San Francisco, May 30: When a doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — one altered to show the Democratic leader slurring her words — began making the rounds on Facebook last week, the social network didn’t take it down.
Instead, it “downranked” the video, a behind-the-scenes move intended to limit its spread. That outraged some people who believe Facebook should do more to clamp down on misinformation.
Pelosi derided Facebook Wednesday for not taking down the video even though it knows it is false. But the company and some civil libertarians warn that Facebook could evolve into an unaccountable censor if it’s forced to make judgment calls on the veracity of text, photos or videos.
Facebook has long resisted making declarations about the truthfulness of posts that could open it up to charges of censorship or political bias.
It manages to get itself in enough trouble simply trying to enforce more basic rules in difficult cases, such as the time a straightforward application of its ban on nudity led it to remove an iconic Vietnam War photo of a naked girl fleeing a napalm attack. (It backed down after criticism from the prime minister of Norway, among others.) But staying out of the line of fire is harder than it used to be, given Facebook’s size, reach and impact on global society.
The social network can’t help but run into controversy given its 2.4 billion users and the sorts of decisions it must make daily— everything from which posts and links it highlights in your news feed to deciding what counts as hate speech to banning controversial figures or leaving them be. Facebook has another incentive to keep its head down.
The deeper it gets into editorial decisions, the more it looks like a publisher, which could tempt legislators to limit the liability shield it currently enjoys under federal law. In addition, making judgments about truth and falsity could quickly become one of the world’s biggest headaches.
For instance, Republican politicians and other conservatives, from President Donald Trump to Fox News personalities, have been trumpeting the charge that Facebook is biased against conservatives. That’s a “false narrative,” said Siva Vaidhyanathan, director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. But as a result, he said, “any effort to clean up Facebook now would spark tremendous fury.” Twitter hasn’t removed the doctored Pelosi video, either, and declined comment on its handling of it.
But YouTube yanked it down, pointing to community guidelines that prohibit spam, deceptive practices and scams.
