Facebook working with fact-checkers to weed out fake news

For example, a user who clicks the Direct Message button on a company’s Twitter account might instantly see a welcome message with links to several automated help options, without having to first type in a question or request.

In a new post, Zuckerberg said Facebook previously relied on users to determine what stories were and weren’t accurate, and said the company still believes in “erring on the side of letting people share what they want whenever possible”. “We need to be careful not to discourage sharing of opinions or mistakenly restricting accurate content”, he said.

Some of the projects now underway involve stronger detection, easy reporting, third party verification, warnings, related articles quality, disrupting fake news economics and listening. The company will also crack down on spam, and get more input from journalists “to better understand their fact checking systems and learn from them”.

The announcement came as Zuckerberg flew to Peru to address an Asian-Pacific trade summit in Lima, where he told world leaders Saturday that more connectivity would help raise people out of poverty.

Facebook was sharply criticised during the last days of the USA presidential election for hosting false news stories that were widely shared on the platform.

Not only had Silicon Valley been largely anti-Trump, but the social media platforms themselves had been a big part of Trump’s electoral success, partially because he was able to use them to spread both his messages and false news, said Ian Bremmer, founder of an American geopolitical strategy consultancy, the Eurasia Group.

“Some of these ideas will work well, and some will not”, Zuckerberg wrote. The problems are obvious to most regular Facebook users.

He’s also refused to acknowledge that Facebook is a media site at all, instead choosing to refer to it as a tech company. They then steer readers to their stories through Facebook. The company said on Monday that it was clarifying its advertising policy to emphasize that it won’t display ads – thus cutting revenue – for sites that run information that is “illegal, misleading or deceptive, which includes fake news”.

Put simply, the Facebook news feed is the most powerful distribution pipeline for information and news ever created. He said, ” In an age where there’s so much active misinformation and it’s packaged very well and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television”. How many people know there is no such thing as the Denver Guardian, a pretend “newspaper” that on November 5 posted a widely shared, and fictitious, headline saying an Federal Bureau of Investigation agent suspected in Hillary Clinton’s “email leaks” had been found dead in an apparent murder-suicide. We do. Can most of you even tolerate looking at your timeline now?

One such story, which was widely shared on Facebook after the election, falsely claimed Hollywood actor Denzel Washington had praised Mr Trump. It drew more than three times that activity on Facebook.

Under Mark Zuckerberg’s direction, Facebook turned itself inside out to crack smartphones.