Facebook – the ministry of misinformation

Earlier in the month, a news story broke on Facebook that was so gruesome it not only outraged everyone who read it, it also threatened diplomatic relations between two countries.

The story about China exporting “human meat” to African supermarkets in the form of corned beef, didn’t only whip up a storm on social media where it first went viral, it was also picked up by Zambia’s Daily Post who reported, “Since China is so overpopulated to a point where there is no space to spit, what do they do with the dead bodies of the Chinese? Well the answer might be that they are shipping the bodies to Africa in the form of canned meat, and they make a profit during the process.”

So why didn’t such a huge news story hit the front pages of the global press or dominate the top of the hour of our 24-hour rolling news channels?

Well, like so many other news stories on Facebook, it simply wasn’t true.

The gory images that accompanied the story where taken from an elaborate, four-year-old PR stunt for the computer game Resident Evil.

The hoax story prompted a strong reaction from the Chinese ambassador to Zambia who released a statement saying: “Today a local tabloid newspaper is openly spreading a rumour, claiming that the Chinese use human meat to make corned beef and sell it to Africa. This is completely a malicious slandering and vilification which is absolutely unacceptable to us.”

While this breaking news scandal is perhaps at the extreme end of “taste” it does reflect a growing concern that Facebook, now seen by many of its users as a legitimate news source, is being used to distribute spoof, hoax and deliberately defamatory articles as genuine pieces of news.

Much of this “news content” focuses on extremely negative viewpoints, fuelled by misguided fear, ignorance and greed.

In recent years we’ve seen fake news stories about religious groups avoiding the “bedroom tax” by declaring spare rooms as prayer rooms, how to survive a heart attack when alone by coughing repeatedly and how vaccinations against dangerous diseases are the root cause of autism. The negative consequences of these hoax stories, if believed – and with more than one billion users on Facebook there are many millions of naïve people who are all too ready to swallow anything they read, are dire.

A fake story might disappear from the web, but it doesn’t disappear from the minds of those naïve enough to believe it and even if the mainstream media picks up on it and debunks its myths, the truth never has the same impact or reach as a good lie.

The question is, if Facebook wants to consider itself as a serious news source (and remember, more millennials get their news from Facebook than anywhere else) shouldn’t it be doing more to tackle unsourced, unverified and malicious news articles before they have the chance to go viral?