Facebook employees form secret task force against 'fake news'
15 Nov 2016
Facebook employees have formed a secret task force against the 'fake news' issue in the US presidential election. According to a report in BuzzFeed, over a dozen employees were involved in this, and five of them spoke to the site on conditions of anonymity.
Two of the employees insisted that the fake news issue had been raised earlier but the company had failed to take it seriously.
''One said she had made it clear that even though users were flagging certain media as being fake, or a hoax, the company was not taking a strict enough line with removing that content or defining what constituted fake news,'' the report said.
The problem for Facebook was that CEO Mark Zuckerberg had been in denial about fake news influencing election outcomes, and had denied it twice in public, and also in a private memo to the employees at Facebook.
He denied allegation that the election outcome had been influenced by fake news spread on Facebook and termed the idea ''crazy''. ''The idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way I think is a pretty crazy idea,'' he had said.
Meanwhile, Facebook is being accused of abdicating its responsibility to clamp down on fake news stories and counter the echo chamber that defined this election
''It's not a crazy idea. What's crazy is for him to come out and dismiss it like that, when he knows, and those of us at the company know, that fake news ran wild on our platform during the entire campaign season,'' one Facebook employee told Buzzfeed.
Meanwhile, according to Gizmodo, Facebook executives had been reviewing its products to eliminate the appearance of political bias. According to one high ranking source, officials were briefed on a planned news feed update that would have identified fake or hoax news stories but it disproportionately impacted rightwing news sites. The update was consequently dropped according to Gizmodo, although Facebook denied it.
