Facebook Drowns Out Fake News With More Information -- Update
August 03 2017 - 3:51PM
Dow Jones News
By Deepa Seetharaman
Facebook Inc. is fighting misinformation with more
information.
Starting Thursday, when Facebook's U.S. users come across
popular links -- including made-up news articles -- in their feeds,
they may also see a cluster of other articles on the same topic.
The "related articles" feature, which will roll out widely in the
U.S. after months of testing, is part of the Facebook news feed
team's effort to limit the damage of false news without taking down
those posts.
In recent months, Facebook has launched features such as
"related articles" that push users to think twice before sharing a
story, but don't prevent them from sharing and thus spreading false
news. Facebook has also partnered with five outside fact-checkers
like Snopes.com, which Facebook recently started paying to label
completely false stories as "disputed" from a Facebook-built
database of possibly false news articles.
The moves show Facebook's strategy to reduce the presence of
misinformation on its platform, without going so far as censoring
it, a role it says it doesn't want. While Facebook has content
policies that ban hate speech and other forms of expression, the
social-media company is queasy about creating similar policies
around accuracy.
Last year, Facebook came under fire for failing to prevent the
spread of fabricated news articles during the 2016 U.S.
presidential race, despite being a dominant platform for news
consumption.
After initially resisting criticism, Chief Executive Mark
Zuckerberg eventually acknowledged Facebook's responsibility to
curb misinformation, but said he was wary of Facebook becoming what
he calls the "arbiters of truth."
Facebook's approach to fighting misinformation mirrors that of
Alphabet Inc.'s Google, which is also working with fact-checkers
and recently retooled its search engine to prevent sites peddling
fake news, hoaxes and conspiracy theories from appearing in its top
results.
In a lengthy corporate manifesto posted in February, Mr.
Zuckerberg said Facebook "would focus less on banning
misinformation, and more on surfacing additional perspectives and
information, including that fact checkers dispute an item's
accuracy."
In coming months, Facebook says it plans to rely more heavily on
fact checkers. If two or more label a story as "disputed", the
article will automatically show up lower in users' news feeds.
In many cases, Facebook staples a "disputed" tag to those posts
to warn users that fact checkers found an article's claims
completely false. The company also is experimenting with other
approaches, such as using "related articles" to show stories
written by its fact checkers that debunk a false story in lieu of a
disputed tag.
The "related articles" feature shows up on some stories that
have been flagged as false by fact checkers working with Facebook,
but also on some legitimate stories that are going viral. Facebook
hopes the feature will make it easier for people to break out of
their filter bubbles and see other views.
If the stories are going viral, Facebook software selects other,
relevant articles to show underneath those posts. For some articles
deemed false, Facebook will link to fact checkers' explanations for
why the information presented is wrong.
Facebook has started paying those fact checkers, a spokeswoman
said, declining to specify amounts. Facebook paid one partner, the
nonprofit FactCheck.Org, $52,283.34 for fact-checking work in the
first six months of 2017, FactCheck.Org disclosed in a financial
report. Facebook's second-quarter net income was nearly $4
billion.
Fact checkers will start seeing more articles in their queues.
Facebook has also started using fact checkers' rulings to improve
its algorithms for predicting whether a story is potentially false,
the spokeswoman added. Those articles will be sent to fact checkers
who determine their accuracy.
Facebook has also been adjusting its news feed algorithms to
help demote fake stories, as it did in June when it started
punishing accounts that routinely post 50 links a day because they
tend to share "low quality content" like misinformation.
Write to Deepa Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
August 03, 2017 15:36 ET (19:36 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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