Can Facebook, or Anybody, Solve the Internet’s Misinformation Problem?

Can Facebook, or Anybody, Solve the Internet’s Misinformation Problem?

In theory, Facebook’s announcement on Tuesday that it had discovered and shut down a wide-ranging Iranian misinformation campaign should make you feel better.
The social network was slow to recognize such campaigns as threats before the 2016 presidential election, and it surely deserves some credit for what Mark Zuckerberg, its chief executive, described as the company’s shift from “reactive to proactive detection” of coordinated propaganda operations.
But it was not just Iran, and not just Facebook.
YouTube also said that it had removed content linked to the Iranian campaign. So did Twitter. And Facebook said that it had also removed pages stemming from a Russian propaganda operation that was unrelated to the Iranian campaign.

And there’s more: Microsoft announced this week that it had discovered a Russian hacking campaign aimed at conservative think tanks in the United States. And on Wednesday there was news that hackers had this week tried to penetrate the Democratic National Committee’s voter database.
All that in three days. (And Facebook took down another influence campaign last month that was of uncertain origin, but might have been operated by Russians.)
Feeling better yet? Yeah, me neither.

These drip-by-drip revelations inspire something like the opposite of confidence. Find one cockroach in the kitchen and you might feel better for having caught the sucker. Find another, and then another, and pretty soon you start to wonder if you should burn your house down.
And these revelations of mischief underscore the novelty of the threats we are dealing with — and how unprepared we might be to handle them.

Some of these disclosures are about actual criminal activity. But others, like the Iranian campaign, describe a more fuzzy kind of misbehavior, one that is not obviously illegal, and whose tactics amount to something that lots of people do everyday : Lying on the internet.
Given the gray area some of these activities occupy, figuring out what to make of each revelation — how to assess its potential impact and our collective capacity to respond to it — is going to be the next great task of digital society. And the task is far bigger than any of us realize now.