Facebook Wants to Thwart 'Fake News' With New 'Head of News'
posted Sunday Dec 18, 2016 by Scott Ertz
After the election, a surprisingly high number of people blamed Trump's win on social media and what is currently being called "fake news" shared, particularly, on Facebook. The complaining has been enough that Facebook has been forced to respond to the issue, continuously reminding people that they neither create nor promote this content, and it is, instead, brought to them care of their friends.
After weeks of pleading from users, Facebook has been bullied into responding in a different way, implementing a fact-checking system for content shared on their network. The system will work similar to its other reporting platforms, like fake profiles or offensive ads. You will mark a post as inaccurate, and it will be flagged to Facebook. From there, it will be run through a 3rd party fact checking system and, if the link is found to be inaccurate, it will be marked as such on Facebook. This initiative will be head up by a new hire, whose job title will be Head of News.
The issue here is, who believes that it should be Facebook's responsibility to determine the validity content written by a non-Facebook controlled website and shared by a non-Facebook employee on their network? The idea of inaccurate content is not a new concept. For decades, while checking out at the grocery store, you can read about Elvis's secret performances from beyond the grave, or proof that *insert celebrity name here* is actually an alien, yet no one has ever blamed Kroger's for the belief in bigfoot.
In fact, people used a skill that the internet seems to have diminished called critical thinking to determine that these types of stories were obviously nonsense. For example, using critical thinking, anyone would know that Hillary Clinton was not holding children as sex slaves inside of a pizza parlor, or that the Pope had endorsed Trump. These are the kinds of stories that a generation ago would have been easily identifiable.
Rather than trying to force Facebook to police the content created by people outside of their network, people should actually be concerned about the educational system that has produced people who are unable to discern between obvious nonsense and potential reality.
