Facebook doesn't need to ban fake news to fight it
Summary: Mark Zuckerberg’s social media site doesn’t have to become a censor to help tackle false stories. It can do a lot by helping its own users with context. Ev Williams, the co-founder of Twitter, Blogger and Medium, posted his own example a few days later: links, claiming to be from ESPN and CNN, to stories that implying that Tiger Woods had died and Donald Trump had been “disqualified”, right next to the Facebook chief executive’s post. There’s little agreement on where to draw the line. Open questions like this explain why many are wary of pushing Facebook to “take action” against fake news. “Do we really want Facebook exercising this sort of top-down power to determine what is true or false?” asks Politico’s Jack Shafer. “Wouldn’t we be revolted if one company owned all the newsstands and decided what was proper and improper reading fare?” the company’s goals are to maximise time spent on site, to try and make sure readers come back every day and continue to share posts, engage with content, and, ultimately, click on the adverts that have made the social network the fifth largest company in the world by market cap.
Facebook could do to help deal not with fake news, but with the negative effects it has on our society: de-emphasise who shared a story into your timeline, instead branding it with the logo and name of the publication itself, and encourage readers to, well, read, before or instead of liking, sharing and commenting. Doing so might not be great for Facebook’s bottom line, of course. The site would be less “sticky”, users would be more likely to click away and not come back, and the amount of sharing would drop.
[] Mark Zuckerberg has finally said that Facebook will take it seriously. “Our goal is to connect people with the stories they find most meaningful, and we know people want accurate information,”
[] 10 months leading up to the election, the top 20 fake news articles being shared on Facebook skyrocketed from 3 million “shares, reactions, and comments” to nearly 9 million, while mainstream media articles declined from 12 million shares, reactions, and comments in February to just 7.3 million by Election Day
[] 10 months leading up to the election, the top 20 fake news articles being shared on Facebook skyrocketed from 3 million “shares, reactions, and comments” to nearly 9 million, while mainstream media articles declined from 12 million shares, reactions, and comments in February to just 7.3 million by Election Day
My Opinion: I believe that audiences should always be active in terms of what they read and share, we should all check twice if the information is real by going on other sources and seeing if a similar information have been said. Social media can never be trusted as a lot of people give away false news to generate the whole point of media as "dumping down" and for Andrew Keens quote to be true "web pages and blogs are like million monkeys typing nonsense" in this case it is also on social media accounts. From now, I think Facebook will be impacted by whatever Mark Zuckerberg decides to do next and if the audiences would react.
No comments:
Post a Comment