Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg has set in place actions to help fight against fake news on Facebook.
When Donald Trump won the U.S election there were so many angles the finger was pointed for blame, and Facebook was one of them. Many users have complained that the social networking giant failed to stop the spread of fake news on its platform, which indirectly cost Hilary Clinton the Election.
When the claims first came out, Mark said 99% of its content was “authentic”. He also said the idea that Facebook helped influenced the election was a “pretty crazy idea”.
But after about a week of criticism, Facebook CEO and founder have finally agreed to take the required steps. He took to Facebook on Saturday morning saying ” A lot of you have asked what we’re doing about misinformation, so I wanted to give an update……We’ve been working on this problem for a long time and we take this responsibility seriously. We’ve made significant progress, but there is more work to be done.”
See his post here. He laid out some projects “already under way” to combat the problem, including:
- Tools to help flag fake news automatically.
- Showing warnings to users when a post that has been flagged as false is shown on a user timeline.
- Working with third-party fact-checking groups.
- Making adjustment to Facebook policies, so as to strangle the spread of fake news.
Mark also said he doesn’t want Facebook to edit users content “We believe in giving people a voice, which means erring on the side of letting people share what they want whenever possible. We need to be careful not to discourage sharing of opinions or to mistakenly restrict accurate content. We do not want to be arbiters of truth ourselves, but instead rely on our community and trusted third parties.”
Source : Facebook.