'They don't care': Facebook fact checking in disarray as journalists push to cut ties
'They don't care': Facebook
factchecking in disarray as journalists push to cut ties
Journalists paid to help fix Facebook’s fake news problem say
they have lost trust in the platform
Journalists working as
factcheckers for Facebook have pushed to end a
controversial media partnership with the social network, saying the company has
ignored their concerns and failed to use their expertise to combat
misinformation.
Current and former Facebook
factcheckers told the Guardian that the tech platform’s collaboration with
outside reporters has produced minimal results and that they’ve lost trust in
Facebook, which has repeatedly refused to release meaningful data about the
impacts of their work. Some said Facebook’s hiring of a PR firm that used an antisemitic narrative to discredit
critics – fueling the same kind of propaganda factcheckers regularly debunk –
should be a deal-breaker.
“They’ve essentially used us for
crisis PR,” said Brooke Binkowski, former managing editor of Snopes, a
factchecking site that has partnered with Facebook for two years. “They’re not
taking anything seriously. They are more interested in making themselves look
good and passing the buck … They clearly don’t care.”
Facebook began building its partnerships with news outlets after the 2016
presidential election, during which fake stories and political propaganda
reached hundreds of millions of users on the platform.
The goal was to rely on journalists to flag false news and limit its spread,
but research and anecdotal evidence have repeatedly
suggested that the debunking work has struggled to make a difference.
Facebook now has more than 40
media partners across the globe, including the
Associated Press, PolitiFact and the Weekly Standard, and has said false news on the platform is “trending
downward”.
While some newsroom leaders said
the relationship was positive, other partners said the results were unclear and
that they had grown increasingly resentful of Facebook, especially following revelations that the company had paid a
consulting firm to go after opponents by publicizing their
association with billionaire Jewish philanthropist George Soros. The attacks
fed into a well-known conspiracy theory about Soros being the hidden
hand behind all manner of liberal causes and global events. It was later
revealed that Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer, had directed her staff to research Soros’s financial
interests after he publicly criticized the company.
“Why should we trust Facebook when
it’s pushing the same rumors that its own factcheckers are calling fake news?”
said a current Facebook factchecker who was not authorized to speak publicly
about their news outlet’s partnership. “It’s worth asking how do they treat
stories about George Soros on the platform knowing they specifically pay people
to try to link political enemies to him?”
“Working with Facebook makes us look bad,” added the journalist,
who has advocated for an end to the partnership.
Another factchecker who has long worked on the Facebook
partnership said they were demoralized: “They are a terrible company and, on a
personal level, I don’t want to have anything to do with them.”
Kim LaCapria recently left Snopes as a content manager and
factchecker partly due to her frustrations with the Facebook arrangement. She
said it quickly seemed clear that Facebook wanted the “appearance of trying to
prevent damage without actually doing anything” and that she was particularly
upset to learn that Facebook was paying Snopes: “That felt really gross …
Facebook has one mission and factchecking websites should have a completely
different mission.”
Binkowski said that on at least
one occasion, it appeared that Facebook was pushing reporters to prioritize
debunking misinformation that affected Facebook advertisers, which she thought
crossed a line: “You’re not doing journalism any more. You’re doing
propaganda.”
Other times, Snopes ended up factchecking satirical articles for
Facebook, which felt like a waste of time and in certain instances, sparked
intense backlash against Snopes, the former staffers
said. Once Snopes became an official partner, there was also a noticeable
increase in online harassment, death threats and attacks from far-right users
and prominent conservatives who accused the factcheckers and Facebook of having
a leftwing bias and agenda, Binkowski said.
When reporters got caught in these
kinds of firestorms, Facebook let individual journalists shoulder the blame,
she said: “They threw us under the bus at every opportunity.”
Added LaCapria: “We were just
collateral damage.”
A Facebook representative said it
has begun incorporating journalist safety training for new partners.
LaCapria, who is now working with
Binkowski on her new site, said it became difficult to report on Facebook at
Snopes due to the financial arrangement: “We knew that if anything involved
Facebook it was at risk of being compromised.”
“Most of us feel it’s more trouble
than it’s worth,” said one current factchecker.
Facebook has said that third-party
factchecking is one part of its strategy to fight misinformation, and has
claimed that a “false” rating leads an article to be ranked lower in news feed,
reducing future views by 80% on average. The company has refused, however, to
publicly release any data to support these claims.
One current factchecker said the process overall was too slow
and that often their factchecks came too late: “By the time it gets to us, how
many people have already seen it?”
In contrast, Angie Drobnic Holan,
editor of PolitiFact, said the partnership was a “public service”, and that “Facebook
is helping us identify questionable material”. The revenue from Facebook “added
to our overall sustainability”, she said.
Asked of the impacts of her site’s
work, she said, “Is it reducing fake content on Facebook? I don’t know, I can’t
tell. Can Facebook tell? You would assume they could. I don’t have any way of
knowing.”
Facebook said in a statement that
it had “heard feedback from our partners that they’d like more data on the
impact of their efforts”, adding that it has started sending “quarterly
reports” with “customized statistics” to partners and would be “looking for
more statistics to share externally in early 2019”. Facebook declined to share
the reports with the Guardian.
PolitiFact has not yet received
any reports, according to Holan, who said Facebook stated the documents must
remain private once they are produced.
Snopes’s founder and CEO, David
Mikkelson, said he was
unaware of any quarterly reports. In an interview, he also said he did not
share Binkowski’s concerns about the Facebook partnership and said he felt it
has had a minimal impact on how Snopes operates.
“Our work remains the same,” he
said, adding that he did not expect Facebook to share data on how Snopes’s work
is affecting other publishers. “It’s up to Facebook to decide the relative
success of it.”
Comments
Post a Comment