Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained how the social media network plans to tackle the rise of fake news in a post late Friday night.
“The bottom line is: we take misinformation seriously … and we know people want accurate information,” Zuckerberg said. “We’ve been working on this problem for a long time and we take this responsibility seriously. We’ve made significant progress, but there is more work to be done.”
Friday’s note was a departure after Zuckerberg earlier this week called it a “crazy idea” for critics to claim that fake news floating around on Facebook swayed the 2016 election results.
Zuckerberg said the percentage of misinformation is relatively small, but acknowledged “there is more work to be done” and the company is taking steps to improve its ability to detect misinformation. Facebook will make it easier for people to report stories as fake, involve third-party verification and fact-checking organizations, and warn readers when they share or read them, he said in the post.
According to a study by BuzzFeed News, fake election news beat real news on Facebook in the final three months of the presidential elections. “20 top-performing false election stories from hoax sites and hyperpartisan blogs generated 8,711,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook,” BuzzFeed reported.
“It may seem like the top stories get a lot of traction, but they represent a tiny fraction of the total,” a Facebook spokesman told BuzzFeed Wednesday.
In the Friday post, Zuckerberg said, “The problems here are complex, both technically and philosophically.” He added that, Facebook would normally not “share specifics about our work in progress, but given the importance of these issues” he explained the efforts that are already underway.
One of the important steps the company is taking is to have better “technical systems to detect what people will flag as false before they do it themselves.” This goes hand-in-hand with the process of making it easy for people to report misinformation.
Zuckerberg said that Facebook has reached out to various third-party verification and fact-checking organizations and plans to learn from them too. “We do not want to be arbiters of truth ourselves, but instead rely on our community and trusted third parties,” he said.
