Facebook and Fake News
This article is a recent example of one of Facebook’s biggest issues: the spread of fake news.
The Agricultural Commissioner of Texas recently posted a fake news article about Donald Trump’s decision to remove a federal judge from the “22nd court of criminal appeals”, which does not exist. This individual has 600,000 followers on social media and is a trusted elected official. This environment led to the continuous sharing of the post and nasty comments from conservative extremists using islamophobic and racist rhetoric. The Ag Commissioner acknowledged that the post was fake, but has not removed the post. Many officials in the cities of Texas have spoken out saying that the commissioner has the responsibility of not promoting fake news, especially if it is aimed to promote division and mistrust in our communities.
This is one of many example of Facebook’s fake news problem. A typical user sees posts (whether promoted or not) and the number of likes and comments associated with them. This leads a lot of users to prematurely make a judgment on the information given in the post. As long as the post has a bunch of likes and comments, or in the recent case posted by a significant figure in society, it can be trusted, right? Wrong. This tactic is being used day in and day out to spread propaganda by hate groups with malicious intent.
This ties into the idea of information cascades and how critical they can be when it comes to news. Should there ever be a point where an individual doesn’t do their own due diligence and simply follows the crowd? Well, we’ve seen what happens when there is (as studied) on social media. It only takes a few likes and comments to persuade a user that the information of a post is valid. Somehow we’ve defined validity such that it is directly correlated with popularity. This is a recipe for disaster and has led big information companies to actively combat such information cascades as we’ve seen the results of fake news and the previous election.
The spread of fake news is a widely experienced form of information cascades that have further divided our country. It will be interesting to see if these information companies use what we’ve studied in class about information cascades to figure out how to combat negative cascades.
Link : https://www.sacurrent.com/the-daily/archives/2017/11/28/texas-ag-commissioner-miller-admits-he-shared-fake-news-on-facebook-doesnt-remove-it