Twitter and Facebook can barely shut down death threats and targeted harassment, let alone combat the problem of fake news. Two sweeping reports from Monday demonstrated in detail the extent and content of Russia’s campaign of disinformation not just on the most politicized social media networks, but also their manipulation of Pinterest, Tumblr, Reddit, Gab, Instagram, and even PayPal.
According to the New Knowledge and Oxford reports, Russia’s Internet Research Agency engaged in the proliferation of both fake news and divisive memes across multiple platforms, and they targeted African-Americans in particular. The NAACP has already called for a boycott of Facebook, where fake accounts like Black Matters and Blactivist specifically stoked racial tensions with fake news, calls to forgo voting in elections, and intentionally stirring racial animus.
In 2017, back when I was a college journalist for The Tab, I had my own brush with Russian trolls stealing my real news and turning it into fake news to sow political discord. I reported on a quick story about a local black neighbor who had placed a racist sign — “NO BLACK PEOPLE ALLOWED #MAGA” — outside of a house occupied by USC students in retaliation for a neighborly dispute. The piece itself, which initially only garnered a few thousand views, was unremarkable, a pretty unsophisticated hate crime hoax that I had debunked by contacting law enforcement and interviewing the residents of the home. The next day, an edited version of my photo appeared on the Blactivist Facebook account, with a caption painting the incident as though it weren’t a hoax at all but a legitimate act of white supremacy. While I never figured out how many likes or shares their fake news post got (the Wall Street Journal tried to no avail), the New York Times found that a Blactivist post from even earlier got upwards of half a million shares on Facebook.
While social media companies have a responsibility to respond to reports of harassment, threats, and fake news, at a certain point, Americans need to individually step up to the plate and become more conscious consumers of media. The Blacktivist heist of my article featured dead giveaways that it was a shady story at best.
“Look around my people,” the last paragraph of the caption read. “Is this the country our ancestors died for? Is this the country that we want our children to grow up in? Why racial intolerance still has a place in our country. Do these signs reaffirm values to educating citizens equipped to serve in diverse society?”
There was no news link, and all of the identifying information in the photo was cropped out. That literate Americans in the 21st century read that, shared it, and possibly believed it says more about the death of civics than it says about a Russian troll army.
Given that just one quarter of Americans can name the three branches of government and that a third of millennials think President George W. Bush killed more people than Joseph Stalin, it should come as no shock that Americans are losing their ability to discern fact from fiction.
As long as there is America guiding the rest of the world toward freedom, there will always be an authoritarian regime seeking to destroy it. Eradicating Russian trolls from the Internet won’t stop the next set of foreign or domestic dissidents from cropping up and seeking to wreak havoc within the American electorate. The onus to fight fake news is ultimately not on large and inept corporations, but on ourselves.
