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When a video of Nancy Pelosi, president of the House, of D-Calif., Began to spread on the Web this week, the researchers quickly described it as distortion. His sound and his speed of reading had been manipulated to give the impression that his speech was frozen.
But hours after the social media giants were alerted, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube offered very contradictory answers that could potentially allow viral disinformation to continue to spread.
On Thursday afternoon, YouTube gave a definitive answer, stating that the company had removed the videos because they were breaking "clear rules describing the content that it is impossible to publish."
Twitter declined to comment. However, the sharing of the video would probably not be in contradiction with the company's policies, which allow "inaccurate statements about an elected official", insofar as they do not include attempts at electoral manipulation or repression. voters. Several tweets sharing the video, often accompanied by insults that Pelosi was "drunk as (a) skunk," remained online on Friday.
But Facebook, where the video seemed to win a good deal of its audience, declined Friday to remove it, even after Facebook's independent fact-checking groups, Lead Stories and PolitiFact, found the video "wrong".
"We do not have a policy stating that the information you post on Facebook must be true," Facebook said in a statement to the Washington Post.
The company said that it was on the contrary "significantly reduce" the number of appearances of the video in the news threads of Internet users, add a small area of information next to the video linking the two fact checking sites, and open a dialog box containing "additional information" each time someone clicks to share the video.
This has not satisfied lawmakers such as the representative David N. Cicilline, a Democrat from Rhode Island, who went to Twitter to ask Facebook to "fix this now!"
"Facebook reacts very well to my office when I want to talk about federal legislation and suddenly we have trouble responding when we ask them to handle a fake video," tweeted US Senator Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii. "It's not that they can not solve this problem, it's that they refuse to do what's necessary."
Although Facebook's actions can provide context and reduce the speed at which people encounter video while browsing the social network, they have done virtually nothing to prevent the spread of the fake video by people who have already seen it: any user can always like, comment, view and share the video as often as they wish.
In the 24 hours following the Washington Post's video alert on Facebook, its audience on one Facebook page has nearly doubled to more than 2.5 million views. The video had also been rested on other Facebook pages, where the audience was still increasing.
The contradictory answers reveal a major vulnerability in the way Internet giants protect themselves against viral lies and blatant falsehoods. Companies manage some of the largest and most powerful sources of information in the country, including to understand the political campaigns of the months leading up to the 2020 presidential elections. But they showed little capacity – and, in the case of Facebook, of interest – to limit the spread of lies.
Facebook has resisted the removal of false information citing issues of freedom of expression, said Friday the stand. "There is a tension here: we are working hard to find the right balance between encouraging freedom of expression and promoting a safe and authentic community, and we believe that reducing the distribution of non-authentic content is detrimental to this balance. ", said Facebook in a statement.
But Jason Kint, chief executive of Digital Content Next, a professional group representing online publishers, said that Facebook should play a more active role in maintaining order and slowing the spread of misinformation.
The site, he said, is reluctant to give too much power to fact checkers or content moderators, and many pieces of content can often fall into shadows, where content perception by people depend on their personal politics.
But with sharper distortions such as the Pelosi video, the company should react faster and decisively to potentially smother the misinformation before it makes a living.
"When they put that into people's timelines and give them velocity and they reach what they do not deserve, they help spread it," he said.
"Misinformation can spread faster than the actual information itself," he added, "and these networks have bad actors – which, in a scary way on this one, involve people occupying very important positions – that can disinformation move so quickly I do not think that truth-revealers are able to mobilize these networks in the same way. "
President Donald Trump on Thursday night tweeted a separate video taken from the Fox Business Network: a selectively edited 30-second clip focusing on his breaks and his verbal difficulties during an official briefing of 20 minutes earlier in the day.
The videos fueled what Pelosi's advocates have called badist and conspiratorial depictions of the health of the highest elected woman in America. They also look like political videos that asked similar questions about Hillary Clinton's physical condition during the 2016 campaign.
Pelosi tweeted Thursday night that Trump "was diverting attention from the great achievements of the House Democrats #ForThePeople, its cover-ups and its unpopularity".
Facebook has an internal software tool to search and demote online duplicates of the distorted video, but the company could not tell Friday how many times the video had been re-released.
Following the company's decision, Facebook groups reiterated their interest in promoting distorted video. The Facebook page "Politics WatchDog" – from which the video was shared 47,000 times, often at the same time as false statements about the consumption of alcohol and drugs of Pelosi – organized a survey of users with the following question: "Should the Pelosi video be eliminated?" When a majority voted "no", the page posted: "The people spoke.The video stays", next to an emoji of a glbad of wine.
The owners of the Facebook page have not responded to requests for comments. But in a Facebook post, they called the newspaper "fake news" and said that "the independent fact checkers that Facebook uses are pro-liberal and funded by the left".
Among the people who promoted the distorted video before Facebook's response: President Trump's personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani. He tweeted a link to the Facebook page Thursday night – "What's wrong with Nancy Pelosi's her speech pattern is weird" – and then removed it a few minutes later. He later called this "caricature exaggerating already in his speech".
Giuliani said in an interview Friday that someone had sent him this video via SMS and that he had decided to share it after watching it in recent weeks when he had declared that She had "spoken in a funny way".
After his tweet, he said, someone else texted him that the video had been changed. "I can not say if he was trafficked," he said. "I could tell that she was worse than a few days ago so I took it just in case."
© The Washington Post 2019
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