Relationship building is the only real way to fight misinformation
Let's stop outsourcing our responsibilities to corporate America
The following was something I wrote and posted to my personal Facebook page earlier this week, in response to the announcement by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg that Facebook would no longer engage in fact checking on its platform.
This is probably not gonna endear me to a lot of my more progressive friends, but....I don't really have a problem with this decision from Meta. Further, I don’t think Meta should have been in the fact checking business in the first place. I think Zuck admitting defeat on this is really a big nothingburger, even if it did come in service of him sucking up to Trump, and in fact, is probably a positive move in the direction of those who really want to combat misinformation in pursuit of a better world, rather than just scoring the next win in the comments section.
Meta is a corporate behemoth, no different than Amazon or WalMart of ExxonMobil or Lockheed Martin. Why in the world should we outsource our fact finding to them? Why in the world do we trust them to do that for us? Here’s a fact: misinformation existed before Facebook, and will long outlive it. Since Facebook took a harder line of misinformation and face checking, it hasn’t gotten better. In fact, in case we forgot, the cause of Meta’s original move in this direction – the presidency of Donald Trump and his serial need to lie – wasn’t undone. In a world where online fact checking existed, Trump still ran and was elected, on the back of a whole host of lies. All Meta’s fact checking apparatus did is further alienate a whole cohort of people from a potential public square of discussion, but imposing a faceless, impersonal corporate mandate in the form of a beige box of text. Did we really think that was gonna stop people from sharing untrue things? Hell, I’m a person of the left who despises misinformation, and I don’t even trust Meta’s fact checking comments and often feel a wave of anger when I see them. They serve no purpose other than to entrench both sides further into a conflict over the facts of a case. And here’s a hard truth we all have to live with: there will always be misinformation, and those who believe it fervently. This isn’t a fight we ever get to win 100%. You have to accept that.
The anger and outrage I’ve seen since yesterday feels a lot like the toothless cry of frustration from people who know misinformation is a problem and who don’t really know how to combat it outside of having someone enforce rules on someone else. But that’s not how we are going to combat misinformation. If your tactic in the fight against false claims is to hunker behind Meta’s moderation policies, then I’m afraid you’ve already lost the war you are fighting. We don’t win the war on misinformation by flinging factual statements and reasoned arguments harder and harder at people we have less and less in common with every day. One of the key findings in political science research over the last decade that has really shaped the way I engage here and in real life is the finding that persuasion almost never occurs through information dumping. There is only one way to persuade: relationship building. Those who believe misinformation don’t trust Meta. But they might trust you, if you speak to them like a human being and do the real, hard, messy work of building a relationship. That’s the only way we get out of this mess. Facebook can’t do it for us. Thank goodness they’ve stopped trying. Now, if they’d just fix the damn news feed and let me see what my friends and loved ones are saying and posting.