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Facebook has detailed its plan to deal with fake news appearing on the platform. It involves labeling false information with a link to a fact-checking site, as well as warning users when they attempt to repost these flagged items and giving them a worse position in the news feed:
Facebook has struggled for months over whether it should crack down on false news stories and hoaxes that are being spread on its site. Now, it has finally come to a decision. The social network is going to partner with the Poynter International Fact-Checking Network, which includes groups such as Snopes and the Associated Press, to evaluate articles flagged by Facebook users. If those articles do not pass the smell test for the fact-checkers, Facebook will label that evaluation whenever they are posted or shared, along with a link to the organization that debunked the story. Many of the organizations said that they're not getting paid for this.
"We have a responsibility to reduce the spread of fake news on our platform," Adam Mosseri, Facebook vice president of product development, told The Washington Post. Mosseri said the social network still wants to be a place where people with all kinds of opinions can express themselves but has no interest in being the arbiter of what's true and what's not for its 1 billion users.
The new system will work like this: If a story on Facebook is patently false — saying that a celebrity is dead when they are still alive, for example — then users will see a notice that the story has been disputed or debunked. People who try to share stories that have been found false will also see an alert before they post. Flagged stories will appear lower in the news feed than unflagged stories. Users will also be able to report potentially false stories to Facebook or send messages directly to the person posting a questionable article.
The Pew Research Center also released a survey about fake news, finding that a majority of Americans believe that fake news has caused confusion about the basic facts of current events.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18 2016, @11:38PM
The real problem is that anyone is on Facebook [stallman.org] to begin with. It's not just a personal decision, because Facebook even collects information on people who don't even have accounts. People should not be promoting such an unethical service.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @02:05AM
Like I said, techno-hermit elitism.
It really doesn't matter what platform people use, these problems will happen with all of them because the problem is people. Traditional journalism had a process for dealing with it - editorial discretion, multiple sources, fact-checkers, retractions, etc. The new p2p communication system on the net lack an equivalent. So now we are back to a complete free-for-all. And if we are all omniscient experts that would be fine. But we aren't so it isn't. Instead we get an object lesson in the fact that opinions are like assholes because everybody's got one and most of them stink.