Analysis: Facebook's new emphasis on groups could leave it more vulnerable to disinformation

Facebook is making communication with smaller communities "the heart" of its biggest redesign in years. But that change could leave the service even more vulnerable to disinformation artists.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that communications on its Groups feature will be as central as connecting with Facebook "friends." They'll be front and center in the company's app as Facebook undergoes a makeover that Zuckerberg says signals the company's plans to reorient toward privacy.

But skeptics warn that Facebook groups are a preferred tool for trolls, spammers and other bad actors seeking to stoke divisions or blast fake news. They've been leveraged by Russian trolls ahead of U.S. elections and exploited by hoaxers spreading false information about vaccinations.

"This may be good for Facebook's business, but I'm not sure it's good for society at large," said Paul Barrett, deputy director of New York University's Stern Center for Business and Human Rights.

This strategy could put Facebook in a serious bind as policymakers in Washington and around the world want the company to beef up its defenses against disinformation, especially ahead of key elections. Putting Groups front and center could lead to political headaches down the line as lawmakers scrutinize the role disinformation on social media can play in influencing election outcomes or public health decisions.

The shift to communities means Facebook may put more of the onus on users to play a bigger role in policing content on the website. Already, group administrators set the rules and monitor the communities they administrate on Facebook. If such groups become a more prominent feature on the site, these users could be a bigger line of defense against disinformation on the service.

"I think it does shift a great deal more responsibility onto the shoulders of the group administrators," Barrett told me.

But not all group administrators have good intentions - which could exacerbate safety problems. "The thing that makes me nervous is the formation of groups for malign purposes - situations where the admins might be part of the problem, not the cops on the beat," Barrett said.

Facebook has a business incentive to make communities a more prominent part of the experience. As Zuckerberg noted in his keynote at the F8 developers conference yesterday, communications with smaller groups of friends - through messaging, ephemeral stories and Groups - are the fastest-growing ways people are communicating online.

Zuckerberg described the positive benefits of groups in building digital communities. He touted groups that connect military families moving to new cities, or one that connects runners who care about the environment and want to coordinate jogs where they pick up trash.

But he didn't mention some of the more sinister ways that Facebook Groups - which can have varying levels of secrecy depending on the administrator settings - can be leveraged.

For instance, special counsel Robert Mueller's indictment of a Russian troll farm in early 2018 exposed how the actors seeking to influence the election used groups on the platform to target Americans on politically divisive issues. BuzzFeed reported how Facebook groups were used to troll people who thought they were seeking information about the 2018 March for Our Lives rally in favor of gun control. The Washington Post's Lena Sun detailed how a closed Facebook group was ground zero for a plot to troll a Pittsburgh doctor's office that was urging parents to vaccinate their children.

Zuckerberg did acknowledge in his keynote that the company is prioritizing safety as it makes this shift.

"We are very focused on safety here across groups," Zuckerberg said. "While we're recommending groups for people to join, we're very focused on making sure that our recommendation and discovery services aren't highlighting groups where people are repeatedly sharing misinformation or harmful content. We're working hard to remove groups if they exist primarily to violate our policies or do things that are dangerous."

But Barrett frets that the groups will simply replicate the same disinformation problems on the platform currently. "My reaction was one of great skepticism and concern that in an effort to hold onto user volume, keep as many users as possible, that Facebook could end up just going down a different path that leads to same problems we've seen before," Barrett said.

Facebook's decision to elevate groups follows the company's announcement that it would shift to more private and encrypted forms of communication. The broader strategy of moving toward encryption comes with clear safety trade-offs.

Zuckerberg told The Washington Post's Elizabeth Dwoskin in an interview this week that the company is working on ways to identify coordinated activity from bad actors even when it can't see the messages, "but there's no way that I can sit here and tell you that we can do 100% as well if we eliminate one of the big tools that we have."