With Great Power comes Great Responsibility

Spread of misinformation and fake news is rampant today. On one hand, social media platforms are becoming mainstay as a source of news and announcements from political leaders and on the other they are (inadvertently?) acting as sources of unverified and ill-researched opinion that tend to be construed as news/facts.

In the aftermath of the 2016 USA Presidential elections, alleged Russian interference by means of Twitter and Facebook triggered multiple Congressional hearings on the issue of the companies’ platforms being used as a means to spread misinformation.

Following this, both companies dove into creating policies, developing algorithms and hiring moderators to stop spread of false stories, flag incendiary content and take down posts that portray violence and anti-social elements. But there has always been an imbalance in the implementation of these policies, in the sense that politicians were viewed with a different lens than what was used with the public. Leaders were allowed unfettered “free speech” on the platforms, irrespective of the nature/quality of the content.

Recently, Twitter has taken the bold step of countering this inherent bias by fact-checking and flagging Trump’s tweets. Trump immediately issued an executive order seeking to curtail the legal protections enjoyed by social media companies with respect to bearing the burden for the content that users post on the platform. Of course, the order is seen as stretching the limits of the Oval Office’s authority.

Trump’s reactionary order apart, it is worthwhile to note the stand the other social media giant has taken. Facebook’s Zuckerberg has made it clear that the company deems it fit to maintain dual standards of content policing. This is consistent with the company’s long-standing policy of not interfering with politics. While a cursory examination might lead us to believe that the company’s stand is justified, we must be cognizant of the immense intangible weight the action carries. The stand might help in staving off regulatory threats into Zuckerberg’s grand business empire which includes some of the ginormous entities of the online world- Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram.

As Spider-Man says, “With great power comes great responsibility”. Is Facebook shirking away from this responsibility in an endeavour to further its interests?