Source : the age
By Alexandra Senter
Humans have always been ambivalent about the truth. The tech giants Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk understand this shortcoming of humanity better than most. It’s become their business model, and now it is playing out in real time as they opportunistically navigate the incoming Donald Trump presidency.
When Zuckerberg announced his decision this week to get rid of Meta’s professional fact-checkers, he aligned it with Trump’s election, which he called a “cultural tipping point” towards freedom of speech. We should be more worried that this is a global tipping point towards freedom from facts – a tipping point away from the truth.
Illustration: Dionne Gain Credit:
Throughout history, humans have repeatedly rejected facts and evidence in favour of belief systems that serve their emotional and/or political needs.
During the Black Death in the 14th century, conspiracy theories were rampant across Europe. The blaming of Jews, witches and heretics was common, whereas the culprits were bacteria transmitted mainly by fleas and rodents. In the 1880s, there were fears of European elites overthrowing American democracy and accusations that Chinese immigrants spread disease. “Us versus them” explanations were fantasies that fed societal anxieties. Perversely, they also comforted the anxious.
During the COVID pandemic, distrust of medical authorities took over Facebook’s newsfeeds. Researchers found that a group of just 12 people labelled the “Disinformation Dozen” became responsible for 65 per cent of the anti-vaccine content that went viral across Facebook, TikTok and Twitter, now X. For too many people, it was simpler to label vaccines and lockdowns as conspiracies than to grapple with the reality of uncertainty, political missteps, the race to understand the virus and the necessarily flawed nature of evolving science. When their freedom of movement was at stake, a fact could be a dangerous thing. “Doing your own research” became a euphemism for going down a rabbit hole of piecemealing YouTube videos, blog posts and opinions on social media platforms.
Meta launched fact-checking in 2016 in response to criticism that Facebook helped to spread misinformation during the US presidential campaign – the one that led to Trump’s first presidency.
Most people I know who published a post that triggered the “false information” flag ignored it, and viewed it with hostility, as an ideological weapon. Pew Research Centre research in 2019 found that almost half of Americans, and most Republicans, believed fact-checkers were biased. And now that is Zuckerberg’s claim: his paid fact-checkers are biased and can no longer be trusted. So he’ll do something akin to Elon Musk’s “community notes” system on X. That turns all users into experts. It hands over the job of challenging falsehoods and misinformation to unpaid social media users, a ragtag army of volunteer moderators. It also hands this responsibility for giving a second opinion to language models (that is, the artificial intelligence systems that platforms such as ChatGPT are trained on).
Some of the human volunteers will be great, no doubt. Many will love a good fact, or the challenge of hunting one down. Others won’t know a fact if they trip over it. And volunteer moderators will bring to the task their own views and prejudices, while AI has inherent biases drawn from the datasets and developers they are powered by. They struggle to validate source information. One bias will challenge another. This will compound the existing problem of confirmation bias. It will send more social media users to the comfort of their echo chambers, especially when it comes to political campaigns, medicine and science.
Walt Wang was among the army of volunteers on X who devoted as many as 20 hours a week to debunking falsehoods in the lead-up to the US election. But he described it as akin to “a game of whack-a-mole”. He’d dismiss one conspiracy theory only to watch another arise moments later, as The Washington Post reported.
Zuckerberg’s decision to terminate fact-checking coincides with Trump’s return to the presidency. The Meta boss has donated $US1 million to the president-elect’s inauguration fund. No doubt that will help heal some old wounds, not least the one that Zuckerberg inflicted on Trump with the audacity of introducing fact-checking.
But seeing this moment in history merely as political is lazy. Humans have always been susceptible, even partial, to misinformation. What is new is the speed and scale at which it spreads. In the digital age, this challenge is not merely technological. It remains profoundly human.
It was the late Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan who said: “You are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts.” But do facts still matter to us? Zuckerberg and Musk would have us believe that the fact-checkers are stifling free speech. But to hide behind “free speech” in order to reject empirical evidence – just because you listened to a Joe Rogan podcast that “really resonated” with you – is intellectually dishonest.
Blaming social media is pointless. The invention of the printing press disrupted the centralised control of information, then spurred an explosion in human knowledge, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. It delivered us from the Dark Ages. The digital age need not be a tipping point into another dark age. Our transition to a civilisation forever tethered to devices requires a shift in how we digest, filter and trust information. This backlash against fact-checking is just the next phase of our evolution. How we deal with it will be a marker for our future.
Alexandra Senter is the chief executive of The Big Smoke Media Group, which manages media platforms and digital agencies. She is a regular commentator on television and radio.
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