A Misinformation Test for Social Media

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 21 October 2020

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have invested a significant amount of time and money trying to avoid the mistakes made during the 2016 election. A test of those new policies came last week, when The New York Post published a story that contained supposedly incriminating documents and pictures taken from the laptop of Hunter Biden. The provenance and authenticity of that information is still in question, and Joe Biden’s campaign has rejected the assertions. We speak to Kevin Roose, a technology columnist for The Times, about how the episode reveals the tension between fighting misinformation and protecting free speech. Guest: Kevin Roose, a technology columnist for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily Background reading: Here’s Kevin’s full report on the efforts by Twitter and Facebook to limit the spread of the Hunter Biden story.The New York Post published the piece despite doubts within the paper’s newsroom — some reporters withheld their bylines and questioned the credibility of the article.Joe Biden’s campaign has rejected the assertions made in the story.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the New York Times, I'm Michael Babaro. This is Daily.
0:10.0	Today, the nation's biggest social media companies are determined to avoid the mistakes
0:17.0	that they made during the 2016 election.
0:20.0	But in the process, they've ignited a different kind of firestorm.
0:25.0	My colleague, Kevin Arrus, reports from San Francisco.
0:32.0	It's Wednesday, October 21st.
0:38.0	You know, Kevin, actually, it's been ages since we had you on the show.
0:42.0	Ages?
0:43.0	Yeah. And I wonder who's fault that is.
0:46.0	You don't call, you don't write. I thought we had something.
0:51.0	I think that you didn't intersect with the news.
0:53.0	That's true. But here you are, intersecting.
0:56.0	There's been a lot going on.
0:58.0	So, Kevin, my sense is that the big social media companies which you have been covering for a really long time
1:04.0	have been preparing very diligently, very carefully, very expensively for the 2020 election
1:10.0	and for the possibility of a major moment of misinformation, for some kind of active interference,
1:16.0	given how much they failed to do that back in 2016.
1:20.0	So, I wonder who can summarize what the preparations that they have been doing have looked like.
1:26.0	So, since 2016, these three big social media companies, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube,
1:34.0	they've spent tons of time and money investing in trying to keep foreign interference
1:41.0	from happening on their platform again.
1:43.0	There have been new policies, new teams.
	...

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