The leaders of social media giants Facebook, Twitter, and Google will be grilled next week about the rise of disinformation on their platforms, driven largely by increasing levels of partisanship and mistrust of the media.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai will be in the congressional hot seat next Thursday during a virtual hearing organized by the House tech subcommittee called “Disinformation Nation: Social Media’s Role in Promoting Extremism and Misinformation.”
All three social media platforms suspended former President Donald Trump’s accounts following the violent Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The hearing next week will help unpackage the role social media played in feeding people disinformation, false information which is intended to mislead, which played a large role in many Republicans distrusting the results of the 2020 election.
“The tech CEOs are being called to the hearing because the seeds of disinformation are planted on social media platforms,” said Emerson Brooking, a resident fellow for the Atlantic Council who studies digital platforms and disinformation.
“It’s a debate worth having, how much responsibility these CEOs bear for the Jan 6th attack.”
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Brooking said the two key factors of increasing political polarization and mistrust of news organizations have led to the significant rise of disinformation in the past couple of years.
“Disinformation is driven by outrage. Every study of online rhetoric shows that outrage is the most important emotion to attracting and keeping readers,” Brooking said.
He added that content fueled by outrage is that which makes people feel aggrieved about an alleged injustice done to a person or society. Outrage is often used by those peddling disinformation to create false animosity for those with differing political views and can draw people toward conspiracy theories and false narratives.
The prevalence of “salacious and scandalous false content,” particularly in private groups on social media and on platforms like YouTube, Brooking said, has drawn people away from credible news outlets.
Furthermore, he said that trust in the media has declined because many local and regional papers have gone out of business, thanks largely to Google’s and Facebook’s dominance in the online ads business.
The decline of local news outlets has also led to the growth of national news outlets such as CNN or the New York Times, which were often critical of Trump, and this unintentionally created mistrust with conservatives, said Brooking.
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Major social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others have made hundreds of policy changes in the past year and a half to address the issue of disinformation but have largely failed, according to a report released earlier this month by Decode Democracy, a nonpartisan campaign to fight online political deception.
