Opinion: Google, Facebook have most to lose with fake news. Here’s what they should do

Photo credit: Silvia and Frank.

The fight against fake news is an enormous no-win situation. Almost everybody loses. Only the handful of fake news peddlers stand to gain. For the price of a few ad dollars, they have almost certainly impoverished the media landscape for the rest of us.

Where we stand

The companies with the most to lose from fake news are Facebook and Google. Google has already implemented a policy against misrepresentation by websites.

“This means the sites built by Macedonian teenagers to capitalise on crazy stories associated with Trump, employing Adx adverts, would be in violation, because they were concealing who they really were,” TechCrunch reports.

However, stories about “Pizzagate” (a controversy surrounding Hillary Clinton’s campaign) on legitimate news sites, would not be in violation even though they are entirely fictitious. This is because the policy targets misrepresentation by the news organization, and not by the article itself.

Facebook has struggled mightily with fake news. They have tried numerous measures that ranged from PR to product, but no effort proved to be the silver bullet. Mark Zuckerberg believes that surfacing a plurality of viewpoints will overcome the problem.

The difference in how Facebook and Google approach the problem with fake news has something to do with the users’ behavior on their platforms. Google users actively search for information, while Facebook users are passive consumers of information, which is pushed to them by a predictive algorithm. Google’s job is easier; their search results do not actively deny information to users. If someone wants to read about the moon-landing hoax, they can.

As we’ve learned […], bullshit is highly engaging.

Facebook has an enormous problem because as their former product designer, Bobby Goodlatte, said: “Sadly, News Feed optimizes for engagement. As we’ve learned […], bullshit is highly engaging.”

The closest that Google gets to Facebook’s problem is with Google News. Facebook and Google News both thrive in user engagement. For both services to effect lasting change against fake news, they would have to act against their own interests in the short-term, aiming to find a long-term solution.

Unfortunately for us, Google (through Google News Labs) and Facebook (through CrowdTangle) are doing the digital equivalent of a fluffy CSR project with the CrossCheck project. Through CrossCheck, anyone can submit a story for investigation by professional news organizations who are part of the project. Results of these investigations will be released on the CrossCheck website, where, presumably, they will be read by all four objective-minded people in the world. The project is clearly not a long-term solution.

Dropping the hammer on fake news

The truth is fact-checking will not keep up with the volume of fake news. To compound the problem, a lot of materials will also be ambiguous. Facebook and Google cannot vet all content before allowing them entry into their ecosystems. To solve about 80 percent of the problem, I predict that they will eventually move to adopt a three-pronged strategy toward fake news.

Step 1

The first strategy is to have a whitelist of trusted news sources and a blacklist of known fake news peddlers. Whitelisted sites will see their content published instantly, while blacklisted sites will never appear on Facebook and Google. This is easy.

Smallest players, but biggest losers