How Social Media 2.0 Can Create a Marketplace for the Truth | Opinion

Last week, Meta—the Mark Zuckerberg-run company that owns Facebook—closed the fact-checking unit on its multi-billion-user social media platform.

The move is not notable because it reveals that Facebook is not really concerned about ensuring the veracity of the content it presents; they never were. Rather, it’s an acknowledgement that their attempts to do so were ultimately futile.

The unit was created after Russian agents flooded America’s most popular news source with misinformation to facilitate a victory by now-President-elect Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. But today, the site is filled with phony health remedies, outlandish conspiracy theories, and—still—a lot of foreign propaganda.

Of course, X—the platform formerly known as Twitter—is no different. In fact, all traditional social media platforms feature the same problematic model: They incentivize users to generate outrage, not information. There is no way to hold posters accountable for their content. And user-targeted algorithms reinforce participants’ perspectives, siloing them from opposing views.

The result is a massively flawed information market and an increasingly ungovernable world. In the United States, many Americans cannot agree on basic facts, let alone universal policies. Some people are estranged from family members who hold fundamentally different values. There is pervasive skepticism about key social institutions like universities, law enforcement agencies, science labs, public health offices, and—of course—the news media.

For over a century, a relative handful of daily newspapers, radio stations, and television networks attempted to play the role of neutral arbiters of truth for broad, ideologically diverse readerships. They were accountable to ombudsmen and boards, employed large numbers of fact-checking editors, and many had teams of investigative journalists. But with the emergence of digital media, today’s cacophonous environment features billions of podcasts, blogs, streaming channels, and social media influencer accounts that each cater to micro-viewerships with zero editorial oversight or accountability. Information is what you want it to be. And in this race to the bottom, everyone is biased, so trust is abysmal.

But consumers are not satisfied with our current informational environment. There is latent demand for the accountability of yesteryear on the digital platforms we have today. After Elon Musk purchased Twitter and swiftly removed all content moderation, a substantial exodus flowed to weak impostors like BlueSky, Threads, and Mastodon. The number of young people on Facebook is in steep decline. Many consumers are turning to AI engines for balanced answers to their questions about current affairs, even though experts still have doubts about their reliability. Online prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket have emerged as alternative sources of information on certain major questions because at least their users put their money where their mouth is.

None of these alternatives offers a true remedy, a sort of next generation. Their appeal represents the desperation of consumers flailing for a new approach to sharing information about our world — pent-up demand for Social Media 2.0.

What form might a new approach take?

Reward people for sharing information widely believed to be accurate; and disincentivize them from sharing information that is wrong. This is the essential logic of prediction markets. But because participants must wager money, they exclude voices who are risk averse or who hold fewer resources. They can also ignore more niche debates, and always present sides as binary when the truth often lies somewhere in the middle. Worse, participants must be over-21 and they neither share their identities nor the data that underpin their bets.

Present familiar viewpoints next to opposing viewpoints; and make it easy and welcome for consumers to change their minds. Ground News is a new source that aggregates and curates a variety of publications to present reporting about the news of the day from disparate angles. This facilitates access to multiple sides and greater context and debate. Implicitly, the site suggests that one cannot not fully understand current affairs until all perspectives are considered. Alas, Ground News is merely a resource, not a platform for debate and persuasion.

Hold people accountable for the information they share and the positions they take. One of the most devastating blows to the credibility of X was when the platform began selling blue checkmarks—which Twitter previously assigned to established authorities, government officials, and other sources with track records—to anyone willing to pay a few dollars a month. These basic certifications were never a panacea, of course, but they provided a minimal signal of quality that helped consumers validate and recognize legitimate sources and distinguish them from others who are speculating or, worse, deliberately misinforming.

The stakes couldn’t be higher for democracy and civic relations. A society cannot self-govern if people do not share fundamental understandings of the problems they want to address, of the world they hope to shape.

In many ways, my own career has followed the deterioration of our information markets.

I began as a newspaper reporter and television writer, only to depart for academia when reporters were no longer given the time to investigate, when objectivity came to be doubted and devalued by our readerships. And with all the investigative resources and research methods of academia, I have been frustrated by the death of expertise on social media platforms that value high-frequency reactions and often baseless punditry—not rigor.

But there will be no countertrend. Informational content is only becoming shorter, faster, and more integrated in multiple media.

If we are to establish new forms of accountability, transparency, and pluralism, we cannot yearn for a bygone past. We must meet the market where it is and reimagine a new space that mobilizes all participants to get things right. No fact-checkers necessary.

Justin Gest (@_JustinGest) is a Newsweek columnist. He is a professor and director of the Public Policy program at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. He is the author of six books on the politics of immigration and demographic change, including in 2020, Mass Appeal: Communicating Policy Ideas in Multiple Media.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.