Döpfner: Right. But was does that mean for fake news?
Berners-Lee: What’s the fake news? How do they define fake news in this case?
Döpfner: Well, that’s already where the problem starts. That means that, in the end, Facebook or another social media platform can define what fake news is, and I think it should always be the prosecutor and not a private company. Facebook should be a neutral platform. People exchange all kinds of things, good and bad, truth and lies. However, only if something is illegal, the prosecutor should intervene. If Facebook with its almost two billion users – ushered by well-intentioned politicians – morphs into a universal media monopoly making editorial decisions and even judging on who gets to read what, then we have a problem. And it is exacerbated if that happens in a closed system.
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Döpfner: Again: How about the whole fake news phenomenon? How should society deal with that? Should publishers help Facebook to correct their fake news stories, or is it basically more about media education, that people should learn that not everything that is distributed on a social media platform is necessarily true?
Berners-Lee: I think we have to be very scientific and look at how these systems interact. The Macedonian websites we talked about earlier generated ad revenue by making up things about the US election, and affected that election even though their motivation was not at all political, only commercial. The ad network trained them that lies can generate more revenue than truth. As a system engineer, I look at that and say, "Well, now, something’s broken here." So one of the possibilities is for Google at that point to tweak the way they reimburse people not just on the clicks, but on some other function.
Döpfner: So you could say the fact that Facebook is incentivizing people to distribute bad content, fake news, has to be changed in the very interest of the social media platform.
Berners-Lee: The guys in Veles, Macedonia, they were independent , they were not on Facebook. They were only on websites. They pointed at them with Twitter. So it wasn’t a Facebook phenomenon.
There’s a separate Facebook phenomenon which I’m told was an important factor in the election. That is targeted advertising. Targeted advertising on social networks is very effective. There’s a blog. He claimed that what they did was divided the entire American voting population into 32 different subtypes, like Myers-Briggs, different sorts of people, different demographics, and so they could then send targeted information.
So to one group with children, you’d say, "Our candidate is going to fight for education." Then there’s a group without children, and they can say, "Our candidate is going to save money by cutting down education"“ Because it’s targeted advertising, it’s not public so nobody can check.
So one simple rule could be that you could say, actually, targeted advertising by political bodies is not democratic. Therefore, from now on, if you want to advertise as a political person, you have to say same thing to everybody because, that’s what democracy is.
There are several types of "fake news" which are often --- and sometimes intentionally --- conflated. As the interview does, I think it's necessary to distinguish "click bait" (which has a primarily monetary incentive) from "political propaganda" (which has a primarily social agenda).
But not all "click bait" and "political propaganda" is false, and not all that are false are false in the same way. It seems also worth distinguishing "lies by omission" (biased reporting) from "lies of whole cloth" (truly "fake" news). I'm doubtful that there is any algorithmic way of distinguishing these, or any legal definition that is not ripe for abuse.
I'm also dubious about the claim that "something is broken here, at least from a business perspective. Google and Facebook are making tons of money with the current system. It seems likely that any change would reduce their profits. Other than "don't be evil" (for Google at least), what's their incentive to change? As a society, what can we change so that such an incentive exists, and is stronger than the currently dominant ones?