In a blog post, Facebook product director Samidh Chakrabarti says that “at its normal, social media supports us to express ourselves and take action. At its serious, it allows people to spread misinformation and destroy democracy.
“I wish I could promise that the positives are designed to outweigh the negatives, but I can’t,” Chakrabarti adds.
Chakrabarti’s post lists situations in which Facebook has been involved in aiding or empowering players of democracy, admitting the site was initially “far too slow to recognize how bad actors were hurting our platform.”
On Facebook’s use as a “knowledge weapon” by Russian state actors through the 2016 US Presidential election, he says: “Russian meddling worked in part by promoting inauthentic Pages, so we’re working to make governments on Facebook more transparent.
“We’re making it possible to visit an advertiser’s Page and see the ads they’re currently managing. We’ll soon also require organizations running election-related ads to confirm their personalities so we can show viewers of their ads who exactly paid for them. Finally, we’ll archive elective ads and make them searchable to enhance responsibility,” Chakrabarti said.
“It’s shocking to us that a nation-state used our platform to wage a cyberwar meant to divide society,” he added.
On fighting “False News” on the site, Chakrabarti cited the enrolment of third-party fact-checkers and the creation of “trust indicators” to “help people intensify their social media literacy”.
Chakrabarti lists Facebook’s efforts to counter numerous other indictments commonly laid at its feed, including that it “creates echo governments where people only see viewpoints they agree with”, puts women off explaining on politics online and enables harassment of agitators and citizens.
In response, he says, Facebook is “hiring over 10,000 more characters this year to work on safety and security”, but warns that it is cruel to that sort of moderation “at a global scale … since it is hard for machines to guess the cultural nuances of political intimidation.”
Facebook is trying to fight the production of echo chambers online with a feature called “related articles” that shows people other items about the stories news they’re reading.
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