What Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel gets right and wrong about Fake News
This morning, Snap founder and CEO Evan Spiegel posted a treatise on Axios on how his company will change the social media model. In his words, Snap will “separate the social from the media.”
In his post, he makes several mentions of the phenomenon of fake news, using the media’s pre-election definition of the term: hoaxes and fictions designed to drive clicks for profit or propaganda.
Social media fueled “fake news” because content designed to be shared by friends is not necessarily content designed to deliver accurate information. After all, how many times have you shared something you’ve never bothered to read?
And later…
The Snapchat solution is to rely on algorithms based on your interests — not on the interests of “friends” — and to make sure media companies also profit off the content they produce for our Discover platform. We think this helps guard against fake news and mindless scrambles for friends or unworthy distractions.
Spiegel is correct that fake news is a product of the social media era, because people do indeed use Facebook and Twitter to share crap that triggers their emotions. (I’m still not sure what the “mindless scrambles for friends or unworthy distractions” part means. Tell me if you can figure that one out.)
Now, I haven’t seen any research that shows that news stories shared privately are any more accurate than those broadcast to friends or followers on social media.
And his assertion that basing content discovery on your personal interests will deliver more accurate information is utter hogwash, completely belied by reality. And by “reality,” I mean Twitter, where you can choose and groom exactly whom and what you follow, and yet you still have to constantly sift through dodgy content, viral falsehoods, and “whoa if trues.”
Spiegel continues:
The combination of social and media has yielded incredible business results, but has ultimately undermined our relationships with our friends and our relationships with the media. We believe that the best path forward is disentangling the two by providing a personalized content feed based on what you want to watch, not what your friends post.
Spiegel is referencing Facebook News Feed, the most successful media platform since the television, but he’s deliberately misinterpreting what’s actually happening on Facebook today. Fake news doesn’t spontaneously appear in News Feed; it’s most likely to be traded in Groups or accelerated by hyper-partisan Pages. These types of Groups and Pages are basically mini-News Feeds that are really self-imposed filter bubbles. (I manage one of this type of group myself, but I moderate it closely to delete fake news and memes.) To Facebook’s credit, they’ve taken algorithmic action against hoaxy Page content appearing in News Feed, But these Groups and Pages are not your “friends.” These are your interests. And more importantly, they’re your biases. And they’re often loaded with bullshit.
Which gets to the core point about Fake News: people don’t care if something they shared is real as long as it feels thematically truthful to them. They’re not sharing facts after all; they’re sharing a concern.
Just as Spiegel’s post was hitting, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders articulated this magically well, as she explained why it wasn’t so bad that President Trump had shared horrifying anti-Muslim snuff videos on Twitter earlier this morning.
“Whether it is a real video, the threat is real…that is what the President is talking about, that is what the President is focused on is dealing with those real threats, and those are real no matter how you look at it.”
This is why fact-checking is no antidote to Fake News. And neither is taking your friends out of the filtering equation. Even if Facebook, Twitter, and Google were to shut down today, Fake News would continue to thrive because it does what it does exceptionally well — trigger people’s anger and disgust responses.
In some sense, President Trump is the perfect avatar for the Fake News consumer. He spends time like an old man should — watching TV and reading the newspaper. But like many of us, he’s added Twitter to his media diet. And also like many of us, he mostly follows accounts that confirm the biases that he’s demonstrated in public for 40 years. And again like many of us, he’s easily triggered by stories that break his filter bubble, so he himself declares “fake news” anything that doesn’t align with his worldview.
It’s unlikely that Snap has much to offer Mr. Trump or anyone else of his generation (or maybe even the generation after his), but it’s encouraging to read Spiegel’s intention to give publishers more opportunity to thrive.
And this is where the rubber really hits the road in Spiegel’s vision for Snap:
It’s vitally important that future content feeds are built on top of a human-curated supply of content — rather than just anything that surfaces on the Internet. Curating content in this way will change the social media model and also give us both reliable content and the content we want.
Bingo! This is the inherent tension of social media platforms. When I was working at Facebook last year in News marketing, one media executive after another told me (and everyone else I worked with): Fix fake news, but don’t be the arbiter of truth. Your algorithms are destroying the news industry, but don’t hire people to decide what’s quality news.
Spiegel’s vision for news is Netflix, which he references earlier in the post. Netflix isn’t a platform like YouTube or Facebook. You can’t put your dumb standup routine on Netflix, and RT can’t put its state-sponsored propaganda there either. No, the humans at Netflix build the library, and then the robots at Netflix figure out what you might like to watch next. Snap envisions the same model for Discover, with native content built exclusively for Snapchat, served based on what they know about you.
Imagine the screaming clusterbomb of anguish if Twitter tried to do that. Trump would be demanding Jeff Sessions send the FBI to raid mid-Market that very day.
It’s exciting that Snap is trying to rethink access to information based on a more mediated model. As its influence grows and more partisan outlets try to push themselves into Discover, we should expect more drama. Should Breitbart be in Discover? Infowars? MSNBC? Fox News?
Republicans were calling CNN the “Clinton News Network” in 1996; they’ll demand balance to this liberal partisan presence. “Human curators” who work at Snapchat will decide, and that will be a big deal.
Stay tuned.
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