Facebook in cross hairs as fake news battle heats up

WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton was about to be indicted, Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump: the battle over fake news is heating up after a White House campaign in which the misinformation industry may have swung the outcome of the vote. Last week, Google and Facebook moved to cut off ad revenue to bogus news sites. But media watchers say more is needed to stamp out a powerful phenomenon seen by some people as a threat to democracy itself. One of those people is President Barack Obama, who has warned that fake news threatens the basic principle of freedom of speech. “If everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won’t know what to protect,” Obama said during a visit to Germany. The hoaxes of the 2016 election season were in many cases spectacular — “Did the Clintons Commit Murder?” — and created by groups purely out to make money from clicks and ads. And since Trump’s victory, reports have exposed the dark underbelly of operations — run from Macedonia to California — that boast of making easy money with wholly fabricated stories, under such headlines as “Look At Sick Thing He Just Did To STAB Trump In The Back.” An analysis published by BuzzFeed News found that the 20 top-performing bogus stories from hoax websites and extremely partisan blogs generated slightly more than 8.7 million “shares” on Facebook to just 7.4 million from major news websites, in the three months before the election. Now, the outcry over fake news and its apparent role in the election is prompting calls for Facebook to consider itself a media company, with editorial responsibilities, which the social network has repeatedly rejected. Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan argued that Facebook “should hire a top-flight executive editor and give that person the resources, power and staff to make sound editorial decisions.” For Gabriel Kahn, a former journalist who teaches at the University of Southern California, “they’re in the same business as pretty much every media company, which is aggregating audiences and using that to sell advertisements.” And Kahn believes that Facebook, by considering itself a “neutral” platform, “allows the media ecosystem to be polluted” with bogus news. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg on Friday offered additional insight on plans to curb online misinformation while arguing for caution. “The problems here are complex, both technically and philosophically,” Zuckerberg said in a posting. “We believe in giving people a voice... We do not want to be arbiters of truth ourselves, but instead rely on our community and trusted third parties.” Zuckerberg said nonetheless that Facebook would step up efforts to weed out fake news with “stronger detection,” an easier process to report hoaxes and “third party verification” from “respected fact checking organizations.” Tech entrepreneur Elad Gil said it should not be too difficult for a company like Facebook to apply its technical expertise to determine when a news story is fake. “Intriguingly, a group of undergrads at Princeton were able to build a quick and dirty fake news classifier during a 36-hour hackathon,” Gil said in a blog post. — AFP