08 Dec Zuckerberg plans crackdown on Facebook Fake News
The revolutionary invention of the Internet has allowed us to read news from all corners of the globe at a click of a button. And social media giant, Facebook, has allowed us to share it, in effect, boosting its overall reach. Yet, how much of it is actually based on factual information, rather than alarming falsehoods? Indeed when you think about it, it’s not such an easy thing to measure. The truth is that a proportion of the links that people share and many of us click on every day is fake news. And Facebook’s creator knows it. Ergo, Mark Zuckerberg has planned out a course of action in order to banish Facebook Fake News for good. But will his plan work? Only time will tell.
Facebook entrepreneur addresses the problem of misinformation
Social Media giant, Facebook, has been subjected to much scrutiny as a result of America’s election, including an unprecedented comment from Obama on Trump’s surprising election win, which has essentially caused the multi-billion company to take a stand against fake news been being shared on its site. On the 19th November, Mark Zuckerberg posted a status on Facebook stating that the company takes ‘misinformation very seriously’ and that fundamentally their goal is to present the public with ‘accurate information’. And although the entrepreneur stated that the company has made ‘ significant progress’ in regards to improving Facebook, he publicly confessed that ‘there’s still more work to be done’.
A ‘technical’ & ‘Philosophic’ Problem
According to Zuckerberg, Facebook’s concern about the problem of fake news is both ‘technical’ and ‘philosophical’. Whilst the overall company philosophy centers on ‘giv[ing] people a voice’, it feels that it needs to work on significantly decreasing, if not annihilating, the amount of Facebook Fake News stories shared on its network by changing certain policies and continuously improving the social media platform in this regard.
One Step Forward – Facebook Bans Fake News from its Advertising Network
Zuckerberg took his first step in tackling the problem on Monday 14th November when the company he co-founded added fake news sites to its list of sites that are banned from its advertising network – the Facebook Audience Network. In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for the social media giant said, “In accordance with the Audience Network Policy, we do not integrate or display ads in apps or sites containing content that is illegal, misleading or deceptive, which includes fake news.”
The Facebook Audience Network is an advertising platform which is used to display ads on third-party sites and mobile applications, in effect, helping partners produce advertising revenue whilst Facebook gains a small slice of the pie in the process. Despite a predicted loss in overall revenue for the company, the social media company decided to update its policies which paralleled Google’s decision to ban fake news sites from monetizing their pages by utilizing Google’s ad-selling software.
The Fight’s not over it’s just begun
Zuckerberg’s fight against fake news does not simply end at banning it from its advertising network. The co-founder of the social media network has also vouched to keep working on a number of factors to ensure that it’s wiped out by striving for better detection of news by untrustworthy sources and ‘raising the bar for stories that appear in related articles under links in News Feed’ in an attempt to weed out good articles from bad ones.
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