Member-only story

Facebook May Face Another Fake News Crisis in 2020

And in 2021. And 2022.

Will Oremus
OneZero
14 min readDec 3, 2019

--

TThree and a half years after the pope endorsed President Donald Trump (or didn’t), Facebook has put in a lot of work to clean up its News Feed. But has it made a difference?

In October, a bogus news article claimed that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had diverted $2.4 billion from Social Security to pay for the impeachment of Trump. “ENOUGH!!!!!!! NO ONE IS SUPPOSED TO TOUCH THAT MONEY!!!!” begins one top comment on the story in a Trump-Pence 2020 group. “Treasonous worthless bitch,” reads another. The article was shared on Facebook more than a million times.

The claim is a classic example of the type of fabricated political propaganda, popularly known as “fake news,” that flooded Facebook in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. election, and the company later pledged to address. Facebook has partnered with fact-checkers, added warning labels to debunked stories (then removed them, then added them again), tweaked its algorithm to reduce those stories’ spread, and punished state-sponsored election meddlers. Yet a recent study from the nonprofit Avaaz found that the social network’s misinformation problem might actually be worse in 2020 than it was in 2016 — a startling conclusion that made headlines in a number of outlets, including CNN, Columbia Journalism Review, and Politico.

--

--

OneZero
OneZero

Published in OneZero

OneZero is a former publication from Medium about the impact of technology on people and the future. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

Will Oremus
Will Oremus

Written by Will Oremus

Senior Writer, OneZero, at Medium

Responses (6)