Throughout 2016, a lot of fake news gained attention on Facebook. To recall a few of the more famous items, Facebook users learned that the Pope, had endorsed Donald Trump. That a Democratic Operative was murdered after agreeing to testify against Hillary Clinton and also went to the extent of Bill Clinton raping a 13-year old. Well, none of this happened.
Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg has addressed this issue of fake news disguised as pieces of journalism in public, not once but twice. Last night, Zuckerberg posted a comment related to this matter on his home page.
The comment read,
Normally we wouldn’t share specifics about our work in progress, but given the importance of these issues and the amount of interest in this topic, I want to outline some of the projects we already have underway.
Facebook is trying to find out a solution regarding what to do once the fake information is already out and how to cut down its impact on the audience. The Facebook VP of News Feed, Adam Mosseri said last night at the University of California, Berkeley, that one way to reduce this is to let people know that they are reading the wrong news.
So, if someone read and shared a story that comes out to be fake, Facebook could send the user a notification.
In December, Mosseri had revealed the company’s plans to bring out measures to combat fake news that gets shared and read throughout the social media platform. Earlier this week, Facebook stretched this measure to Germany.
All other panelists at the University agreed that there will always be fake news and especially till the time when financial incentives is provided. Although Facebook does not make money from fake news, the social media does send economic value to fake news publishers.
Mosseri also said that the ultimate goal is to prevent the fake news from entering Facebook at all. He also mentioned that he is excited about inspecting the landing page carefully because as it goes, if you are looking at a landing page and 90 percent of the pages are ads, then that’s not a legitimate site.
Facebook is a popular platform to be extracting all kinds of news. This issue of fake news is dangerous for the social media platform as it can lead to a whole lot of complications. We hope the platform is able to take effective measures to deal with this problem.
