Facebook’s Campbell Brown: No silver bullet for tackling fake news … no way Facebook can monitor every story or video shared

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Fake news on digital media has become a potent means of manipulating political discourse around the world. Campbell Brown, Facebook’s New York-based head of news partnerships, spoke to Nalin Mehta on how the world’s largest social network is responding to the propagation of fake news through its platform in India and worldwide:

How are you handling the problem of fake news?

Most of the false news is actually financially motivated. For example, if someone goes to a link which is clickbait in the form of sensational headlines, it takes you to a site that only has ads. We were seeing examples of this in the US political system too. If we are able to disrupt the financial incentives for this, that is progress.

Secondly, we are lowering the rankings of stories in our newsfeed where we sense certain signals that could be clickbait – headlines, for example, which are sensational. There are other signals we look at: like if someone spends five seconds reading a story versus five minutes then the former is probably clickbait or something misleading. The idea is that false stories are pushed down and quality journalism hopefully becomes more visible.

The financially motivated stuff may be more prominent but then there is also politically motivated content. Our security teams are spending a lot of time trying to identify fake accounts in cases where people are trying to manipulate civic discourse. We then remove them from the platform.

What about fact checking and your approach in India?

We are very interested in building fact checking partnerships in India, as we have with publishers and fact checking organisations in the US and other countries. We had a lot of success in France during the elections there. But there’s no silver bullet for fake news.

How do you respond to the critique that social networks push people into filter bubbles where they only end up seeing one kind of content?

It’s important you put this in historical context because everyone blamed cable news for the filter bubble and now they are blaming social media. The fact is that Facebook strengthens your weak ties. On Facebook you are likely to engage with people that you’d normally not engage with. It exposes me to a more diverse group of viewpoints than I would have in my life if I were in my filter bubble of New York City.

A number of your shareholders are challenging Facebook to show people a broader narrative.

We would like to experiment with ideas for giving people a full picture. One of the new things is related articles. Now if you are reading a specific story about something and your related articles pop up, you’ll get different perspectives on a similar story. I don’t believe Facebook is narrowing your worldview, I actually think it’s expanding it.

Is Facebook a tech platform or a news organisation?

Facebook is a new kind of platform. We are not a news organisation, but are a part of the news ecosystem and that changes our role.

How many Facebook fact checkers are there in other countries and how many do you plan to have in India?

We don’t have or hire fact checkers. We partner with news organisations or third parties. There are a couple of organisations that we are working with in Europe: we support First Draft which has been at this for a long time. There is another group called the Trust Project in the US.

Facebook has been criticised for taking a long time to remove objectionable videos like that of a baby being killed in Thailand.

It is gut wrenching when something like that happens. Obviously we want to deal with these things as quickly as possible. The incident that you mentioned is the reason why Mark Zuckerberg has recently added another 3,000 people to the 4,500 who review content for us.

Given the amount of content available on Facebook, there’s no way you can monitor every single story or video that’s ever shared but we definitely think we can do a better job at reviewing the millions of reports we get every week and improve the process for doing it quickly. That’s why we are expanding the team of people working on it.

European regulators say we are at a turning point with digital media. On fake news how difficult is the regulatory challenge?

There is no easy answer to this. False news is a problem for everyone – publishers, online platforms, society, government. It’s something that we all have to work on in partnership with one another.

On content, we have Community Standards, which include no nudity, no hate speech, no glorification of violence. We want people to feel safe on Facebook. It’s not something we can solve alone. We have long collaborated with policymakers, civil society, and others in the tech industry, and we are committed to continuing this important work together.





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