After years of denying they could filter out disinformation, the social media giants have suddenly been able to keep rampant fake news off their platforms. All it took was an unprecedented global pandemic in which false information could be life threatening.
Suddenly, human lives outweighed the need to keep eyeballs glued to your platform, at any cost and with any drivel (looking especially at you, Facebook and YouTube).
The obvious response from Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, YouTube and others was an outright ban. Rational people the world over sighed in relief. So, science-based arguments work after all. Perhaps only when lives could be lost, but chalk one up for rationality.
Social networks thrive on engagement, the key word that basically means: how long can they keep eyeballs glued to their platform, and therefore their advertising. The more something spreads across the network, the better for them.
The accuracy of the information has never been a concern of the social networks, who have used a variety of US statutes to argue that they should not be held responsible for the content they carry. But those arguments have nowhere to hide now.
Now we know: social media could just as easily filter out all the other lies
A third of Americans believe Covid-19 was made in a lab, according to a survey by the respected Pew Research Centre. Social media accounted for 88% of the sources where people found false info on the coronavirus, Oxford’s Reuters Institute found in 225 cases it reviewed.
But Covid-19 is different, and people are dying right in front of us. It’s not like climate change or global warming, which is difficult to see, or the long-term consequences of anti-vaxxers convincing gullible communities not to get the measles vaccine.
But what we are seeing right now is the social networks doing what they have been telling us for years they cannot do: cut down on disinformation and fake news.
A whole secondary industry has developed to facilitate the spreading and profiting off blatant untruths. Most of the anti-Hillary Clinton websites during the 2016 US presidential election were run out of Eastern Europe, where the operators cared only about profit. The political repercussions were of little consequence to them. They made all their money from Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Google — by running patently fake news. Alex Jones’s noxious InfoWars website about numerous conspiracy theories also made fortunes.
But the immediacy and deadliness of the Covid-19 pandemic has given the social networks nowhere to hide. And they cannot profit from this wave of disinformation, at last.
How hard can it be to substitute "coronavirus" for "measles" or other anti-vaxxer keywords? Social media could just as easily filter out all the other lies. They have shown the world they can, so there’s no going back to the swamp now.
- Shapshak is editor-in-chief and publisher of Stuff magazine (stuff.co.za)
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