![]() ![]() By 4:30, the UFO Sightings Daily post had almost entirely stopped circulating on Facebook. This set off a chain of events where Facebook applies a warning label over false content and deprioritizes it, dropping it to the bottom of users’ feeds. Aliens had not in fact landed in the Garden State. The checkers had made their official decision. on September 16, Facebook’s internal system finally marking the post as fact-checked. ![]() It would take nearly another day for the verdict to come in. At this point, the UFO Sightings Daily post was being read at a rate of 3 million views per quarter hour. (It’s not clear which organization fact-checked the UFO Sightings Daily story.) Facebook remains reluctant to make such a call itself, and it hesitates to take its strongest action against misinformation until those outside checkers complete their review. The company relies on organizations like Poltifact to assess the veracity of content on its site. ![]() In the evening around 8, Facebook shifted responsibility for reviewing the post to its third-party fact-checkers. The post stayed up on Facebook, attracting millions of views. presidential election that was seven weeks away. By 10, it had been flagged internally as potential misinformation, but the moderation team within Facebook ignored it, likely burdened by reviewing content seen as more pressing-possibly related to Covid-19, but more likely material related to the U.S. The post from UFO Sightings Daily that really captured attention began circulating the next morning around 8 a.m. “Who knows what it is but it definitely does look suspicious LOL,” one member wrote in a comment. (Its caption continued an enduring meme from last year that imagined what else could happen in topsy-turvy 2020: “Who had bets on aliens in September?”) The post got 38 comments and 55 reaction emojis, making it more likely to show up on the group members’ Facebook feeds. It appeared on a Facebook group celebrating Italian-Americans. on September 14, shortly after the Giants game kicked off. As best can be told from Crowd Tangle data, the first Facebook post about it came at 8:16 p.m. The Facebook group remains publicly viewable on the site.Ī year later, in 2020, the UFO-or the blimp, depending on what you prefer to believe-appeared over New Jersey. On September 20 that year, several dozen people turned up outside the Nevada military base to carry through with the mission, eventually turned away by the guards stationed there. (Its tagline: “We attack at dawn!”) A Facebook invite to the proposed assault got 2 million RSVPs. In 2019, for instance, a Facebook group called “Storm Area 51 They Can’t Stop Us” attracted nearly 200,000 members. (Those fictional invaders landed in New Jersey, too-a little farther south, near Princeton.) Decades on, Facebook has proven a consistent home for interstellar speculation. Indeed, the first modern instance of misinformation spread was probably Orson Welles’ 1938 radio dramatization of War of the Worlds, famously the spark of a nationwide panic. It has no excuse when it comes to restraining talk about Little Green Men, a decidedly time-honored pastime. ![]() Recently, Facebook, which couldn’t be reached to comment for this story, has struggled to contain new wild conspiracy theories like QAnon, clearly underestimating at first how many people would fall under the political cult’s spell. And there’s also the difficulty that the platform has with real-time events.” Facebook, she says, struggles “to do any sort of quick turnaround” because of “the volume of everything that they have to go through.” “It’s a type of story that a lot of people will click on. She spent ten years at Facebook as a director of public policy fighting misinformation and has since started a consultancy, Anchor Change, to consider best practices for big tech. “The thing about the UFO-it seems like a perfect storm,” says Katie Harbath. ![]()
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