Facebook has a lot of problems right now, but one that’s definitely not going away any time soon is fake news. As the company’s user base has grown to include more than a quarter of the world’s population, it has (understandably) struggled to control what they all post and share. For Facebook, unwanted content can be anything from mild nudity to serious violence, but what’s proved to be most sensitive and damaging for the company is hoaxes and misinformation — especially when it has a political bent.
So what is Facebook going to do about it? At the moment, the company doesn’t seem to have a clear strategy. Instead, it’s throwing a lot at the wall and seeing what works. It’s hired more human moderators (as of February this year it had around 7,500); it’s giving users more information in-site about news sources; and in a recent interview, Mark Zuckerberg suggested that the company might set up some sort of independent body to rule on what content is kosher. (Which could be seen as democratic, an abandonment of responsibility, or an admission that Facebook is out of its depth, depending on your view.) But one thing experts say Facebook needs to be extremely careful about is giving the whole job over to AI.
What about natural human intelligence? Not going to happen. That's because the humans running Facebook clearly have a political agenda. To read more, click here.