The Internet can and will be riddled with faux news and inappropriate information. Facebook itself is as vulnerable just like every other website and social media outfits in the woodwork. And in the wake of the recent US Presidential elections, fake news operations came in full swing.
Edgadget has it that fake news "propelled" Republican bet Donald Trump's campaign en route to his win over Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton. Another source pointed that more than a hundred Pro-Trump websites were identified, and they are all in a tiny town in Macedonia called Veles. Here, "at least 140 US political websites" were launched and oddly, some had a very "American sounding" names like DonaldTrumpNews.co and USADailyPolitics.com.
Managers of these websites admitted that they have no interest in Trump. Rather, they are after "straightforward economic incentives." They earn via pay-per-click, a model of internet marketing that pays each time their ads are clicked. And what better way to take advantage of this strategy and generate traffic than to use Facebook as scapegoat. By creating fake news and posting it on the site, they generate shares each time a Facebook user shares or clicks these "sensationalist and often false content" that lures the supporters of the lucrative Trump.
This is where Facebook's problem comes in. Its Newsfeed algorithm is not accurate in filtering whether a "trending news" is real or fake. In this case, make-believe reports that are often going up and hitting up likes and shares could be fabricated, and users have no idea that they have (or about to) spread a false virus. Adam Mosseri, Facebook's VP of Product Management, said in a statement that the company treats misinformation "very seriously", but also admitted that "there's so much more we need to do".
Facebook doesn't account themselves as a news site, but with the volume of users visiting the site, information streams like a river. May it be fake, hold a little bearing or the truth, these news, if it catches are attention and interest, will most likely be shared. It doesn't take a lot to do this, but there's so much that it could spell if this problem will remain to be unsolved.
