Fake News: What Facebook is doing

There is a lot of fake news going around Facebook, at least that’s what some commentators say, and the fake stuff is too often believed.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Facebook came under fire during the presidential election in November with allegations that Facebook feeds included fake political stories intended to be seen as real.

According to the liberal news site Huffington Post, a news story infamously accused Hillary Clinton of running a child sex-trafficking ring out of a pizza shop. This story was seen as having a negative affect on voters and the implication was that the political right started it all.

As might be expected, now the whole issue of news has become politicized.
Hoaxes are everywhere on Facebook and the most ridiculous ones are meant to be funny, but some can sound plausible. The fake stories look exactly like news from professional news organizations.

Meanwhile, on the right, conservative websites claim news from even mainstream news organizations is so biased as to be fake. Left-wing websites make the same claim about conservative news sites. ‘

The question is how savvy Facebook readers are in identifying hoax news. An entire industry appears to have evolved around writing and sharing fake news stories through social media like Facebook. These shares can generate clicks on ads and revenue to the hoaxers. Buzzfeed, a liberal website itself accused of having fake news, analyzed the question and claimed that Facebook users shared the top 20 hoax news stories 18 percent more often than the top-20 stories from legitimate sources.

In response to these issues, Facebook said in its blog in December that it will be rolling out a series of protections to help ensure that what their users see is legitimate. Here are their four main strategies:

Easier Reporting – Users can now report a news story as a hoax by clicking on the upper right hand corner of a post allowing for a community-based response to the problem.
Flagging Stories as Disputed – Facebook itself has started working with third-party fact checkers and is using the Poynter Institute (a journalism teaching group) to help flag stories. Flagged stories will include a link to the article explaining why the story is false. Conservative groups point out the fact checking organizations, like snopes.com, are owned and staffed by politically active Democrats and groups like Poynter are also liberals. The fear is that conservative viewpoints will be flagged as false. Fact checking organizations have vigorously denied bias.

Informed Sharing – If articles are read and then not shared then they will be ranked lower than shared items.

Disrupting Financial Incentives for Spammers – They have taken steps to block known hoax sites and shut down their ability to get viewers and ad revenue sourced from Facebook.