Fake News and Information Cascades
The article talks about Google, Facebook, and Twitter screening ads from now on, and how Facebook chooses to display ads. Senators want the three companies to make political ads publicly available and want to know how they plan to filter out hate speech while not taking away free speech. The article also talks about how Facebook’s algorithms decide what to show on its users’ feeds. Since Facebook gets money from ads, they get more money the longer their users on using the website, and so it’s beneficial for them to display stuff that won’t upset their users. Their algorithms can decide what political beliefs they have and then choose to only show posts with a similar view on their feed.
Algorithms like this can cause information cascades. Since the feed is only giving similar viewpoints, you see a bunch of people with the same belief and start to believe what you think is the crowd believes. In the case of “fake news,” if you see a bunch of people like and share a news piece, you’re more inclined to believe it’s accurate since a bunch of other people believed it was accurate, without fact-checking the article. This can lead to falsehoods being spread after a few initial people begin to spread an article without checking its accuracy. On Facebook, combined with their algorithm to show only viewpoints you have, this can lead to many people taking an article as fact since it appeals to them and other people also believed it. So inaccurate news articles can easily spread through information cascades. If the companies can track which articles are fake and which are factual before they start gaining momentum, then they can stop a lot of people from blindly believing something untrue since they can prevent cascades before they start.