Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a comment to his home page last night that
finally addresses the problem of fake news on his social media site. "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," he wrote.
The importance of and interest in the topic arose shortly after the election when journalists like New York Magazine's Max Read began faulting social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit for Donald Trump's unexpected win. "The most obvious way in which Facebook enabled a Trump victory has been its inability (or refusal) to address the problem of hoax or fake news," Read wrote.
"Fake news is not a problem unique to Facebook, but Facebook's enormous audience, and the mechanisms of distribution on which the site relies — i.e., the emotionally charged activity of sharing, and the show-me-more-like-this feedback loop of the news feed algorithm — makes it the only site to support a genuinely lucrative market in which shady publishers arbitrage traffic by enticing people off of Facebook and onto ad-festooned websites, using stories that are alternately made up, incorrect, exaggerated beyond all relationship to truth, or all three," Read wrote. https://www.livescience.com/56951-zuckerberg-outlines-how-to-reduce-fake-news-on-facebook.html
