Undercurrents

Under-the-radar trends, stories, and random anecdotes worth your time.

Facebook’s fact-checking labels aren’t doing much to slow the spread of election-related misinformation, BuzzFeed News reported. Reporters Craig Silverman and Ryan Mac obtained information from Facebook’s data scientists suggests that labeling election claims as disputed slowed re-shares by only about 8% on average, according to the report. That helps explain why, per the New York Times’ Kevin Roose, the past week’s 20 most-engaged Facebook posts containing the word “election” were all from Trump, even though every single one carried a fact-checking label. (I dove into Roose’s Facebook engagement data in last week’s newsletter.) This was not an accident on Facebook’s part: According to The Information’s Alex Heath, the company’s civic integrity unit had recommended measures to slow the spread of misinformation, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg rejected them. Meanwhile, “Stop the Steal” groups are still flourishing on Facebook despite some attempts to purge them, my OneZero colleague Sarah Emerson reported.
Facing antitrust probes, Apple lowered its cut of App Store revenues from 30% to 15% for small developers clearing less than $1 million per year, the Wall Street Journal reported. It’s a welcome gesture, and Apple was quick to tout that it would help the “vast majority” of developers who use its platform. And yet, as the New York Times noted, those small developers account for less than 5% of Apple’s App Store revenues. In other words, it’s a cheap way for Apple to earn some good will and perhaps defuse some of the regulatory pressure it’s facing. It’s also a good reminder that even the threat of a more robust antitrust regime is enough to start changing companies’ behavior. (I wrote in depth about the antitrust argument against Apple in February.)
The New York Times