William Shatner Criticizes Facebook Hoax Ad Announcing His Death (people.com)

"William Shatner is alive and well -- in fact, he turned 87 on Thursday, so the actor was not pleased when he saw an ad on Facebook sharing a story about his alleged death," writes the Hollywood Reporter. An anonymous reader quotes People: "@WilliamShatner I thought you might want to know you're dead," a Twitter user wrote, along with a screenshot of the ad. Less than a half hour later, Shatner posted his own message calling out the social media company for spreading the phony news... "Thought you were doing something about this?" he wrote. Several hours after Shatner's tweet, Facebook's director of product management Rob Leathern messaged the actor to let him know that the ad had been removed. "Thank you," Shatner replied. "I'm not planning on dying so please continue to block those kinds of ads..." Fortunately, Shatner's in good company when it comes to celebrity death hoaxes... News of Sylvester Stallone's fake death originally began circulating on Facebook in 2016.
In late 2016 Mark Zuckerberg posted that "We take misinformation seriously..." while adding that "we know people want accurate information. We've been working on this problem for a long time and we take this responsibility seriously." Ironically, that announcement appeared next to a similar fake ad announcing that Hugh Hefner was dead, though at the time Hefner was very much alive.

"We've made significant progress," Zuckerberg's post continued, "but there is more work to be done."

Comments

It really shouldn't be that hard

[DeplorableCodeMonkey]

With Facebook's resources they should already have algorithms that can roughly pinpoint who started the hoax, ID them and publicly castigate them or ban them.

Or even better, the originators just get a notice saying "Facebook Legal has determined that you are one of the first/most influential sharers of this hoax. All information about this defamatory post has been preserved in the event that the target wishes to pursue legal action."

I think that would cause enough puckering sphincters to start changing attitudes.

Re:It really shouldn't be that hard

[freeze128]

Maybe just provide information about who it was who paid for the ad. There has always been bad information on the internet, it's just that now it's easier to hide the source. On usenet, if a particular poster was suspected of spreading bullshit, you could just killfile him. Allow the same on facebook.

Re:It really shouldn't be that hard

[mschwanke97402]

Fact checking does not equal censorship. All newspapers used to be pretty strict about it, Republican or Democrat or Agnostic. We're not talking about filtering opinions here. Either Shatner is dead or he isn't.

"We take misinformation seriously..."

[Blinkin1200]

"We take misinformation seriously..." unless it leads to ad revenue.

Any and all currencies accepted. Thank you.

The reports of my death have been greatly...

[mykepredko]

Erroneously reporting the death of a famous person in various forms of media has been going on a lot longer than Facebook has been around.

Bill Shatner should be pleased that people actually care whether or not he's alive - there are a lot of octogenarian TV & movie stars that when somebody hears their name reply with "I thought they were dead."