The right and left may not agree on what constitutes misinformation, but both would like to see less of it on social media. And as the world faces the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the threat medical misinformation poses to public health remains real. Companies like Twitter and Facebook have a stake in cleaning up their platforms — without relying on censoring or fact-checking.
Censoring can engender distrust when social media companies expunge posts or delete accounts without explanation. It can even raise the profile of those who've been "canceled."
And fact-checking isn't a good solution for complex scientific concepts. That's because science is not a set of immutable facts, but a system of inquiry that constructs provisional theories based on imperfect data.
A recent post on Politifact illustrates the problem. The claim at issue: a meme circulating on Facebook that viruses evolve to be less virulent. Politifact deemed it false, but Purdue University virologist David Sanders disagrees. "I would say that it actually is true that viruses do tend to evolve to be less harmful to their host," he told me, though it's a process than can sometimes take decades — or even centuries — from the time a new virus jumps from animal to a human host. Sanders said Politifact had conflated virulence with other things, such as resistance to drugs. When a complex issue is still a matter of scientific uncertainty and debate, rating it "true" or "false" doesn't work very well.
Another limitation of fact-checking: There's so much dubious content floating around Facebook and Twitter that human fact checkers can only get to a miniscule fraction. Consumers may wrongly assume what's left over has been reviewed and is reliable.
"It's not a truth-seeking medium — it's meant for entertainment," says Gordon Pennycook of the University of Regina in Canada.
But he is convinced that Facebook and Twitter can be made less deceptive by harnessing the analytical power of the human brain.
One way is to harness the phenomenon known as "the wisdom of the crowds." If you ask enough independent sources a tough question — like how deep the Pacific Ocean is at its deepest point — people converge on the right answer. But social media misguides our crowd-seeking compasses.