By: Katherine Ljungqvist Freelancer
Following the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, social media giants Facebook and Twitter, as well as the popular search engine Google, are coming under fire for their part in spreading false information throughout the 2016 campaign season.
Through the use of paid advertising services, websites that contain false news are able to get posted onto Facebook and Google pages in spite of algorithms and filters put into place to prevent the spread of misleading information. According to The New York Times, Google spokeswoman Andrea Faville said, “The goal of search is to provide the most relevant and useful results for our users. In this case, we clearly didn’t get it right.”
According to the Pew Research Center, in 2012 it was reported that roughly 49 percent of U.S. adults received at least a portion of their news from social media. A more recent study showed that around 62 percent of U.S. adults get their news from social media. This gives us a rough idea of how many adults are exposed to false news, when, according to Business Insider, “the top malicious fake news stories actually outperformed legitimate news stories shared by some of the most popular media companies.”
As students, we can expect to be influenced by websites promoting false information. NPR’s Kelly McEvers interviewed Stanford University’s Professor Sam Wineburg about a study of over 7,800 high school aged students who were exposed to false information; the results showed that as many as 80 to 90 percent of those students struggled to determine the validity of the information they were presented with.
According to Facebook’s Help Center, the ads and news articles that filter into our Facebook feeds show up according to our trending interests. Unfortunately, that means that we are being presented with information that conforms to our own biases, which may or may not be well informed. Fortunately, Google and Facebook are currently working on ways to improve the algorithms they use for adding content to our searches and news feeds.
The New York Times and NPR have quoted representatives from both companies accepting responsibility for their part in influencing political and social mentalities, in spite of Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg publicly denying that his company has any pull in political outcomes. In a public post on Facebook from Nov. 12 he went so far as to say, “Overall, this makes it extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this election in one direction or the other.”
Zuckerberg did go on to say, in the same post, that Facebook has encouraged more than 2 million people to register to vote. In the meantime, as students, it is important to bear in mind that, for the most part, it is a good idea to take trending stories with a grain of salt unless it is being reported by accredited publications.
Contact the author at kljungqvist16@wou.edu
