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A24 TECHNOLOGY
Monday 5 noveMber 2018
Social media's misinformation battle: No winners, so far

in a few weeks later with
a parallel charge, claim-
ing without evidence that
Google and other com-
panies were "suppressing
voices of Conservatives
and hiding information and
news that is good."
Twitter, in fact, charges
that researchers such as
the Oxford team define
"junk news" too broadly.
The group, for instance,
classes conservative sites
such as Breitbart News and
the Daily Caller as "junk" by
its criteria. Twitter argues
that banning "media out-
lets that reflect views within
American society" would
"severely hinder public de-
bate." Some critics charge
that the very advertising-
based business model that
In this Aug. 6, 2015, file photo, a FaceBook elections sign stands in the media area in Cleveland, before the first Republican presi- made Zuckerberg rich is
dential debate. also perfectly suited for
Associated Press propagandists. Services
like Facebook and Twitter
By BARBARA ORTUTAY fake news on his service 4.2 percent on Monday. resents only a small fraction "sustain themselves by find-
NEW YORK (AP) — Face- could have swayed the Even at these levels, fake of the material they share ing like-minded groups and
book and other social plat- election as "pretty crazy." news remains huge and on Facebook.) selling information about
forms have been fighting In July, for instance, the may be spreading to new Such studies offer imper- their behavior," Dipayan
online misinformation and company announced that audiences. A team led by fect pictures of what's ac- Ghosh, a former privacy
hate speech for two years. heavy spending on security Philip Howard, the lead re- tually happening on social policy expert at Facebook
With the U.S. midterm elec- and content moderation, searcher on Oxford's Com- networks, since the ser- and Ben Scott, senior advis-
tions just a few days away, coupled with other business putational Propaganda vices typically don't offer er at New America, wrote
there are signs that they're shifts, would hold down effort, looked at stories researchers untrammeled in a Time Magazine op-ed
making some headway, growth and profitability. shared on Twitter during access to their data. Twit- earlier this year. "Disinfor-
although they're still a very Investors immediately pan- the last 10 days of Septem- ter, for instance, takes is- mation propagators sustain
long way from winning the icked and knocked $119 ber 2018 and found that sue with the Oxford study, themselves by manipulat-
war. billion off the company's what it called "junk news" noting that it used a public ing the behavior of like-
That's because the effort market value. accounted for a full quar- feed of tweets that doesn't minded groups."
risks running into political The social network has start- ter of all links shared during reflect the filtering Twitter "They don't self-regulate,"
headwinds that Facebook, ed to see some payoff for that time — greater than does to remove malicious said Dora Kingsley Ver-
Twitter and Google find its efforts. A research col- the number of professional or spammy material. tenten, a professor of pub-
bad for business. Some laboration between New news stories shared during Tamping down misinfor- lic policy at the University
even argue that the social York University and Stan- that time. mation, of course, is any- of Southern California and
networks are easy to flood ford recently found that The team defined junk thing but easy. Adversar- CEO of research consulting
with disinformation by de- user "interactions" with fake news as sources that pub- ies are always finding new firm Trenton West. "They just
sign — an unintended con- news stories on Facebook, lished deceptive or incor- ways around restrictions. want to make a profit, and
sequence of their eager- which rose substantially in rect information, often in It can also be hard to dis- what they have done to
ness to cater to advertisers 2016 during the presidential an ideological or conspira- tinguish misinformation date is not nearly enough."
by categorizing the inter- campaign, fell significantly torial way, while failing to and propaganda from le- Really fixing the misinfor-
ests of their users. between the end of 2016 meet criteria such as pro- gitimate news, especially mation problem might re-
Caught embarrassingly and July 2018. On Twitter, fessionalism, bias, credibility when world leaders such quire big changes to how
off-guard after they were however, the sharing of and style. as President Donald Trump these services work. Users
played by Russian agents such stories continued to While the Oxford analysis are regularly disseminat- started spending less time
meddling with the 2016 U.S. rise over the past two years. didn't produce similar fig- ing falsehoods on social on Facebook after it made
elections, the technology A similar measure from the ures for Facebook, the re- media. Politics also compli- changes to make its ser-
giants have thrown millions University of Michigan's searchers did map out how cates matters, since the so- vice more "meaningful" to
of dollars, tens of thousands Center for Social Media Re- junk news circulates on the cial-media companies are users, involving less scrolling
of people and what they sponsibility dubbed the "Iffy social network and found anxious to avoid charges of through posts and more in-
say are their best techni- Quotient " — which gauges that conspiracy theories political bias. When Face- teractions with friends, the
cal efforts into fighting fake the prevalence of "iffy" ma- and other misinformation book, Google's YouTube company said.
news, propaganda and terial on social networks — once confined to a "hard and, eventually, Twitter all Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey
hate that has proliferated also shows that Facebook's right" audience are now banned the conspiracy- has hinted that he is open
on their digital platforms. "iffiness" has fallen from shared more freely among monger Alex Jones for vari- to drastic changes , but he
Facebook, in particular, a high of 8.1 percent 1n mainstream conservatives ous violations of their terms hasn't yet said what they
has pulled a major reversal March 2017 to 3.2 percent as well. (Left-leaning us- of service, Jones and his might look like. And there
since late 2016, when CEO on Monday. Twitter iffiness ers have also developed a allies immediately claimed haven't been any obvious
Mark Zuckerberg infamous- has also fallen slightly, from taste for junk news, the Ox- he was being censored. shifts since he made that
ly dismissed the idea that 5.6% in November 2016, to ford team found, but it rep- President Trump chimed statement in August.q