Fake news is an existential crisis for social media
The funny thing about fake news is how mind-numbingly boring it can be. Not the fakes themselves — they’re constructed to be catnip clickbait to stoke the fires of rage of their intended targets. Be they gun owners. People of color. Racists. Republican voters. And so on.
The really tedious stuff is all the also incomplete, equally self-serving pronouncements that surround ‘fake news’. Some very visibly, a lot a lot less so.
....
As Zeynep Tufekci has eloquently argued: “The most effective forms of censorship today involve meddling with trust and attention, not muzzling speech itself.”
So we also get subjected to all this intentional padding, applied selectively, to defuse debate and derail clear lines of argument; to encourage confusion and apathy; to shift blame and buy time. Bored people are less likely to call their political representatives to complain.
Truly fake news is the inception layer cake that never stops being baked. Because pouring FUD onto an already polarized debate — and seeking to shift what are by nature shifty sands (after all information, misinformation and disinformation can be relative concepts, depending on your personal perspective/prejudices) — makes it hard for any outsider to nail this gelatinous fakery to the wall.
....
Every gun outrage in America is now routinely followed by a flood of Russian-linked Twitter bot activity. Exacerbating social division is the name of this game. And it’s playing out all over social media continually, not just around elections.
...
Really, the case for social media regulation is starting to look unstoppable.
But even with unfettered access to internal data and the potential to control content-sifting engines, how do you fix a problem that scales so very big and broad?
Regulating such massive, global platforms would clearly not be easy. In some countries Facebook is so dominant it essentially is the Internet.
So, again, this problem looks existential. And Zuck’s 2018 challenge is more Sisyphean than Herculean.
And it might well be that competition concerns are not the only trigger-call for big tech to get broken up this year.
See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/18/fake-news-is-an-existential-crisis-for-social-media/?utm_medium=TCnewsletter