Most of the misinformation happens in groups on Facebook, far away from the feeds of most people. If you are going to fight misinformation, you will need to sacrifice a bit of your personal sanity and mental wellbeing by joining some of these groups. Groups about QAnon, groups about “The Plandemic”, groups about 5G causing Covid-19. Groups with innocuous names like “The Seers”. It really doesn’t matter what the name of the group is, just join 1 or 2, or 8, or 25. Then lurk for a bit and get the lay of the land.
You might be thinking that the next step is to start reporting blatant misinformation, hate speech, calls to violence, etc. And while you can do that, it’s largely useless. Facebook’s business model basically relies on misinformation, hate speech, and conspiracy theory. Zuckerberg all but said so this month in an interview with Axios. The best that you can hope for if you do this, generally, is that you might be one of the reasons Facebook puts one of those useless fucking tags on a post saying the info is disputed by fact checkers. And even that is unlikely.
It took a while, but I figured out how to, at the very least, get the people most stridently peddling misinformation on a temporary post ban. As a person who has spent many many 30 day periods in “Facebook jail” for being too mean to bigots, it should have dawned on me sooner honestly. Facebook will nearly always police tone if not content. So if you can very politely wind up one of the people spreading misinformation, you can make them stop, at least temporarily.
Once you’re ready, and I dunno, once you have a big pile of weed in front of you if you do smoke weed, start asking questions. Start asking things like “where did you get this information from?”. Or “do you have another source for this information? This website you linked to seems shady.” Or even a bit more assertive, something like “I do not believe this, I don’t think anyone should believe this, it’s poorly sourced and the article has a lot of grammatical errors”, which doesn’t even have to be true. Odds are that the person who shared the article didn't read it. The person likely just saw the headline, liked the headline, and shared it. Do not tag them in any of your replies. Ever.
Assuming you are not immediately kicked out of the group for asking these questions, it’s likely that the person spreading the misinformation will start tagging you in their responses over and over again. And over and over and over and over again. When they do this, keep pushing. Politely. Ask them why they cannot just answer your question about the article or post they shared. After a little bit of this, the person who posted the article, and possibly others in the group who are not too pleased with the push back, will start making aggressive or even threatening comments… with your user name tagged in the comment. At this point, it’s not a bad idea to suggest that they need not incessantly tag you in every reply, that you can see the messages without being constantly tagged. In some cases, this will wind these people up even more, and their comments will become more aggressive, tagging you in each reply. All you have to do is keep replying, saying that you don’t believe their claims and asking for more information about the source of the claims being made.
And now it becomes a judgement call as to when to start reporting the comments. Do not report them for “fake news” or “hate speech” or “violence” even if they are clearly threats. Report them for harassment. Go through and report each tag that includes aggressive or threatening language for harassment. At this point it is also a good idea to inform them that you’ve gone ahead and started reporting their comments for harassment. After all, that’s what you are doing. Again, be polite but direct and do not tag their username in any of your replies. This will very likely result in a ramp up of the rhetoric. As that happens, just continue asking them questions. Ask why they’re being so aggressive, or if they’re threatening you, ask why they’re threatening a stranger for disagreeing with them in a comment thread. And as you go along, keep reporting the aggressive replies with tags as harassment.
This works. And you yourself will not end up in Facebook jail as you have not insulted anyone or engaged in aggressive rhetoric yourself. Believe me, if you “fight fire with fire” in a group like this where you are outnumbered, you will be brigade reported. And since most of these groups only really have a handful of people doing most of the posting of misinformation and disinformation, a few infiltrators using this method can pretty easily go in and disrupt the flow of misinformation.
