紐時賞析／不再是當務之急 社羣媒體巨頭打擊假消息力道減弱

假消息示意圖。圖／ingimage

Combating Disinformation Wanes at Social Media Giants

社羣媒體巨頭打擊假消息力道減弱

YouTube, like other social media platforms, spent years expanding its efforts to tackle misinformation after the 2016 election. It hired policy experts and content moderators and invested in more technology to limit the reach of false narratives. Not anymore.

2016年美國大選後，YouTube和其他社羣平臺一樣，花數年時間擴大其處理錯誤訊息的努力。該公司聘請政策專家與內容審覈員，並投資更多技術來限制假論述的傳播。現在沒有了。

Last month, the company, owned by Google, quietly reduced its small team of policy experts in charge of handling misinformation, according to three people with knowledge of the decision. The cuts, part of the reduction of 12,000 employees by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, left only one person in charge of misinformation policy worldwide, one of the people said.

三名知情人士透露，谷歌旗下的這家公司悄悄減少負責處理錯誤訊息的政策專家小組。其中一人表示，這次裁員是谷歌母公司字母削減1.2萬名員工行動的一部分，只留下一個人負責全球錯誤訊息政策。

The cuts reflect a trend across the industry that threatens to undo many of the safeguards that social media platforms put in place in recent years to ban or tamp down on disinformation — like false claims about the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russian war in Ukraine or the interity of elections around the world. Twitter, under its new owner, Elon Musk, has slashed its staff, while Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has shifted its focus and resources to the immersive world of the metaverse.

裁員反映了整個產業的一種趨勢，恐破壞社羣媒體平臺近年爲禁止或遏制假訊息所實施的許多防護措施，例如有關新冠疫情大流行、俄烏戰爭或世界各地選舉公正性的虛假說法。推特在新老闆馬斯克領導下大幅裁員，擁有臉書、Instagram和WhatsApp的Meta，則將重點和資源轉移至沉浸式的元宇宙世界。

Faced with economic headwinds and political and legal pressure, the social media giants have shown signs that fighting false information online is no longer as high a priority, raising fears among experts who track the issue that it will further erode trust online.

遭逢經濟逆風及政治與司法壓力的這些社羣媒體巨頭，已表明打擊網路虛假消息不再是當務之急，讓追蹤此議題的專家擔心，這將進一步削弱網路上的信任。

“I wouldn’t say the war is over, but I think we’ve lost key battles,” said Angelo Carusone, the president of the liberal media watchdog Media Matters for America. After years of efforts, he described a mounting sense of fatigue in the struggle. “I do think we, as a society, have lost the appetite to keep battling. And that means we will lose the war.”

自由派媒體監督機構「美國媒體事務」的卡魯桑表示：「我不會說戰爭結束了，但我認爲我們輸掉關鍵戰役。」經過多年努力，他描述這場抗爭中愈來愈強烈的疲勞感。「我的確認爲，我們整個社會已失去繼續戰鬥的興趣。這意味我們將輸掉這場戰爭。」

The companies maintain they remain diligent, but the efforts to combat false and misleading information online — which arguably peaked during the COVID pandemic and the 2020 presidential election — have waned at a time when the problem of misinformation remains as pernicious as ever with a proliferation of alternative sites competing for users.

這些公司堅稱他們仍很勤奮，但打擊網路虛假及誤導資訊的行動已有所減弱，這些假訊息在新冠疫情大流行與2020年總統大選期間達到巔峰，隨着替代網站激增且競相爭奪用戶，假訊息問題仍像以往那樣有害。

文／Steven Lee Myers、Nico Grant　譯／陳韋廷