Mark Zuckerberg Details How Facebook Plans to Fight Fake News
The company’s employees were reportedly not happy with the lack of any action against fake stories
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After Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the US elections, social media giant Facebook came under attack for carrying several fake stories.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Trump winning the elections due to the fake news on Facebook was a “crazy idea”. He insisted that such news will not have any impact on people.
On Friday, Zuckerberg put out a Facebook post saying that the social media company has been working on the problems related to misinformation, adding that “it’s a complex technical problem to fix”.
Facebook has always relied on the discretion of the users to report links with false information. The website extensively depends on the “community standards” to figure what kind of content is acceptable.
Following the fake news controversy, many Facebook employees reportedly expressed unhappiness with the lack of any action against such stories. A task force of employees has purportedly been formed within the organisation to discuss the issue.
Zuckerberg outlined a series of steps that Facebook was taking to include a greater use of automation to detect what was flagged as false information.
He said Facebook would make it easier to report false content, work with third-party verification organisations and journalists on fact-checking efforts, and explore posting warning labels on content that has been flagged as false. The company will also try to prevent fake news providers from making money through its advertising system, as it had previously announced.
Zuckerberg said Facebook must be careful not to discourage sharing of opinions or mistakenly restricting accurate content. "We do not want to be arbiters of truth ourselves, but instead rely on our community and trusted third parties," he said.
Facebook is also making sure that users are not discouraged to share their opinion or mistakenly restrict accurate content.
(With inputs from Reuters and NBC News)
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