31/01/17 - Facebook is trying to tackle fake news, but what should we do? (42)

https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2017/jan/26/facebook-is-trying-to-tackle-fake-news-but-what-should-we-do

This article is about how Facebook are wanting to find a way to prevent fake news from happening. For example, the writer mentions that in mid-December, it announced that Facebook was testing a system to indentify fraudulent news stories. Now, Facebook is updating its trending list feature to favour verified news stories and to counter fake news. The list, itself, will be covered and monitored by several publishers, rather than on subjects that draw the largest number of people who share or comment on posts, where a lot of the fake news occurs with numerous of people misleading other users by feeding them the inaccurate information. In addition, at the very top, it gave an example of Donald Trump on how he is also filled with lies and would get a lot of his message across to the public via social media and then a lot of the popular social media accounts started to act upon this and try to make a difference to the world and online platform. 

• After a review, it has excited about 200 publishers from its AdSense network for various misrepresentations. 
• But is all fake news all the fault of social media ?
• "I swear to tell the post truth, the alternative truth and nothing but the truth".

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.