After Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg last week defended the social networking site against accusations of influencing the US elections as fake news items were shared on it, he posted on November 19 that they "take misinformation seriously."
In a post on Facebook outlining the steps the social networking site has taken and will be taking to battle circulation of fake news, Zuckerberg said, "Our goal is to connect people with the stories they find most meaningful, and we know people want accurate information. We've been working on this problem for a long time and we take this responsibility seriously. We've made significant progress, but there is more work to be done."
He said that they will be working on 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."
Apart from that, he said that Facebook depends on the community to flag fake content so it would be making it easier for people to report fake news easily. It will also be looking towards third party verification by using fact-checking organisations. They have already reached out to few of them.
Sites that have been flagged by third party websites and community members could show up on news feeds with a 'warning' sign on it.
Stories that appear as related articles will also go through quality checks and Facebook is "raising the bar for stories that appear in related articles under links in News Feed."
"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," Zuckerberg said.
He also said that they "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."
Facebook had earlier fired its news team, which was known to have manually created trends and was favouring non-conservatives.
The issue about fake news was also recently taken up by US President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
