Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO, addressed the criticisms that his company has been promoting fake news in a lengthy post on the site. Since Facebook fired the editors who used to curate its “trending” topics, Facebook has received criticisms that its algorithm proliferates misinformation throughout the site and is unable to distinguish facts from fiction.
The Fake News Issue
"We take misinformation seriously. Our goal is to connect people with the stories they find most meaningful, and we know people want accurate information. We've been working on this problem for a long time and we take this responsibility seriously," he wrote in a Facebook post about the topic. "We've made significant progress, but there is more work to be done."
According to Silicon Beat, some people blamed Facebook for Donald Trump’s presidential victory because fake election stories circulated on the site and the company curates the information it shows to its 1.79 billion users on News Feeds, creating a “filter bubble” or echo chamber. The number of people who have been consuming news on social media sites has been on the rise.
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, mostly known as Mark Zuckerberg said earlier he thought the idea that Facebook influenced the outcome of the election is a “pretty crazy idea,” noting that less than 1 percent of news is fake on Facebook. Since then, the criticism Facebook has been facing over fake news has only grown.
Mark Zuckerberg Shares Facebook's Plan
From Zuckerberg's post on Facebook, here is the outline of some of the projects Facebook already has underway:
- Stronger detection. The most important thing we can do is improve our ability to classify misinformation. This means better technical systems to detect what people will flag as false before they do it themselves.
- Easy reporting. Making it much easier for people to report stories as fake will help us catch more misinformation faster.
- Third party verification. There are many respected fact-checking organizations and, while we have reached out to some, we plan to learn from many more.
- Warnings. We are exploring labeling stories that have been flagged as false by third parties or our community, and showing warnings when people read or share them.
- Related articles quality. We are raising the bar for stories that appear in related articles under links in News Feed.
- Disrupting fake news economics. A lot of misinformation is driven by financially motivated spam. We're looking into disrupting the economics with ads policies like the one we announced earlier this week, and better ad farm detection.
- Listening. We will continue to work with journalists and others in the news industry to get their input, in particular, to better understand their fact checking systems and learn from them.
