Facebook and fake news: what’s the real story?
Social media has been giving us the freedom to express our opinions in every possible way. But with this comes a great responsibility to backup any opinion with credible facts, because guess what? You can now report fake news on Facebook to stop it from spreading.
Facebook is providing users with the option to report a potential story that they suspect as false. Once reported Facebook sends it to a select group of pre-approved publications for fact checking. If they hold it to be inaccurate, the story will be marked with a ‘disputed tag’, have its advertising revenue removed and placed lower in news feeds.
The urgency came after Facebook faced a lot of criticism during the electoral season, which was followed by a statement from Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg that included:“Facebook is a new kind of platform different from anything before it. I think of Facebook as a technology company, but I recognize we have a greater responsibility than just building technology that information flows through. While we don’t write the news stories you read and share, we also recognize we’re more than just a distributor of news. We’re a new kind of platform for public discourse — and that means we have a new kind of responsibility to enable people to have the most meaningful conversations, and to build a space where people can be informed.”
What are your thoughts on the matter?