Sarah Wasko / Media Matters

In late August, as Hurricane Harvey crashed through the Texas coastline, millions of Americans searching for news on the crisis were instead exposed to a toxic slurry of fabrications. Fake news articles with headlines like “Black Lives Matter Thugs Blocking Emergency Crews From Reaching Hurricane Victims” and “Hurricane Victims Storm And Occupy Texas Mosque Who Refused To Help Christians” went viral on Facebook, spreading disinformation that encouraged readers to think the worst about their fellow citizens.

When Facebook set up a crisis response page a month later -- following a mass shooting in Las Vegas, Nevada, that killed dozens and injured hundreds -- the company intended to provide a platform for users in the area to confirm they were safe and to help people across the country learn how to support the survivors and keep up to date on the events as they unfolded. But the page soon became a clearinghouse for hyperpartisan and fake news articles, including one which baselessly described the shooter as a “Trump-hating Rachel Maddow fan.”

In Myanmar, an ethnic cleansing of the Muslim Rohingya minority population was aided by misinformation on Facebook, the only source of news for many people in the country. In India, The Washington Post reported, “false news stories have become a part of everyday life, exacerbating weather crises, increasing violence between castes and religions, and even affecting matters of public health.” In Indonesia, disinformation spread by social media stoked ethnic tensions and even triggered a riot in the capital of Jakarta.

Throughout the year, countries from Kenya to Canada either fell prey to fake news efforts to influence their elections, or took steps they hoped would quell the sort of disinformation campaign that infected the 2016 U.S. presidential race.

Last December, Media Matters dubbed the fake news infrastructure 2016’s Misinformer of the Year, our annual award for the media figure, news outlet, or organization which stands out for promoting conservative lies and smears in the U.S. media. We warned that the unique dangers to the information ecosystem meant “merely calling out the lies” would not suffice, and that “the objective now is to protect people from the lies.” We joined numerous experts and journalists in pointing to weaknesses in our nation’s information ecosystem, exposed by the presidential election and fueled by key decisions made by leading social media platforms.

Twelve months later, too little has changed in the United States, and fake news has infected democracies around the world. Facebook has been central to the spread of disinformation, stalling and obfuscating rather than taking responsibility for its outsized impact.

Media Matters is recognizing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as 2017’s Misinformer of the Year.

He narrowly edges Larry Page, whose leadership of Google has produced similar failures in reining in misinformation. Other past recipients include the Center for Medical Progress (2015), George Will (2014), CBS News (2013), Rush Limbaugh (2012), Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. (2011), Sarah Palin (2010), Glenn Beck (2009), Sean Hannity (2008), ABC (2006), Chris Matthews (2005), and Bill O'Reilly (2004).

Facebook is the most powerful force in journalism

“Does Even Mark Zuckerberg Know What Facebook Is?” Max Read asked in an October profile for New York magazine. Rattling off statistics pointing to the dizzying reach and breadth of a site with two billion monthly active users, Read concluded that the social media platform Zuckerberg launched for his Harvard peers in 2004 “has grown so big, and become so totalizing, that we can’t really grasp it all at once.”

Facebook’s sheer size and power make comparisons difficult. But Zuckerberg himself has defined at least one key role for the website. In 2013, he told reporters that the redesign of Facebook’s news feed was intended to “give everyone in the world the best personalized newspaper we can.” This strategy had obvious benefits for the company: If users treated the website as a news source, they would log on more frequently, stay longer, and view more advertisements.

Zuckerberg achieved his goal. Forty five percent of U.S. adults now say they get news on Facebook, dominating all other social media platforms, and the percentage of people using the website for that purpose is rising. The website is the country’s largest single source of news, and indisputably its most powerful media company.

That goal of becoming its users' personalized newspaper was assuredly in the best interest of Facebook. The company makes money due to its massive usership, so the value of any particular piece of content is in whether it keeps people engaged with the website. (Facebook reported in 2016 that users spend an average of 50 minutes per day on the platform.) But ultimately, Zuckerberg’s declaration showed that he had put his company at the center of the information ecosystem -- crucial in a democracy because of its role in setting public opinion -- but refused to be held accountable for the results.

That failure to take responsibility exposes another key difference between Facebook and the media companies Zuckerberg said he wanted to ape. Newspapers face a wide variety of competitors, from other papers to radio, television, and digital news products. If a newspaper gains a reputation for publishing false information, or promoting extremist views, it risks losing subscribers and advertising dollars to more credible rivals and potentially going out of business. But Facebook is so popular that it has no real competitors in the space. For the foreseeable future, it will remain a leading force in the information ecosystem.

Fake news, confirmation bias, and the news feed