Social media is hurting people, society, even entire systems of government in ways unforeseen 20 years ago. If a healthy democracy relies on an informed populace - or at least one not deliberately disinformed by malicious actors - then the prevalence of disinformation is an existential threat.

“We still collectively have a tendency to believe things we hear that we probably shouldn’t, especially when they seem to confirm prior beliefs we hold.”įake news is 70% more likely to be retweeted than the truth, according to a widely cited 2018 MIT study.

“It’s inexpensive - and in fact cheaper - to produce lies rather than truth, which creates conditions for a lot of false information in the marketplace,” says Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman, an expert in constitutional law and free speech who serves as an adviser to Facebook. In the months since Trump’s deplatforming, concerns about blatant and unchecked falsehoods on social media have only grown. Many people believed that the social media giants were taking long-overdue action and assuming some responsibility for the serious injuries that disinformation begets. A week after Trump was barred from social media, The Washington Post, citing the online analytics firm Zignal Labs, reported a 73% decrease in online disinformation about the election. Still, the unprecedented actions seemed to achieve the desired effect. But even those who have been critical of President Trump, such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, were troubled that these corporations had clearly demonstrated that, in some ways, they had more power than the president of the United States. Trump’s outraged supporters insisted his deplatforming proved that big tech is biased against conservatives. Suddenly, the leader of the free world was, if not silenced, certainly muffled - and by a handful of private companies whose immense power was undeniable. Twitter, Trump’s favored means of communicating, went a step further and banned him for life, and other social media sites followed suit. Capitol following a rally in which then-President Donald Trump and others repeated false claims that the 2020 election, which Congress was about to certify, had been stolen from him, Facebook took the stunning action of indefinitely suspending the president from its platform.

Oh what a tangled web we weave