John Borthwick of Betaworks and Jeff Jarvis of CUNY offer ideas for tackling fake news on Facebook, Twitter, and Google
We—John Borthwick and Jeff Jarvis—want to offer constructive suggestions for what the platforms—Facebook, Twitter, Google, Instagram, Snapchat, WeChat, Apple News …
Context & Ripple Effects
In the weeks after the 2016 election, fake news became a named problem for the distribution layer of media rather than a publishers-only complaint. The publishers' trade body DCN had already written directly to Facebook and Google's CEOs demanding action, and Borthwick and Jarvis — one a platform-builder via Betaworks, the other a journalism scholar at CUNY — are adding an outside-in design brief aimed at Facebook, Twitter, Google, and the wider set including Apple News and Snapchat.
What makes their intervention notable is that it arrives as suggestions rather than demands, positioning the two as bridge figures between Silicon Valley product culture and the news industry at the exact moment platforms were deciding how much editorial responsibility to absorb.
First-order effects
- Facebook, Twitter, and Google now have a concrete, public checklist of fixes from credible industry insiders, layered on top of the DCN letter campaign — raising the cost of doing nothing beyond reputational risk.
- The proposal reframes fake news as a product-design problem (ranking, labeling, friction) that the platforms' own teams can implement, rather than a content problem requiring them to become editors.
Second-order effects
- Within a month, Facebook moved toward exactly this kind of mechanism, adopting [[a:914963|warning labels and lower News Feed ranking for stories flagged by third-party fact-checkers like Snopes and AP]] while keeping flagged stories shareable — evidence that outside proposals shaped the response.
- Fact-checking organizations like Snopes and AP gain leverage and workload as platforms outsource verification to unpaid third parties, creating a new dependency between platforms and news-adjacent institutions.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform governance drifts toward hybrid models — algorithmic ranking plus external fact-checkers plus academic study, as later seen when Facebook solicited academic proposals to research false news on its own service — institutionalizing trust work as permanent infrastructure rather than crisis response.
- The unresolved tension Borthwick and Jarvis surface — platforms distributing news without bearing its economics — resurfaces later in debates over whether forcing Facebook and Google to pay for news fixes the underlying ad-market problem, per the Stratechery argument that payment mandates risk uncritical tech coverage.
The trend: Platform responsibility for information quality is shifting from ad-hoc crisis response toward standing infrastructure built from ranking changes, third-party fact-checking, and external oversight.