Facebook May Not Want to Beat Fake News | Katherine Maher | Big Think

Facebook May Not Want to Beat Fake News

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Users don't need better media literacy to beat fake news. We need social media to be frank about its commercial interests.Wikipedia has come a long, long way. Back when teachers and education institutions were banning it as an information source for students, did anyone think that by 2017 "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit" would gain global trust? Wikipedia had a rough start and some very public embarrassments, explains Katherine Maher, the executive director at the Wikimedia Foundation, but it has been a process of constant self-improvement. Maher attributes its success to the Wikimedia community who are doggedly committed to accuracy, and are genuinely thankful to find errors — both factual and systemic ones — so they can evolve away from them. So what has Wikimedia gotten right that social platforms like Facebook haven't yet? "The whole conversation around fake news is a bit perplexing to Wikimedians, because bad information has always existed," says Maher. The current public discourse focuses on the age-old problem of fake news, rather than the root cause: the commercial interests that create a space where misinformation doesn't just thrive — it's rewarded. Why doesn't Facebook provide transparency and context for its algorithms? An explanation for 'why am I seeing this news?' could allow users to make good decisions based on where that information comes from, and what its motive is. "We [at Wikimedia] hold ourselves up to scrutiny because we think that scrutiny and transparency creates accountability and that accountability creates trust," says Maher.

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KATHERINE MAHER :

Katherine Maher is the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, a position she has held since June 2016. Previously she was chief communications officer.

In addition to a background in the field of information and communications technology (ICT), Maher has worked in the non-profit and international sectors focusing on the use of technology to empower human rights and international development, specifically improving communities, promoting inclusivity and transparency, and deepening participation.

You can find more information about her on — guess where?

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TRANSCRIPT:

Katherine Maher: So Wikipedia—it is a fascinating thing today, that Wikipedia is as trusted as it is and is used by as many people as it is. To think that an encyclopedia that anyone could edit could possibly grow to be a resource that gets about a billion visits every single month from all over the globe!

There's a story of constant self-improvement in there, a story of really grappling with our flaws and with our faults along the way. Wikipedia wasn't trusted when it first started because it was the encyclopedia anyone could edit. And then we had a series of fairly high-profile mistakes, hoaxes, screw-ups. The thing that makes Wikipedia work is that the Wikipedia community is so committed to getting it right that when errors happen their first response is to fix them.

So there's this story from 2005 when a journal Nature, which is a scientific journal, did a study, a sample study on how accurate Wikipedia articles are. And the study found that on average the articles that they surveyed were about as accurate as a relative sample set from Encyclopedia Britannica. And the story of this goes that when this was published the Wikipedia community went to Jimmy Wales (the founder) and asked if he could put them in touch with the editors at Nature so they could find out where the errors were so they could fix them. And I think that that is such a classic example of Wikipedians: when they find out that something's wrong, their first response is not to get defensive. Their first response is generally delight, because it means that there's something to improve.

So, the whole conversation around fake news is a bit perplexing to Wikimedians, because bad information has always existed. The very first press freedom law was passed more than 250 years ago in Sweden, and I bet the very first conversation about misinformation happened within that first year. Yellow journalism, misinformation, propaganda—however you want to name it—there are already names for fake news and there are ways of dealing with them, established ways of dealing with them. So for Wikipedians we look at this and we say this has been a problem since time immemorial, and

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