Another step for Facebook in its fight with Fake News

After months of struggling with Fake News, it seems that Facebook is coming with a new plan. The company also declared that it has to improve its response to fake news before the UK general election.

Moreover, the chairman of the Commons culture has declared that Facebook has to start issuing warnings or blocking out material that contains fake content. He also added that fake news are very
dangerous and a real threat to “the integrity of democracy.”

He is right, because a huge numbers of voters that are using Facebook could be misled and make a huge mistake.

“The risk is what happened in America,” has declared Damian Collins, the chairman of the Commons culture, for The Guardian.

The top 20 fake news stories in the last three months of the election were shared more than the top 20 most shared stories that were true. The danger is, if for many people the main source of news is Facebook and if the news they get on Facebook is mostly fake news, they could be voting based on lies. he added.

In the last couple of weeks, Damian Collins held several meetings with Facebook in the US and in the UK.

They discussed about Facebook’s fake news strategy, and Collins asked the company to start acting strongly on the issue. As we know, Facebook has approximately 31 million users in the UK.

Moreover, Damian Collins didn’t like the speed that Facebook has to address fake news, so he asked the company to improve its response by removing them in the next couple of days.

“Looking at some of the work that has been done so far, they don’t respond fast enough or at all to some of the user referrals they can get. They can spot quite quickly when something goes viral. They should then be able to check whether that story is true or not and, if it is fake, blocking it or alerting people to the fact that it is disputed. It can’t just be users referring the validity of the story. They [Facebook] have to make a judgment about whether a story is fake or not,” Damian declared.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, also came up with a public response these days.

“We definitely don’t want to be the arbiter of the truth. We don’t think that’s appropriate for us,” Sheryl declared. 

Moreover, a spokesperson for Facebook responded to Collins, saying that:

“Improving news literacy is a global priority and false news runs counter to our mission to connect people with the stories that they find meaningful. We understand that we need to do our part to help people understand how to make decisions about which sources to trust.”

We also must say that efforts of combating fake news are not only ongoing in the UK. Facebook also has problems in Germany, Netherlands and France.

So, at this moment, Facebook is hardly working with the established media organizations to flag and delete fake content from users’ newsfeeds.

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