Google Executives Are Floating a Plan To Fight Fake News on Facebook and Twitter (qz.com)

Fake news, bots, and propaganda were hot topics at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos last month, and Google executives there floated an intriguing idea to some fellow attendees -- what if the company could tell users whether information is trustworthy before they shared it on social networks like Facebook and Twitter? From a report: Representatives from Google and its parent company Alphabet eagerly discussed how the company can play a greater role in reducing misleading information online, several Davos attendees involved in and briefed on these conversations told Quartz. A notification system, perhaps via an optional extension for Google's Chrome browser, was an idea that these people said was broached more than once. Such a browser-based system controlled by Google could alert users on Facebook's or Twitter's websites when they're seeing or sharing a link deemed to be false or untrustworthy. Right now, this appears to be merely an idea company executives are discussing, not a product in development.

Comments

Re:propaganda is not an accident

[ranton]

Those who post fake news already know it is untrustworthy, but they do it anyway because they like/agree with it.

Not everyone who shares fake news stories knows it is untrustworthy. I generally check any information I see on Facebook / Twitter with snopes or politifact immediately, and I commonly see wrong information from both sides of the political spectrum. Left leaning misinformation tends to be misleading or exaggerations as opposed to right leaning misinformation which is more commonly outright lies, but it is hard to trust nearly anything you see online now.

On top of that difficulty is the attempt to discredit main stream media so that no one trusts the fact checkers. Once you accept that narrative it is nearly impossible to be well educated on any topic.