Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) has recently come under fire for the increased number of fake news articles concerning the US presidential election.
Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg addressed critics and said in a Facebook post on Friday evening that the site will be taking part in a series of steps to weed out hoaxes and other false information.
Facebook has reached out to several “respected fact-checking organisations” for third-party verification, Zuckerberg wrote. He said the company are also planning to make the reporting of false stories much easier and to create “better technical systems to detect what people will flag as false before they do it themselves”.
“If we are not serious about facts and what’s true and what’s not if we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems,” he said at press conference.
“If everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won’t know what to protect,” he went on. “We won’t know what to fight for. And we can lose so much of what we’ve gained in terms of the kind of democratic freedoms and market-based economies and prosperity that we’ve come to take for granted.”
This new approach to the fake news found circulated on the social media site differs to Facebook’s previous claims that it is a technology company, not a publisher, and therefore not responsible for the content that users circulate on the site.
The fake news stories found on Facebook have been varied. Two include the stories that the Pope Francis had endorsed Trump in the presidential election and that the federal agent who had been investigating Hillary Clinton was found dead.
“While the percentage of misinformation is relatively small, we have much more work ahead on our roadmap,” Zuckerberg said.
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