Social media executives sitting uncomfortably before congressional committees has become a common sight over the past few years.

In April 2018, July 2019 and most recently, March 2021, Congress called Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and others to explain topics ranging from data privacy to Big Tech monopolies to online misinformation. The March hearing happened in part because of the assault on the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, in which groups looking to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election communicated and even coordinated with one another online.

"We've always had lies. We've always had rumors. We've always had misinformation," said Harrison Mantas, a fact-checking reporter at the Poynter Institute. "We just have a faster way of getting it out now. It's a serious issue in the sense that democracies live and die on facts."

According to the Pew Research Center, 50% of Americans said that made up news or information was a bigger issue than violent crime, climate change, racism, illegal immigration, terrorism and sexism. Additionally, 52% of Americans say they have changed the way they use social media while 43% say they have lessened their overall news intake to combat this problem in their daily lives.

In 2020, a peer-reviewed study in the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review found that, on average, 71.08% of respondents agreed that social media companies should be providing fact-checks of statements made by politicians, although the responses differed between Democrats and Republicans, with about 86% of Democrats in support of fact-checking politicians compared to 56% of Republicans.

While social media companies have increasingly begun taking action against misinformation, from flagging content to banning high-profile users such as former president Donald Trump, just how effective are their efforts?

Despite the large number of Americans getting news on social media, 59% of social media news consumers in 2020 said they expect news on social media to be "largely inaccurate."

Social media companies have started implementing a variety of changes to their content recommendation algorithms and practices in order to address some of these issues.

Reuters and other major media organizations in the United States, such as PolitiFact, are signatories of the International Fact-Checking Network’s code of principles. The five principles outline a commitment to transparency about non-partisanship, sourcing, funding, methodology and corrections policies.

The IFCN, hosted by Poynter, created the code and includes organizations in dozens of countries who’ve all signed. It investigates organizations who want to join the network and acts as a filter to find committed fact-checkers, Mantas said. Facebook chooses who to work with from there.

“We set the standard,” Mantas said. “We make sure people live up to it.”

However, third-party fact-checkers are not enough to stop the spread of all misinformation on Facebook. Human content moderators are spread all over the world, coming from different cultures with different belief systems.

"It really doesn't come as a huge surprise then that you would find that a content moderator in the Philippines might arrive at a really different content-related decision under the same set of rules than a content moderator based in San Francisco," said Jonathan Peters, an associate professor in the University of Georgia's College of Journalism and Mass Communication and the UGA School of Law.

Mantas said one area of work for Facebook is boosting its content moderation in more countries. Language barriers aside, foreign moderators might not even know if a post contains misinformation, he said.

But fact-checkers can’t reach this scale of misinformation control on their own. Facebook employs AI to ramp up the efforts, according to multiple 2020 blogs published by the site.

Its SimSearchNet++ image recognition system is “resilient to a wider array of image manipulation,” according to a November 2020 blog post, in order to detect copies and slight changes to misinformation shared on Facebook. It’s supposed to scale fact-checking while reducing the number of legitimate posts to receive labels.

Although the number of flagged posts related to the pandemic and the election is staggering, it's a fraction of all the information shared globally on Facebook every day. Dangerous misinformation can still fall through the cracks.

AI’s effectiveness at finding and removing illegal information and content is up for debate. According to a report published by Security and Human Rights, AI excels in “screening for and identifying fake bot accounts — techniques known as bot-spotting and bot-labelling”.

Digital platforms such as Google, Facebook and Twitter use these techniques to identify and remove trolls and fake accounts. AI may also inadvertently identify accurate information, or produce false positives/negatives, according to the report.

“AI is 100% a function of the people who develop the algorithms,” said Jason Anastasopoulos, assistant professor of political science at the University of Georgia.

He said bias within programmers can find its way into the program itself and influence what content is labeled as misinformation on social media platforms.

“Think of AI as simply an extension of the preferences of the people who program it.”

To moderate or not to moderate?

Given the spread of content flags and high-profile social media bans, questions have been raised about why and how social media companies choose to limit misinformation and whether or not their actions are legal.

"As non-governmental entities, they themselves enjoy First Amendment rights," Peters said.

Essentially, this means social media companies have the right to develop their own content and community guidelines and generally enforce those rules as they please. That includes the ability to de-platform users, to suspend accounts and to create systems by which they can block users or flag their content.

While it is completely within their power to remove any content that does not meet their community guidelines, they are under no obligation to do so.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, part of a larger telecommunications law passed in 1996, does not hold these companies liable for the content on their platforms. It enables the platform to avoid liability if it does not remove content that is objectionable, flagged as misinformation or even illegal. Platforms also avoid liability if they choose to remove content, per Section 230. The drafters of section 230 "wanted the web to be a place that would be a forum for diverse viewpoints," Peters said.

"section 230's encouragement for platforms to police their own content is by design. that is a feature that's not a bug, it was meant to put the power in the hands of the platforms," said Peters

The bottom line: The government doesn't have a way to enforce anti-misinformation practices other than to publicly shame Big Tech CEOs during congressional hearings. And while Facebook and Twitter have the legal right to remove anyone spreading misinformation on their sites, it's still their choice to do so or not.

"They're trying to thread this needle of being a place where people can connect ... while not being seen as too heavy-handed in terms of the way that they moderate content," Mantas said.

"Do I think that they actually care?" he said. "To the most extent, I'd say yes. But people would disagree with me on that."