“If you want to liberate a country,
give them the internet.”
Wael Ghonim
“Google can bring you back 100,000 answers.
A librarian can bring you back the right one.”
Neil Gaiman
The web is using two kinds of muscle to strong-arm the status quo. With the first, it is successfully taking on the establishment. With the second, it is successfully taking on the truth.
Fighting the Establishment: Political
A flexing of the first kind of muscle was dramatically illustrated on Friday, February 11, 2011—Egypt’s so-called “Friday of Wrath.” After using social media to help mobilize massive street protests against Hosni Mubarak’s thirty-year-long presidency, Egyptians got what they wanted: Mubarak resigned.
“Social media have become the pamphlets of the 21st century,” declares Sascha Meinrath, director of the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative, “a way that people who are frustrated with the status quo can organize themselves and coordinate protest, and in the case of Egypt, revolution.”253
Closer to home, the web’s muscle was instrumental in the surprising election of Donald Trump, America’s first populist-outsider-billionaire president. As no one before him, Trump successfully commandeered the web’s ultrademocratic showground—especially Twitter—in order to speak directly to the public, circumventing the election cycle’s overtly hostile media and establishment politicians of both parties.
Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy published a postmortem titled, “News Coverage of the 2016 Election: How the Press Failed the Voters.” According to the study, coverage of Trump’s candidacy by the establishment news media—ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post—was fully 77 percent negative. The coverage by CBS News, the worst of the lot, was 89 percent negative.254
With his adroit use of the web, Trump overcame it all—his victory in the wee hours of November 9 sending shock waves throughout the planet. The London Daily Telegraph’s big, bold headline shouted: “Trump’s American Revolution.”255
To be clear, the web does not create widespread disgruntlement, like the kind that ignited the revolts in Egypt and the United States. Rather, like a planet-sized megaphone, it greatly amplifies the human experience—both for better and for worse. It has the unrivaled muscle to transform one person’s call to arms into a collective scream, a collective scream into a wrathful movement, and a wrathful movement into a headline-grabbing coup.
“I’ve worked my whole life to see the power of the people come to the fore,” activist Rabab Al Mahdi exclaimed after Egypt’s fateful Friday of Wrath. “I never thought I would be alive to see it. It’s not just about Mubarak. It’s . . . about the people’s power to bring about the change that no one, no one thought was possible.”256
“We are considered flyover country, as you well know, and they don’t care about us,” said Scott Hiltgren, a small-business owner in Wisconsin, immediately after Trump’s election. “And I think it was the silent majority that finally said, ‘Enough’s enough. We want a change. We don’t like the way things are going.’”257
Fighting the Establishment: Scientific
Like politics, science is greatly influenced by an elite ruling class, of which I am a member. I gained my place in that rarefied world by earning a BS in physics, an MS in experimental high-energy physics, and a “3-D” PhD in physics, mathematics, and astronomy.
According to the latest UNESCO Science Report, in 2013 there were 7.8 million scientists worldwide.258 Given there are 7.1 billion people in the whole world, it means we scientists represent about 0.11% of the population.259
Generally speaking, most people express respect for my colleagues and me. According to the most recent Pew Research Center poll, for example, 76 percent of Americans have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in science. That’s just below the military (79 percent) and way above religious leaders (52 percent) and the media (38 percent).260
However, there are some major wrinkles. Notwithstanding people’s respect for science, they don’t agree with everything it claims to be true. According to a 2015 Pew poll, the three fiercest revolts against the scientific establishment are over its oft-repeated proclamations that: 1) genetically modified (GM) foods are safe to eat, 2) foods grown with pesticides are safe to eat, and 3) climate change is mostly being caused by humans.261
The differences of opinion are striking. Regarding GM foods, 88 percent of scientists say they’re safe; only 37 percent of the public agrees. Regarding pesticide-grown foods, 68 percent of scientists say they’re safe; only 28 percent of the public agrees. Regarding anthropogenic climate change, 87 percent of the scientists agree; only 50 percent of the public agrees. (A separate, more recent Pew poll puts the public’s agreement at 48 percent.)262
These rebellions are remarkable because they include those 76 percent of Americans who have a great deal or fair amount of confidence in science. In other words, these uprisings are not against science itself, but against the claim that scientific consensuses are unquestionable.
Understandably, the scientific establishment is alarmed by these insurrections. Like any elite ruling class, it is not accustomed to having its authority challenged and has taken to the web in an all-out campaign to “educate” the infidels.
Among those leading the charge is the National Center for Science Education, a not-for-profit advocacy group based in Oakland, California. Its elegant website trumpets this battle cry:
“NCSE defends the integrity of science education against ideological interference. We work with teachers, parents, scientists, and concerned citizens at the local, state, and national levels to ensure that topics including evolution and climate change are taught accurately, honestly, and confidently.”
But others are revolting against this orthodoxy, also by using the web. I Googled “GM foods are not safe,” and instantaneously (0.70 seconds, to be precise), I was served up 1,090,000 articles, authored by people and organizations with wide-ranging credentials.
The US Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, for example, posted a report revealing that, “Over 400 prominent scientists from more than two dozen countries recently voiced significant objections to major aspects of the so-called ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming.”263
Many of the dissenting scientists are among the most elite members of science’s elite ruling class, including Nobel Prize winners—infidels clearly not in need of being better educated. “The distinguished scientists,” explains the Senate report, “are experts in diverse fields, including: climatology; geology; biology; glaciology; biogeography; meteorology; oceanography; economics; chemistry; mathematics; environmental sciences; engineering; physics and paleoclimatology.”264
This web-wide war between the scientific establishment and dissenters could be likened to the Egyptian and American revolts we just discussed. But I also see similarities with the essential disagreement between Catholics and Protestants.
Catholics believe the pope to be infallible, as explained by the original Vatican Council of 1870:
“Therefore, faithfully adhering to the tradition received from the beginning of the Christian faith . . . we teach and define as a divinely revealed dogma that when the Roman pontiff speaks EX CATHEDRA . . . he possesses, by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his Church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals.”265
To anyone tempted to challenge the pope’s infallibility, the Council’s decree adds these choice words of warning and condemnation: “So then, should anyone, which God forbid, have the temerity to reject this definition of ours: let him be anathema.”
In the sixteenth century, Martin Luther rejected papal infallibility. To him, the Bible alone—Sola Scriptura—is Christendom’s supreme, infallible authority. “The Word of God is greater than heaven and earth,” he declared, “yea, greater than death and hell, for it forms part of the power of God, and endures everlastingly.”266
Luther’s Protestant Reformation declared that ordinary people could study the Bible for themselves and come to their own conclusions, even if they ended up disagreeing with the pope. Understandably, the Catholic church fought back tooth and nail, but Protestantism went viral and transformed the entire world—greatly aided by the web of its day, the printing press, which Johannes Gutenberg invented the century before.267 “Once the Bible was printed, people who could read had direct access to the text itself,” explain the curators of the website Musée virtuel du Protestantisme. “This was truly a revolution.”268
Today, those who use the web to defend the infallibility of scientific consensuses are behaving like Catholics. To them, anyone who dares— who has the “temerity”—to question the establishment’s interpretations of the available evidence on such matters as GM foods, pesticides, and climate change are anathema.
Yet, as I see it, the dissenters are simply behaving like Protestants. They respect science—or should, in my opinion—but strongly disagree with the dogma that, like the pope, it is infallible. As support, they cite the many times in history when scientific orthodoxies have been upended by mutinous ideas—documented brilliantly by philosopher Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions but also on the world wide web, for all to read.269
Albert Einstein, for one, was a scientific Protestant. His provocative ideas about space and time flew in the face of the scientific consensus of his day and were, therefore, considered anathema.
Long after his spectacular vindication, he explained why science should never be treated as infallible, no matter how strongly it believes the facts support its preferred position. “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right,” he observed, “a single experiment can prove me wrong.”270
As a scientific Protestant myself, I agree with Einstein. Treating science as infallible is tantamount to making it into something it is not meant to be, and most assuredly does not wish to be: a dogmatic religion. I’ll have more to say on the subject in my concluding chapter, SCIENCE, SACREDNESS, AND SELF-DESTRUCTION.
For now, I like how New York University physicist Steven Koonin, who served in the Obama administration’s Department of Energy, explains it:
“Consensus statements necessarily conceal judgment calls and debates and so feed the ‘settled,’ ‘hoax’ and ‘don’t know’ memes that plague the political dialogue around climate change. We scientists must better portray not only our certainties but also our uncertainties, and even things we may never know. Not doing so is an advisory malpractice that usurps society’s right to make choices fully informed by risk, economics and values. Moving from oracular consensus statements to an open adversarial process would shine much-needed light on the scientific debates.”271
Fighting the Truth: Accidental
The cancer of misinformation is nothing new: rumors and propaganda are a staple of the human experience. But today, thanks to the web, the deceptive noise level is at an all-time high, earning it a derisive nickname: fake news.
The proliferation of misinformation is a top concern of the web’s creator, Tim Berners-Lee. As he sees it, social media sites and search engines are among the biggest malefactors:
“These sites make more money when we click on the links they show us. . . . The net result is that these sites show us content they think we’ll click on—meaning that misinformation, or ‘fake news,’ which is surprising, shocking, or designed to appeal to our biases, can spread like wildfire.”272
I think Berners-Lee is right to finger the distributors of fake news. But surely the creators of fake news are equally to blame, even when it’s done accidentally.
Case in point: on April 14, 2017, at 10:27 pm EDT, Bloomberg’s website flashed the arresting headline: “North Korea Fires Projectile, Media Says: Xinhua.” Underneath were the words: “Story developing . . .” In less than sixty seconds Blomberg amended the headline—still datelined 10:27 PM EDT—to read: “North Korean Missile Seen at Military Parade: Xinhua.”273
The financial giant’s honest mistake, which instantly went viral, caused first a wave of panic and then a wave of outrage. Afterward, Mediaite published a critical article titled “Bogus Headlines on Bloomberg and Chinese Media Risk Starting WWIII.”274
Fighting the Truth: Intentional
Far more problematic is intentional fake news, the perpetrators of which have motives running the spectrum from noble to nefarious. Let me give you three quick examples.
• On June 16, 2006, when YouTube was but sixteen months old, a brainy, attractive sixteen-year-old homeschooled girl named Bree began a video diary called lonelygirl15. It went viral and very quickly shot to the top of YouTube’s most viewed list.
The web community’s love affair with Bree was so intense, her doings and sayings were covered by the establishment media. “She has huge online fame,” wrote The New York Times columnist Virginia Heffernan. “What could be more 2006?”275
The enigmatic girl’s true confessions—delivered to a webcam in her bedroom—mixed routine teenage angst (one post was titled “My Parents Suck”) with deep musings about science, religion, history, and philosophy. “Today for our installment of ‘Proving Science Wrong,’” she announced at the start of her sixteenth posting, “our topic is going to be the Tolstoy Principle. Jared Diamond came up with this one.”276
Imagine the world’s reaction when Richard Rushfield, then entertainment editor for latimes.com, exposed lone-lygirl15 as a hoax. “The team behind the lonelygirl15 YouTube mystery has come forward, claiming that lone-lygirl15 is part of their ‘show’ and thanking their fans effusively for tuning in to ‘the birth of a new art form.’”277
Ah, yes, deception—a new art form.
lonelygirl15’s co-creators—an eclectic group of wannabe screenwriters, filmmakers, actors, and a software engineer—seem to have missed the irony of calling deception a new art form. In fact, they were quite defensive about what they’d done. “We never lied,” says co-creator Miles Beckett, “we just put it out there. When people asked us if it was real or not, we never responded, we just let it ride.”278
The popularity of lonelygirl15 helped seal YouTube’s already rising star. A mere one month after the media’s unmasking of lonelygirl15 as fake news, Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion.279
• On April 13, 2017, The Huffington Post published an article titled “Could It Be Time to Deny White Men the Franchise?” authored by a South African feminist philosophy student named Shelley Garland. “If white men no longer had the vote, the progressive cause would be strengthened,” Garland wrote. “At the same time, a denial of the franchise to white men, could see a redistribution of global assets to their rightful owners.”280
Predictably, the article went viral.
The following day, Verashni Pillay, editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post’s South African bureau, defended the article in a commentary piece titled “This blog On White Men Is Going Viral. Here’s Our Response.” In it, she declared: “Those who have held undue power granted to them by patriarchy must lose it for us to be truly equal. This seems blindingly obvious to us.”281
But it was a different story when, four days later, Shelley Garland was outed as Marius Roodt, a researcher at the Centre for Development and Enterprise, a leading South African think tank. The Huffington Post retracted the story, and Pillay sang a different tune. “I did not make it clear enough in my initial response that I absolutely do not agree with the disenfranchisement of any group of people,” she said. “I don’t hate white men.”282
Despite the initial blunder and subsequent mea culpa, neither Pillay nor anyone else at The Huffington Post was fired or, it appears, even disciplined. Nevertheless, the reputation of the well-known, extremely liberal publication took a big hit, as the web lit up with comments such as these:283
Congrats Huffingtonpost! You are now Officially the most racist website online!
Let’s do an experiment: 1 - copy this article in MS word. 2 - Hit “Ctrl+R” and replace “White men” with any other group, gender or ethnic background. 3 - Read the article again . . . Are you offended? If you are, why are you printing this garbage?
Here’s a correction. Delete your entire website. You absolute psychopaths.
• Finally, consider 20th Century Fox’s marketing campaign for its 2017 horror movie “A Cure for Wellness.” The studio published seemingly real online, big-city newspapers— Houston Leader, NY Morning Post, Indianapolis Gazette, etc.—cleverly intermixing movie ads with sensational, left-leaning, fake news stories such as these:284
“BOMBSHELL: Trump and Putin Spotted at Swiss Resort Prior to Election”
“LEAKED: Lady Gaga Halftime Performance to Feature Muslim Tribute”
“California Legislature to Consider Tax Rebates for Women Who Get Abortions”
Reporters at BuzzFeed outed the deception just before the movie’s opening weekend. Their article, “A Hollywood Film Is Using Fake News to Get Publicity,” revealed that Fox’s “fake stories—such as one about Donald Trump implementing a temporary ban on vaccinations— have been picked up by real websites and generated significant engagement on Facebook thanks to people being fooled.”285
Fox eventually apologized, but there were no reports of anyone being fired or disciplined. Moreover—no surprise, given the web’s infamously long memory—the sham newspaper links remain permanently archived on the web. See for yourself by going to, say, http://archive.is/OxyG1.286
Another of the wellness movie’s phony promotional websites, healthcuregov.com—made to look like the Affordable Care Act’s official website, healthcare.gov— still lives as well but now sends you to a website peddling the studio’s upcoming movies.
“This absolutely crosses the line,” says Bonnie Patten, executive director of truthinadvertising.org. “Using a fake news site to lure consumers into buying movie tickets is basically a form of deceptive marketing.”
It is that, of course, but much more. “I think this is a hot enough subject that most marketers would understand that taking advantage of a vulnerable public is dangerous,” observes Susan Credle of FCB, a global ad agency. “When you start to tear down media and question what’s real and what’s not real, our democracy is threatened.”287
Inevitably, some try putting a positive spin on the hoax—for example, by comparing it to the 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast, in which twenty-three-year-old Orson Welles played a reporter breaking the story about a Martian invasion. But unlike Fox’s marketing campaign, the broadcast, while realistic, was up front about what it was doing.
As explained by Snopes, the well-known watchdog website, “the [‘War of the Worlds’] show was a regularly scheduled and announced episode of The Mercury Theatre on the Air, a radio program dedicated to presenting dramatizations of literary works.”288 War of the Worlds, of course, is the classic science fiction novel by H. G. Wells, first published in 1897.289
Some find comfort in the possibility that online hoaxes are making us more cautious, less dupable—clearly, a good thing. “I think it would be really hard to do something that feels real but isn’t real and have people be fooled anymore,” muses Miles Beckett, co-creator of lonely-girl15. “There’s been tons of hoaxes and other things since lonelygirl, and I think they’ve been figured out pretty damn fast because people are skeptical.”
But even if it’s true, our increased skepticism is now coupled with increased confusion. That was vividly illustrated in April 2017, when news stories reported Syria had dropped chemical weapons on the rebelheld town of Khan Sheikhoun. “Dozens of people, including children, died,” reported The New York Times, “after breathing in poison that possibly contained a nerve agent or other banned chemicals, according to witnesses, doctors and rescue workers.”290
Russia called it fake news, claiming the deadly chemicals were actually released from in situ rebel storehouses bombed by the Syrians. In a story posted on the web by Pravda, a former Department of Defense official declared: “As the United States and Western allies march closer to full-scale conflict with Syria, many of their claims are now being scrutinized and dissected by a skeptical public.”
Several days later, the United States retaliated by taking out the airstrip from which the chemical attacks were allegedly launched. However, respected mainstream news sites, appearing to buy into Russia’s version of events, published stories defending Syria.
At one surreal point, like a serpent feeding on its own tail, a Bloomberg story titled “Russia Says Evidence Growing Syria Chemical Attack Was Staged” actually quoted Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov referencing the barrage of pro-Syria news articles as evidence supporting Russia’s position. “Publications including in the U.S. and the U.K.” he said, “have highlighted ‘many inconsistencies’ in the version of events in Syria’s Idlib province that was used to justify the American airstrikes.”291
Similar claims made by Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, were also run by mainstream news sites, including CNN.292 Confusing matters further, on the day of the chemical attacks, Syria’s First Lady, Asma Assad, took to Instagram, posting a photo of herself smiling benignly.
Predictably, many users roasted her for her seeming indifference—one of them accusing her husband of being “a baby killer.” But others, thoroughly caught up in the confusion, questioned the very authenticity of the posting. “How stupid are the people who think the First Lady posted this picture of herself,” one user said, “or that this is actually her account.”293
The debate didn’t end there. Users were left to wonder about the motives of the people posting criticisms or defenses of the First Lady, not to mention the larger controversies about the chemical attack and America’s retaliation. The endless speculation was enough to make anyone’s head spin. Who was lying and who was telling the truth?!
The web makes it too easy for anyone—anyone—to proliferate uncertain information and outright fake news, to warp reality for their own purposes, noble or nefarious. As a result, we are now like people trying to navigate through a house of mirrors, where you can’t trust even yourself to know what to believe. Where reflections lure you into dead ends and often appear to extend to infinity, like the endless assertions, counter-assertions, and ensuing arguments commonly seen on the web.
“If people want to have stunts, fine,” says Richard Edelman, CEO of his well-respected, eponymous global marketing firm, “but one of the great dangers it seems to me at the moment is people can’t differentiate between that which is real and that which is a fake story.”
Today, internet curators are trying many different ways to scrub fake news from the web—to bring law and order to Dodge City. Mostly, they fall into three broad categories.
Establishment Solutions
What I call establishment solutions rely on some form of top-down regulation. For example, Google’s Fact Check initiative, launched worldwide in April 2017. Here’s how the tech giant describes it:
“. . . we’re making the Fact Check label in Google News available everywhere and expanding it into Search globally in all languages. For the first time, when you conduct a search on Google that returns an authoritative result containing fact checks for one or more public claims, you will see that information clearly on the search results page.”294
Some 115 hand-selected third-party reviewers—a very elite group— are given the extreme privilege of passing judgment on nearly every news story and website on the world wide web. The problem with this top-down approach, of course, is that the self-appointed fact checkers themselves invariably have biases.
On January 9, 2018, Mediaite, a left-leaning, online media watchdog magazine, published a critique of Google’s Fact Check titled, “Why Does Google’s New ‘Fact-Check’ Feature Seem to Be Targeting Conservative Sites?”295 The author reports on the results of an impartial experiment he performed on Fact Check, with both conservative and liberal news sites.
Of the ten prominent conservative sites—The Daily Caller, The Daily Wire, The Federalist, Breitbart, The Washington Free Beacon, TheBlaze, Townhall.com, RedState, The Weekly Standard, and National Review— he found “five of them were scrutinized with the ‘Reviews Claimed’ tab.”296 The reviews claimed the sites were unreliable for one reason or another.
Of the ten prominent liberal sites—Slate, Salon, Daily Kos, Media Matters for America, MoveOn.org, ThinkProgress, Mother Jones, Vice, Vox, and The Huffington Post—none was flagged with any ‘Reviews Claimed’ tabs. Not a one.
“Have conservative sites been guilty of spreading misinformation? Sure. But according to Google, liberal sites haven’t,” concludes author Joseph A. Wulfsohn. “Perhaps the search engine will blame some nonhuman ‘algorithm’ for the seemingly blatant bias if they’re pressed on it, but if they’re going to fight ‘fake news,’ which frankly is a bipartisan problem, they need to have bipartisan treatment of these sites.”297
On April 2, 2018—in celebration of the second annual International Fact-Checking Day298—the Monmouth University Polling Institute reported more than three of four Americans believe the mainstream media “engage in reporting fake news.” Patrick Murray, the institute’s director, remarked: “These findings are troubling, no matter how you define ‘fake news.’ Confidence in an independent fourth estate is a cornerstone of a healthy democracy. Ours appears to be headed for the intensive care unit.”299 The matter has become so grave, in 2018 Congress held investigative hearings about fake news, liberal political bias, and faulty algorithms—the one featuring Mark Zuckerberg creating quite a commotion.300 Moreover, the Media Research Center, a conservative group, launched the “Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers” project.301
Not to be outdone, California is threatening to go even further by enacting a particularly strict—some might say, Draconian—version of the establishment approach. On February 17, 2017, state assemblyman Ed Chau introduced the California Political Cyberfraud Abatement Act, which would criminalize people who purvey fake news:
“The bill would also make it unlawful for a person to knowingly and willingly make, publish or circulate on a Web site, or cause to be made, published, or circulated in any writing posted on a Web site, a false or deceptive statement designed to influence the vote on any issue submitted to voters at an election or on any candidate for election to public office.”302
On April 19 the assembly struck the above clause from the bill, effectively gutting it.303 But I doubt we’ve heard the Golden State’s last word on the matter.
Populist Solutions
What I call the populist solutions rely on we the people to police the web. It is an approach very much in line with the web’s ultrademocratic, freedom-loving nature—and one that seems to work. Consider two quick examples.
• On April 18, 2017, the AP tweeted this breaking story: “Fresno police say suspect in triple slaying told them he hates white people, shouted ‘God is great’ before killings.” Immediately, people took to Twitter and pointed out the shooter actually shouted “Allahu Akbar,” the familiar battle cry of radical Islamic terrorists, meaning “Allah is the greatest.”304
Caught with its pants down, the AP tweeted a correction on the following day:
“We deleted a tweet about a Fresno slaying suspect shouting ‘God is great.’ It failed to note he said it in Arabic. A new tweet is upcoming.”305
It was a clear-cut case of the public successfully recognizing and correcting fake news. Still, it’s puzzling to me why—whether out of ignorance or political correct-ness—the AP still failed to report the actual words spoken by the suspect, “Allahu Akbar.”
• On April 19, 2017, The New York Times sports editor, Jason Stallman, posted this tweet, along with two photos that seemed to show Obama had attracted a bigger crowd than Trump:
“Patriots’ turnout for President Obama in 2015 vs. Patriots’ turnout for President Trump today.”306
Just four hours later, the New England Patriots tweeted information that immediately discredited Stall-man’s claim:
“These photos lack context. Facts: In 2015, over 40 football staff were on the stairs. In 2017, they were seated on the South Lawn.”307
It isn’t clear if Stallman’s deception was innocent or intentional, but he quickly apologized. “Bad tweet by me. Terrible tweet,” he confessed. “I wish I could say it’s complicated, but no, this one is pretty straightforward: I’m an idiot.”308
Once again, the public scored a victory against fake news.
Hybrid Solutions
For the past few years, Facebook has experimented with strategies that are part establishment and part populist. “In the public debate over false news, many believe Facebook should use its own judgment to filter out misinformation,” says Samidh Chakrabarti, Facebook’s product manager for politics and elections. “We’ve chosen not to do that because we don’t want to be the arbiters of truth, nor do we imagine this is a role the world would want for us.”309
Starting in early 2017, Facebook users were allowed to flag news stories as fake or suspicious—and so were Facebook’s robots, mathematical algorithms designed to recognize stinkers. If enough users and bots flagged a story, it was sent to human fact-checkers for final evaluation— entities such as Snopes, Politifact, FactCheck.org, ABC News, AP, and even The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine. If enough fact-checkers gave the flagged story a thumbs down, Facebook adorned it with a banner proclaiming it to be “Disputed.”310
On December 20, 2017, however, Facebook announced it was scrapping the whole Disputed banner thing, explaining: “Academic research on correcting misinformation has shown that putting a strong image, like a red flag, next to an article may actually entrench deeply held beliefs—the opposite effect to what we intended.”311
Ah, yes, unintended consequences strike again.
In place of the banners, Facebook is now sending alerts to users who share disputed stories, in hopes of discouraging their dissemination. Also, they are attaching “Related Articles” to disputed stories—web documents that offer alternative points of view. “Indeed,” reports Facebook, “we’ve found that when we show Related Articles next to a false news story, it leads to fewer shares than when the Disputed Flag is shown.”312
Zuckerberg now admits publicly that Facebook and SNS generally have created and amplified a dystopia that must be fixed. “The world feels anxious and divided, and Facebook has a lot of work to do,” he confesses. “My personal challenge for 2018 is to focus on fixing these important issues. . . . If we’re successful this year, then we’ll end 2018 on a much better trajectory.”313
In my opinion, Zuckerberg is on the right track; hybrid solutions are the best way to go. I say that because once upon a time earnest, just-minded authority figures—Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson—joined forces with an alert public to successfully civilize Dodge City.314 Considering human nature hasn’t changed a bit since the days of the wild wild west, I’m tempted to suppose it can also work on the wild wild web.
Tim Berners-Lee appears to agree. “It has taken all of us to build the web we have,” he said on the web’s twenty-eighth anniversary, “and now it is up to all of us to build the web we want—for everyone.”315
My only hesitation comes from realizing that in its wildest days, Dodge City had fewer than one thousand residents. The web, on the other hand, has 3.7 billion inhabitants and counting316—each of whom, remember, is a receiver and a transmitter. No one—no ruler in history— has ever attempted to manage the behavior of that many people.