Facebook never really had a real interest in removing fake news from their site. Being a repository for fake news drives a lot of traffic. Eliminating fake news would cost money in both the costs for finding and removing it and the lost revenue from traffic.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/30/facebook-earnings-q4-2018.ht...
My favourite was the school shooter at Parkland being called part of a "white supremacist militia group" which got 15k+ upvotes, quickly hitting the #1 spot - which means also hitting /r/all.
The story (later the same day) completely discrediting his connection to the militia (despite police already saying during the timeframe of the previous submission that they found zero connection to the militia), got about ~250-500 upvotes and barely made it to the top, while having 1% of the comments. I'd bet the 250,000-500,000 people who saw the original article never saw the second (the sub has 2.5M subs).
I completely stay away from the overtly political subreddits but I wouldn't be surprised if 25%+ of the top stories on those are partially or entirely incorrect.
* Is Facebook responsible for content published on its site?
Legally, the answer is clearly no. Like everything from phone companies to bulletin boards, Facebook is legally considered a medium rather than an agent. But we all know (I hope) that legal != moral. So, morally, is Verizon responsible for what is said in phone conversations? Is Comcast responsible for what is said in conversations over the low-level internet? Can they be, in any meaningful or useful sense? Again, generally no. For them to act in that capacity would make them censors, or agents in some other more significant sense. That's exactly why many people objected to these fact-checking efforts in the first place. Blamed for doing nothing, blamed for doing anything. We as a society have defined a "common carrier" role for these situations. Why does Verizon get this status and Facebook not?
What makes Facebook any different? Sure, there are obvious differences in terms of the connections are made, but how exactly does that justify different treatment? I'm not talking about Cambridge Analytica kinds of private-information stuff here. That's a whole different matter. I'm just talking about the stuff that people meant to share. Data comes in, data goes out, according to the senders' and recipients' own expressed preference for who they should be connected to. How is that really different than what a phone company does? If you can't answer that question with any level of coherency, all you're doing is hating.
Personally, I am well aware of how badly these globe-spanning groups spreading fake news SUCK. But how do we distinguish them from other groups? I see plenty of groups that consist of real people who know each other in real life, deriving benefit from communicating and coordinating through Facebook. I see others that spread humor or support, even though they have many thousands of members who don't really know each other. Maybe it's not a great idea for every random idiot to have that big a megaphone, but how do we eliminate the bad without also eliminating the good? It's all too easy to say "kill them all" from a distance, when you're not among those who benefit from such connections, but being easy doesn't make anything right.
The free-speech common-carrier answer to that central question is a valid one. I'm not convinced it's the best one, but it's valid. Just the medium, the messages are someone else's. There's a mental and legal model for that. If you think that's the wrong model, propose another. One that actually has some hope of working. Like it or not, Facebook and Twitter and Hacker News and other social media are part of how people interact. Not every malady is best solved by picking an organ to remove. Killing the medium is the lazy way out. Maybe we should try addressing the reasons or mechanisms by which that medium is being abused. If you succeeded in killing Facebook and the exact same thing happened on the next social network, and the next, and the next - as it surely would - what else might you try?
Without social media, you normally have to go out of your way to consume news. With social media, it's consolidated with your cousin's vacation photos. There's a massive difference in the work required to call up all your friends to tell them that you heard there's a pizza place running a child sex trafficking ring in its basement versus just quickly hitting a Share button.
Comcast/Verizon don't have a moral obligation to censor fake news because to do so, they'd have to listen in on your private conversations. Facebook and Twitter? I'm not sure. It still presents a major feasibility problem with fake news sites just easily creating new pages.
But back to my original comment...
If Facebook was really interested in curbing the spread of fake news on their platform, certainly they would have budgeted more than a measly $100,000. That's pennies to a company that has well over $15B in quarterly revenue.
So what does "private" mean? If I'm in a group restricted to only people in my RL ski club (which I am), are our posts there not private as far as FB is concerned? Is there a numeric cutoff? A lot of groups spreading fake news on Facebook are nominally private in the exact same way, even though they have thousands of members and do almost nothing to vet new ones. Even humor groups are often private, which I just don't get.
I agree that the "broadcast" nature of Facebook posts is probably significant, but I'm still not sure how to draw a useful line that would distinguish it from the thousands of forums that came before which weren't assigned this kind of moral responsibility. The Prison Planet forums on InfoWars still exist. Stormfront still exists. They do nothing but spew misinformation and hate. Any Facebook-specific accountability standard would be like endless Christmas for them.
> certainly they would have budgeted more than a measly $100,000
They most certainly did. Orders of magnitude. That's only the amount for the external-fact-checker program, which is a tiny (and IMO not all that effective) slice of what they're doing. It doesn't count the thousands of people working on the problem internally, or the billions of machine-hours spent dismantling these "inauthentic content" networks. There are successes on that front almost every day, but everybody would rather focus of the fifth editorial about the third re-post of whatever the last bad news was.
If removing fake news was just about censoring lies, it would be easy. But fake news is about obscuring the truth, which is something else entirely. Censoring fake news makes you the arbiter of truth, not the arbiter of lies. It's like the difference between not being evil vs being good. That's why the weaponization of fake news is so devious.
The only way to win is to not play the game. Facebook's mistake was pretending they could do actually something about it. But they had to say that because to admit that it was infeasible would be an admission that their advertising platform was less powerful and effective than their sales pitches claimed.