Factchecking wont solve this. Talked to people who are in fact checking consortiums already. They are actually grateful for every visibility push they get on facebook or whatsapp, and they currently are pondering how to reach the 40+ demographic, because they dont reach it at all.
Which is the same conclusion the factcheckers complaining in the Guardian article just came to. They only are used for crisis PR purposes. (Their work has almost no impact.)
They even see state side censorship of fake news as a positive, if you talk to the ones situated in Brazil.
Then there have been amusing occurances, where state sponsored PR agencies (foreign office, military) use dark PR on social networks against instate targets, while their neighboring agencies are supposed to protect the public from fake news..
See:
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/politics/foreign-office-funds-2m-info-13707574
Facebook has been caught doing the same, namely hiring PR agencies, to use right wing PR tactics, to discredid their critics. Not one agency, several. Which is also partly what the guardian article is about.
If you want to take this even one step further - you are talking about "influencing elections with limited candidates" by "distributing fake news optimally" all of a sudden becoming a solvable problem - as this AI whiz at Ben-Gurion University set out to proof:
https://www.heise.de/newsticker/mel...ziente-Algorithmen-und-Fake-News-4250939.html
(article in german - but you should be able to cross reference his name - and maybe even find his talk at the IJCAI)
So - to condense this down - fact checking to counteract this will never work, because there is no "consensus majority anymore", Basically people trust their friends and closed facebook groups more, than journalists, politicians, ...
So if you are spreading fake news efficiently, you are targeting social nodes ("influencers") with sponsored messages, that no one else will ever see, but that can be micro targeted to "what works to convince them", then they get to influence their peers. No big trending news story needed.
The way to solve for this is to --
- make facebook not to allow targeted ad campaigns for political purposes
- and make them actively censor ads based on quickly adopting algorithms on what could be seen as a political campaign
(edit: An unforseen negative could be that people then wouldnt participate in the political process any longer, because -simplyfied- instagram doesnt allow for political messages to be shared...
)
No one wants to do that of course, so you are left with a broken system, that basically destroys the democratic process - and can be instumentalized, by really anyone that comes along.
(This is what the political hearings with Zuck are about (despite teaching old people how tech works..
). They are demanding, that facebook gets a grip on this.)
Another way to look at it (from the Ben-Gurion AI research chap) would be to look at facebook as a general sociental system and just bow to the new default - but then you are left with a system that -
- disallows for the opposite party of an argument to be heard (thats a pre roman society setback
)
- optimizes for emotional impact on every story
- allows people with money to buy visibility, but this time without efficiency loss (buing and running a newspaper in the past wasnt very efficient...
)
- isnt reliant on common narratives, or commonly shared public opinions to influence, or direct action
- allows for anonymized public influence campaigns at never before seen cost/benefit ratios
- doesnt have any channels for that content to become visible to anyone but the person (group) that was targeted with it.
Factchecking would solve part of this if people would lend credence to those factchecking accounts, but in the overall scope of things, they dont.
Even they have a visibility problem. (Mostly because they are even more boring and non personal than conventional media.)
Some of this is edgy stuff - but then, I listed sources..
Yet, people still dont want to stop feeding instagram.
Where just a few days ago, news reported that Kendall Jenner was the highest paid model of 2018. Reason, even that has become a mixed calculation, because you now also pay them for the people they are able to influence on your companys/entitys behalf on social media.