Read: Stop trusting viral videos

A bigger revelation came when Cooper asked Bickert why the company was comfortable removing more than 3 billion fake Facebook accounts from October 2018 to March 2019 but not a “clearly fake video.” Bickert cited Facebook’s long-standing rule that accounts must correspond with a single, real identity, and she noted that fake accounts are also more likely to distribute misinformation. But Cooper still couldn’t see the difference. “You’re in the news business,” he pleaded. “There’s a responsibility that comes with that.”

The sentiment makes sense to a journalist interested in taking responsibility for the information he puts into the heads of the citizenry. But Facebook ascribes to none of that responsibility, so Cooper’s appeal to journalistic integrity falls flat. “We have a site where people can come and share what they think—what’s important to them,” Bickert responded. The News Feed is not a feed of news, in the sense of materials created and disseminated to help citizens make decisions in a democracy. It’s a list of things that people find relevant and engaging enough to post and click on. A remarkable company statement to The Washington Post after the Pelosi video appeared makes that position even clearer: “We don’t have a policy that stipulates that the information you post on Facebook must be true.”

That might be bananas, but it is central to understanding how Facebook works. The Pelosi video exemplifies two different philosophies of fakeness, and that conflict is at the heart of every dispute about veracity on the service.

For Cooper and many others, truth is what’s at stake in defining phoniness. The video is considered “fake” because media’s purpose is to depict the world with veracity, or at least with earnest credibility. For a newsmaker, video is created by pointing a camera at a subject, capturing light and sound through lenses and microphones, and mustering that material as evidence in an argument or notice about what is happening in the world. In that case, editing or manipulating the source material to serve other ends would undermine its appeal to veracity. To a journalist, the Pelosi video is construed as “fake” because it depicts a situation that did not take place, while exhibiting the trappings and function of media meant to do the opposite.

A failure of accuracy is one kind of fakeness, although that goal has always been a dubious proposition—video has never really captured truth. But most media don’t aspire toward truth. In those cases, calling something a “fake” makes little sense at all. That’s where Facebook seems to stand on the matter.

When creating a film or a television program or even a YouTube post, video is just a raw material for subsequent composition, through post-processing, editing, collage, or any other set of means. A video created by sampling pictures or sounds of Pelosi for aesthetic instead of political effect would hardly be a “false” one. It’s not even fictional—it’s a video made from Pelosi, not a video of her. But the distinction between fiction and nonfiction matters much less to Facebook than it does to Cooper. The manipulated Pelosi video is still a “real” video, a sequence of moving images and synchronized sounds that plays back on a television, computer, or smartphone screen. This is part of the disagreement that Cooper and Bickert rehearse in the CNN segment. Cooper, the journalist, can’t understand why Bickert won’t see the video as propaganda posing as journalism. Bickert, the social-media executive, can’t grasp why Cooper is able to see the video only as journalism or propaganda, and not just as content, that great gray slurry that subsumes all other meaning.