Fake-news fix by Zuck to save Face
This is not fake news. Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg has agreed that phony news is a problem on his social-media network, and he and his team hope to someday use artificial intelligence to root it out.
Until then, Facebook has hired humans to do the job of policing his vast site’s news feeds, officials said Thursday, a month after Zuckerberg pooh-poohed concerns that so-called “fake news” on Facebook may have tipped the presidency to Donald Trump.
That includes one viral story that falsely claimed Trump had been endorsed by the pope.
“It’s important to us that the stories you see on Facebook are authentic and meaningful,” news-feed Vice President Adam Mosseri posted Thursday.
“And we’ve been working hard to make improvements to our platform so you see less hoaxes and fake news.”
Facebook is testing several ways to make it easier for users to report fake news stories with a couple of clicks, Mosseri said.
They’ll use these “reports from our community” to funnel iffy stories to independent fact checkers, including Snopes, Politifact, ABC News and FactCheck.org, all members of the Poynter International Fact-Checking Network.
If a story is disputed by two or more fact checkers, it will be tagged with a warning: “Disputed by 3rd Party FactCheckers.” Clicking on the warning will bring up explanatory details.
The flagged stories will be deep-sixed in users’ feeds and can’t be made into an ad or promoted.
And artificial-intelligence software is being developed to help cull click-bait hoaxes, Mosseri said.
Already, algorithms can do some of the winnowing.
“We’ve found that if reading an article makes people significantly less likely to share it, that may be a sign that a story has misled people in some way,” Mosseri said. “We’re going to test incorporating this signal into ranking” top stories.
The site is also cracking down on “spoofed” domains that pretend to be legitimate news sites, officials said.
Still, Zuckerberg cautioned against overediting the site in his own post on Thursday.
“With any changes we make, we must fight to give all people a voice and resist the path of becoming arbiters of truth ourselves,” he wrote.
Looking to fend off censorship allegations, Zuckerberg has insisted that he’s running a tech company, not a media company, that provides a neutral distribution platform for other media companies.