Fake news and disinformation are significant problems in each of our lives. For centuries, dictators and leaders have used propaganda to brainwash their citizens and people. Technology has armed these people with the capability to reach billions of peoples at a click of a button. 

Platforms like Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter run rampant with fake news and disinformation to the point that people believe them.

Watch this Aziz Ansari stand up video, it shows truly how ridiculous this is. 

All the social media platforms have been riddled with criticism on their “policies” to govern their platforms and remove inappropriate materials. These trust and safety teams employ an army of content reviewers that go through hundreds and thousands of videos and content and still can’t catch all the flagged content. Classifiers are getting better every single day, but there’s still a lot of work to do.

Take a look at Youtube’s transparency report. It’s an incredible challenge for Youtube and any of these platforms to balance what’s right for their users vs. their business. They took down over 4 Million channels in the last quarter (which could attribute to a large decrease in ad revenue for the business). 

https://transparencyreport.google.com/youtube-policy/removals?hl=en

Of course, we can’t talk about this topic without the 2016 Elections. The propaganda on social media platforms was weaponized to influence people in individual decisions. The sad part is that these ads were created primarily by nation-states and extremist groups such as Russia to bias targetted people towards a certain candidate.

Just this past week, Jack Dorsey of Twitter announced that Twitter would no longer allow political ads.

I wholeheartedly agree that “Political message reach should be earned, not bought.” I commend Jack and the Twitter team for taking this step and refusing revenue to think of their users first.

It’s actions like this that give me hope that we will indeed create ways to solve this issue of fake news and disinformation. 

I know we spend a lot of timing criticizing these platforms about proliferating this information, but we all need to be better about processing this information.

1. Set appropriate filters and continually curate the type of people that you receive information from.
2. Take everything on the internet with a grain of salt and fact check statistics and contents meticulously
3. Be aware of the type of information you pass on to people
4. Take it a step further and flag content and ads you think are inappropriate. This helps improve the social media platforms Machine Learning classifiers and content reviewers.
5. Think critically about what you’re reviewing

Ultimately, we’re all responsible to make sure the truths and facts surface to people.