Facebook — The Leading Fake News Platform!
Facebook became the biggest social networking service in the world with more than one billion active users in 2012 (Clement, 2020). The platform was initially created to be used by students to connect with one another, however when Facebook was made available for the public in 2006, people created profiles not only to get connected, but also stay up to date with friends, join groups or simply get to know another user by sending them a friend request. Users spent time on Facebook consuming content, publishing content, or simply to look for something that could be of interest to them.
In 2012, Facebook decided to go public and with that, they implemented a monetization strategy which allowed advertisers to create and serve ads to users, given that it was a free platform. As the site was gaining popularity amongst users, more brands and organizations (private and public) were interested to take part by being on the platform to share their messages to consumers, or simply to apply their hidden political agenda and used Facebook which can reach a huge mass to be part of their agenda.
During the 2016 U.S. elections, users data was being shared with multiple organizations to help in targeting voters to vote for the candidates. But that wasn’t it, fake news and misinformation were being widespread in an uncontrolled way on the platform, impacting the way voters were voting for their candidates. Facebook didn’t only fail to secure data back in 2016, the problem occurred again in 2020 and this time, brands including Coca-Cola, Verizon, Starbucks, General Motors and others took pledge to boycott Facebook for one month under a campaign called #StopHateForSpeech. One of the many reasons this campaign was created was misinformation, which clearly shows that Facebook is a platform that cannot be trusted by major brands and refuses to act against such content unlike its rivalry, Twitter.
Will Facebook start fighting fake news?
Facebook mentioned recently that they are working on fighting the spread of false news in three ways which are:
- Disrupting economic incentives because most false news are financially motivated.
- Building new products to curb the spread of false news.
- Helping people make more informed decisions when they encounter false news (www.facebook.com).
However, it is unclear how Facebook decides on fighting fake news.
How can Facebook actually fight fake news?
In my opinion, Facebook can fight fake news by applying the following steps:
1- Include a message alert/red flag above the caption to notify the user that the content they are about to read isn’t reliable or comes from a source that’s untrustworthy. Twitter has been doing a great job in managing misinformation, since they actively flag misleading information.
2- Include an overlay screen on videos and images mentioning that this post has been declared fake/misleading by Facebook.
3- Ban accounts from using the platform (for a period of time) if they keep on creating/sharing fake news on the platform. This can be done through fact-checkers.
References:
Clement, J. “Facebook MAU Worldwide 2020.” Statista, 24 Nov. 2020, www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/.
Hall, Mark. “Facebook.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 22 Oct. 2020, www.britannica.com/topic/Facebook.
“Working to Stop Misinformation and False News.” Working to Stop Misinformation and False News | Facebook Media, www.facebook.com/formedia/blog/working-to-stop-misinformation-and-false-news.
Hoffman, Andrew. Facebook: Fake News, Free Speech, and an Internet Platform’s Responsibility, 12 Apr. 2019, pp. 1–20.