09.01.2021 02:00 PM
Could the Wisdom of Crowds Help Fix Social Media’s Trust Problem?
A new study finds that small groups of laypeople can match or surpass the work of professional fact checkers—and they can do it at scale.
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Social media misinformation outrage cycles tend to go through familiar phases. There’s the initial controversy over some misleading story that goes viral, then the platform’s response. Then someone asks “What about Fox News?” Finally, someone points out that the real problem, as far as social media is concerned, is the algorithms that determine who sees what. Those algorithms are primarily optimized for engagement, not accuracy. False and misleading stories can be more engaging than true ones, so absent some intervention by the platform, that’s what people are going to see. Fixing the algorithm, the argument goes, would be a better way to deal with the problem than taking down viral misinformation after the fact.
But fix it how? To change the ranking to favor true stories over false ones, say, the platforms would need a way to systematically judge everything that gets shared, or at least everything that gets shared a nontrivial amount. The current prevailing approach to false material involves punting the judgment to some outside party. Facebook, for example, partners with organizations like Factcheck.org to determine whether a given link merits a warning label. Twitter builds its fact-checks by linking...
Read Full Story: https://www.wired.com/story/could-wisdom-of-crowds-help-fix-social-media-trust-problem
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