Facebook Inc, facing withering criticism for failing to stem a flood of phony news articles in the run-up to the US presidential election, is taking a series of steps to weed out hoaxes and other types of false information, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post on Friday evening.
Facebook has long insisted that it is a technology company and not a publisher and rejects the idea that it should be held responsible for the content that its users circulate on the platform.
Just after the US election, Zuckerberg said the notion that fake or misleading news on Facebook had helped swing the election to Republican US presidental candidate Donald Trump was a “crazy idea.”
Zuckerberg then said on Nov. 12 that more than 99 percent of what people see on Facebook is authentic, calling “only a very small amount” fake news and hoaxes.
However, in his Friday posting Zuckerberg struck a decidedly different tone.
He said Facebook has been working on the issue of misinformation for a long time, calling the problem complex both technically and philosophically.
“While the percentage of misinformation is relatively small, we have much more work ahead on our road map,” Zuckerberg said.
He outlined a series of steps that were already under way, including greater use of automation to “detect what people will flag as false before they do it themselves.”
He also said Facebook would make it easier to report false content, work with third-party verification organizations and journalists on fact-checking efforts, and explore posting warning labels on content that has been flagged as false.
The company is also to try to prevent fake-news providers from making money through its advertising system, as it had previously announced.
Zuckerberg said Facebook must be careful not to discourage sharing of opinions or mistakenly restricting accurate content.
“We do not want to be arbiters of truth ourselves, but instead rely on our community and trusted third parties,” he said.
Facebook historically has relied on users to report links as false and share links to myth-busting sites, including Snopes, to determine if it can confidently classify stories as misinformation, Zuckerberg said.
The service has extensive “community standards” on what kinds of content are acceptable.
Facebook faced international outcry earlier this year after it removed an iconic Vietnam War photograph due to nudity, a decision that was later reversed. The thorniest content issues are decided by a group of Facebook top executives and there have been extensive internal conversations in recent months over content controversies, people familiar with the discussions said.
Among the fake news reports that circulated ahead of the US election were reports erroneously alleging Pope Francis had endorsed Trump.
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TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
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