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SALT LAKE CITY — How have the rise of social media and spread of misinformation changed the news media landscape?
As a major election year nears and the public questions the role of Facebook in combating misinformation, Andrew Pergam, director of governance and strategic initiatives at Facebook, gave a glimpse of what is happening behind the scenes at the social media company during a symposium at the University of Utah on Friday.
“Misinformation is one of the company’s most pressing and scrutinized issues,” he said. “We’re under an immense amount of pressure to do more to tackle viral information more quickly.”
He said the company is working to identify potential misinformation faster and with more certainty, and is working on the creation of an independent oversight board focused on making decisions on content in cases where all appeals have been exhausted.
A way Facebook takes action against misinformation, he said, is by lowering content that’s been rated false by independent third-party fact checkers on someone’s news feed, which has worked to reduce the number of views of false content.
But challenges still remain, like the company’s small number of fact-checking partners, the latency associated with the amount of time it takes to fact check content, and the sharing behavior of Facebook users not reading content before sharing it.
Ideally, Pergam said a potential solution is for the company to ask users to critically evaluate and research content before sharing or interacting with it. In addition, he said the company is bringing more outside voices, like academics, to collaborate to improve the platform and find more potential solutions.
One of the most prioritized projects for the company, he said, is the creation of a new public and independent oversight board, which would uphold or reverse decisions on difficult and contested content and give advice on policy.
“Both the board’s decisions and the company’s responses will be made public,” he said
Pergam said the board would not provide judgment on the majority of the company’s content decisions or address issues beyond content like artificial intelligence or data privacy.
He said the board “needs to be as diverse as the many people in the Facebook community,” and will include up to 40 members and represent a diversity of disciplines and expertise.
He said the first group of board members will be announced at the end of the year and could hear their first case by January or February.
“The big picture here is to ensure that Facebook is being held accountable to building the best and most defensible solutions to some of these most difficult problems that the company faces,” he said.
Pergam’s remarks came during the Lee E. Teitelbaum Utah Law Review Symposium at the S.J. Quinney College of Law, which focused on news, disinformation and social media responsibility.
On Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave a speech at Georgetown University on the value of free expression on Facebook.
“We can either continue to stand for free expression understanding it’s messiness, but believing that the long journey towards greater progress requires confronting ideas that challenge us. Or we can decide that the cost is simply too great,” he said. “And I’m here today because I believe that we must continue to stand for free expression.”
During a panel Friday titled, “News, Information, and Discussion of Matters of Public Concern in a Social Media Age,” U. law professor and moderator RonNell Andersen Jones said the tools that create potential risks for the spread of misinformation are the same tools that are valuable to the spread of local and national news and topics of public concern.
For two decades, Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor and legal correspondent for the online magazine Slate, has covered the U.S. Supreme Court and other legal matters, and has seen a “seismic” change in the news industry.
She said there’s been a shift of editorial focus on what people want to read as opposed to what people might need or find useful, along with the emphasis on being the first to publish a story.
“There’s really no point in writing journalism that no one is going to consume, even though it’s important,” she said, due to the prioritization of clicks.
Lithwick said she’s also seen the demise of publications that cannot afford to pay their staff.
“I would say also most gutting for me, is the demise of public confidence,” she said, noting beliefs “that truth is knowable, that journalists are reliable, and that there is a way to discern which isn’t true and which is fake” have also been lost.
In relation to increasing media literacy, Sonja R. West, First Amendment law professor at the University of Georgia School of Law, said it’s important for the general public to understand how the process of journalism works.
Elizabeth Kronk Warner, dean of the S.J. Quinney College of Law, said “Discussions like this one are long overdue. Thinking about how we use platforms and public information and how they can be taken advantage of by those who wish to spread disinformation is essential to the health of our democracy.”
