Facebook refuses to take down ‘fake news’

MANILA, Philippines — Social media company Facebook has bared new initiatives to strengthen its efforts against misinformation, but stopped short of revising its policy against removing so-called fake news.

Facebook vice president of integrity Guy Rosen and head of news feed integrity Tessa Lyons, in a joint blog post last week, said they are working toward addressing problematic content that do not meet their standards for removal from the platform.

Such problematic content that are not removed include misinformation and clickbait, or links that mislead people to visit a certain website.

“People often tell us that they don’t like seeing this kind of content and while we allow it to be posted on Facebook, we want to make sure it’s not broadly distributed,” read the post.

“Over the last two years, we’ve focused heavily on reducing misinformation on Facebook. We’re getting better at enforcing against fake accounts and coordinated inauthentic behavior; we’re using both technology and people to fight the rise in photo and video-based misinformation,” it added.

The company said it is kicking off a collaborative process with outside experts to find new ways to fight false news more quickly.

“Our professional fact-checking partners are an important piece of our strategy against misinformation, but they face challenges of scale. There simply aren’t enough professional fact-checkers worldwide and, like all good journalism, fact-checking takes time,” said Rosen and Lyons.

“One promising idea to bolster their work, which we’ve been exploring since 2017, involves groups of Facebook users pointing to journalistic sources to corroborate or contradict claims made in potentially false content,” they added.

The officials said they are going to build on those explorations to understand the benefits and risk, stressing the need to find solutions that support original reporting and allow for people to express themselves freely “without having Facebook be the judge of what is true.”

Facebook has repeatedly stressed that it is not in the position to determine which information posted on its platform is accurate or not.

But in response to global clamor to address fake news, it has tapped third-party fact checkers to assess flagged content.

Those determined to contain false information are “downranked,” lessening its visibility on the news feed.

Suggested articles that provide additional context and background on subjects also appear next to the questionable article.

While Facebook does not take down false content, the company has suspended some accounts that share them for violation of other policies, such as coordinated inauthentic behavior and the use of fake accounts.