Not surprisingly, the issue of “fake news” and the role the giant web platforms play in spreading misinformation was a big topic of conversation at the Financial Times “Future of News” conference held last week in New York. But things started to get a little heated when Campbell Brown—Facebook’s head of news partnerships—was asked by moderator Matthew Garrahan if the social network might consider “some sort of accreditation system” as part of its attempts to solve the disinformation problem.
“I think we are moving in that direction,” Brown said, at which point she was interrupted by Google’s VP of News, Richard Gingras, who was also part of the panel discussion (along with Emily Bell, director of Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism). Gingras echoed what many journalists were probably thinking when he protested that “from a First Amendment perspective, we don’t want anyone accrediting who a journalist is.”
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In comments after the event and in tweets sent later to journalists, Brown clarified that what she meant was not accreditation per se. Rather, she said she was describing how, in order to stamp out fake news, Facebook might have to verify trusted news organizations “through quality signals or other means.”
to clarify – i do think fake news may be pushing us into a world where we have to verify news orgs through quality signals or other means.
— Campbell Brown (@campbell_brown) March 22, 2018
The idea of accreditation is horrifying for some, since it brings up unpleasant images of countries where the government or dictator in power decides who qualifies as a journalist. But at the same time, Facebook is trapped between a rock and a hard place when it comes to taking action on fake news and misinformation.
On the one hand, the company is being pressed by governments both in the US and elsewhere to do more to remove or de-emphasize fake news, not to mention hate speech, harassment, and other negative content. But the more it does that, the more it gets accused of infringing on free speech. And every attempt to rank news outlets on vague concepts such as “quality” or “trust” looks a lot like Facebook deciding who is a journalist and who isn’t.
Until the whole Russian troll fiasco broke out, Facebook could plausibly maintain the fiction that it is just a platform, and that it doesn’t play favorites when it comes to sources of news or any other content (which has never really been the case, of course). But now it is having to grapple with the realities of being a media entity and making editorial decisions about what to include and who to highlight, and that is a completely different ball game.
Mathew Ingram is CJR’s chief digital writer. Previously, he was a senior writer with Fortune magazine. He has written about the intersection between media and technology since the earliest days of the commercial internet. His writing has been published in the Washington Post and the Financial Times as well as by Reuters and Bloomberg.