Mark Zuckerberg has a plan to banish fake news from Facebook

If you re-read the aforementioned statement, you’ll realize that it is probably the first time Facebook has accepted that is surely plagued by a fake news problem.

Consulting more widely with fact checkers and journalists may therefore help the company to tweak its news feed, but Zuckerberg’s post leaves no doubt the company’s aim remains to keep you on Facebook for as long as it can.

“A lot of misinformation is driven by financially motivated spam”, Zuckerberg wrote. It is also considering more policies, along with stronger “ad farm detection”.

Facebook made explicit a similar limitation on using its advertising network soon after.

“While the percentage of misinformation is relatively small, we have much more work ahead on our roadmap”, Zuckerberg said. And many see profound risks to the free flow of ideas if platforms like Facebook and companies like Google are supposed to become the gatekeepers or ultimate arbiters of what constitutes legitimate information.

Trump’s November 8 election left many pollsters and pundits mystified.

The CEO’s comments come on the heels of strong criticism of fake political news stories related to the U.S. election circulating on the platform. He had previously described as “crazy” the criticism that fake news on Facebook’s news feed had influenced the vote in favor of Trump.

If all this fake news is a continual problem, there should be a type of regulatory body that will be able to supervise and ban posts related to the spread of false information. Zuckerberg came out clear stating that Facebook is not a publishing company but a technology company. Zuckerberg, who is in Lima for the APEC summit, outlined his intentions on the controversial topic this weekend – in, unsurprisingly, a Facebook post – after widespread criticism over the past months.

“The bottom line is: we take misinformation seriously”, the CEO posted on his Facebook profile. “We believe in giving people a voice, which means erring on the side of letting people share what they want whenever possible”, Zuckerberg explains. Articles that have raised suspicions could be flagged with warnings before people click.

Third-party verification via “respected fact-checking organizations”.

Weeding out those hoaxes was the focus of a hackathon at Princeton University this week, where students built an algorithm that authenticates what is real and what is fake on Facebook.

He said the company also is looking into the possibility of working with established fact-checking organizations to evaluate content and into the feasibility of warning labels for stories flagged as false.