Facebook is taking steps to weed out
fake news and hoaxes, addressing the growing controversy over its role in the
spread of misinformation on the Internet that sharpened political divisions and
inflamed discourse during the presidential election.
The
giant social network said Thursday it plans to make it easier to report a hoax
and for fact-checking organizations to flag fake articles. It's
also removing financial incentives for spammers and plans to pay
closer attention to other signals, such as which articles Facebook users read
but then don't share. Last month, Facebook barred fake news sites from using
its ad-selling services.
"We
believe in giving people a voice and that we cannot become arbiters of truth
ourselves, so we're approaching this problem carefully," Adam Mosseri,
vice president of product management, said in a blog post.
Facebook took heat after the
election for not doing enough to remove fake news reports, such as a
widely shared but erroneous article claiming Pope Francisendorsing Donald
Trump. Some 170 million people in North America use Facebook every day.
Nearly half of all adults in the U.S. say they get their news from Facebook.
Facebook has been reluctant to put
itself in the position of judging what content is misleading, resisting calls
that it has become a de facto news publisher, exercising editorial judgment
with the power to sway the minds of billions.
BuzzFeed News found that people
who say they rely on Facebook as a major source of news were more likely to believe
politically slanted fake news stories. An earlier BuzzFeed News analysis found
that top-performing fake news articles on the election generated more
engagement on Facebook than articles from major news outlets in the last months
of the presidential campaign.
Fake news creates significant public
confusion about current events with nearly one-fourth of Americans saying they
have shared a fake news story, according to a Pew Research Center survey.
Fake news
spread by 23% of Americans, study says
While saying it was "extremely
unlikely" that phony stories shared on Facebook changed the election outcome,
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last month that work had begun to
help the nearly 1.8 billion users of the social-media service "flag fake
news and hoaxes."
"Our goal is to show people the
content they will find most meaningful, and people want accurate news,"
Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page.
CUNY journalism professor Jeff
Jarvis says he's pleased to see Facebook take the scourge of fake news
seriously. There's more that Facebook will need to do to eradicate fake news
from the platform but, he says, it's "headed in the right
direction."
Fake-news
fighters enter breach left by Facebook, Google
Facebook is reaching out to users in
those crucial moments in which they are deciding whether to share an article,
Jarvis says, and that will improve the experience of Facebook, with fewer
opportunities to be fooled by fake news and fewer fake news articles flowing
through the News Feed.
"It's a fairly crappy
experience to go in and see ridiculously stupid lies in your feed. Some people
say people want to believe what they want to believe. I'm not so cynical about
mankind. I actually believe that people want to be correct given the opportunity
to be correct," Jarvis said.
Facebook says it will now make it
easier to report fake news. "We've relied heavily on our
community for help on this issue, and this can help us detect more fake
news," Mosseri said. To flag a fake news article, users will be able to
click on the upper right hand corner of a post.
News articles flagged by users will
be sent to third-party fact-checking organizations that are part of Poynter's
International Fact Checking Network, Facebook says. If the article is
identified as fake by the fact-checking organizations, it will get flagged as
"disputed" and there will be a link to an article explaining why.
Stories that have been disputed will also get pushed down in News Feed.
Mark
Zuckerberg: Facebook fake news didn't sway election
"It will still be possible to
share these stories, but you will see a warning that the story has been
disputed as you share," Mosseri said. Once the article is flagged, it
cannot be turned into an ad and promoted.
Articles that get read by Facebook
users but not shared may indicate they are misleading, Facebook says. So it
will be paying closer attention to those. "We're going to test
incorporating this signal into ranking, specifically for articles that are
outliers," Mosseri said.
And Facebook says it's going to
remove the financial incentives for spammers. Fake news sites lure people from
Facebook to show them ads. Facebook says it has eliminated the ability to
spoof Web domains so that fake news sites can no longer masquerade as
real publications. It says it's also analyzing publisher sites for misleading
or deceptive content and ramping up enforcement.
That's welcome news to Lisel
Laslie, a 48-year-old mother of two and avid Facebook user
from Tallahassee, Fla. Over the summer, bogus articles trashing both
presidential candidates began flooding her News Feed, and she began
posting less frequently and spending less time on Facebook. Even after the
election is over, Laslie says she's reluctant to share any articles on
Facebook. It's too much work figuring out what's real.
"It's like I am an
investigative reporter and I have to check eight sources before sharing
anything," Laslie said.
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