Good morning.
Days after Donald Trump was elected president in November 2016, Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook announced that it had bought a media-tracking and self-described “social-listening” tool called CrowdTangle. The company later touted the tool as part of its efforts to “protect the 2020 election,” announcing that it had provided access to election boards and secretaries of state nationwide “to help them quickly identify misinformation, voter interference and suppression.”
On Wednesday, the company now known as Meta Platforms shut down CrowdTangle, despite pleas from journalists and watchdog groups to keep the tool running through January to fight disinformation during this year’s upcoming U.S. election. While Meta does police its own platforms, CrowdTangle allowed the rest of us to track the spread of false narratives and see the popularity of inflammatory posts on Facebook. Meta’s alternative, called Meta Content Library, excludes most news organizations and is reportedly not as useful, though Meta says it helps them meet regulatory requirements while meeting privacy standards.
Business leaders have a vested interest in combating false information. Along with preserving the integrity and trust that keep societies together, businesses can also be the target of misinformation campaigns, as seen recently with efforts to disrupt the Olympics or defraud employees.
But the leaders who are best equipped to stop the deluge of disinformation on social platforms aren’t making it easy to get the job done. Far from helping solve the problem, Elon Musk’s posts on the social media platform he purchased, X, are contributing to it: The Center for Countering Digital Hate reports that Musk’s false or misleading claims about the U.S. election have garnered nearly 1.2 billion views this year.
One tactic to combat this deluge is to put resources into promoting the truth. That’s the approach Steve Ballmer is taking with his new “Just The Facts” video series via his nonprofit site USAFacts. As the former Microsoft CEO and Los Angeles Clippers owner told me earlier this week, the goal of the series is to clarify the facts around “hot button issues for the election,” from jobs to illegal immigration. Along with running the videos on YouTube, he’s paying for airtime on networks like Fox.
Ballmer cast himself as the narrator to “get just a little bit more viewership,” he explained. Although he can be a little less animated when explaining immigration than talking about Microsoft or his basketball team, the videos are a compelling, and reassuringly truthful, summary of facts. His goal: “Let's get people educated, at a minimum.”
He’s trying to counteract a problem articulated by Tom Steyer, a prominent climate investor, philanthropist, and Democrat: The fact that we like to be entertained, and tend to gravitate to stories that reinforce our preexisting beliefs. Steyer told a group of us at Fortune that there has been “a huge move from edited news to unedited news, where people get to write authoritatively about things they either know nothing about or [are] absolutely lying about. And there is no teacher at the head of the room to say, ‘Aha, Johnny, that's not true.’”
This is partly a matter of market forces, Ballmer says: Because the media industry is “under assault financially,” Ballmer says, “things that are provocative are more rewarded than things which are not.” Ballmer hopes that people will change if confronted with the facts and data, both local and national.
“I think we've accomplished a lot,” he told me, “and I'm daunted by what we still need to do.”
More news below.
Diane Brady
diane.brady@fortune.com
Follow on LinkedIn
