Facebook and Google to Decide What is “Fake” News

Following accusations that Donald Trump won the presidency in part due to fake news stories, tech giants Google and Facebook have announced they will restrict advertising services.

“In accordance with the Audience Network Policy, we do not integrate or display ads in apps or sites containing content that is illegal, misleading or deceptive, which includes fake news,” said a Facebook representative to the The New York Times. “While implied, we have updated the policy to explicitly clarify that this applies to fake news. Our team will continue to closely vet all prospective publishers and monitor existing ones to ensure compliance.”

Google also announced it will decide what news is fake or misleading and act accordingly. “Moving forward, we will restrict ad serving on pages that misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information about the publisher, the publisher’s content, or the primary purpose of the web property,” said a Google representative.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes less than one percent of the stories in its News Feed are hoaxes. He also said it was “extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this election in one direction or the other.”

He said “there is more we can do here” in response. “We have made progress, and we will continue to work on this to improve further.”

Earlier this year Facebook was accused of suppressing conservative news on its feed. The omissions “had a chilling effect on conservative news,” said a former Facebook news curator.

“Every once in awhile a Red State or conservative news source would have a story. But we would have to go and find the same story from a more neutral outlet that wasn’t as biased,” said another curator.

Breitbart, Washington Examiner, Newsmax, and other conservative news sites were passed over unless the stories they covered were also covered by the establishment media.

Management at the social media giant also showed political bias by “injecting” stories into the trending newsfeed.

“We were told that if we saw something, a news story that was on the front page of these ten sites, like CNN, the New York Times, and BBC, then we could inject the topic,” said a former curator. “If it looked like it had enough news sites covering the story, we could inject it—even if it wasn’t naturally trending.”

Sources

NBC News

The New York Times

Gizmodo