- The Israel-Hamas war shows how social media platforms no longer want to deal with the news.
- When you give up on news, you give up on verified facts.
- A cybersecurity expert said journalists should stop correcting bad information on social media.
Not too long ago, social media was the future of news. Millions of people could log on to their platform of choice during big events and get a curated stream of reports from organizations focused on checking if information is true.
To accompany this flow of verified information, Facebook, Twitter and other social media companies built large content moderation teams and partnerships. It was an effort to limit misinformation and disinformation spread by bad actors, spin doctors, and others seeking engagement and influence.
Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey said in a 2018 interview that Twitter had been effectively designed to support news because users “taught us what they wanted to use it for.” Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and cofounder of Facebook, created the News Feed in 2006, with a mix of social updates and links to news stories as the basis of the platform. Later the company designed a dedicated News tab.
Today, Twitter and Facebook, along with Meta’s other platforms, including the new Threads, want very little to do with news content. After more than decade of trying to deal with facts, they seem to have decided that hot takes, celebrities, fashion and other softer topics offer more engagement with less risk. Facebook now avoids promoting news. Elon Musk’s Twitter, known as X, has stopped showing headlines from links and promotes misinformation, as long as it’s going viral.
“Politics and hard news are important, I don’t want to imply otherwise,” Instagram boss Adam Mosseri wrote in July. “But my take is, from a platform’s perspective, any incremental engagement or revenue they might drive is not at all worth the scrutiny, negativity (let’s be honest), or integrity risks that come along with them.”
Fact-checking is tough
When social media companies give up on news, what they are really doing is giving up on a broader effort to ensure the information being shared on their platforms is accurate.
Checking whether something is true is difficult and labor-intensive. Karan Singhal helped create Google’s MedPaLM 2, one of the most powerful medical AI models. He previously tried using AI-based tech to spot misinformation. Singhal now describes that as a “naive project.”
If one of the top AI technologists can’t build tech capable of tackling the verification of facts online, then maybe it’s sensible for X, Facebook, TikTok, and other tech companies to give up on these efforts, too. In the Year of Efficiency, it doesn’t make sense to spend money hiring more human moderators when there are AI chatbots to build.
Meta, which runs Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has cut hundreds of workers who focused on content moderation and related areas, according to CNBC. The company says it still has thousands of employees and contractors working on the “safety and security” of its platforms.
Meanwhile, Twitter is down to roughly 20 full-time trust and safety workers, a team that was made up of hundreds of workers prior to Musk’s takeover a year ago.
The Israel-Hamas information apocalypse
The Israel-Hamas war is the first major event where social media’s new fact-light approach is on show, and there’s been a wave of false information on the platforms.
Shayan Sardarizadeh, a journalist at BBC Verify, has been tracking some of the worst examples on X. Reading these, it’s easy to see how social media can divide people during difficult times.
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One recent post showed soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo holding the Palestinian flag. In fact, it was a Moroccan footballer from a 2022 video. The social media account posed as a BBC journalist to share this misinformation for engagement.
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Another post purported to show video of rockets fired by Hamas toward Israel. It was actually from the Syrian war and was originally shared online in 2020.
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A graphic video, viewed nearly 500,000 times, claimed to show a military convoy of Hamas militants being targeted by an Israeli missile. The clip was really posted online in 2019 and filmed in Syria.
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Another widely shared post claimed to show footage of Hamas or Israel faking the killing of a child by the other side. The video was actually footage from a film posted to TikTok in 2022.
Stop trying
It’s gotten so bad that Marcus Hutchins, a famous cybersecurity hacker, is now advising news organizations and journalists like Sardarizadeh to just steer clear of social media platforms and not try to correct erroneous information posted there.
“Journalists may think they’re countering misinformation by debunking it, but often they don’t fundamentally understand the ecosystem,” he wrote this week. “When you interact with a post (even to debunk it), you boost it in the algorithm, causing the original to spread further.”
News is ‘too risky’
Since the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, some people have been trying to get news on Threads, the new Twitter-like platform from Meta. Hundreds of people piled into posts from Mosseri asking for tools on the platform that would make it easier to find high quality news. Mosseri, who now runs Threads and previously spent several years overseeing Facebook’s News Feed, isn’t interested.
“We’re not anti-news,” Mosseri wrote last week. “But, we’re also not going to amplify news on the platform. To do so would be too risky given the maturity of the platform, the downsides of over-promising, and the stakes.”
In other words, the news is way too messy for us now. Threads is still blocking some words in its search tool that are common in news reports, like “Covid” and “vaccine.” There have also been instances of links to news stories about Hamas and Israel being blocked, although Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said on Tuesday the blocking of such links was “an error.”
Zuckerberg has so far said nothing publicly about news on Threads. His company’s actions elsewhere align with the new antipathy toward hard news expressed by Mosseri.
The company prefers another reality: Today, Facebook’s News tab is the 18th choice in a bar of options in the US, far below a dedicated tab for Meta Quest virtual reality.
The News tab is about to disappear altogether in the UK, along with France and Germany. In Canada, news links are being actively blocked on Facebook and Instagram, due to pending legislation in the country that would require the company to pay for news content.
X is for ‘grifters’
Over on X, the paid verification service Musk rolled out gives any paying user algorithmic amplification. There’s also a new system of direct payment for those who gain a certain level of engagement.
These changes, combined with content moderation job cuts, have turned X into a platform where “individual grifters and professional (sometimes state-aligned) teams” run amok, according to Alex Stamos of Stanford’s Internet Observatory, who was previously Meta’s chief security officer.
Insider asked Meta, X and TikTok for specifics on how they were working to combat false and unverified information.
Meta would not share details on any accounts or posts it has taken action on, but the company said it was actively monitoring content related to the conflict and removing posts.
“After the terrorist attacks by Hamas on Israel on Saturday, we quickly established a special operations center staffed with experts, including fluent Hebrew and Arabic speakers, to closely monitor and respond to this rapidly evolving situation,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement.
TikTok said it had “immediately mobilized significant resources and personnel,” including speakers of Arabic and Hebrew to moderate content related to the conflict. Since violence started on Oct. 7, TikTok said it had removed “over 500,000 videos and closed 8,000 livestreams in the impacted region for violating our guidelines.”
X did not respond to Insider’s inquiry. CEO Linda Yaccarino said users have control over what they see on X. The message here seems to be that the company won’t try to stop bad information, but that individual users can choose not to look at certain posts if they want.
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