There is false information everywhere on social media. So, what are the companies doing to control the spread of fake news?
On The Grill
Once again, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey were grilled by the U.S policymakers. The hearing was jointly held by two subcommittees of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
The policymakers asked whether the platforms bore some responsibility for the riot on January 6. The legislators also questioned the CEOs on the spread of COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation. The CEOs were also questioned about the mental health implications of social media on kids and how their safety could be jeopardized on the platforms.
The Same Old Problems
We all know that misinformation is becoming a big problem in these platforms for the past couple of years and recent reports show how they are emerging as the hotspots for misinformation around vaccines, climate change among others.
Disinformation Around Vaccines: A new report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that anti-vaccine activists on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter reach more than 59 million followers, making these the largest and most important social media platforms for anti-vaxxers.
Disinformation Around Climate Change: A report by Royal Swedish Academy of Science said that the measures required to create a better planet will be difficult to enforce if they continue to suffer targeted attacks in social media.
One of the report’s author, Owen Gaffney, of the Stockholm Resilience Centre was quoted by The Guardian, saying, “Social media reports have created a toxic environment where it’s now very difficult to distinguish facts from fiction.” He added, “This is undermining democracies, which in turn is limiting our ability to make long-term decisions needed to save the planet.”
Are We Doing Anything?
Facebook, Google and Twitter have deployed measures to curb the spread of misinformation, but they are not as effective as they should be. Let’s take Facebook for example. A report by Avaaz, a global nonprofit activist group, found that Facebook could have stopped an estimated 10 billion views on top-performing pages that repeatedly shared misinformation in the eight months leading up to the 2020 elections.
Avaaz found 267 groups with a combined following of 32 million that spread content promoting violence through the 2020 election. When Avaaz concluded its report, it found that 118 of the 267 groups were still active and continued championing violence.
Zooming Out
The bigger question is what can we do to stop the spread of misinformation completely. Representative Peter Welch has said that a new federal agency should be created to oversee the industry. This agency would be staffed by policy and technology experts and could focus on a wide range of issues, from content standards and data privacy to misinformation and disinformation, said Welch.
Be it an agency or better AI tools, stringent measures have to be put in place to curb the spread of misinformation. We hope social media companies take a swift decision and deploy measures that will allow only facts to be circulated in these platforms and not fiction.
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