Fake news, on the other hand, tells people who’ve already made up their minds what they want to hear. Certainly it’s not ideal, but the tradeoffs in dealing with the problem, at least in terms of Facebook, are very problematic. I wrote last fall in Fake News:
I’m of the opinion that fake-news doesn’t affect me because I don’t use social media. I use RSS and subscribe to more traditional blogs authored by people who are tech-savvy enough to know the source they’re linking to is reputable. Ben does an excellent job of breaking this down but I don’t think Facebook or Google need to do anything. Let the Facebook people who interact with other idiots and like idiot pages and do idiot things see articles written that affirm their beliefs that Obama is going to kill their grandmother with the Affordable Care Act (an old ‘fake news’ topic from 8 years ago but that’s really my only point of reference since again, I’m not on social media).
..and, let people searching Google for “Obamacare death trials” find articles from fly-by-night wordpress installs from anonymous authors who have a sole purpose to get you to open their page so they can make google Adsense money from your page-views. If you’re stupid enough to read that as a reliable source, you deserve what you get.
Now, I think the tech sector is dominated by liberal millennials. This is a problem because the Internet is no longer a fad and it no longer has political borders. An espresso sipping messenger bag wearing SF d-bag is writing apps used by people who think Obama was literally a nazi. Is it up to that app developer to build in political safeguards against idiots? No and it’s not up to Facebook or Google to do that either. Let the algorithm do what it was designed to do.
The only issue with all of this is when someone’s assumptions are confirmed via a Google Search, they have just as many voting rights as I do and that bothers me but social media is a reflection of our world. Before ‘fake news’, there was the local watering hole. Jimbo would say to billy-joe, “Hey man, did you hear Obama’s gonna kill your grandpa as soon as he tries to use obamacare?” I grew up with these guys and I’d be the one on my phone google searching for proof and having to awkwardly say “no, Snopes says that’s not true” and they’d say “oh okay, never mind then” Those guys have Facebook as their watering hole now and believe everything they read.
I don’t think liberal millennials should step in to discredit fake news because unfortunately, these large companies have political bias. They tend to be liberal. At some point, they overstep and make the mistake from just filtering out fake news to actually steering people toward reality and they’ll start being blamed for forcing the “liberal agenda” down people’s throats and you’ll get what we saw in 2016 with the presidential election. I mentioned it before. People in Florida, my family intentionally didn’t vote for Mrs. Clinton because she was a woman. Because, everyone said they had to because she’d break a glass-ceiling. They voted for Trump because they were tired of being told it was the right thing to do. I think if you show a lot of gun-toting NRA members news articles about all of the things the NRA does that’s wrong, they’re going to stop using Facebook or Google. You’re going to push them off the service. They use social media because their beliefs are affirmed and they interact with like-minded people. The algorithm is doing its job. Changing it might lead to a mass exodus of the people you’re trying to protect and it starts with fake-news. You may think that showing very right-wing die-hard-christians articles about transgender acceptance, women’s rights, scientific thought, PBS funding and women’s right to choose will sway them to the other side. It only forces most of them to stand their ground even stronger than do things because of social change is happening too fast for them. It’s not about voting for the right candidate anymore or eating at Chik-Fil-A because their food is good. There are members of my family patronizing Chik-Fil-A and not Starbucks because of gay-rights, in spite of the quality of the food. Those people need the algorithm. Changing it too much will alienate them and they’ll invent a new service and based on the election results, half of America would quit Facebook if things were changed too much. something to think about.