It was reported in the Guardian on February 20th that Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, is throwing around the idea of a ‘crowd sourced’ model of fact checking to battle misinformation and fake news stories that plague the site’s News Feed.
Former managing editor of Snopes, Brooke Binkowski, a factchecking site which had previously partnered with Facebook, was critical of the idea.
“You can’t apply an open-source model to factchecking and journalism,” she said. Binkowski feels that experts should be handling this type of work, as many people may act upon their political biases and emotions before objectively looking at the stories in question.
Other sites have used a crowd sourced factchecking method to some amount of success. Google Maps allows people with a Google account to report false information. Wikipedia has a dedicated base of editors who strive to present the best information on the many topics that site covers.
There could be other reasons for Facebook to embrace this model. To understand why, we’ll need to take a step back in time to a decision in the US District Court in Washington D.C. to the decision in Blumenthal v. Drudge, 992 F. Supp 44 (D.D.C. 1998).
Back in the wondrous days of the nineties that apparently nineties kids are only capable of remembering, AOL was a major player in the development of the Internet and acted as an Internet Service Provider (ISP) for many households.
Sidney Blumenthal filed a $30 million libel lawsuit against Matt Drudge and AOL. Libel being defamation done in writing. The court found that, due to the Communications Decency Act of 1996, AOL was not liable, being protected by the fact that they had no hand in creating the content.
Under the Communications Decency Act of 1996, AOL is protected under section 230(c): “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another content provider.
AOL served as a platform. They did not have any hand in the editorial content of the Drudge Report, the site in question. What does this mean for Facebook and why they would prefer a crowd-source model for fact checking?
Right now Facebook serves as a platform that people can use to publish or disseminate information. Under Section 230(c), they are immune from any libel or defamation lawsuits filed due to information published on Facebook, but if they were to employ people dedicated to factchecking, they now would have an editorial hand in the content published on the site. If they were to let anything slip by or make a wrong decision, suddenly they are equally as liable.
Let us consider another case, that of Rolling Stone and the University of Virginia. The magazine was just as liable as the original author of the article in question, and had to pay out over $1 million in damages.
How does a crowd source model avoid this? Individuals participating could be said to perform the same role as an independent contractor, depending on how the Terms and Conditions would be written for this program. In any libel case, the people who performed the fact checking will be liable instead of Facebook, that can stay safe behind Section 230(c).
Sources:
Blumenthal v. Drudge, 992 F. Supp 44 (D.D.C. 1998) https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/blumenthal-v-drudge
“Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act” https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230
Full Text of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 https://transition.fcc.gov/Reports/tcom1996.pdf
“Wikipedia:About” https://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Wikipedia:About
“Are employers liable for injuries or damages caused by independent contractors?” Michael Jacobson, XpertHR. https://www.xperthr.com/faq/are-employers-liable-for-injuries-or-damages-caused-by-independent-contractors/10227/
“‘He’s learned nothing’: Zuckerberg floats crowdsourcing Facebook fact-checks” Sam Levin and Julia Carrie Wong. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/20/facebook-fact-checking-crowdsourced-mark-zuckerberg
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