The biggest change I have noticed in Facebook over recent years is the addition of news being reported on the platform. Before, news was completely controlled by the media, and each story went through multiple checkpoints before going live. Now with reporting being done on Facebook, all news stories look similar and it is much easier for a false story to go viral due to the identical ability all users have to send out information. In other words, this addition of news to Facebook has effectively caused many consumers to believe fake news as the reality.
The dangerous phrase “fake news” is the epitome of the post truth era!
— Jerry Dennis (@JerryD70) January 26, 2018
Facebook’s fake news issue has become serious enough that there is even talk that it could have substantially impacted the 2016 Presidential election. The advice I would give for fixing Facebook actually would not be to those who run the platform. Unfortunately, I do not have confidence in Facebook to be 100% ethical and socially responsible in maintaining a completely fake news free platform.
Rather, my advice would be to those who consume its content: Facebook users. As media consumers, it is up to us to stay informed on which stories are true. If we wait around for Facebook to fix the problem we would be doing ourselves a disservice. We need to change the user mentality from passive to active. We need to do our research. When we take interest in consuming an alleged news story, we should assume skepticism until we have done enough research to be confident the story is true. Too many times do we sit back and wait for someone else to figure things out. We now know about fake news, and we cannot be ignorant to it anymore. It is time to be responsible consumers and stop relying on big giants like Facebook to do the dirty work for us.
Facebook is not going to fix fake news. No one is going to fix fake news because it runs on human nature + virality + network effects. Fake news will continue to hang around — like it always has in various forms — and the phenomenon won't lose its internet boost.
— Sonya 🌐 Mann (@sonyaellenmann) January 22, 2018
Hi, Serena, this was a really interesting article. I do agree with most of what you said and I can add that for me is pretty weird to see the links to fake news websites advertised in real news websites as AP or The New Yorker….So, the problem is not only inside Facebook as you said, but it is in so many spaces in our current society!!!