15/11/16 - Facebook staff mount secret push to tackle fake news, reports say (18)

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/14/facebook-fake-news-us-election-news-feed-algorithm

This article is talking about how Facebook are facing the pressure to improve the way it deals with fake news in the wake of the shock 2016 US presidential election result, amid reports that even some of its own staff have formed an unofficial task force to address the problem. Nowadays, if news if being published by a certain someone, it will expand and get the many different people very quickly and therefore, Facebook cannot do anything about it. However, despite their being 'fake news' published onto Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been denying these statements and says that most of what the audience see on their Facebook news feeds is true. He stated that if he did spot any false news, Facebook would be able to recognise it instantly and would have it removed straight away.

• The Pew Research Center found that 62% of Americans get all or some of their news from social media, of which Facebook accounts for the lion’s share.
• Yet an analysis by BuzzFeed found that 38% of posts shared on Facebook by three rightwing politics sites included “false or misleading information”, while three large leftwing pages did so 19% of the time.
• CEO Mark Zuckerberg insisted on Sunday that more than 99% of what people see on the platform is authentic, rejecting the “crazy idea” that fake news swayed voters.

I believe that what Facebook are doing, is trying to save themselves from the critics so that they will not have anything bad said about them. One of the key reasons I think this is because, CEO Mark Zuckerberg talks about how 99% of the time, news is accurate which therefore means that there is a 1% chance that the news could be inaccurate. However, he did not mention that; he said that they will spot this 1% chance and no one would notice it. In addition, I believe that this is very misleading for the Facebook users and they then may think that everything that they see on Facebook is true when others would know that this is a false piece of news. Therefore, I think that Facebook should change this and should make sure that everything they distribute should be properly checked over before 'feeding the news' to their audience/users.