THERE are many ways to view the kerfuffle over Facebook’s decision to enter into a fact-checking partnership with Rappler and Vera Files.
The Palace on Tuesday objected to Facebook’s choice of partners, saying they, too, were guilty of political partisanship and should not be trusted to vet people’s Facebook pages.
On the Internet, supporters of President Duterte voiced the same objections, albeit with more vitriol—and less thought. One blogger’s threat to delete his Facebook page in protest was a textbook example of cutting off the nose to spite the face. A call for a mass exodus from Facebook to its Russian counterpart seemed even more bizarre and equally pointless, bringing to mind lemmings marching off to oblivion.
The suggestion from a Palace official—to make their objections known to Facebook—seemed a much more sensible way to go.
Unfortunately, given the partisan nature of our media landscape, any choice that Facebook makes would draw opposition from somebody.
A 2018 study of 38 countries by the Pew Research Center is indicative of how far apart we are from other countries in valuing a non-partisan press.
In one part of the survey, respondents were asked if it was never acceptable or sometimes acceptable for a news organization to favor one political party over others when reporting the news. Large majorities in most countries and a global median of 75 percent of all respondents said it was never acceptable. In the Philippines, however, only 52 percent said it was never acceptable, and a large 41 percent said it was sometimes acceptable to favor one political party over others when reporting the news.
Despite this view, Filipino respondents gave local media organizations high marks for reporting on important issues, government leaders and officials and political issues fairly.
These two seemingly incompatible findings suggest that Filipino readers accept that news organizations here are partisan, but patronize enough of them to balance out the falsehoods and get at the objective truth.
None of this makes it easy for a social media company such as Facebook to choose a local fact-checking partner that is acceptable to all. Instead of just two like-minded media partners, perhaps the social media giant needs to widen the field to a more diverse set of partners to ensure that falsehoods on both sides of the political fence are identified and properly vetted.
These partners, of course, will need to check their politics at the door and keep each other honest.
After all, as the US statesman Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”