What You Need to Know About Fake News on Facebook

Controversy About Election-related News Draws Attention to the Issue

Fake news on Facebook is nothing new. Ads saying that “your favourite celebrity is gone forever” have probably enticed you to click at least one of the ads. However, the issue recently attracted the attention of the national spotlight during the months leading up to the U.S. presidential election because there were a number of fake stories targeting both political candidates, and many of the ads even tricked some of the campaign participants and managers into sharing. For example, Eric Trump and Trump’s campaign manager actually tweeted a link to a story on a fake news site called “abcnews.com.co” which stated that a Hillary supporter was paid $3,500 to cause trouble at a Trump rally.

Facebook Gets Rid of Human Moderators, Influx of Fake News Follows

Facebook made the decision to fire its human moderators months ago after investigating claims that many of them were politically biased. The humans were replaced by algorithms, but it’s since become clear that this automated solution hasn’t been very efficient at filtering out fake news. The ongoing flood of fake news ads has led many to suggest that Zuckerberg is considering bringing back the human element.

Figuring out the Grey Area: Who Will Decide Whether a Story is True?

Even with humans in charge again, moderating the problem might not be so easy, because there are many news stories that can’t be definitely ruled either true or false. In those cases, how do you give someone the authority to decide what is true or not? It’s an issue that teeters on the edge of totalitarian censorship, yet most of us can agree that blatantly unverifiable false stories should not be advertised as fact.

Audience Network Policy Updated to Specify the Ban on Fake News

Although it should be obvious to anyone that a fake news story falls under the category of “illegal, misleading or deceptive content,” Facebook has decided to update its ad network policy to explicitly clarify that fake news cannot be promoted using the Facebook Ads system. Although Zuckerberg seems to be on-board with putting a stop to the nonsense, he has stated that he doesn’t believe the fake news had enough of an impact to actually influence the election as some have suggested.

Google Joins in on the Fight Against Fake News

Not surprisingly, Google has followed suit by banning the promotion of fake news stories within its advertising network as well. It will be interesting to see how stringently the new policies are enforced in the coming months.

Image courtesy of stateofthenation2012.com