How the big tech platforms including Facebook, Google, and Twitter, who've pledged to provide accurate information during major crises, are failing miserably
How Google Could Really Help Journalism Dave Winer / Scripting News : Journalism people say Google is bad at journalism. April Glaser / Slate : Facebook's Safety Check For the Las Vegas Shooting Promoted Alt-Right Blogs and a Bitcoin Wallet Tweets: Charlie Warzel / @cwarzel : Platforms like FB & Google have said news is a priority for YEARS. They keep proving w/ actions that's not true http://www.buzzfeed.com/... http://twitter.com/... @buzzfeednews : Facebook and Google issued statements apologizing for promoting misinformation about the Las Vegas shooting — and it isn't the first time they've run into trouble with breaking news http://www.buzzfeed.com/... Brandon Wall / @walldo : “When it comes to breaking news, platforms like Facebook and Google tout themselves as willing, competent gatekeepers. But it's clear they're simply not up to the task.” http://www.buzzfeed.com/... Jasmine El-Gamal / @jasmineelgamal : This is just getting ridiculous now. If you're not a news organization maybe stop trying to be one? Too much at stake here, for gods sake. http://twitter.com/... Charlie Warzel / @cwarzel : New: tech platforms pose as willing & competent gatekeepers 4 breaking news. But it's clear they r not up 2 the task http://www.buzzfeed.com/... http://twitter.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands at the intersection of two running failures the corpus has tracked. Platforms had publicly committed to surfacing accurate information during crises — yet when the Las Vegas shooting hit, Facebook's Safety Check promoted alt-right blogs and a Bitcoin wallet, forcing apology statements from both Facebook and Google. The pattern wasn't new even then: Charlie Warzel's point is that Facebook and Google have claimed news was a priority for years while their actions keep contradicting it.
What makes the story durable is how it foreshadows the corpus's later findings — that Google, YouTube, and Facebook still couldn't catch hoaxes fast enough after tragedies months on (breaking-news misinformation gaps), and that platforms ended up leaning on journalists as unpaid moderators to fill the void.
First-order effects
- Facebook and Google are immediately on the defensive, issuing apology statements for crisis-misinformation promotion — a repeat performance that undercuts their stated news commitments.
- Users turning to Safety Check and search during the Las Vegas shooting were served alt-right blogs and a Bitcoin wallet instead of verified information, directly harming the people the tools exist to help.
Second-order effects
- Newsrooms and individual journalists get pulled into de facto moderation roles, fact-checking platform surfaces in real time without compensation or tooling support.
- Each apology-without-fix compounds the sector's trust deficit, feeding the broader erosion narrative around election interference and platform influence that BuzzFeed documents weeks later.
Third-order effects
- If crisis-response failures persist structurally, the credible path is dedicated breaking-news verification teams inside platforms — an admission that algorithmic ranking alone cannot gatekeep live events.
- Repeated gaffes push regulators and the press toward treating crisis misinformation as a governance problem rather than a product bug, raising the cost of every subsequent failure.
The trend: Crisis misinformation is becoming the recurring stress test that exposes the gap between platforms' public pledges on news quality and their actual ranking systems.