What companies can do against disinformation

Days after Donald Trump was elected US president in November 2016, Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook company announced that it had purchased a media tracking and self-described “social listening” tool called CrowdTangle. The company later touted the tool as part of its efforts to “protect the 2020 election,” and announced that it had granted access to election commissions and secretaries of state nationwide “to help them quickly identify misinformation, voter manipulation and voter suppression.”

On Wednesday, the company now known as Meta Platforms shut down CrowdTangle, despite pleas from journalists and watchdog groups to keep the tool running until January to combat disinformation during this year's U.S. election. While Meta monitors its own platforms, CrowdTangle allowed the rest of us to track the spread of false narratives and see the popularity of inflammatory posts on Facebook. Meta's alternative, the Meta Content Library, excludes most news organizations and is reportedly not as useful, though Meta says it helps them meet regulatory requirements while adhering to privacy standards.

Business leaders have a vested interest in combating misinformation. Not only do companies need to maintain the integrity and trust that hold society together, they can also themselves be the target of disinformation campaigns, as seen recently in attempts to disrupt the Olympics or defraud employees.

But the politicians who are best equipped to stop the flood of misinformation on social platforms are not making it easy to do this job. Instead of helping to solve the problem, Elon Musk's posts on the social media platform X, which he bought, are contributing to it: The Center for Countering Digital Hate reports that Musk's false or misleading claims about the US elections this year have been viewed nearly 1.2 billion times.

One tactic to counteract this tide is to put resources into spreading the truth. That's the approach Steve Ballmer is taking with his new video series “Just The Facts” on his nonprofit website USAFacts. As the former Microsoft CEO and Los Angeles Clippers owner told me earlier this week, the series' goal is to get the facts straight on “hot election issues,” from jobs to illegal immigration. In addition to posting the videos on YouTube, he's also paying for airtime on networks like Fox.

Ballmer has hired himself as a narrator to “get a little more viewers,” he explained. Although he can be a little less animated when explaining immigration than when talking about Microsoft or his basketball team, the videos are a compelling and reassuringly truthful summary of the facts. His goal: “Let's at least educate people.”

He is trying to counteract a problem articulated by Tom Steyer, a prominent climate investor, philanthropist and Democrat: the fact that we like to be entertained and tend to favor stories that reinforce our pre-existing beliefs. Steyer told a group of us at Assets that there has been “a huge shift from edited news to unedited news, where people can write competently about things they either know nothing about or [are] absolutely lying. And there is no teacher standing at the front of the classroom saying, 'Aha, Johnny, that's not true.'”

This is partly a question of market forces, says Ballmer: With the media industry “under financial attack,” Ballmer says, “things that are provocative are more rewarded than things that are not.” Ballmer hopes that people will change when confronted with the facts and data, both locally and nationally.

“I think we have accomplished a lot,” he told me, “and I am discouraged by what we still have to do.”

More news below.

Diane Brady
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