Mark Zuckerberg really pushed the limits of a Friday night news dump when he posted Facebook's new plan for dealing with fake news, which includes vague notes on "warnings" and "disrupting fake news economics." Again, the social media mogul mostly communicated that he would just like us to trust him.
Zuckerberg began his message on combating false information by writing several sentences in a row that are mostly untrue. First, he wrote, "The bottom line is: we take misinformation seriously." Facebook has repeatedly refused to acknowledge that it functions as a media company and therefore has a responsibility to make every effort to deliver the truth.
"Our goal is to connect people with the stories they find most meaningful, and we know people want accurate information." He furthered.
In a report, insiders at the company claim that Facebook had tools to fight fake news but decided not to use them because they "disproportionately impacted right-wing news sites by downgrading or removing that content from people's feeds."
That is to say, users would not be happy if they found out they weren't getting their "news" because the information was inaccurate. It can be known that Zuckerberg has previously said "more than 99% of what people see on Facebook is authentic," but that information comes from internal statistics that haven't been independently reviewed.
Pressure then increased for the company to address the issue when it was reported by Buzzfeed that false news stories "outperformed" accurate information in the weeks before the election.)
The CEO then wrote that Facebook currently relies on the community to flag posts and that they "use signals from those reports along with a number of others - like people sharing links to myth-busting sites such as Snopes - to understand which stories we can confidently classify as misinformation."
Zuckerberg seems to be saying that Facebook has already made some determinations about what kind of site is trustworthy as Snopes, for example and it uses that information. In the past, the young billionaire has publicly worried that making decisions like that would be a slippery slope in which his company could wield too much power.
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