Perspective: Digital disinformationFacebook, Google, Twitter and the “Digital Disinformation Mess”

The preliminary results of Facebook’s long-awaited “bias” audit are out. The key takeaway? Everyone is still unhappy. The report is little more than a formalized catalog of six categories of grievances aired in Republican-led congressional hearings over the past two years. It doesn’t include any real quantitative assessment of bias. There are no statistics assessing the millions of moderation decisions that Facebook and Instagram make each day. Renee DiResta writes in Slate that, instead, there are merely some capitulatory minor product tweaks to address edge cases, such as the permitting of images of premature babies to bolster pro-life ads (previously, Facebook had apparently prohibited images of medical tubes connected to a human body).

These tiny changes are all the more remarkable because the audit was an exhaustive affair, the result of about a year of research led by former Republican Sen. Jon Kyl, encompassing interviews with scores of conservative lawmakers and organizations. Facebook committed to the audit in May 2018, amid criticism that it silenced conservative voices.

“Despite the time and energy invested, the conspicuous absence of evidence within the audit suggests what many media researchers already knew: Allegations of political bias are political theater,” DiResta writes. Sen. Ted Cruz has been touting anecdotes about Silicon Valley censorship for more than a year. President Donald Trump has fundraised on it. Recognizing that it plays well, left-leaning politicians have begun to seize on the censorship talking point, too: Sen. Elizabeth Warren got angry about Facebook denying one of her ads (it was later restored), and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, another presidential candidate, is presently testing the limits of cognitive dissonance by suing Google for censorship while simultaneously touting her debate performance on Google search trends.

“Still, the audit findings (or lack of them) may help shift the conversation in a positive direction. While they’re unlikely to put a stop to the belief in political bias, perhaps they will dissuade the Trump administration from pursuing a misguided executive order to “police” social media censorship,” DiResta writes. “That may be too optimistic. But perhaps the findings—and the challenges of even conducting a meaningful audit—could be used to focus the conversation on problems with social media: an advertising infrastructure masquerading as a communications infrastructure and algorithms that incentivize misinformation.”