A Misinformation Test for Social Media

<p>Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have invested a significant amount of time and money trying to avoid the mistakes made during the 2016 election.</p><p>A test of those new policies came last week, when The New York Post published a story that contained supposedly incriminating documents and pictures taken from the laptop of Hunter Biden. The provenance and authenticity of that information is still in question, and Joe Biden’s campaign has rejected the assertions.</p><p>We speak to Kevin Roose, a technology columnist for The Times, about how the episode reveals the tension between fighting misinformation and protecting free speech.</p><p>Guest: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/by/kevin-roose" target="_blank">Kevin Roose</a>, a technology columnist for The New York Times.</p><p>For more information on today’s episode, visit <a href="http://nytimes.com/thedaily?smid=pc-thedaily" target="_blank">nytimes.com/thedaily </a></p><p>Background reading: </p><ul><li>Here’s Kevin’s full report on<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/15/technology/facebook-twitter-nypost-hunter-biden.html" target="_blank"> the efforts by Twitter and Facebook to limit the spread</a> of the Hunter Biden story.</li><li>The New York Post published the piece despite<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/18/business/media/new-york-post-hunter-biden.html?searchResultPosition=2" target="_blank"> doubts within the paper’s newsroom</a> — some reporters withheld their bylines and questioned the credibility of the article.</li><li>Joe Biden’s campaign<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/14/us/politics/hunter-biden-ukraine-facebook-twitter.html?searchResultPosition=3" target="_blank"> has rejected</a> the assertions made in the story.</li></ul>