Fact-checking social media

The coronavirus pandemic has quickly led to an upsurge in fake news that often seems to spread through social media faster than the virus itself spreads through the population. This makes fact-checking all the more important, and not just for the platform operators. Each and every one of us has to be vigilant.

COVID-19 was created in a lab, masks are bad for your health, and 5G mobile network masts spread the virus – these are just a few examples of the sort of outlandish conspiracy theories that have been doing the rounds in recent weeks. The flood of fake news on social media is a growing threat as many people use them as a source of information. Unlike the conventional media, however, they allow anyone to publish directly to an audience with no filter.

How social media are defending themselves

The platform operators have acknowledged the problem and introduced their own fact-checking systems to identify critical or factually incorrect content and mark it as such. Facebook and Instagram use external, independent fact-checkers all over the world. These divide content into nine rating categories, including “false”, “partly false”, “true” and “opinion”. The problem here is that deciding whether to label a piece of content as “opinion” or “satire”, for example, is a subjective matter.

Twitter, meanwhile, works with internal experts who focus on three fundamental questions: Is the content synthetic or manipulated? Is the content being shared in a misleading way? Is the content likely to have an influence on public safety or cause serious damage? Twitter faces regular criticism in this regard. Some think its judgements are inconsistent – for instance, it did not intervene when US President Donald Trump accused TV news show host Joe Scarborough of a crime with no evidence, but it did add a “Get the facts” link to Trump’s tweets about mail-in voting.

Working together in the fight against fake news

There is still a great deal of room for interpretation, and vast quantities of false information are still out there, but fact-checking is a step in the right direction. In the end, while we have to be aware that the war can probably never be won outright, every piece of fake news we succeed in preventing should be seen as a victory.

Especially in times of crisis like the current pandemic, it is immensely important to identify fake news and continually improve the methods used to do so. However, responsibility must fall not just to platform operators but to users as well. They must remain critical when faced with a deluge of information and take action against fake news. This means reading content carefully, consulting multiple sources wherever possible and helping to make other users aware of false information.