Facebook's uphill battle to safeguard the election from sock puppets, astroturfers and bad actors

Updated

"Move fast and break things," exhorts the poster that was once an ubiquitous fixture inside Facebook's headquarters.

Key points: Facebook is boosting its efforts to ensure that disinformation doesn't interfere with the election

In addition to using automated filtering, it is relying on third-party fact-checkers to police its platforms

However, not everyone is convince it can win the arms race against increasingly sophisticated bad actors

Conceived as a motivational mantra for its workforce, the slogan also captured the ethos of a company on a mission to expand its footprint and dominate the social media landscape.

And it worked. Facebook moved very fast and grew very big.

In the 16 years since Mark Zuckerberg's epiphany in a Harvard dorm, the company has grown to become the fifth-largest public company in the United States. Every day some 2.1 billion people use at least one of its four platforms, posting 1 billion pieces of content.

But along the way, it also broke things. Many things, say its many critics, including trust, truth and civil discourse.

Now Facebook is using another slogan — "Remove, Reduce, Inform" — to spearhead its efforts to put the monster it calls "problematic content" back in its cage.

In the run-up to the federal election on May 18, the social media giant has rolled out measures to make it harder for sock puppets, astroturfers, trolls and bad actors to contaminate the Facebook and Instagram feeds of Australian voters.

A big part of that strategy involves the use of a combination of automated filters and human fact-checkers to vet the veracity of posts, memes and videos, especially those with politically motivated themes.

But critics say Facebook's response is just a sop to cover what it can't — or won't — fix because of the impact it might have on its bottom line.

Moreover, there is a lack of transparency about Facebook's deals with these third-party fact-checkers and a dearth of publicly available data about the impact this program is having.

And it has declared that the pages and profiles of politicians, candidates and parties are off limits to the fact-checking oversight.

All of which leaves a big dollop of doubt hanging over the efficacy of Facebook's war against disinformation.

'They are just screwing it up'

Brooke Binkowski used to be one of those human fact-checkers, working for a company engaged by Facebook to help manage the disinformation deluge.

It did not take long for her to conclude that it was a tide they could not contain and that Facebook was part of the problem, not the solution.

"They did a horrible thing and they have so far failed to take responsibility for it," she told the ABC.

"They've seized the means for global mass communication and they are just screwing it up."

Ms Binkowski was the managing editor of the online myth-busting website Snopes, which until earlier this year was one of Facebook's fact-checking partners.

Founded in 1994, the privately owned company is one of the world's longest-standing online fact-checkers.

Snopes sacked Ms Binkowski shortly before it terminated its deal with Facebook.

She said it was because she complained too much about her frustrations in working with Facebook and its lack of meaningful feedback about the effectiveness of the program.

Fact-checking organisations which sign up to work with Facebook are given access to a dashboard into which trickles an endless stream of questionable content that has been tagged for investigation by Facebook's systems.

Alongside the Facebook-provided feed, individual fact-checkers can and do browse Facebook themselves to search for misinformation. Many will also use a Facebook-owned online tool called CrowdTangle which allows users to build their own list of sources and keep an eye on activity.

Once something is deemed to be false or inaccurate, the fact-checker will write an article correcting the error. Facebook will then add that as a related article link beneath the post to inform readers.

In addition, if you try to share the post, a link will pop up saying: "Before you share this content, you might want to know that there is additional reporting on this ..."

Facebook says it will also downgrade the visibility of a post, reducing future views by an average of 80 per cent. False claims alone are not enough to warrant deletion.

Ms Binkowski — who now runs truthorfiction.com, another public service website working in the fact-checking space — said she still harboured a deep distrust of Facebook and its motives.

She said she did not believe the company had acted in good faith, and said it had failed to protect the fact-checkers from backlash and had ignored advice on how to improve the fact-checking process.

"It seems to me that those algorithmically-based fact-checking lists are there to steer us, not just towards certain stories but also away from certain themes and topics," she said.

Facebook has already rebutted Ms Binkowski's criticisms when she surfaced them late last year.

In response to a list of questions posed by ABC News, Facebook defended its program, adding it had supported its fact-checker partners through training and support for the adoption of new tools and legal assistance.

"Our fact-checking is one part of our multi-prong strategy and is not intended to catch every false story that's shared on the platform," the company said in a statement.

The right thing for the wrong reason

At least some of Ms Binkowski's claims are supported by fellow fact-checker Alexios Mantzarlis.

From September 2015 to February this year he was the founding director of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), a global coalition of fact-checkers based at the Poynter Institute in Florida.

He helped coordinate the signatories to an open letter to Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg in November 2016 that ultimately led Facebook to include third-party fact-checkers as a part of its solution to the mounting crisis.

He also believes that Facebook's response was PR-driven, but said he was less troubled by that.

"I don't confuse motive with efficacy," he said from New York, where he is a resident fellow at TED Talks. "An organisation can do the right thing for the wrong reason and still have the desired effect."

Mr Mantzarlis said although Facebook now provides its partners with quarterly data updates on the impact of their work, there was room for more and better-quality information.

"Researchers, fact-checkers and, most pressingly, regulators need to make evidence-based decisions," he said. "You can't make those without, you know, evidence."

He also said he believed the payment structure — where fact-checkers are paid per item they debunk — warranted more transparency.

Despite those caveats, he said he believed it was important to continue working with Facebook.

"While we should not be naive about Facebook, I don't think disengaging completely from one of the world's major sources of information is going to further the cause of fact-checkers."

The horse has bolted

Today, Facebook's network of third-party fact-checkers involves more than 45 partners fact-checking content in 24 languages globally.

In Australia, the fact-checking duties are being carried out by a specialist team at Agence France-Presse (AFP), a multilingual news agency with a worldwide network of bureaus.

AFP, which is owned by the French state and operates as an independent commercial enterprise, is currently engaged by Facebook as its official fact-checking partner in 19 countries.

Karl Malakunas is a Hong Kong-based AFP editor who helps manage the regional fact-checking team.

He was in Sydney last week training a recruit to his team, the first of two new positions made possible as a result of the deal with Facebook.

The two Australian-based recruits are supported by regional teams based out of Hong Kong, Europe and North America, as well as smaller teams based in Asia and Africa.

"We are one small part of a big fight," said Mr Malakunas.

The first act of the Australian fact-checking team was to debunk a meme which claimed the Coalition Government had pushed the national debt up to $725 billion.

The post was created on February 19 and shared 880 times before AFP debunked it on Thursday last week in a correcting post which established that Australia's net debt at the time of the post was only $370.9 billion.

"Sometimes the horse has bolted," Mr Malakunas conceded. "It's harder to keep pace with this kind of disinformation. The scale and magnitude constantly surprise me."

The Poynter Institute regularly publishes lists of its leading Facebook fact checks and compares them against the untruths they debunked. Overwhelmingly, the falsehoods out-perform the debunks — often by a huge margin.

Once a hoax goes viral, there is little fact-checkers can do to turn the tide before they have to move onto the next correction.

That, quipped journalism professor Peter Fray, was a consequence of the "bottomless pit of crap that people like to share".

The era of 'counterfeit reality'

Mr Fray, who is co-director of Centre for Media Transition at the University of Technology, Sydney, first plunged into the fact-checking world in 2013 when he launched the Australian arm of PolitiFact, one of the US pioneers in this field.

Finding money to fund this type of public service journalism is hard, he said.

"People like the idea but then you say give us a cheque and then they run a mile. So Facebook, to its credit, isn't running a mile. It's pumping up the cash."

He is about to leap back into this field with the launch of the local arm of First Draft, a global verification and collaborative investigation network headquartered in the US.

First Draft Australia is not part of the Facebook program but works in an overlapping space. It is bankrolled by Google, which has also contributed funds to help domestic news agency Australian Associated Press launch its own fact-checking arm.

RMIT ABC Fact Check, the ABC's own fact-checking arm which it runs in partnership with Melbourne's RMIT University, has signalled an interest in doing more to police the platforms.

"Misinformation and disinformation disseminated on social media is also an increasingly interesting area for fact-check journalism — we're already positioned to do this and after the election will look into it more," said the unit's director, Russell Skelton.

There will be plenty of work coming down the line.

Facebook cites new, independent research which concludes that the overall volume of false news on its main platform has been in retreat since it ramped up measures to thwart disinformation.

But according to Gartner, one of the world's leading research and advisory firms, we are heading towards a cliff.

It has published a research paper which predicts the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence in coming years will create a tsunami of what it calls "counterfeit reality".

Because the cost and effort of creating false information will always be less than the cost of detecting it, faux information will outgun fact.

"By 2022," the Gartner research states, "most people in mature economies will consume more false information than true information".

The hidden campaign: How are you being targeted this election?

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Please note your information will be handled in accordance with this This federal election, the ABC is digging into how political messages are being crafted to influence your votes.We're collecting texts, emails, robocalls, social media posts, memes, pamphlets, billboards, letters or even posters and graffiti you have spotted in your neighbourhood.Please submit any material you've spotted in the form below.Please note your information will be handled in accordance with this privacy statement

Topics: federal-election, elections, federal-elections, media-studies, social-media, australia

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