Fake News On Facebook Could Have Been Stopped, But Company Feared Right-Wing Backlash [Report]


Fake news on Facebook has been blamed, in part, for Donald Trump’s victory in last week’s presidential election.

Critics have slated the company and its co-founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, for not doing enough to curb the spread of false, incorrect, and defamatory material on the social network. For instance, a fake news story that claimed Pope Francis endorsed Trump was apparently shared almost a million times — potentially reaching tens of millions of Facebook users.

At a conference last week, Zuckerberg said it was “a pretty crazy idea” that fake news on Facebook could have pushed Americans towards voting for President-elect Trump, as the Inquisitr reported.

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Zuckerberg has since issued a statement saying that “more than 99 percent of what people see” on Facebook is authentic.

“Only a very small amount is fake news and hoaxes. The hoaxes that do exist are not limited to one partisan view, or even to politics. Overall, this makes it extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this election in one direction or the other.”

He added that he and his staff don’t want any hoaxes or fake news on Facebook.

“Our goal is to show people the content they will find most meaningful, and people want accurate news. We have already launched work enabling our community to flag hoaxes and fake news, and there is more we can do here. We have made progress, and we will continue to work on this to improve further.”

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Fake news on Facebook is a problem that the company has the ability to kill off, however. Around 44 percent of Americans get news from Facebook, according to a Pew Research Center study, so the company is concerned about the matter. However, according to Gizmodo, there are a few reasons why Facebook hasn’t removed fake news.

Apparently, since May, high-ranking employees have debated how Facebook handles its place as the biggest distributor of news in the U.S., including over what role the company has in preventing fake news from reaching its users.

Executives carried out a review of company policies and products earlier this year with the aim of eliminating political bias. Apparently, the company created an update that would have identified fake news on Facebook and downgraded or removed that information from the news feed, but it would have had a disproportionate impact on right-wing news sources. The update was ultimately halted, although it’s not clear if there were other problems that prevented it from becoming a public feature.

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It seems that decision partly followed on the news that Facebook editors were preventing right-wing news stories from being included in the news feed’s trending topics section, as the Inquisitr reported. Until earlier this year, human editors decided what appeared in the trending topics, but they routinely stopped conservative news from appearing there, even when right-wing topics were naturally trending among Facebook users.

In the aftermath, Facebook held discussions with top conservatives, and the company’s vice president of global public policy insisted Facebook was “a home for all voices, including conservatives.” The company made some changes to the news feed in June, where posts from family and friends were prioritized, but neglected to roll out the update that would have reduced fake news on Facebook.

Facebook fired all its editors soon after the trending topics incident, but since the company started solely relying on an algorithm to pick what was featured, there’s been a greater visibility of fake news on the section, including one story that said Fox News fired Megyn Kelly for being a secret liberal who wanted Hillary Clinton to win the election.

“There was a lot of fear about upsetting conservatives after trending topics […] a lot of product decisions got caught up in that,” a source told Gizmodo.

The apparent “internal culture of fear” after the incident was echoed in a New York Times report this weekend. Facebook employees told the newspaper that the trending topics controversy “paralyzed Facebook’s willingness to make any serious changes to its products that might compromise the perception of its objectivity.”

Fake news on Facebook saw much lower engagement in 2015, although hoaxes and fake news from both left-wing and right-wing sources spread far more widely in 2016 as the presidential election approached, BuzzFeed found in an investigation. In another report, the publication reported that teenagers in Macedonia were operating popular Facebook pages that spread false conservative news, pushing users to click through to their 140 websites that host false U.S. politics news and making them thousands of dollars a month.

Currently, Facebook relies on users to report content, but if a user is shown fake news or hoaxes that enforce or embolden their opinions, it seems less likely that they would report that content. If someone sees a post from a trusted friend, it follows that they’re more likely to believe that information, even if it is a complete fabrication.

Fake news on Facebook has an impact on business interests as well. While it might publicly denounce fake news and seek ways to downplay hoaxes, Facebook lives on attention. The more people read, watch, like, and share content, the more revenue Facebook can generate from advertising.

Facebook also makes money when publishers pay to promote posts, and it’s inconceivable that fake news publishers haven’t used paid promotion.

Fake news on Facebook makes money for Mark Zuckerberg, his employees, and shareholders. That’s a fact. Curbing fake news that might grab users’ interest could cause them to use the social network less and lower revenue.

In its most utopic vision of itself, Facebook thinks it’s an impartial player in the spread of information, allowing people to do as they please on the social network — within reason as, for instance, Facebook has a ban on some types of content, including nudity.

Facebook’s choice to police or not police what users post is certainly its own prerogative, but there’s always going to be a question of morality surrounding the executives’ decisions, weighing the value of truth versus income. The company holds an enormously powerful position in users’ news diets and it’s clear there’s a very real impact on the spread of fake news on Facebook.

[Featured Image by Eric Risberg/AP Images]

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