On Thursday, Zuckerberg seemed to be saying that some people were overestimating the role of the fake news, simply because they were taken by surprise by the election results.
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Zuckerberg himself has refuted the theory, claiming 99% of what users see is authentic and said the instances of fake news did not favour one side or the other.
Although, Zuckerberg did not completely denied the absence of fake news but assuaged the fears highlighting the action being undertaken and progress being made towards eliminating fake news and hoaxes. “The hoaxes that do exist are not limited to one partisan view, or even to politics”, he added.
While Zuckerberg has said it’s “extremely unlikely” that phony stories posted on Facebook changed the election outcome, the company already is working to enable the social media giant’s users “to flag fake news and hoaxes”.
Last week at the Techonomy conference in Half Moon Bay, Calif., Zuckerberg said, “To think it influenced the election in any way is a pretty insane idea”. Zuckerberg has since acknowledged that his platform has a problem with false stories, but rather than meeting with journalists to discuss solutions as he did with conservatives in May, Zuckerberg offered up the excuse that “identifying the truth is complicated”, and once again expressed concern that Facebook “find ways for our community to tell us what content is most meaningful”. This includes continuously review updates (sic) to make sure we are not exhibiting unconscious bias.
That’s right, the ABC is reporting that myth-busting website Snopes found these three viral posts to be false. “A lot of that dialog may not have happened without Facebook”, he says.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has another political controversy on his hands.
A previous effort to use human editors to handle trending news on Facebook was roundly criticized by conservatives and abandoned. Facebook can not and should not be considered the single reason for Donald Trump’s triumph, but it’s also hard to imagine that the social network – on which 44 percent of Americans read news – is blameless. This even while Facebook has officially vowed to do better and insisted that ferreting out the real news from the lies is a hard technical problem.
Facebook also announced last week that it would do more to combat fake news on the site.
Regardless of where we stand politically, the results of the 2016 election will dominate the news cycle for a long time. The group reportedly disagrees with Zuckerberg’s public statements on the issue and plans to suggest changes the company can make to improve News Feed. Citing anonymous sources, Gizmodo alleges that Facebook employees planned an update to the News Feed that would hide fake news and hoaxes earlier this year. “If you believe that, then I don’t think you have internalized the message that Trump supporters are trying to send in this election”.
The posts users see on their respective News Feed are tailored, which explains why some users may see more hoax posts than other users.
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Just how hard of a problem is it for an algorithm to determine real news from lies? Never mind that algorithms can also be biased-and, apparently, these algorithms were just fine with letting outright inaccurate news trend on Facebook.
