Stopping Disinformation At The Systemic Level
August 19, 2021
Disinformation has been a problem since humans created the first conspiracy theory, but the spread has gotten worse in the past view years during Trump’s administration and the pandemic. TechDirt describes how it is more difficult to stop the disinformation spread in the article: “Disentangling Disinformation: Not As Easy As It Looks.” Protestors are urging Facebook to ban disinformation super spreaders and rightly so.
Disinformation about COVID-19 comes from a limited number of Facebook accounts as well as WhatsApp groups, news programs, local communities, and other social media platforms. Facebook does ban misinformation about COVID-19, but the company does not enforce its own rules. It is easy to identify the misinformation super spreaders, it is difficult to stop them. Disinformation has infected the Internet on a systemic level and it is hard to target.
It is hard to decide what actually qualifies as misinformation. What is real deemed hard fact and conspiracy theories changes all the time. For example, homosexuality used to be considered a mental illness and the chronic illness ME/CFS was only deemed recently deemed real. Another part of the issue is that giving authorities power to determine what is disinformation has downsides, because authorities do not always agree with the public about what is truthful. It is also extremely difficult to enforce rules about disinformation:
“We know that enforcing terms of service and community standards is a difficult task even for the most resourced, even for those with the best of intentions—like, say, a well-respected, well-funded German newspaper. But if a newspaper, with layers of editors, doesn’t always get it right, how can content moderators—who by all accounts are low-wage workers who must moderate a certain amount of content per hour—be expected to do so? And more to the point, how can we expect automated technologies—which already make a staggering amount of errors in moderation—to get it right?”
In other words, companies can do better jobs to moderate disinformation, but it is nearly an impossible task. Misinformation spreads around the globe in multiple languages and there is not an easy, universal way to stop everything. It is even worse when good content gets lost because of misinformation.
Whitney Grace, August 19, 2021
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