Facebook and Google announce plans to tackle fake news

While we – and others – have been warning our readers about the rise of the fake news industry for a number of years now, it seems that Internet giants Facebook and Google are now facing up to the problem too.

Let’s not chastise them for being late to the party. Let’s just celebrate the fact they could make it.

Earlier in the month, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg rejected claims that the fake news industry could have swayed the US presidential election result and asserted that more than 99% of what was seen on Facebook was accurate. That assertion was vague at best.

However it does seem the surge in fake news has been on the Facebook CEO’s mind. In a later post, Zuckerberg has claimed that the social networking giant does indeed take the propagation of misinformation seriously, and has outlined several ideas to help tackle the issue – from his Facebook post –

– Stronger detection. The most important thing we can do is improve our ability to classify misinformation. This means better technical systems to detect what people will flag as false before they do it themselves.
– Easy reporting. Making it much easier for people to report stories as fake will help us catch more misinformation faster.
– Third party verification. There are many respected fact checking organizations and, while we have reached out to some, we plan to learn from many more.
– Warnings. We are exploring labeling stories that have been flagged as false by third parties or our community, and showing warnings when people read or share them.
– Related articles quality. We are raising the bar for stories that appear in related articles under links in News Feed.
– Disrupting fake news economics. A lot of misinformation is driven by financially motivated spam. We’re looking into disrupting the economics with ads policies like the one we announced earlier this week, and better ad farm detection.
– Listening. We will continue to work with journalists and others in the news industry to get their input, in particular, to better understand their fact checking systems and learn from them.

While the 2016 presidential election may have put the issue of fake news forefront and centre, it has been a pressing issue for a number of years now. The number of sites publishing just-about-believable content under the guise of satire or entertainment (a genre we’ve dubbed ‘fauxtire’) has sky-rocketed and is now big business for a number of people, raking in thousands of dollars in ad revenue.

However some of that ad revenue may also be at risk for the owners of such fake news sites, as Google announced that they will be clamping down on sites known to promote fake news, removing them from their Google Adsense platform, which allows website owners to put monetised ads on their webpages.
 
For Facebook in particular, tackling fake news is certainly going to be a problem. A Buzzfeed investigation shows that in the final months of the US presidential campaign, the number of Facebook engagements on top election-themed fake news stories (8,711,000 engagements) topped the overall engagement on the top election-themed stories from major media outlets (7,367,000 engagements.)

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The more cynical of us would also point out that this ultimately equates to ad revenue for Facebook, too, which puts Facebook in somewhat of a financial quandary. That is to say, fake news helps Facebook add to its revenue stream.

Either way, both Google and Facebook have explicitly acknowledged that fake news is a problem, and they’re working on it. Whether this will help curb the propagation of fake news in the future remains to be seen.

Learn how to spot a fake news website in our blog post here.