Don't rely on social media users for fact-checking, many don't care much about the common good
In the wake of Donald Trump's election victory, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg fired the fact-checking team for his company's social media platforms. At the same time, he reversed Facebook's turn away from political content.
The decision is widely viewed as placating an incoming president with a known penchant for mangling the truth.
Meta will replace its fact-checkers with the “community notes” model used by X, the platform owned by avid Trump supporter Elon Musk. This model relies on users to add corrections to false or misleading posts.
Musk has described this model as “citizen journalism, where you hear from the people. It's by the people, for the people.”
For such an approach to work, both citizen journalists and their readers need to value good-faith deliberation, accuracy and accountability. But our new research shows social media users may not be the best crowd to source in this regard.
Our research
Working with Essential Media, our team wanted to know what social media users think of common civic values.
People who relied on newspapers, online news aggregators, and non-commercial TV all scored significantly higher than those who relied on social media and commercial broadcasting.
The survey also found that as the number of different media sources people use daily increased, so too did their civic values score.
This research does not indicate whether platforms foster lower civic values or simply cater to them.
But it does raise concerns about social media becoming an increasingly important source of political information in democratic societies like Australia.
Why measure values?
The point of the civic values scale we developed is to highlight the fact that the values people bring to news about the world are as important as the news content.
For example, most people in the United States have likely heard about the violence of the attack on the Capitol protesting Trump's loss in 2020.
That Trump and his supporters can recast this violent riot as “a day of love” is not the result of a lack of information.
It is, rather, a symptom of people's lack of trust in media and government institutions and their unwillingness to confront facts that challenge their views.
In other words, it is not enough to provide people with accurate information. What counts is the mindset they bring to that information.
No place for debate
Critics have long been concerned that social media platforms do not serve democracy well, privileging sensationalism and virality over thoughtful and accurate posts. As the critical theorist Judith Butler put it: the quickness of social media allows for forms of vitriol that do not exactly support thoughtful debate.
Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci said social media is less about meaningful engagement than bonding with like-minded people and mocking perceived opponents. She notes, “belonging is stronger than facts”.
Her observation is likely familiar to anyone who has tried to engage in a politically charged discussion on social media.
These criticisms are commonplace in discussions of social media but have not been systematically tested until now.
Social media platforms are not designed to foster democracy. Their business model is based on encouraging people to see themselves as brands competing for attention, rather than as citizens engaged in meaningful deliberation.
This is not a recipe for responsible fact-checking. Or for encouraging users to care much about it.
Platforms want to wash their hands of the fact-checking process, because it is politically fraught. Their owners claim they want to encourage the free flow of information.
However, their fingers are on the scale. The algorithms they craft play a central role in deciding which forms of expression make it into our feeds and which do not.
It's disingenuous for them to abdicate responsibility for the content they chose to pump into people's news feeds, especially when they have systematically created a civically challenged media environment.