Efforts Being Taken To Eradicate Fake News On Social Media Sites
Prior to the tug-of-war on information, social media platforms already had means of filtering what you get to see. A user’s feed is determined by their social circle within that platform, the things that they follow or like, and other activities that reflect their own. Over time, however, people eventually found ways to use these configurations to forward their own personal interests.
It is in this way that social media sites have become the go-to platforms for misinformation and black propaganda. People can easily craft news articles and images that trigger an emotional response and sensationalize it to spread it around the network. This compromises and twists the truth to their advantage, allowing them to recruit other people to their cause.
Their content is tailored to fit the algorithmic design of the social media application, so it can reach as much people as it can. This activity, dubbed as “social media optimisation”, is quite similar to search engine optimisation — the art of ensuring that your web pages show up high on Google search results.
So how exactly do internet trolls use social media platforms to proliferate fake news — and more importantly, what kind of efforts are being taken to mitigate it?
Twitter users do not expect to have to fact-check what they see on their feed. The appeal of this platform is in the way users can give, share, and view bite-sized updates. Compared to Facebook, it gives off a more relaxed atmosphere.
By using “bots” — automated or semi-automated Twitter accounts pretending to be real people — to create and retweet content, trolls can generate photoshopped images and fake news articles and then speedily spread them across the Twitter network.
Twitter users, who often do not have the time or the patience to review the things on their feed, then become passive consumers of fake news. Eventually, it becomes a part of their social media experience and the familiarity they have with it makes it difficult for them to confirm the veracity of the news.
To combat this, Twitter is currently working on a Report Fake News button. This button allows users to flag false, misleading, or harmful information for review. However, the development of this prototype is moving slowly due to concerns that people may find ways to manipulate the system with it — the way other aspects of Twitter have been used.
They are also working on machine learning, where software is programmed to detect micro-signals from accounts to determine whether they are fake.
Facebook has a more collaborative feel. People can like and join a wide variety of pages and groups that catch their attention, and write longer, more informative posts. News agencies and websites find it easier to direct people to read their articles here.
After Facebook suffered heavily from news that Russian groups may have spent thousands of dollars to tilt the 2016 election season to their favor, it has tried to be more vigilant with monitoring its content. It began incorporating the use of “trust indicators”, which provide a background of the publishers as well as the authors behind the news article, and “related links”, which give the users the option to explore other factual articles related to the one on their news feed.
Facebook is also under scrutiny for creating “filter bubbles” — only showing people things that they like or tend to agree with, and hiding content that they don’t support. With this, they introduced a new feature that allows users to follow topics, and not just pages. This way, people receive content from different sources, and not just the ones that reflect their views.
Lastly, trolls are using Facebook to recruit people into Groups that display heavily skewed information on politics, religion, and the like. Once these Groups worm their way into a user’s biases, it can be difficult to bring them back out.
Both Facebook and Twitter have dedicated themselves to becoming more transparent about political advertisements on their sites. They’ve also partnered with independent fact-checking organizations to help catch fake news before it spreads too far.
The power of weaponized information — misinformation, usually of a political nature, deliberately spread around to gain a competitive advantage over the opponent — is augmented by the existence of social media platforms. Instead of bringing people together, it is segregating them and isolating them into groups that reflect their own biases. This is making it more difficult to relate to others who do not think the way that they do.
In the efforts to regulate fake news, social media platforms will inevitably run into controversies regarding where they can draw the line between verbal abuse and free speech, valid opinions and harmful ones, their right to regulate Twitter feeds and a user’s right to their own content. These will be difficult questions to answer — but necessary ones nevertheless, as they determine the way social media influences its users.
Fake news can have very real, very frightening consequences. These social media platforms are now part of a race that can control the political tide of entire countries, as well as the lives of innocent citizens — a race to find the best ways to engineer their feeds before someone else does.
