"In recent weeks, Facebook and YouTube have strained to explain why they won’t ban
Alex Jones’ Infowars, which has used its verified accounts to spread
false news and dangerous conspiracy theories on the platforms.
Meanwhile, the midterms are approaching, and Facebook won’t say
definitively whether the company has found any efforts by foreign actors
to disrupt the elections. Facebook did recently say
that it will start to remove misinformation if it may lead to violence,
a response to worrisome trends in Myanmar, India, other countries. The
social media platforms are being called on to explain how they deal with
information that is wrong—a question made even more complicated because
the problem takes so many forms.
To understand the many forms of misinformation and
disinformation on social media, we recently spoke with Claire Wardle,
the executive director of First Draft,
a nonprofit news-literacy and fact-checking outfit based at Harvard
University’s Kennedy School, for Slate’s tech podcast If Then. We
discussed how fake news spreads on different platforms, where it’s
coming from, and how journalists might think—or rethink—their role in
covering it"
