Many people will have seen this quote, attributed to a 1998 interview with Donald Trump in People Magazine, in their Facebook news feed. It's a great quote, but he never said it. It typifies the kind of fake news and misinformation that has plagued the 2016 election on an unprecedented scale. It's not surprising that the Oxford Dictionary has named "post-truth" its international word of the year, which it defines as an adjective...
"...relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief."
The deliberate making up of news stories to fool or entertain is nothing new. And there is fake news in mainstream media, too. But the arrival of social media has meant real and fictional stories are now presented in such a similar way that it can sometimes be difficult to tell the two apart.
We have always relied on many kinds of sources for our political news and information. Family, friends, news organizations, politicans certainly predate the internet. But whereas those are sources of information, social media provides the structure for political conversation. When Jenkins considered new media "to have the potential to extend civic participation, and to create new forms of deliberative democracy" in 2006, he probably would not have thought that ten years later president Obama warns that the ease with which people can promulgate fraudulent news stories on Facebook threatens basic democtratic principles.
The company is being accused of abdicating its responsibility to clamp down on fake news stories and counter the echo chamber that defined the US election. But is Facebook to blame for electing Trump? No. Is Facebook clear of responsibility? No. Are media free of responsibilty for what happens on Facebook? No. Can they cure the situation? No. Can they improve the situation? Yes.
What journalists can do
CUNY J-school professor Jeff Jarvis said it loud and clear:
"We [in media] should be going to the social platforms, speaking the language there, respecting their context, and using the devices they provide - memes, video, photos, dancing GIFs if that's what it takes - to bring journalistic value to the conversations that now occur without us."
As a journalist who gathered most of my news experience by working in social media I couldn't agree more. I don't want to set up Facebook or Google as the censors of the world. I don't want them to decide what is real and fake, true and false. I rather work on Facebook or Twitter not to promote my own damned stories but to find what people are curious, wrong, and confused about and to bring them journalism. I want to strengthen fact-checking, context, explanation, education, reporting, watch-dogging. Journalism should inform and empower the users, the citizens, the public to share smarter, more factual, more rational and reasonable information. They won't win all the wars but they will win some fact battles if only someone enable them.
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What Facebook can do
Facebook is not blameless. In the opinion of Jarvis, Facebook, too, has a problem. It can do much better to improve what people read and share - "to create not just a better experience but a better society." He states that Facebook has the means to show related content and with that it can show related fact-checking and debunking from reliable media sources. Imagine if, as you get ready to share a meme, Facebook says: "Hey, here's something you might want to see from a news organization showing this is not true." To make this happen, he suggests that Facebook hires an editor not to create content, and not just to do delas but to bring sense of public responsibility; to explain journalism to Facebook and Facebook to journalism.
So with the fake news floodgates now wide open, has the battle to contain it already been lost? No. There will always been fake news, lies, and politicans and they will all go together. Will Facebook's role in the news disappear? Unlikely. It's undeniable that Facebook is a massive source of news consumption, and according to a study by the Pew Research Center, it's only growing. More than 40 percent of American adults access news on the social media platform. Instead of complaining that Facebook doesn't send enough traffic to articles that countless consumers have demonstrated they don't want to read, media should flood it with true news and nurture it.
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