09 August, 2020

The new referees in American politics are Facebook, Google and Twitter, and they would be wise to pay attention to lessons the old media tried to learn.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/09/business/media/trump-facebook-google-twitter-misinformation.html

In fact, two people close to the Facebook fact-checking process told me, the vast bulk of the posts getting tagged for being fully or partly false come from the right. That’s not bias. It’s because sites like The Gateway Pundit are full of falsehoods, and because the president says false things a lot.

That’s the messy political reality — not the sort of neat systemic answer that makes engineers comfortable. The global surge in misinformation isn’t a matter of code, or an eternal political truth, or the structure of information. It’s just how the social-media-fueled, right-wing populism of 2020 works. And while Google, Facebook and Twitter dance around to refuse saying it out loud for obvious regulatory reasons, it makes them look dishonest and, at times, as Mr. Frankel now says of his boss’s accommodations, “ridiculous.”