What a Kamala Harris Meme Can Teach Us About Fighting Fake News in 2020
"‘Sustained and ongoing’ disinformation assault targets Dem presidential candidates"
I tracked the spread of a bogus claim about the candidate. Here’s what I learned.
By BENJAMIN T. DECKER March 03, 2019
Benjamin T. Decker is a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.
Will fake news tarnish the 2020 election as much as it did in 2016? It’s tempting to think that we’ve started to solve the problem. After the 2016 election, the big social media platforms pledged to root out mis- and disinformation through self-regulation. Facebook is tripling the size of its safety and security teams to help protect election integrity. YouTube promised to reduce the spread of “borderline content.” Twitter published large data sets of potential foreign information operations for researchers to analyze. And Reddit increased the scope of its quarantine and ban policies for content such as Holocaust denial, conspiracy theories and misogyny.
But if you look at how fake news really works—how ideas and memes take root and spread across the digital universe—it’s becoming clear that these measures won’t be enough.
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The first recorded appearance of the meme was a May 2018 Reddit post the on r/The_Donald message board, a popular hub for disinformation. From there, the idea hopped to Pinterest, Twitter, 4chan’s “politically correct” message board, as well as Gab and Voat, two “alternative” platforms that emerged as hubs of toxic information after the 2016 election. By the time Harris had announced her presidential run earlier this year, the meme had been shared more than 100 times, including across conspiracy-themed Facebook groups, several websites and a known neo-Nazi web forum.
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What I propose is a cross-platform hub in which independent researchers and journalists, as well as members of major social media outlets’ security teams, would work together to inform one another of emerging threat intelligence by parsing through hashtags, memes, videos and web sites. For example, the soft spike in Harris-related birther content in the spring and summer of 2018 could have been flagged by researchers and reported to social media platforms’ trust and safety teams. These teams would in turn monitor the meme on the internet and share information about its spread. If the bad content made it to their own platforms, they would be prepared to counter it, whether through fact-checking, down-ranking, allowing users to filter content or removing content altogether.
There is some precedent for this. Social media outlets already work together to fight explicitly illegal internet content, such as child pornography. And in 2017, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Microsoft partnered for an industry-led initiative called the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism to “substantially disrupt terrorists’ ability to promote terrorism, disseminate violent extremist propaganda, and exploit or glorify real-world acts of violence using our platforms.” The partnership has been fruitful—there is significantly less terrorist content available across social media websites, especially among Islamic State, al-Qaida and Boko Haram.
To apply the same kind of collaboration to political disinformation, the social media platforms would have to agree to some standards for what constitutes problematic information—a tricky question in a realm where fiction, satire, news and opinion all legitimately co-exist. But these platforms are already developing policies to identify such information and remove it. Academic researchers are also building better methods to understand and anticipate fake-news narratives. We can’t wait much longer to try new, collaborative tactics—not when our politics and our democracy are at stake.
Donald, You never know, your liar and distorter "fake news" campaign, and the resultant climate you have egged on, just could contribute to some lasting and real reform of the internet. Good news.
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