good morning.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook announced it had acquired CrowdTangle, a media tracking and self-described “social listening” tool, days after Donald Trump was elected president in November 2016. The company later touted the tool as part of its efforts to “secure the 2020 election” and announced it had given access to election boards and secretaries of state across the country to “help quickly identify misinformation, voter interference and suppression.”
On Wednesday, the company, now known as Meta Platforms, shut down CrowdTangle, despite requests from journalists and watchdog groups to keep the tool running through January to combat disinformation in this year’s U.S. presidential election. Meta monitors its own platform, while CrowdTangle allows the public to track the spread of false stories and see how popular incendiary posts are on Facebook. Meta’s alternative, the Meta Content Library, excludes most news organizations and is considered less useful, but Meta says it helps it meet privacy standards while satisfying regulatory requirements.
Business leaders have a vested interest in fighting disinformation. While they uphold the integrity and trust that hold society together, companies can also be targets of disinformation campaigns, as seen in recent efforts to disrupt the Olympics and deceive employees.
But the leaders best placed to stop the deluge of misinformation on social platforms aren’t making the job easy. Rather than helping to solve the problem, posts on Elon Musk’s acquired social media platform X are adding to it: Musk’s false or misleading claims about the U.S. election have been viewed nearly 1.2 billion times this year, according to a report by the Digital Hate Countermeasures Center.
One strategy to combat this deluge is to devote resources to spreading the truth. That’s the approach Steve Ballmer is taking with “Just The Facts,” a new video series for his nonprofit site, USAFacts. As the former Microsoft CEO and Los Angeles Clippers owner told me earlier last week, the series aims to uncover the facts on “big election issues,” from jobs to illegal immigration. In addition to streaming the videos on YouTube, he’s also paying for airtime on networks like Fox.
Ballmer explained that he took on the role of narrator himself to “grow a little bit of an audience.” Though he’s a little more reserved when talking about immigration than he is about Microsoft or basketball teams, the videos are compelling, reassuringly truthful summaries of the facts. His goal, he said, is “to, at the very least, educate people.”
He’s trying to counter a problem identified by Tom Steyer, the prominent climate investor, philanthropist, and Democrat: that we like to be entertained and tend to be drawn to stories that reinforce our existing beliefs. Steyer told our group at Fortune that “there’s been a big shift from edited to unedited news, where people can write authoritatively about things they know nothing about or don’t know at all.” [are] It’s a total lie, and there’s no teacher standing at the front of the room and saying, ‘Oh, Johnny, that’s not true.'”
This is partly down to market forces, Ballmer said. “The media industry is under economic attack, so being provocative is more rewarded than being non-provocative,” he said. He hopes that when people are confronted with local and national facts and data, they will change.
“I think we’ve accomplished a lot,” he told me, “and I’m overwhelmed by how much more there is to do.”
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Diane Brady
diane.brady@fortune.com
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This CEO Daily was curated by Joey Abrams.
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