It’s certainly no secret that the Internet is rife with trolling, both on social media directly and through news articles that are less than truthful. Facebook recognizes the latter as being quite the problem with their newsfeed and aim to fix it. Somehow.
Facebook fighting fake fables on newsfeed
A large amount of individuals, 62% according to research, tend towards getting news from social media, be it Twitter, Facebook or even Youtube, though it doesn’t mean any stories being linked to or talked about are anywhere near truthful. Even somewhat obvious troll comments or articles can sometimes be taken at face value., even though these stories are sometimes completely made up.
They are attempting to fix this issue with new ways of combating fake stories from even showing up on the newsfeed. The sent a statement to TechCrunch stating as much, though they didn’t elucidate as to exactly how they’re going to fight these fallacies.
In Newsfeed we use various signals based on community feedback to determine which posts are likely to contain inaccurate information, and reduce their distribution. In Trending we look at a variety of signals to help make sure the topics being shown are reflective of real-world events, and take additional steps to prevent false or misleading content from appearing. Despite these efforts we understand there’s so much more we need to do, and that is why it’s important that we keep improving our ability to detect misinformation. We’re committed to continuing to work on this issue and improve the experiences on our platform.
There was concern during the run up to the election because some people were even gaming the Newsfeed system with patently fake stories with headlines that were fallacious, though were able to gain quite a bit of traction and earn them more than $5000 in profit. At times the news, no matter the size of the source behind it, helps us make informed decisions every day in life.
Thus it makes sense for them to introduce new ways to differentiate between real and fake stories. Perhaps they should even consider re-implementing human curators to help sift through the erroneous stories. AI could potentially help, in the future as it work on their own cloud services continues. Until then, we should start seeing a more filtered newsfeed