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Chapter V: Conclusion
It is widely concerned by pundits, observers, and public mass that online opinions could be shaped by misleading content to create an upper hand for specific stands and/or candidates in an election. The revelation of CAS is tremendously ominous because it struck modern democracy with an unprecedented yet destructive stick of mal-harvest on personal data. Modern democracy, heralded by neo-liberalism, along with economic interdependence and international institutions, are the three main pillars underpinning a world of the harmonious accord, and virtually, the very cornerstone of democracy is eroded by the army of termites of fake news directed to its target audience.
If we are to agree that we are what we read, our minds, our conscious, our free wills that employ our sensible daily decisions from having tea or coffee to casting a vote are being compromised by myriads of fake news targeted at us now. And if we could not make a conscious decision, is there still a democracy? Is not the free will of self-conscious individuals the essence that manifests democracy? If we were to be deprived of that, so would be the doom of democracy, and worse, humanity. Therefore, deterring the threat brought by fake news is essential to preserve democracy. Examining the effectiveness of the tool wielded by the very social media attempting to tackle the threat is merely a little step in the long run.
In Chapter two, I discuss the origins, drives, definitions, outlets, impacts, dissemination of fake news to reveal what flaws and issues may lurk behind the surface of Facebook’s fact-checker solution. In short, the weaknesses and concerns exposed in the fact-checking program include: 1) The program exempts political speech from scrutiny when there are chances for politicians to take advantage of fake news generated by ideological and financial purposes. This is to say when ordinary people are under
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censorship, and politicians are tested with a privileged system. The program counts on the morals and ethics of the politicians, trusting them and even transcending them to a superior rank that requires no inspection. 2) Even though the program aims to fight
“false news,” it failed to clarify why false news is defined in the fashion it is. For what purpose, Facebook is serving to make a definition of fake news generally different from mainstream discourses. 3) Provided the features allowing information accessible with only a click away, Facebook needs to be aware of its impact on the perceptions of individuals as the study suggests a biased social media network may trigger different perceptions from the same piece of information. If Facebook could not remain politically-unaffiliated, the integrity of the fact-checking program would be doubted in return. 4) The attention-based business model of Facebook fuels the propagation of fake news and is considered the inherent DNA flaw that is meant to make the fact-checking program a PR work. Also, it makes one further wonder if it is why Facebook resorts to fact-checking, for it does not concern to make adjustments of business models at all.
To check whether the fact-checking program performs effectively on Facebook, I present the observations from the case study in chapter three. Overall, the findings can be concluded as follows: 1) Approximately 30% of the posts in FLDEMS were after the incompetence of Trump administration and local government during the coronavirus outbreak, and most of the contents from the shared links contained misleading statements that could be interpreted as mal-information, or false news (by Facebook’s definitions), an online disorder Facebook pledged to combat. Ironically, all the posts stay intact to date. 2) As for ROPF, although no distinct false news was spot in the studied period, vicious campaign ads with debunked contents aiming for Biden mushroomed after he became the presumptive candidate in mid-April. These pictures only seem to make Facebook’s claim on campaign ads to be held by higher transparency
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a self-slapping joke because it turns out by higher transparency it literally means transparently visible to the users regardless of how demeaning the ads would be. It only again raises the same question that why political ads are not subject to the program when there were myriads of debunked false news contents in them. 3) Based on the observations, I argue that the fact-checking program does not work effectively in terms of fighting fake news, or even to be exact, lowering the spread of false news because basically it failed to do what it claimed, and not to mention, lots of false news were not even under scrutiny.
Following the previous works and findings, I further come up with a response to Facebook’s fact-checking program in chapter 4 that analyses the flaws of the program and urges Facebook to admit the incapability of the program to deter fake news. In brief, 1) The design flaws in the definition of false news and the exclusion of politicians in the program limit the performance of the program, and come with a latent danger to transcend Facebook an arbitrator of truth. 2) The implementation flaws in geographic coverage make fake news possible to dodge the censor and be introduced to a targeted country through connections between users. 3) Instead of sugarcoating their missions, Facebook needs to admit the fact-checking program is not going to deter fake news because as long as the current business model remains kept, the drives for fake news providers stay. 4) Despite measures to counter the threat of fake news are spawn in variety, it is necessary to think that fake news via different outlets may need separate, tailor-made solutions, and that if Facebook did not manage to redress their fact-checking program in time and contemplate the fate of their business model, the truth is it may incur unwanted government regulations before they could still amend at lesser costs.
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