Editorial: Troubled by social networks’ fake news? Consider the source

By The Herald Editorial Board

Did you see the news on Facebook?

Days before the election, the pope endorsed Donald Trump. And so did Tom Hanks earlier in the year.

After the election, a widely shared Instagram photo of a downcast Michelle Obama showed her holding up a sign that read, “An immigrant is taking my job,” a uncharacteristically first-ladylike dig at Melania Trump.

And Monday morning on Google, the top news link for a search of “final election results” led to a website that proclaimed that Donald Trump had won both the popular vote and the Electoral College majority.

Was any of it true? Nope, nope, nope and nope.

Briefly, Pope Francis gave no endorsement to either candidate for U.S. president; Tom Hanks’ comments were blatantly misinterpreted and taken out of context; the photo of Michelle Obama was photoshopped; and while Trump won the Electoral College tally and the presidency, Hillary Clinton still leads the popular vote, now by about 1.3 million votes.

But all of it was widely disseminated on Facebook, Instagram or Google, read — and in many cases — accepted as legitimate news.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in a post Sunday denied that this and other fake news published in its news feeds or shared by members were common occurrences. “Ninety-nine percent of what people see is authentic,” he claimed. We’re not sure where Zuckerberg gets that figure, but it’s on Facebook, so it must be true.

But Facebook and Google were alarmed enough about the attention that fake news is getting that both announced changes to address false reports. Facebook said it would no longer display ads in its news feed that link to fake news sites. And Google said it was making similar changes.

If Facebook, Google and other social media sites can make improvements to their algorithms that improve accuracy and boost the confidence of their users that’s great. But the better solution and responsibility lies with the users of those sites and the consumers of news; you can’t write computer code that can match the capability of the human brain to discern truth from fiction or tell the difference between legitimate satire and a fake news site whose goal is either generating clicks or scoring political points.

But it’s easier to “like and share” than it is to doubt and investigate.

The story about the pope endorsing Trump appeared on a now defunct site, WTOE 5 News, that — if readers made the effort to find out — identified itself as a “fantasy news website.”

The Hanks story is trickier, as FactCheck.org explained in October. The site responsible for the claim that Hanks supported Trump, Conservative 101, labeled as “news” a brief quote from a “CBS This Morning” interview — which it did not link to — that misinterpreted Hanks’ statement to CBS that the nation could weather a Trump presidency, spinning it into an outright endorsement. The website took Hanks’ reassurance that if Trump were elected, “American’s going to be fine,” as enthusiastic approval of Trump.

And the photo of the first lady? That’s up to the beholder as to whether that was an attempt to deceive or was meant as satire and a shot at either Obama or incoming first lady Melania Trump. The photo repurposed another photo of Obama holding up a sign that read “#BringBackOurGirls,” following the kidnapping of 276 school girls in Nigeria in 2014.

Regarding the link giving false election returns, Google gave the top spot for what should have been a simple search to a website called 70 News that cited a tweet from an equally dubious source. It didn’t explain how it happened, but Google told the Wall Street Journal, “We clearly didn’t get it right, but we are continually working to improve our algorithms.”

Zuckerberg can downplay the extent of Facebook’s fake news problem, but we can’t ignore the reach that Facebook and other social media sites have in presenting news and informing the public. A 2016 study by the Pew Research Center found that 6 in 10 Americans get their news from social media and nearly 1 in 5 do so often, perhaps exclusively.

While the social media giants work out the code, the responsibility is on us to be more discerning and skeptical about what we see, to question whether a particular source of news deserves our trust.

Our advice — and this goes for all media, print, broadcast and social networks — consider the source.