What Google and Facebook Need to do to Fight Disinformation

Editor's Note: In an interview with Mathew Ingram of Columbia Journalism Review, Karen Kornbluh and Ellen Goodman discuss their newly published paper on how digital platforms can address disinformation. 

Both Google and Facebook have acted surprisingly quickly to remove disinformation related to the COVID-19 virus over the past few weeks, considering their somewhat mixed track record when it comes to removing hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and trolls related to political campaigns. But experts there is still a lot more that they and other digital platforms could be doing. CJR spoke this week with Karen Kornbluh and Ellen Goodman, co-authors of a new paper published by the German Marshall Fund entitled “Safeguarding Digital Democracy,” which includes a series of steps they say the major digital platforms need to take in order to deal with the problem. Kornbluh is a former US Ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and a senior fellow at the GMF and director of the Digital Innovation and Democracy Initiative, and Goodman is a professor at Rutgers Law School, co-founder and co-director of the Institute for Information Policy & Law and a non-resident fellow with the GMF.