Fake News and Social Media

Maria Ressa Blog Post - Fake News and Social Media

“FAKE NEWS” - these two words together probably trigger some response out of you. Whether you sigh from having read the phrase for the thousandth time or get frustrated about why the fake news is so prevalent, both responses are warranted. They show how big of an issue fake news and misinformation are in our world.

As a journalist, Maria Ressa has been a strong advocate about the severity of fake news and how it can dismantle the fabrics of society. She’s appeared on news shows, been interviewed for a variety of publications like Vox and NPR, and has her own documentary (called A Thousand Cuts), sharing how we all need to be aware of what is really going on.

Fake News Issues

Maria Ressa has argued how the onset of social media has allowed political powers and radical organizations to spread false or misleading information for their own political and social gains. From the outcome of the Brexit vote to the human atrocities in Myanmar and China to the rise of President Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, social media has been the weaponized tool used to alter the outcome of these events.

As Maria Ressa put it in 2018, “...social media provided cheap armies to potential authoritarian and dictators to control and manipulate public opinion.”

So, how is social media capable of doing this? How can these platforms be so powerful and destructive when they are a part of almost everyone’s everyday life? It’s hard to imagine that something so enjoyable and seamlessly harmless can actually do a lot of damage. Behind the posts, likes, comments, retweets, and funny memes, the real problem lies in social media’s business model: paid advertising content.

In the advertising world, advertisers create ads and try to broadcast them in hopes that the right audience will see it, react, and act on what they are selling. With social media, advertising has transformed from casting a broad net of people with similar interests to being hyper focused and targeted based on a variety of factors. People can now be targeted for advertisements and promoted content based on their interests, location, demographics, who they follow, and what social media algorithms (aka. The engines that curate what appears on your social media feed) “think” a user would like to see. All of this data creates “profiles” of individuals on social media that are stored in algorithms and it is continuously updated every time you use the platform to create a better profile of you.

So, when a company decides to run an advertisement on a platform like Facebook, the company can refine exactly what type of user and audience it wants to advertise to when setting up an advertising campaign, and the Facebook algorithm will find the exact users the company wants to target because it has information on every user on Facebook.

The kicker to this all: it costs dirt cheap to advertise on social media. And on top of that: who can advertise and what they can advertise, for so many years, has been highly unregulated.

This setup wasn’t a real issue until the last 5 or 6 years, when what was being advertised and spread on social media was not only misleading, but was so targeted and misleading that it was altering the views and outcomes of elections, human rights issues, and democracies around the world. Governments have spread false information about their opponents or policies that many people believed, leading to surprise election turnouts for countries around the world like Brazil. Radical groups spread misinformation about alienated minority groups that justify their rationale to commit mass atrocities and violate human rights.

Maria has shared how this has had major effects in the Philippines and their most last and recent elections. For Duterte’s rise to presidency, Ressa said their “... angle is to make you doubt the facts” and silence critics who try and share how his views are wrong.

When you have the misinformation being served in the same way as the truthful information, distinguishing one versus the other gets harder and harder. This is why Maria has voiced heavily how social media platforms need to be held responsible and accountable for regulating misinformation circulating their platforms.

For what Maria thinks should be done, the answer is clear. “The data is there: Take down the networks. Take down the terrorist networks. Restore order. Be the gatekeepers. Again, this idea of letting lies live. If it’s a lie, if someone is saying there are three bottles of water here, why even let that statement there?”

We can only hope that the social media giants and those who lead them, who have power to make these changes, are actually listening to her, and her supporters, now.

How to Learn More/What You Can Do

• List Resources

• The Social Dilemma documentary