Fake News! Fake Followers! Fake millions coming your way if you’ll just reply with personal banking information! And, to put it frankly, Fake Lives smiling happily on Facebook pages! The world seems shocked, shocked at the surreal revelations of unsavory players entrapping us in a world-wide con of virtual unreality. It apparently never occurred to the geniuses who brought the virtual networks to our screens that they also were opening our gates to a host of bad actors as well.
The World Wide Web and its social networks have transformed our lives. But this valuable tool, like a hammer, can be used to build a home or brutally attack someone. Business models that have brought so much information free to users everywhere also undermine the expensive business model for gathering “real” news even as they’ve served up fabricated accounts spreading “fake” news to millions. Professional newsgathering is never free.
Views are king, turning major players into multi-billion dollar companies in which “the house” always wins, even rewarding those adept at attracting clicks - even when it threatens our democracy.
Consequently, Monday’s announcement by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg may be a turning point. He indicated that local news coverage, presumably from trusted local news sources like the the Daily News and other local media companies across the country, will get a higher priority in Facebook news feeds in their home regions. The effort’s byproduct, “lowering the temperature” in a divided nation, may work if it can offset players who purvey fictions intended only to incite viewers and views. It represents hope for a more civil discourse, not ending disagreements but possibly better establishing an agreed upon set of facts.
Giants such as Twitter and Google, along with Facebook, have been as inscrutable as the Kremlin about their operations and algorithms. It hasn't, however, prevented wrongdoers from gaming the system. Too often, it allowed unscrupulous individuals and governments to access not only our secrets, but also our pocketbooks and, even worse, our minds.
During the 2016 election cycle, Russian troll farms bought Facebook advertising keywords to spread discord on issues such as Black Lives Matter and illegal immigration. But a lot of fake news – we still don’t have a complete accounting – appeared to come from lone actors, including teenagers in countries such as Macedonia, who created or spread fake news not for political gain but for money. Their invented stories “weaponizing social media” targeted whichever side was more likely to bring in more clicks. It just happened that those about Hillary Clinton were more likely to be clicked on and shared. And a measure of that sharing came from automated accounts, known as bots, in enabling click-bait to spread exponentially in this web of deceit.
The latest social media revelation came last week from a New York Times report about a virtual marketplace that steals social media identities to use as bots to sell as fake followers. They're being sold for pennies to people intent on elevating their social media profiles. “By some calculations, as many as 48 million of Twitter’s reported active users – nearly 15 percent – are automated accounts designed to simulate real people, though the company claims that number is far lower,” the Times wrote.
Services such as Facebook, Twitter and Google have a lot to answer for in creating empires so easily hacked. It’s not their apparently well-protected servers, mind you, at least that we know of. It’s their very business models being used by malefactors for political harm as well as monetary gain. And it's undermining local news outlets by siphoning off advertising dollars from local media companies, including newspapers. Facebook rewarded those fabricating anything outrageous enough to gin up page views, whether through clicks and shares by real people or bots. Trusted, honest brokers are needed to provide reliable news.
Even if Facebook’s new initiative succeeds, we all need to step outside our information bubbles. We need to expose ourselves, on screen and in person, to multiple viewpoints. We need to listen to each other's concerns. We need to follow media that is transparent, that employs professional reporters and editors who work under a code of ethics and whose news reporting covers all sides of an issue. Also, a media that routinely publishes corrections in print and online, and also differing viewpoints in the opinion pages.
Assuming it works, Zuckerberg’s announcement is a welcome development. He and the other keepers of these virtual empires have an obligation to make sure that the “news” on their sites is “real.” Democracy demands it.