Although I’ve covered this somewhat on my newer Wordpress
blogs, I wanted to mention that both Facebook and Google are responding to
criticism that the viral “fake news” distributed widely on their platforms
could have affected the elections and fed gullibility by many voters. Elizabeth Dwoskin, Caitlin Dewey, and Craig
Timberg report in the Washington Post here.
Google has an issue with search engine placement, which it
is always tweaking (and, no, it doesn’t pay to buy “optimization” services from
quasi-spammers) – we all heard the story about Trump’s wining the popular
vote. And it will soon effectively ban
websites that sponsor “fake news” from displaying its ads.
But for both companies it’s pretty hard to tell what is ‘fake”. A lot of commentary is “Opinion” (like, there
is an “opinion rule” in common defamation law).
Yup, claims that Barack Obama is (subjunctive mood) a Muslim, are fake
news. But a lot of it is hard to
tell.
The measures don’t seem to target amateur sites
specifically.
There is a general impression that “Google” users are
politically more in the middle (more or less like Hillary Clinton), and that
heavy Facebook users migrate to the extremes.
Blogger, by the way, has a discussion (“mystagogy”) of the
psychology of people drawn to extremist positions.
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