紐時賞析／不再是當務之急 社群媒體巨頭打擊假消息力道減弱

假消息示意图。图／ingimage

Combating Disinformation Wanes at Social Media Giants

社群媒体巨头打击假消息力道减弱

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年美国大选后，YouTube和其他社群平台一样，花数年时间扩大其处理错误讯息的努力。该公司聘请政策专家与内容审核员，并投资更多技术来限制假论述的传播。现在没有了。

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，谷歌旗下的这家公司悄悄减少负责处理错误讯息的政策专家小组。其中一人表示，这次裁员是谷歌母公司字母削减1.2万名员工行动的一部分，只留下一个人负责全球错误讯息政策。

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.

裁员反映了整个产业的一种趋势，恐破坏社群媒体平台近年为禁止或遏制假讯息所实施的许多防护措施，例如有关新冠疫情大流行、俄乌战争或世界各地选举公正性的虚假说法。推特在新老板马斯克领导下大幅裁员，拥有脸书、Instagram和WhatsApp的Meta，则将重点和资源转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.

遭逢经济逆风及政治与司法压力的这些社群媒体巨头，已表明打击网路虚假消息不再是当务之急，让追踪此议题的专家担心，这将进一步削弱网路上的信任。

“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.”

自由派媒体监督机构「美国媒体事务」的卡鲁桑表示：「我不会说战争结束了，但我认为我们输掉关键战役。」经过多年努力，他描述这场抗争中愈来愈强烈的疲劳感。「我的确认为，我们整个社会已失去继续战斗的兴趣。这意味我们将输掉这场战争。」

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.

这些公司坚称他们仍很勤奋，但打击网路虚假及误导资讯的行动已有所减弱，这些假讯息在新冠疫情大流行与2020年总统大选期间达到巅峰，随着替代网站激增且竞相争夺用户，假讯息问题仍像以往那样有害。

文／Steven Lee Myers、Nico Grant　译／陈韦廷