Major social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are attempting to dilute the spread of fake news by implementing independent fact checkers on posts that promote false information about the coronavirus, vaccines, mail-in ballots, QAnon conspiracies or the Holocaust.
According to Niko Poulakos, a communications professor at the University of Rhode Island, in a digital age where Twitter bots can instantly reach millions, preventing the spread of misinformation online becomes exceedingly complicated. This is due to the long-standing debate about whether or not policing fake news on social media is an infringement of free speech.
“We might want to get rid of all this [fake news] that is just an abundance of pollution that makes it hard to see anything that is real, but we also live in a culture in which saying political, crazy things, however outlandish they are, is exactly the purpose of the First Amendment,” he said.
Poulakos said that deliberately facetious posts should be taken down, an example being the many fake news articles that came out of the country of Macedonia in 2016. However, this can get messy with political free speech where statements such as, “Barack Obama is the founder of ISIS,” are protected by the First Amendment, despite being false.
“The idea that you can shut down or stop the circulation of all these points of view, ideological perspectives, political free speech rants, truths that are misleading — policing these ideas and the way they circulate on social media is entirely complicated due to an abundant amount of protections for a class of what’s referred to as political free speech,” Poulakos said.
Political science professor Maureen Moakley argued that due to the complexity of restricting free speech on social media, fact checking is ultimately left up to people themselves. Moakley also said that educational institutions should teach students how to pick out false information in articles, however, propaganda posts stemming from foreign countries should completely be removed.
“There needs to be careful restrictions in order to do something about misinformation and intrusions from particularly foreign governments,” Moakley said. “The courts and other large [social media] platforms have already agreed to stop disinformation if it comes from Russian intrusion.”
In the wake of the pandemic, Facebook announced that they will begin to put independent fact checks on misleading posts about the coronavirus. These will include posts that claim masks do not prevent the spread of disease and completely ban ads that discourage vaccinations. Poulakos asserted that it would not be infringement for Facebook and Twitter to intervene in order to prevent the spread of dangerously false medical information.
“Medical information is super important because it can be independently verified,” he said. “There are doctors and organizations out there who can attest to and verify something like vaccines, the extent to which they are dangerous or not, the extent in which they help people or not. This is a majority category where people can become very misinformed and we do have an obligation to prevent that.”
In the upcoming election, many Americans are choosing to vote by mail instead of in person due to COVID-19. In some states such as New Jersey, registered voters automatically received ballots in the mail in an effort to promote public health during the pandemic. This has led to a circulation of posts on Facebook that claim mail in ballots will result in voter fraud. As a response, Facebook has implemented fact checks on these posts so that people will not be discouraged to vote by mail.
“These very powerful platforms, they have an obligation to be honest and let people know what is out there and put up fact checks, not take it down, not obscure it, but just let people know for the sake of the election,” Moakley said.
Facebook said that it would also attempt to crack down on posts perpetrating the popular QAnon conspiracy theory which claims certain government officials are satanic pedophiles who run a sex trafficking ring under a pizza parlor in Washington D.C.
Poulakos said that the mass spread of this false conspiracy theory reflects a growing distrust in government.
“The problem isn’t the truth or untruth of this idea, we do not need to have a trial in which we prove whether or not ‘pizzagate’ is real, we need to understand why there are groups of people who hate the government so much that they accuse them of being satanic pedophiles,” Poulakos said.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, made the executive decision to ban all content that denies the Holocaust on Facebook. This contrasts his previous stance that stated while Facebook could fact check the post, they could not outright prohibit Holocaust deniability.
“Again, I think that this is a very tricky situation,” Moakley said. “The idea of taking these down arbitrarily, is a critical thing and it is a difficult choice to follow up with the facts that it in fact happened, but not entirely forbid the discussion.”
Despite attempts to prevent the spread of misinformation, Poulakos fears that at this point, it may be too late.
“We are trapped in an emotional, people psychologically driven conversation and third party fact checking about specific things is not going to curb the spread of this rampant system of conversation protected by the first amendment that is circulating out of control,” he said.