Eight months later, Facebook fulfills promise to label state-run media

At long last, Facebook announced Thursday that it has started labeling “state-controlled media” on the social network. Labels noting that an outlet is “partially or wholly under the control of a state” are showing up in a page’s Ad Library, on Pages themselves, and in the Page Transparency section.

Beginning next week, for U.S. users, Facebook will also affix the label to posts from the pages that show up in News Feed. Ads from the organizations will start getting the label “later this summer.”

Facebook first announced the initiative in October of 2019. It’s part of the company’s efforts to increase transparency about who is behind the information a user is seeing, particularly as related to elections.

“We’re providing greater transparency into these publishers because they combine the influence of a media organization with the strategic backing of a state, and we believe people should know if the news they read is coming from a publication that may be under the influence of a government,” Thursday’s blog post announcing the feature reads.

However, working out how to fairly apply the label apparently took some time. Facebook had to distinguish between several types of media outlets: those with public funding and editorial independence, organizations funded and controlled by the state, and those that fell somewhere in between. That difference has gotten other tech companies into trouble: YouTube faced criticism when it painted the editorially independent PBS and the Russian government-directed RT News with the same labeling brush.

In Facebook’s announcement Thursday, it said it consulted with experts to understand “the different ways and degrees to which governments exert editorial control over media entities.” That led it to establish several criteria to determine who is really in charge, where the money comes from, and if there is editorial independence. 

“We know that governments continue to use funding mechanisms to control media, but this alone doesn’t tell the full story,” Facebook writes. “That’s why our definition of state-controlled media extends beyond just assessing financial control or ownership and includes an assessment of editorial control exerted by a government.”

Labeling is a great step, but harmful state propaganda comes in many forms — most obviously, directly from a state leader. We can all think of one such guy whose freedom to incite violence and spread lies Facebook is still defending.