Victims were still bleeding out below the Vegas sniper’s deadly perch when the first noxious lies, disguised as “news,” began circulating through the Internet.
The anonymous message site 4chan, infamous for deliberately disseminating misinformation, falsely pinned the Sunday night massacre on a completely innocent individual—and linked the attack to a made-up Trump-hating liberal agenda. Those falsehoods were picked up by Google’s “top stories” module and gained even more traction after other sites republished them. Facebook’s official “safety check” page for the shooting prominently displayed a post from Alt-Right News Blogspot, which identified the gunman as a “Trump-hating Rachel Maddox fan.”
More inaccurate reports followed, among them that the FBI had already linked the shooter to the Islamic State and that the mainstream media was concealing that he was a convert to Islam.
As Americans grappled with the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history, the Internet’s hateful troublemakers and trolls were hellbent on using the tragedy to further divide the nation.
As two-thirds of American adults get news from social media, the honest vetting and presentation of information by these companies is mandatory. Even when Google or Facebook takes down bad information, it’s already been read.
The powerful platforms’ attempts to hide behind weak excuses like “we’re just a tech company” or “it’s all about the algorithms” don’t cut it. The solution is not to improve the computers’ instructions but rather to add some experienced, intelligent humans into the decision-making.
While it’s impossible for the platforms to catch every instance of fake-news profiteers, Facebook, Google, Twitter and others could at least moderate the most important searches. Especially in the cases of rare breaking news that’s likely to confound the computers.