The 2023 Social Media Summit@MIT Event Report

WATCH VIDEO
IS THE TIDE
TURNING FOR
MISINFORMATION?
Truth is making progress on social media.
But with platforms regrouping and facing
tough times, can the gains continue?
Tom Cunningham
Economist
Kate Klonick
Associate Professor of Law, St. John’s University
David Rand (Moderator)
Professor, MIT Sloan, and Research Lead,
Misinformation and Fake News, MIT IDE
While the threat of online misinformation remains serious,
some experiments with intervention seem to be working
and turning the tide. The proliferation of fake news peaked
in 2016, and since then, growing concern has kept online
misinformation in check. This panel, led by IDE leader David
Rand, considered what should—and should not—be done to
keep it there.
Greater awareness and vigilance are helping to keep social
media truthful. Still, it seems unlikely that misinformation and
fake news can be eliminated entirely, especially as platform
companies face earnings pressure, panelists said. Debates
now center on how social media platforms and others should
combat the spread of misinformation and prevent backsliding.
Since the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, social media
platforms have experimented with interventions to flag or
remove false information. This type of content moderation
has been effective and represents the best way forward,
said Tom Cunningham.
Cunningham, who previously worked as an economist and
data scientist for Facebook and Twitter, believes that content
moderation can reduce misinformation. But there are tradeoffs,
he added, such as inadvertently taking down accurate
information and infringing on free speech. Identifying
misinformation isn’t as straightforward as it might seem.
Rand agreed, noting that when fake news first began to
spread on Facebook, he believed it would be easy to tackle.
“There are things that are true and things that are false,” he
recalled. “If the platform wanted to do something about it, it
could just get rid of the false stuff.” However, Rand said that
once he started working in the field, “I changed my mind.
This is way more complicated than I’d appreciated.”
Rand now sees online information as a “continuum” of truth
and falsity, with most content somewhere in the middle.
“That doesn’t mean we’re in a post-truth world,” he said.
“It’s just that accuracy is hard to measure with certainty.”
Research shows that most social media users don’t actually
want to share misinformation, Rand explained. Instead, many
are either confused or not paying enough attention.
Gold Standard
Professional fact-checking by dedicated employees is “still the
gold standard,” Rand said. But even fact-checkers don’t always
agree on what’s true or false.
Cunningham suggested that decentralized social media
platforms accelerate the spread of misinformation because
they’re “bad at assessing the quality of content...people
tend to click whatever is shiny, whatever looks good, but not
what is good.” This can amplify sensational and superficial
ideas. By contrast, centralized media—newspapers, radio,
and television—have traditionally been more cautious, fearing
they’ll lose readership and ad revenue, or risk litigation.
[Read more about decentralization on page 12.]
Kate Klonick noted that Facebook and Twitter are mostly
centralized, which may be good for creating what she
called “one place for intervention.” But over the next couple
of years, she expects to see more decentralization, where
“misinformation is breeding, and it’s going to be very difficult
to track.”
Cunningham noted that while misinformation is still too
prevalent, it has declined by a factor of five or 10 since
peaking in 2016. The reason? Platforms, he said, have
“added friction on politics, on sharing, on viral content, on
certain types of reactions, on content from new producers,
on content from fringe producers, and on content that looks
like clickbait.” While this has significantly decreased the rate
of misinformation, Cunningham added, “Anything that looks
a little bit like misinformation is going to get suppressed
as well.”
Platforms Under Pressure
Cunningham also maintained that social-media companies
should strive to be platforms that distribute high-quality
“In a free society, the law does not necessarily have a
role to play in trying to determine truth.”
Kate Klonick
Associate Professor of Law, St. John’s University
content, not just platforms that maximize retention, likes, and
time spent. And yet, in the current cost-cutting environment,
many social media companies have been laying off their
ethicists and fact-checkers.
Klonick said that while “lots of work has been done to raise
awareness about malicious actors and misinformation,” the
tradeoff may be increased public skepticism about what is
or is not fake news.
She doubts that legal interventions will help to clarify online
truth. “One of the very unpopular things that I have said over
the last five years, but I think is ultimately true, is that in a
free society, the law does not necessarily have a role to play
in trying to determine truth,” Klonick explained.
Sometimes, she added, it’s best to let the private sector be
the gatekeepers. Platforms know how to create friction and
slow things down. “Markets,” Klonick said, “respond faster
than the law to changing norms.”
For these reasons and more, Klonick doesn’t see legislative
remedies coming to the rescue anytime soon. Policy
proposals, she said, are “a disincentive, a stick...but they’re
not that helpful.” What’s more, she said, substantial bans on
certain types of content, based on subjective judgments, are
“not going to be in line with First Amendment principles at all.”
The Cost of Regulation
In many countries, social media platforms already comply
with content regulations, Cunningham noted. Much of that
content would be removed anyway, he said: “They’re going
to take down terrorist stuff, child porn; they’re going to take
down hate speech.”
Before the current layoffs, platforms were aggressively
addressing the problem. They were spending 5% of their
overall costs on data scientists, content raters, and different
structures for moderating content, Cunningham said, even
when they were not legally required to do so. The reason
wasn’t altruism or free speech, but pressure from advertisers.
Cunningham isn’t confident that most platform companies
“have a super-clear North Star; they’re responsive to half a
dozen different constituencies.” Those include the media,
governments, advertisers, users, employees, and investors.
“All of those,” Cunningham added, “have very strong opinions
about what content should be on the platform.”
Ideally, social media platforms will discover new ways to keep
the good content while eliminating the bad. But, Cunningham
warned, “I don’t think that we should be crossing our fingers
for that business model in the very short term.”
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