Facebook Fights Fake News
False news is harmful to our community, it makes the world less informed, and it erodes trust. It’s not a new phenomenon, and all of us tech companies, media companies, newsrooms, and teachers have a responsibility to do our part in addressing it.
Facebook is working to fight the spread of false news in three areas:
1- Disrupting economic incentives
One of the most effective approaches is removing the economic incentives for traffickers of misinformation.
These spammers make money by masquerading as legitimate news publishers and posting hoaxes that get people to visit their sites, which are often mostly ads.
Making it as difficult as possible for people posting false news to buy ads on our platform through strict enforcement of our policies.
Applying machine learning to assist our response teams in detecting fraud and enforcing our policies against inauthentic spam accounts.
Updating our detection of fake accounts on Facebook, which makes spamming at scale much harder.
2- Building New Products
Facebook is building, testing and iterating on new products to identify and limit the spread of false news. Facebook cannot become arbiters of truth ourselves it’s not feasible given our scale, and it’s not our role. Instead, Facebook is working on better ways to hear from our community and work with third parties to identify false news and prevent it from spreading on our platform.
3- Helping people make more informed decisions
Though Facebook is committed to doing everything Facebook can to reduce the spread of false news to as close to zero as possible, Facebook also need to make sure Facebook take steps to address the problem when people do encounter hoaxes. To that end, Facebook is exploring ways to give people more context about stories so they can make more informed decisions about what to read, trust and share and ways to give people access to more perspectives about the topics that they’re reading.
Sources:
https://www.facebook.com/formedia/blog/working-to-stop-misinformation-and-false-news
