misinformation spreads via social networks, we need to understand how and why fake news are produced and planted in the first place.

Misleading information is mostly designed and produced with political motivation to provoke extremist sentiment, influence political processes, or seed distrust and confusion in society.[6] The use of technological tools and techniques such as bots, trolling, big data, deep-fakes, and others help misinformation to be produced to reach targeted and potentially endless audiences.

Especially for the social network context, misleading information is produced to create attention economy to gain one’s attention and then sell it to others. That being said, disinformation is a currency now.

“Few lies carry the inventor’s mark, and the most prostitute enemy to truth may spread a thousand, without being known for the author: besides, as the vilest writer hath his readers, so the greatest liar hath his believers: and it often happens, that if a lie be believed only for an hour, it hath done its work, and there is no further occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it.”

As Jonathan Swift stated in his essay [7] on Political Lying back in 1710, the level of generating and producing content and information was not as it is today since there was no social media and a bunch of opportunities to have done so at the time. However, he laid stress on that lies spread much faster than the truth.

https://github.com/chrismeserole/blog-posts/tree/master/How%20Misinformation%20Spreads

Why do lies spread much faster than the truth? The reasons for that vary and these are some of them:

Most of the time, lies are more exciting than the truth. It excites people bored with reality and routine.
We tend to pay attention to evidence that supports our belief and ignore evidence that doesn’t.
Lies are being generated as conspiracy theories, and conspiracy theories always have excited customers.

Especially, during the COVID-19 pandemic, we have witnessed that the conspiracy theories spread faster than the virus itself. And it is fully recognized that misinformation problem poses a fatal threat to our health.

Social Media Platforms Against Misinformation

Social media platforms are responsible for taking necessary measures in fight against misinformation and but this task is not too easy to handle. Because misinformation is a complex and multi-layered problem. They could not have developed concrete solutions to the problem by now, but some efforts are in the making. Let’s focus on how they are acting during coronavirus infodemic[8] and what their plans are, because most of the progress on the misinformation problem seems to happen during this pandemic.

Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Linkedin, Reddit, Twitter and Youtube issued a joint statement and pledged to work together to combat misinformation.

Apart from this statement, each platform has their own method to fight this infodemic.

One significant example to put forth is that not only did Facebook initiate informative pop-ups at the top of all newsfeeds, but it also added a special “COVID-19 Information Center” which provides real-time information updates from national health authorities.

Facebook has assisted Reuters in creating a free online course to help journalists and media consumers to identify the “manipulated media” or the media which deliberately mislead people, such as deep fakes.

Twitter decided to remove tweets that deny official health guidance or endorse a dangerous treatment. The company is also banning tweets that attack specific groups or nationalities and claim that certain groups are more susceptible to coronavirus.

Reddit organizes “ask me anything” events with experts and it also published a statement explaining the planned course of actions ;

“To further help ensure that authoritative content is what redditors see first when they are looking for conversations about coronavirus, Reddit may also apply a quarantine to communities that contains hoax or misinformation content. A quarantine will remove the community from search results, warn the user that it may contain misinformation, and require an explicit opt-in.”

These steps are essential and good efforts. But are they sufficient? Not necessarily, and we can say they fail in the fight against misinformation. Because these solutions or efforts are not sustainable as a concrete solution. As most of the misleading contents are produced in social media platforms, they need to do more than that.

Why Social Media Platforms are not Effective in Fighting Misinformation

Current social media platforms were not designed for the problems now we have to solve. In their early incubation days, misinformation was not a problem to care about that much. So, in order to fight misinformation, they need major changes in their structures. But they are so mature to make these changes and it is a risk for them to have these huge structural changes.
Until now, their main solution to misinformation was automated algorithms, because they scale well. But fighting misinformation requires human labor; algorithms do not have the talent to analyze and decipher complex human interactions yet. But as for the human labor; we have a trust issue.
Developing solutions for the misinformation problem requires financial sacrifices. Because their main financial income depends on the activity traffic of these platforms. And manipulated information are the best source of feed for this traffic. So, in order to take action against misinformation as a social media platform, they must be social impact-oriented before financial growth.

geppetto.io aims to assist these social media platforms as it is designed as a social truth media for social impact and for the needs in the fight against misinformation.

Join our community and follow us to learn more about our project.

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