#14 - Fighting fake news: A tale of two platforms (Twitter, pt. 1)
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A tale of two platforms (Twitter, pt. 1)
Twitter recently fact-checked a couple of President Trump’s tweets regarding mail-in ballots:
Clicking the ‘Get the facts’ link takes you to a Twitter page describing what third-party fact checkers think about Trump’s tweets and what other verified Twitter users have tweeted about mail-in ballots. After Twitter applied its labels, Trump went on a tirade and released an executive order that (1) lambasted Twitter’s actions as being politically biased; (2) claimed that such actions are not protected from legal liability under Section 230; and (3) called for legislation reform to enhance liability.
Mark Zuckerberg also joined the fray, saying that Facebook and other internet platforms shouldn’t be arbiters of truth. I largely agree. The question, though, is where to draw the line for being an “arbiter of truth.” For instance, it’s clearly pretty bad if a few engineers got together, decided that a post is fake, and deleted the post. But it’s not always that clear-cut. What if a few engineers got together, decided that a post is fake, and chose to downrank the post in users’ News Feeds? Or what if Facebook’s algorithms flagged a post as potentially fake and then downranked the post?
You know where I’m going with this: In attaching a fact-checked tag to Trump’s tweet, was Twitter acting as an arbiter of truth?
My answer is probably not.
This post is not about any sort of legal analysis, but about my philosophy on how online platforms can fight fake news while not being an arbiter of truth. This week, I’m writing about how Twitter’s actions fit in with this philosophy. In a couple weeks, I’ll tackle Facebook.
The marketplace of ideas
My philosophy on fake news stems from the marketplace of ideas. From a judicial opinion for the Supreme Court:
“The remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true. This is the ordinary course in a free society. The response to the unreasoned is the rational; to the uninformed, the enlightened; to the straightout lie, the simple truth . . . The theory of our Constitution is ‘that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market’ . . . Only a weak society needs government protection or intervention before it pursues its resolve to preserve the truth. Truth needs neither handcuffs nor a badge for its vindication.”
I promise I’ll get back to Twitter in a bit, but let’s first take a step back to think about who decides truth. The government? Twitter? CNN? The marketplace of ideas suggests actually that we ourselves are our own arbiters of truth. We digest the multitude of information coming our way, and we arrive at our own ultimate conclusions about what to believe, based on the merits of what we see. As information competes in a “survival of the truthiest,” the “truth” organically emerges as our clear winner. Or, at least that’s what’s supposed to happen in theory.
In practice, in order to decide what’s true, we often shift the responsibility of sifting though the informational deluge to external actors. In other words, instead of digesting information to be our own arbiters of truth, we (sometimes blindly) rely on external proxies to evaluate “truth.” Some people will place heavy weight on who’s making a statement. “Did CNN just report something? It must be true!” Other people will place more weight on the number of people making the same statement: “All my friends say this is true, so it must be true!” Still others will place the most weight on what their trusted experts say about the statement: “The Federal Reserve Chairman said he agrees, so it must be true!”
Now, let me be clear: Relying on proxies isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s a mental heuristic to cope with the reality that we’re bombarded with information. Often, it’s impossible for us to perform the intellectual due diligence to verify every piece of information we come across. For example, most people believe global warming to be true yet have never read a journal paper on global warming. Instead, we justifiably rely on scientific experts to tell us what they know via news articles, podcasts, and TV appearances. Instead of reading the scientific research paper in Nature, we take a quick glance at the scientist’s credentials, who agrees with the scientist, and if we’re really intellectually honest, perhaps even who the scientist’s detractors are and what they are saying. For a given idea in the marketplace of ideas, we necessarily rely on contextual proxies to evaluate its truth.
Okay, so relying on proxies isn’t bad per se, but what I think is bad is blindly relying on one proxy to the exclusion of all others. This distorts the free market of ideas. If we always trust what Fox News says, Fox News becomes a bottleneck for error. Instead of letting ideas compete and survive on their merits, we co-opt this competitive process and place conclusive weight on a proxy, like who makes the statement. By introducing other proxies into our mental heuristics, though, we have more robust protection against the chance that one of our proxies is incorrect for a particular piece of news.
Let’s recap: We should be our own arbiters of truth, digesting and verifying information to trust, but we often outsource this rather difficult job by relying on proxies. When one proxy garners conclusive weight, it becomes the de facto arbiter of truth. The more proxies we rely on, though, the better and more effective is the competition in the marketplace of ideas.
Twitter
Alright, now back to Twitter. In my opinion, Twitter was not acting as an arbiter of truth but merely enhancing competition in the marketplace of ideas by adding contextual information that certain organizations have deemed Trump’s tweets to be false. Twitter did not delete Trump’s tweets, nor did it hide Trump’s tweets. I’m not even sure Twitter downranked Trump’s tweets. If that were the case, Twitter would be stifling the competition of ideas, and I’d be more amenable to calling Twitter an arbiter of truth. But Twitter’s action, standing alone on its face, is consistent with the marketplace of ideas.
The problem with Twitter, though, is that you can’t view its action in a vacuum. Twitter already functions pretty closely to a free marketplace of ideas. Many people come to Twitter to barter and exchange their version of the truth. For instance, a couple months ago, CNN tweeted that Elon Musk had failed to deliver ventilators to California hospitals. Musk responded, debunking CNN with a string of tweets showing that the hospitals had actually received the ventilators and were being put to use. Another example: Early on in the coronavirus crisis, the U.S. Surgeon General had tweeted that the general public didn’t need to wear masks. Many people on Twitter responded citing the need for universal masks. Now, as many States begin to open up, wearing masks is a general requirement. Twitter never added any ‘fact-check’ tags to either CNN or the Surgeon General. Yet it chose to do so for Trump.
To be clear, I’m not coming to Trump’s defense. If more contextual information is a good thing, then by all means, we should add them. But if Twitter adds them, it shouldn’t do so discriminatorily. That is, it should add more contextual information not just for Trump, but also for CNN and Fox News and everyone else on the platform. As it stands right now, Twitter’s decision to fact-check Trump seems more partisan than neutral. Imagine a hypothetical world where Twitter provides contextual information only for conservative viewpoints and media outlets. This would create more nuance to the competition of conservative ideas and may even create more nuanced views among conservatives. However, liberal media outlets would still enjoy an unquestioned dominance (monopoly?) in shaping the views of liberals. To me, that’s not only unfair, but also inconsistent with the marketplace of ideas. In such a world, Twitter would be one step closer to actually being an arbiter of truth.
📚 4 articles
Inside Twitter’s decisions to fact-check Trump. An interesting view from the inside.
Twitter’s new feature letting you choose who can reply to your tweets raises First Amendment concerns. Essentially, public officials using this feature can stifle free speech, in violation of the Constitution.
Section 230 and Twitter. I explicitly said this post wasn’t going to dive into the legal specifics of Twitter’s actions and Trump’s response, but this article gives a great overview. I’ve also previously written about Section 230.
We should be skeptical about COVID-19 models. “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” There are too many moving parts, and they all interact with each other in complex ways. Often, models can’t capture such complexity, so when something outside the model changes, the model is ruined.