As with All Things, Fake News in Social Media stems from Money in Politics
The quote above is so incredibly oft-cited, that it’s become some trite nothing. I’m actually not a huge fan of the overly-saturated image, but it gets the point across. It’s telling us to not try to solve a problem by addressing the surface level problems, but tackle it at the root. It’s why the Gates Foundation uses its funds to eliminate the systemic issue of the problem instead of throwing money at the symptoms. They know that solving world hunger for finite period isn’t going to actually fed the world indefinitely. And it’s not just the Gates Foundation that practices root cause analysis (RCA), entire consulting firms have based their success around RCA.
(As a quick aside, as a business analyst by trade, I love frameworks. Give me a problem and I’ll shoehorn it into some framework so I don’t have to go through the effort of creating a bespoke solution. Since I’ve already started off with Bill Gates, let’s use a quote of his: “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it”).
So What’s the Problem?
So let’s tackle the big problem set up by The Social Dilemma. How do social media giants ensure they aren’t agents of chaos in allowing misinformation to spread? Numerous folks have a stance on this: Kara Swisher wrote a NYT OpEd around Facebook’s role in allowing holocaust deniers to spread their message and NYU Stern’s own Scott Galloway has a podcast around what drives this behavior. With Russian interference in the past election and multiple foreign actors looking to influence the coming election, it’s obvious that this is a huge problem.
So let’s use a RCA framework to drill down into the bottom of this problem. A really simple one is the 5 Whys. It’s basically being at toddler and asking “Why” every single time you get a response. While it may seem incredibly simple (the best solutions always are), it’s allows us to make sure that we’re dedicating resources to the root cause, not the symptoms.
5 Whys Root Cause Analysis
The problem statement: Social Media serves as a platform allowing for mass spread of misinformation
Why (1): It’s easy to reach target demographics on social media
Why (2): These demographics spend a lot of time on that platform
Why (3): Misinformation is more catchy than real news
Why (4): Social Media firms are incentivized to make the platform as addicting as possible
Why (5): Revenue model is based on user segmentation and ad serving only
So What’s the Solution To the Problem?
Maybe I took away the weight of the “so-what” with the title of the post, but honestly, the problem here stems from the fact that the existing revenue model for these companies are entirely based in maximizing CPM/CPC. In order to do that, they need to optimize Daily Active Users (DAU) and time on page or platform. They achieve both of these through maximizing user utility of the platform (in other words, making it as addictive as possible). Note that promoting fake news doesn’t appear anywhere in this simple equation — social media is agnostic of what content it’s promoting as long as it’s maximizing user utility and the firm’s revenue.
Sinan Aral (in Scott Galloway’s podcast) notes that until there’s a disincentive to promoting fake news or otherwise dangerous misinformation, there’s no way to expect social media giants to prioritize real news over fake news. No public company can be expected to act against its self interest, so we have to rely on federal regulation to ensure that expected profit from promoting misinformation is less than the expected profit from promoting reality. And there’s precedent here: carbon taxes have created a market-based incentive for companies to not pollute, and it’s worked (granted this example is from Sweden)!
At the end of the day, putting a “misinformation” tax on media companies (not just social media) can work in the existing framework of maximizing shareholder value by chasing profits. Of course, putting this into law means having a legislature that’s agreeable to harming the profits of these companies. And with the current way that campaign finance laws are structured, there’s no incentive for our legislators to vote against their self interest to remove money from politics. But that, of course, is a discussion for another time.
