By Robert Tracinski
Monday, December 19, 2016
After a month of being hammered over the highly dubious
claim that “fake news” on social media tipped the 2016 U.S. presidential
election to Donald Trump—as opposed to, say, having a really awful Democratic
candidate—Facebook has announced their solution: outsourcing content decisions
to legacy media “fact-checking” organizations that are notorious for bias by
holding politicians and activists on the Right to much stricter standards than
politicians on the Left.
According to Eugene Kiely, director
of Factcheck.org, after Facebook alerts them of potentially fake news, the
fact-checkers will send back a link to a story that debunks it, if applicable.
Facebook will then append the questionable content with a notice that reads
“Disputed by 3rd Party Fact-Checkers,” with an option to read more about why
that specific post was flagged. If users try to share the post anyway, they’ll
be met with an interstitial that again reminds them that third-party fact
checkers dismissed it, and a further note that reads, “Before you share this
story, you might want to know that independent fact-checkers disputed its
accuracy.”
Taken at face value, this “fake news” fix is useless. The
same people who flock to read fake news out of a desire to defy the despised
Mainstream Media will now go ahead and click on stories flagged as “disputed”
out of an urge to defy Facebook and Factcheck.org.
An overview of studies on the fake news phenomenon
indicates that Facebook’s critics have it completely backward. People don’t
form their political preferences by reading fake news, they seek out fake news
to support their political preferences. That goes for both sides, mind you, but
given the organizations Facebook has tapped to deal with this issue, I have a
feeling that in the new system one side is going be flagged way more often.
Yet for readers of those stories, gaining the official
disapproval of Facebook is going to be like being “banned in Boston.” For the
right audience, it’s a selling point: “Read the news Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t
want you to hear!”
That’s why Facebook doesn’t just leave it to users to
make their own choices. Instead, flagged stories will be harder to find in
Facebook news feeds and won’t be able to promote themselves with advertising.
Given how “fact checkers” have played favorites with their ratings, there is a
massive incentive for them to abuse this power simply to suppress facts and
interpretations that support the other side of the political debate.
That’s kind of baked into the whole idea. After all,
nobody was all that bothered by “fake news” until they thought it produced an
election result they didn’t like. Then it suddenly became an issue. So from the
very beginning, this push to suppress “fake news” is motivated by a desire to suppress undesirable political outcomes.
The decision to defer to the supposed authority of
mainstream media “fact checkers” indicates an even wider agenda. The old
mainstream “legacy media” is trying to use the hysteria over fake news as an
opportunity to reconstitute its old role as the gatekeeper that controlled what
news you saw, heard, and read—and collected a lucrative toll along the way.
It’s important to remember how a lot of these “fact
check” sites came into existence. They were a kind of marketing gimmick by the
old “legacy media”—the big newspapers and the big three broadcast networks—in
an attempt to reassert their fading influence. As more people started getting
news and commentary from talk radio, from cable television, and then from blogs
and upstart websites, the legacy media began to lose their role of gatekeeper.
That’s when they set up “fact check” sites where they put themselves forward as
the final arbiter of everybody else’s claims.
But this was just a palliative. It made them feel better,
which is to say that it made them feel superior, but it didn’t bring back the
audience, or the ad revenues.
Now the legacy media sees its chance to get revenge on
digital media, and more to the point, to harness digital media as their new
servants. They’re framing up Facebook in the hope that the social media giant
will be so eager to show they’re on the correct side that they will invite the
legacy media “fact checkers” to be the official gatekeepers of digital media.
And it’s working.
This is just the first step. According to a report on
this new system, “There are no financial arrangements between Facebook and the
fact-checkers, or arrangements that would otherwise benefit the groups.” Well,
how long do you think that is going to last? How are they going to take on the
job of policing the entirety of Facebook if they’re not getting paid for it? So
that will be the next step. The ultimate solution to fake news, the only way
for Facebook to expiate its (supposed) guilt for Donald Trump’s election
victory, will be to put the legacy media on retainer, to hand over some of its
billions and give them favored access to Facebook’s audience.
If only someone would come along and spell it all out for
us. And here is Jeff Nesbitt at Time
magazine, as antiquated a media dinosaur as you can think of, to reveal the end
game. “Fake news,” he thunders, is “an existential threat to Facebook’s reputation.”
The only solution: “partner with legacy media to curate real news and reward
them for it.” In other words: give us back the power and money we lost. Make us
the gatekeepers and toll collectors again. It’s a shakedown, and the motive is
nakedly financial: he laments that legacy media’s “business models aren’t
sustainable.”
(Meanwhile, it turns out that Nesbitt, who boasts that
real journalists “can spot fake news in a nanosecond” was previously peddling
an outright conspiracy theory about “how Big Oil and Big Tobacco invented the
Tea Party.”)
Mark Zuckerberg has shown that he can occasionally defy
demands for political conformity. He shouldn’t let the vampire squid of the
legacy media attach itself to Facebook and drag them down into another iteration
of their unsustainable business model.
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