In fake news, there's no such thing as ghosts

Despite the distorted narrative created by social platforms and indulged by key media figures, misinformation is not led by robots, foreign spies, or algorithmic aliens

David Kirkpatrick’s book The Facebook Effect attributes to Mark Zuckerberg a saying that became an instant classic. When trying to explain the News Feed mechanism to his colleagues, Facebook’s CEO said: “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.”

You can think what you want about the phrase, it’s a free country (most of them anyway). And this was 2006, a time when social media’s greatest dilemma was the excess of kitten videos over hard news.

If transported 15 years into the future, this squirrel comparison would be quite different, and it would yield a much more disturbing imagine-this exercise. So, imagine this:

It’s 2021, Facebook users still don’t give a damn about “people dying in Africa” — that part hasn’t changed — and they still remain intrigued by the squirrels’ death in the front yard. Everyone’s News Feed is full of stories about the rodents — some of them are true, most are false. It turns out that the squirrels are actually…