Social Media Companies Are Rolling Back Their Efforts to Tackle Online Misinformation: What Now?

After the 2016 presidential election, the major social media giants ramped up their efforts to tackle misinformation online. YouTube, for instance, hired policy experts and content moderators, and even invested in new technology designed to handle misinformation. Now tech workers, journalists, and experts who study the adverse impacts of misinformation and false narratives warn these efforts are failing in the wake of job cuts that have trimmed departments in charge of misinformation policy.

Last month, YouTube, which is owned by Google, “quietly reduced its small team of policy experts in charge of handling misinformation,” according to the New York Times, whose reporters spoke to three people with knowledge of the decision. The cuts were part of a larger reduction of 12,000 employees by Alphabet, Google’s parent company. The cuts were so extreme they left only one person at the company in charge of orchestrating worldwide misinformation policy.

Still, YouTube’s cuts are part of a larger trend among social companies that has attracted heated criticism, particularly after efforts to target misinformation peaked during the COVID-19 pandemic, with many companies announcing efforts to address COVID-19 and other health-related misinformation as well as falsehoods about the integrity of the electoral process that have strained the United States’ image as a beacon of democratic principles.

The cuts have prompted media watchdog groups like the left-leaning Media Matters for America (MMA) to sound the alarm.

“I wouldn’t say the war is over, but I think we’ve lost key battles,” Angelo Carusone, the organization’s president, told the Times. “I do think we, as a society, have lost the appetite to keep battling. And that means we will lose the war.”

Policy experts like Joel Finkelstein, co-founder of the Network Contagion Research Institute, which tracks hate and extremism on social media, are also perturbed by these developments. Finkelstein said “trust and safety was the first thing to go.”

Indeed, combating misinformation appears to be playing second-fiddle to policy decisions like the ones ordered by Elon Musk, the billionaire chief executive of Twitter who has silenced critics; spread falsehoods about events like the attack last October on businessman Paul Pelosi, the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, by a reported QAnon believer and election fraud conspiracy theorist; and announced he would lift a ban on former President Donald Trump, who was booted from the platform after inciting his supporters to storm the United States Capitol. While Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has made a similar announcement, Trump has thus far resisted returning to either platform, preferring instead to address his base via Truth Social, an “alternative” social media platform created by Trump Media & Technology Group.

Musk has shown a relative disinterest in addressing the misinformation that has come to dominate Twitter since he acquired it late last year, and a new report by the Network Contagion Research Institute and the Combat Antisemitism Movement found antisemitic content blossomed on Twitter following his takeover.

Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at Free Press, an advocacy organization that is part of the media democracy movement, told the Times that content moderation “is good for business, and it is good for democracy,” observing that companies are tossing aside efforts to police misinformation and offensive content “because they seem to think they don’t have a big enough role to play.”

Journalists will need to step up their efforts in the coming months and years, particularly in the age of artifical intelligence. For instance, ChatGPT, the brainchild of Open AI, the AI research and deployment company, can be used to saturate the media landscape with more disinformation. Alex Mahadevan, the director of MediaWise, the digital literacy initiative run by the Poynter Institute, demonstrated that the tool, which he said he’d mainly used “to generate Seinfeld scripts about media literacy” could be used to generate fake news sites. In fact, he created one—and was taken aback not only by the swiftness with which he was able to craft a fictional news organization “out of thin air” but by what that means for media literacy at large in a world where bad actors—from political operatives to “ad dollar-chasing grifters”—can and have used dubious news sites to further their own ends.

The media is entering uncharted territory where the ethics of professional journalism need not apply but that doesn’t mean it should balk at the challenge of combating misinformation in all its forms. If anything, journalists must be bolder—and media organizations must support them by fostering their talents and continuing to adhere to journalistic principles. That is crucial if the media and its journalists want to address growing media distrust.

Last year, the annual Reuters Institute Digital News Report, a survey of more than 93,000 readers in 46 countries, found that the United States is ranked last among all countries in regard to media trust. Just 26 percent of Americans reported that they trust the news most of the time, though the Reuters Institute noted that all of the countries in its survey are experiencing a decline in media trust in some form or another.

It would be unwise to ignore the pernicious impact of partisan media, which could hinder progress. However, even “The Most Basic Level of Information Literacy is Important,” as the team here at foreignpress.org stressed in a recent column. A “stronger baseline” for fact-checking and media literacy is bound to make headway in the ongoing battle against online misinformation. So long as journalists are up to the task, trained accordingly, and learning, always learning, their efforts will override the failure of the major social media companies to engage in responsible stewardship.