hate postings!” This way, similar to the rest of the Four, company
executives can wrap themselves in a progressive blanket to mask
rapacious, conservative, tax-avoiding, and job-destroying behavior
that feels more Darwin than (Elizabeth) Warren.
Fake news stories are a far greater threat to our democracy than a
few whack jobs wearing white hoods. But fake stories are part of a
thriving business. Getting rid of them would force Facebook to accept
responsibility as the editor of the world’s most (or second most)
influential media company. It would have to start making judgments
between truth and lies. That would spark outrage and suspicion—the
same kind that mainstream media faces. More important, by trashing
fake stories, Facebook would also sacrifice billions of clicks and loads
of revenue.
Facebook attempts to skirt criticism of its content by claiming it’s
not a media outlet, but a platform. This sounds reasonable until you
consider that the term platform was never meant to absolve
companies from taking responsibility for the damage they do. What if
McDonald’s, after discovering that 80 percent of their beef was fake
and making us sick, proclaimed they couldn’t be held responsible, as
they aren’t a fast-food restaurant but a fast-food platform? Would we
tolerate that?
A Facebook spokesperson, in the face of the controversy, said, “We
cannot become arbiters of truth ourselves.”^35 Well, you sure as hell can
try. If Facebook is by far the largest social networking site, reaching 67
percent of U.S. adults,^36 and if more us, each day, are getting our news
from it, then Facebook has become, de facto, the largest news media
firm in the world. The question is, does news media have a greater
responsibility to pursue, and police, the truth? Isn’t that the point of
news media?
As the backlash continued, Facebook introduced tools to help
combat fake news. Users can now flag a story as fake, and it will be
sent to a fact-checking service. In addition, Facebook is using software
to identify potentially fake news.^37 However, with both of those
methods, even if false, at most the story is only labeled “disputed.”
Given the polarization of our political climate and the “backfire
effect”—where if you present someone with evidence against their
beliefs, they double down on their convictions—a “disputed” label