Facebook is taking new measures to curb the spread of fake news on its huge and influential social network. It will focus on the “worst of the worst” offenders and partner with outside fact-checkers and news organizations to sort honest news reports from made-up stories that play to people’s passions and preconceived notions.
The social network said it will make it easier for users to report fake news when they see it, which they will be able to do in two steps, not three. If enough people report a story as fake, Facebook will pass it to third-party fact-checking organizations that are part of the nonprofit Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network.
Five fact-checking and news organizations are working with Facebook on this: ABC News, The Associated Press, FactCheck.org, Politifact and Snopes.
Facebook says this group is likely to expand.
Stories that flunk the fact check will not be removed from Facebook, but they will be publicly flagged as “disputed,” which will force them to appear lower down in people’s news feed.
Users can click on a link to learn why that is and if people decide they want to share the story with friends anyway, they can — but they will get another warning.
“We do believe that we have an obligation to combat the spread of fake news,” John Hegeman, Facebook vice president of product management on news feed, said in an interview.
He added that Facebook also takes its role to provide people an open platform seriously, and that it is not the company’s place to decide what is true or false.
Fake news stories touch on a broad range of subjects, from unproven cancer cures to celebrity hoaxes and backyard Bigfoot sightings. However, fake political stories have drawn outsized attention because of the possibility that they influenced public perceptions and could have swayed the US presidential election.
There have been dangerous real-world consequences. A fake story about a child sex ring at a Washington pizza joint prompted a man to fire an assault rifle inside the restaurant.
By partnering with respected outside organizations and flagging, rather than removing, fake stories, Facebook is sidestepping some of the biggest concerns experts had raised about it exercising its considerable power in this area.
For instance, some worried that Facebook might act as a censor — and not a skillful one, either, being an engineer-led company with little experience making complex media ethics decisions.
“They definitely don’t have the expertise,” said Robyn Caplan, researcher at Data & Society, a nonprofit research institute funded in part by Microsoft and the National Science Foundation.
In an interview before Facebook’s announcement, she urged the company to “engage media professionals and organizations that are working on these issues.”
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has said that fake news constitutes less than 1 percent of what’s on Facebook , but critics say that is wildly misleading.
For a site with nearly 2 billion users tapping out posts by the millisecond, even 1 percent is a huge number, especially since the total includes everything that’s posted on Facebook — photographs, videos and daily updates in addition to news articles.
In a study released on Thursday, the Pew Research Center found that nearly a quarter of Americans say they have shared a made-up news story, either knowingly or unknowingly. Forty-five percent said that the government, politicians and elected officials bear responsibility for preventing made-up stories from gaining attention. Forty-two percent put this responsibility on social networking sites and search engines, and a similar percentage on the public itself.
Facebook is emphasizing that it’s only going after the most egregious fake news creators and sites, the “the clear hoaxes spread by spammers for their own gain,” Adam Mosseri, vice president of product for Facebook’s news feed, wrote in a blog post on Thursday.
Facebook will not allow publishers to promote any story flagged as disputed. If this works, users should not see fake news stories in Facebook advertisements.
However, fake news stories will not disappear from Facebook the way child porn, spam and various illegal stuff does.
“We believe providing more context can help people decide for themselves what to trust and what to share,” Mosseri wrote.
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