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Facebook VP Says Company Won't Use Experts To Fix Fake News Because It is Worried About Criticism (theoutline.com)
Joshua Topolsky, writing for The Outline: According to Axios reporter Ina Fried, the vice president of global communications, marketing, and public policy (phew!) at Facebook shook off suggestions that the network should use outside media literacy watch dogs as opposed to outsourcing its "fake news" problem to a "statistically representative" group of its own users. While speaking at the tech conference DLD (Digital Life Design) in Munich, he revealed that the real motivation behind the company's decision was one based almost entirely on optics. This shouldn't come as much of a surprise, as the company has been totally ignorant and outrageously slow in accepting responsibility for what has been a disaster for its users. While Twitter is turning to media literacy groups such as Common Sense Media and the National Association for Media Literacy for solutions to its own troll and fake news epidemic, Facebook continues to cower behind a broken concept that the company is a neutral platform where all of its participants are equally weighted.
Except a lot of the fake news is coming from your friends political links.
This is the real crux of the problem. People on Facebook have become militantly political, down all the usual dividing lines. People I've known for 10-20 years who never appeared to have any political opinions are now rabidly political on Facebook.
My own sense is that this grew out of Facebook enabling the easy re-sharing of links and pictures. At first it was just mostly dumb memes, but as election season hit it quickly became a way of sharing and ultimately manufacturing and reinforcing partisan outrage.
I don't think Facebook can fix this without some heavy AI analysis of submitted links and images that eliminates the ability to re-share political ones without hindering the ability to re-share non-political content. News links might be more amenable to machine analysis, but images would be touch. The only other option is just disabling re-sharing of any of them, which I think users would find an unacceptable functionality limitation.
An individual can "solve" this themselves by unfriending people who post too much political stuff, but my own sense is that means gutting even moderate-sized friend lists, rendering the entire thing kind of pointless.
I've kind of abandoned it completely myself. I'm missing out on some socialization, but mostly I think it's false socialization with people in ordinary circumstances I wouldn't keep in touch with. A loss perhaps for some old friends and family, but not enough to make it worth putting up with.