Today is Facebook’s 15th birthday -- a good
time to look at the profits and pitfalls of the social network.
Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously wrote about pornography: ”I know it when I see it." Among the digerati,
there’s a sense that people who consume web media with thoughtful engagement can discern the difference between what is fake and what’s real. But now we know that isn’t
true.
Over the past two years, as the impact of Russian trolls and fake news farms have made their presence known, digital platform leadership has sprung into action.
“Our responsibility is to prevent hoaxes from going viral and being widely distributed,” said Mark Zuckerberg in an interview with Kara Swisher of Recode last year.
Bravo.
Well, as it turns out — sort of.
For its fourth quarter of 2018, Facebook reported revenues of $16.9 billion, with profits of $6.9 billion. That’s a staggering result, up 30% from
the same period a year earlier.
So even as Facebook has taken it on the chin regarding fake news, Russian hacking, and various invasions of user privacy, advertisers seem unbothered by the
environment. And to be fair, Facebook is growing so quickly you could make the case that it's just having to catch up to a raft of bad behavior and spammers that will be addressed by
new technology, new algorithms, and partnerships to find and root out fake news.
Problem solved. Uh, well — not so much.
Back in 2016, on the heels of reports of
Facebook’s use to drive election fraud, the company they announced with great fanfare a fact checking partnership with The Associated Press, Snopes, FactCheck.org, and
PolitiFact.
The plan was to let independent third-party fact checkers review and flag material that was fake. And, when it was announced it was received as a step toward a more open
and collaborative Facebook.
Now, two years later, the Facebook fact-checking partnership is in shambles.
The Associated Press and Snopes both announced they were exiting
the partnership, frustrated by the lack of progress they’ve been able to achieve. So, what happened?
Brooke Binkowski, the former managing editor of Snopes, slammed Facebook, telling The
Guardian: "They’re not taking anything seriously. They are more interested in making themselves look good and passing the buck … They clearly don’t care. They’ve
essentially used us for crisis PR.”
Both the AP and Snopes, officially, were careful not to slam the massive powerful platform, saying they were open to working with Facebook in
the future.
But buried in the reporting is this searing piece of information: Facebook paid Snopes and its 16-person staff the princely sum of $100,000 in 2018. One hundred thousand dollars.
That would mean, say, if each fact-checker makes $25,000 a year (which would in itself be criminally low) Facebook was only paying for four of them.
Let’s return to Facebook's profits
for the year 2018: $22,123 BILLION.
News organizations and fact-checking shops aren’t swimming in new sources of revenue, so for the AP and Snopes to walk away from a paying
customer we know isn’t a decision they take lightly. But Snopes’ tiny payment, along with the criticism of how the fact-checking partners were treated, puts Facebook’s
promises of aggressive fact-checking in stark contrast with the truth.
Said Snopes’ Binkowski “I strongly believe that they are spreading fake news on behalf of
hostile foreign powers and authoritarian governments as part of their business model.”
In the end, partners said that being part of the Facebook fact checking partnership proved too
expensive, too frustrating, and too dangerous.
Binkowski reported that once Snopes became an official Facebook partner, there was also a noticeable increase in online
harassment, death threats and attacks from far-right users and prominent conservatives who accused the fact checkers and Facebook of having a left-wing bias and agenda. And rather than support
their partners, Facebook blamed them for controversies that arose. “They threw us under the bus at every opportunity,” said Binkowski.
As journalism faces an economic crisis,
Facebook's dramatic revenue growth tells a story that’s hard to ignore. If it is an empire built on fake news and click-bait fictions, then the time is rapidly approaching for the social
media platform to put real dollars, and real humans, in charge of fighting misinformation at every turn -- or risk a loss of trust in the platform that can’t easily be rebuilt.