FAKE NEWS AND FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS: Zuckerberg’s Gamble.
I don’t trust them.
Facebook is taking a major step to appease its mostly liberal post-election critics, who charged that disinformation that proliferated on its platform affected the election outcome (read: helped elect a candidate they oppose). . . .
The company’s leadership is presenting this as a kind of technical tweak that will simply out transparent scams. Facebook already enforces various content standards for its site; it could be that the new protocol will affect ostentatiously fabricated items—”Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump,” for example—and nothing else. That kind of limited system could run into difficulties—what to do about parody sites, for example?—but would probably not be fatal to Facebook’s mission of free and open communication and debate.
But conservatives are already raising concerns that the new regime will go far beyond its stated aims, and for good reason. In the wake of the election, Clinton supporters eager to blame ostensibly less enlightened people for her loss and media mandarins distressed about the collapse of their authority expanded the definition of “fake news” to include any content they found politically objectionable. The Washington Post published a hysterical report decrying the supposedly vast influence of fake news that relied on a now-discredited report that used broad and opaque criteria to dismiss partisan news sites as “Russian propaganda.” The anti-fake news crusade, in other words, has gathered momentum in part by exploiting all of the same human impulses that can make actual propaganda so potent in the first place—tribalism, hysteria, and, as the New Yorker‘s Adrian Chen put it, “weav[ing] together truth and disinformation.”
And then there is the fact that some of the fact-checkers Facebook has enlisted to help with its effort—most notably, PolitiFact—have a clear record of bias against conservative viewpoints, rating as “true” or “false” statements that are essentially expressions of opinion and then casually mixing their own predispositions with objective facts in a way that tends to subject the Right to greater scrutiny.
I don’t trust them.
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