“Fake news is not a technical glitch.” This sentence is the headline of a recent article about the hysteria that has enveloped the nation over the “unexpected” presidential outcome. It also is a simple explanation that clears up much of the confusion being disseminated since the Nov. 8 vote.
Ironically, there has been a lot of misinformation about what “fake news” is. Is it false stories made up whole cloth? Yes. Is it misreporting about events that have happened? No, but that’s become a much-discussed point about the journalism profession since the issue arose. Is it media opinion? No.
Blaming members of the media for expressing their opinion rather than just stating the facts of a news story has been a complaint for decades, if not centuries. Not reporting all the facts is poor journalism, but a lie of omission is not the issue at hand.
Fake news is “creative writing,” to be kind. It’s the act of crafting imaginary facts about people whose opponents would be willing to believe are true. It’s pernicious, but it isn’t merely bad journalism. It is not based in fact at all.
Yet, people are willing to believe what they are told is news because Americans trust the format. “Crankish conspiratorial thinking has been a theme in America for a long time,” notes professional software engineer and blogger Ariel Rabkin.
But there has been an outcry at the platforms that have unwittingly served as dispensers of fake news. The messenger has been condemned as much as the fake news itself.
Blaming the messenger — the online platforms where this fake news appears — is not the answer, however. Getting angry at Google or Facebook for “throwing” the election by permitting fake news on their sites is a pretty big waste of breath.
Consider the complaints. Facebook repeatedly tweaks its algorithm to impact how news trends, for which it recently faced a fair backlash, but that does not equate to Facebook making up false stories that show up on the site. And it would hurt Facebook’s business model to try to decide what’s real and what’s not.
As Rabkin explains:
Facebook didn’t invent rumor-mongering. It doubtless has made the problem more visible, since what used to be merely asserted drunkenly in saloons or spoken on talk radio is now in publicly visible text online. But visibility is not the same as impact and we should not assume without evidence that technology has made false rumors more dangerous to society. (The election of Donald Trump is not evidence that falsehood has any new potency. Partisans have been repeating lies about their opposition since the birth of democracy.) …
Google and Facebook have a deep ethos of neutrality, and to the extent that they are credible, it is precisely because they do not make blatant editorial decisions that embed their preconceptions and beliefs about which sources to trust. If Google or Facebook were to anoint some limited set of news sources as “authoritative” and some others as “fake,” they would immediately be faced with quite an ugly controversy about who is who, and this is controversy they avoid for both business and philosophical reasons.
Getting to the top of Facebook or Google search returns is a contest, and contestants know how to play the game.
This is the era of digital marketing, where getting seen is as important as what is said. Many players are vying for the top spot, and are willing to pay for it. An entire industry has made its fortune teaching other businesses how to rank up the Google pages. They game and test and look at data to learn how to outbid their competition to get to that spot.
This is how these platforms make their money, and they aren’t going to jeopardize the funding stream. So while Facebook and Google may constantly be rewriting and reframing their algorithms to try to second-guess what people are looking for to be able to deliver that to them, there are many, many guardians at the gate willing to point out what these platforms are doing wrong.
To wit: Being the editors of quality news is not the job description for Facebook and Google engineers.
If users are seeking carefully curated news, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal are both available online, and there is no particular reason why Google ought to compete directly against them.
Americans do want reliable information on which to form opinions, it’s in their best interest to have all the competing arguments coming at them, good and bad. This involves becoming educated, not just by what’s on the screen, but what is in books, what occurs in real-life experiences and involves real-life witnesses.
Anybody can put anything on the Internet, for better or worse. It’s our responsibility as members of society to be able to develop and express well-considered, well-formed, and well-sourced positions.
And for all its faults, America was not “hacked” into electing Donald Trump. Some Americans may have believed fake news and used it to form their opinions, but that is not what “hacking” is. No evidence points to machines having been tampered with, despite Trump’s pre-victory claims that it could happen. The Wisconsin and Pennsylvania recounts requested by Green Party candidate Jill Stein only reinforce the validity of the vote.
So let’s be vigilant thinkers and put a little effort into determining the quality of information on which we form our opinions. We’ve no one to blame but ourselves if we fault the machines for doing a poor job of thinking for us.
