Fake News Shouldn’t Worry Facebook

Businesses have a life cycle. They have their inventive period, their growth period, their maturity period and their decline period. When a business is in the growth and mature period, investors believe the company can keep going forever, but that usually doesn’t happen. Sometimes businesses get a second life like Apple got with the iPhone, but often that’s not the case. The reason why investors are rational to believe in mature firms is because they have the capital necessary to invest in the next big thing. Big corporations also have the best talent in the industry they are in. For example, Microsoft has infrastructure, billions in cash, and the best engineers in the world, yet in completely missed out on mobile computing.

Businesses can try to alter their strategy and organizational structure, but it’s not the solution to solve these misses. I think it’s a part of the human condition. When you are the top dog, you have a lot to lose. With great power come great responsibility. If a firm ships a product that tests the limits and it fails, the business can lose its brand’s integrity it worked so hard to create. I wouldn’t bet on one individual startup defeating a big brand, but collectively I would bet on the startups to out-innovate the mature firms because they have nothing to lose and a lot to gain, so they take more risks.

This example works with Facebook as I see the business showing its first signs of dwindling. When Facebook was founded it had a clear mission, but now it has lost its way. The college aged Mark Zuckerberg had much more integrity than the current one. This is natural to the human condition. When Facebook first was getting started, it had to innovate as fast as possible to gain users. Now it is a giant and its every move is questioned. Facebook has intense political pressure on it which I expect it will fold to.

Normal companies face political pressure, but Facebook is facing the most any company has ever faced. This is because Facebook has the power to change elections. A change in the algorithm could possibly alter an election. Given the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the past elections, it’s safe to say this is a big deal.

I think Facebook is getting some of the blame for Trump winning the election because media reports about fake news seem to surface every day. The narrative is that fake news stories shared on Facebook swung the election. This is based only on metrics reported about these stories. According to Buzzfeed, during the last 3 months of the campaign, hyper-partisan and hoax sites generated 8.7 million engagements compared to the top 20 news sites received 7.4 million engagements. I have seen no evidence that this swayed undecided voters. There is a possibility that the people sharing these stories either didn’t believe them or had their minds already made up. Mark Zuckerberg made the claim that 99% of what people see on the site is authentic. If this is true, the claims that Facebook swayed the election aren’t accurate.

There’s intense pressure on Facebook to remove these stories. It should not be Facebook’s problem if a user wants to live in an echo chamber surrounded by stories which aren’t truthful. Facebook is not the arbiter of the truth. If it goes down this path of censoring news items, it will lose its market share. Losing its commitment to free speech is a clear way for Facebook to destroy itself.

Today it was reported by the Verge Facebook filed a patent for an automated solution to its fake news problem. This is a big mistake because not only is Facebook trying to censor reports, but it is using an automated system to do so. This will make mistakes just like how YouTube’s automated system to get rid of controversial content does. The system Facebook is using allows users to flag content. Facebook’s algorithm considers the record of the person reporting the content, the number of people reporting it, the age of the account reporting the content, and if the account is verified. The last one is scary because just because someone is verified does not make them more suitable to know the truth. Most people verified are celebrities, not reporters. What expertise do they have about political issues?

The issue of whether to monitor the veracity of claims is black and white. Facebook should be as open to all viewpoints as possible to remain a safe place for everyone to share their opinions. There is no difference between flagging fake stories and flagging an individual’s status which gets the facts wrong. This censorship would cause users to delete their accounts.

Besides the fact that Facebook is working on an algorithm to solve this problem which I believe isn’t a problem, Facebook is also working with the Chinese government on a tool to let it limit what is posted on the website. Facebook is willing to sell out its principles which favor an open discussion for profits. The profits may not even come because Facebook’s main selling point is its network and if it entered China, no one in China would have friends on it. The fact that Facebook is working on this product is enough to know that it does not have the same principles it had when the company started. It doesn’t matter if the product is ever implemented because this will likely be determined by China. Facebook is trying to get a product approved that censors news.

When Facebook started, it didn’t need China to grow its user base. Now that it’s saturated, it needs China because it’s one of the last untapped areas. This type of pressure is what leads big companies to eventually decline. Big companies lose the spark that made them great. If Facebook is not committed to free speech values, there is nothing to it.

Conclusion

If I was in charge of Facebook and my goal was to destroy it as quickly as possible without shutting it down, I would censor what is posted. The internet is a free space for anyone to post opinions. Users do not like limitations on what they can say. This not political issue that anyone, outside of authoritarians, would disagree with. Facebook is having trouble growing engagement, so the last thing it needs is to limit engagement.

As you can see from the chart above, every day the free speech platform, Gab, gains more traffic. I have used the site and can objectively say it isn’t the best product compared to others. The belief in free speech is so powerful, people will use an inferior product that their friends aren’t using to get away from censorship