By Josh Siatkowski | Staff Writer
In an Aug. 26 letter to Congress, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the platform succumbed to government pressure to demote potential misinformation about COVID-19 and the Biden family. He vowed that from now on, Meta will resist demands for censorship from federal officials, regardless of the administration in power.
Zuckerberg wrote, “I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any administration in either direction — and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”
The letter explained that the Biden administration had contacted Meta in 2021 to demote content containing misinformation and satire about COVID. The letter has been controversial in Washington, being called “a win for free speech” by some and a move for “fewer guardrails against misinformation” by others.
With a high-stakes election right around the corner, Meta is promising the average Instagram and Facebook user that they will value users’ right to free speech more than it does the truth of information. It grants power to the individual, but not without a price. Now more than ever, the responsibility to verify the truth of thousands of claims will be vested in the reader.
This power can be tough to exercise. Paul Yanowitch, adjunct professor at Baylor Law School, said determining the truth of a claim is harder today than it has been in previous generations. With countless opinions entering people’s phones every day, the process of filtering truth from untruth becomes even more challenging.
“Younger generations have this added obligation we didn’t have, which is that you have to be much more purposeful and diligent in finding reputable sources of information,” Yanowitch said.
In 1919, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes called this surplus of sources the “marketplace of ideas,” Yanowitch said. Citing Justice Holmes, Yanowitch said “the best test of truth is whether it will win out in the marketplace of ideas.”
The marketplace that existed in Holmes’ time, however, is not the same one that exists in our technology-dominated world. Voters today have much more work to do when it comes to evaluating truth. There are infinitely more accessible news sources than there were in the days before social media. Because of this, readers must be far more diligent to verify the accuracy of the information they consume.
There’s also the issue of the social media algorithm. Since Meta’s platforms are designed to promote content similar to the things users interact with, social media can easily become an echo chamber.
“Everyone goes to the place on the internet where they can get the information they want,” Yanowitch said.
When that’s the case, the tradeoff for Zuckerberg’s call for free speech becomes clear: In some cases, the truth takes ages to reach a user, and it sits on the outside of a bubble of misinformation.
“If everyone gets a chance to talk, the truth will come out, [according to the marketplace of ideas],” Yanowitch said. “The problem is, if everyone gets to say what they want… then maybe truth will win out 50 years from now, but in the short run, a lot of people are going to believe a lot of things that are wrong.”
Sommer Dean, the Fred Hartman Distinguished Professor in Baylor’s journalism department, said she also noticed the dangers of this hyper-democratized marketplace.
Through social media, the few existing “barriers to entry” for journalism have been broken down, Dean said.
“Journalism isn’t like other fields,” Dean said. “To be a doctor, you have to pass certain tests and you have to do certain things. For me to be a lawyer, I had to pass the bar, and I have to do certain things, or else I’ll get disbarred. Journalism doesn’t have that same sort of method of checks and balances.”
Although anyone can become a journalist, Dean said, it doesn’t mean that all social media reporters are created equal.
“I certainly think that in today’s age where everyone can be a journalist and everyone can spread news and disseminate information, the need for that skepticism is heightened,” Dean said.
Zuckerberg’s letter is a reminder that there is no infallible authority protecting people from believing potentially dangerous falsehoods. It affirms that on social media, truth is in the eye of the beholder.
Part one in a three-part series on the impact of social media.
