News Update on Facebook – Facebook’s Wide Spread Of Fake News: The impact of fake news, propaganda, and misinformation has been widely scrutinized since the US election.
Fake news actually outperformed real news on Facebook during the final weeks of the election campaign, according to an analysis by Buzzfeed, and even outgoing president Barack Obama has expressed his concerns.
The project has snowballed since Pariser started it on 17 November, with contributors putting forward myriad solutions, he said. “It’s a really wonderful thing to watch as it grows,” Pariser said.
“We were talking about how design shapes how people interact. Kind of inadvertently this turned into this place where you had thousands of people collaborating together in this beautiful way.”
In Silicon Valley, meanwhile, some programmers have been batting solutions back and forth on Hacker News, a discussion board about computing run by the startup incubator Y Combinator. Some ideas are more realistic than others.
Facebook has been slow to admit it has a problem with misinformation on its news feed, which is seen by 1.18 billion people every day.
It has had several false starts on systems, both automated and using human editors, that inform how news appears on its feed. Pariser’s project details a few ways to start:
Similar to Twitter’s “blue tick” system, verification would mean that a news organization would have to apply to be verified and be proved to be a credible news source so that stories would be published with a “verified” flag.
Verification could also mean higher priority in newsfeed algorithms, while repeatedly posting fake news would mean losing verified status.
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The system would be simple to impose, possibly through a browser plug-in, and is likely to appeal to most major publications.
It would require extra staff to assess applications and maintain the system, could be open to accusations of bias if not carefully managed and could discriminate against younger, less established news sites.
A central fact-checking service could publish an API, a constantly updated feed of information, which any browser could query news articles against.
A combination of human editing and algorithms would return information about the news story and its URL, including whether it is likely to be fake (if it came from a known click-farm site) or genuine. Stories would be “fingerprinted” in the same way as advertising software.
People could choose their fact-checking system – Snopes or Politifact or similar – and then install it as either a browser plug-in or a Facebook or Twitter plug-in that would colour-code news sources on the fly as either fake, real or various gradations in between.
Pros: Human editors would become less necessary as the algorithm learns, and wouldn’t have to check each story individually. Being asked to choose a fact-checker might encourage critical thinking.
Cons: Will be labor-intensive and expensive, especially at first. It could be open to accusations of bias, especially once the algorithm takes over from the human input.
Arguably only those already awake to the problem would choose to opt in, unless a platform like Facebook or Google assimilates it as standard.
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