Facebook vs. Fake News: Round Two

Should we dump Facebook now?

Facebook has been under fire to address the proliferation of fake news for over a year.

According to a widely publicized study, the top 20 fake news stories about the 2016 US Presidential Election received more attention on Facebook than the top 20 real news stories.

Pro-Trump readers were three times more likely to visit fake news sites promoting Trump than pro-Clinton readers were to visit fake news sites promoting Clinton. More significantly, mildly left-leaning users were more likely to read pro-Trump content than pro-Clinton content.

A few months after the election, Facebook started tagging articles with “trust indicators.” The indicators alerted users about stories that seemed to have fake content. This seems to be like what Google is working on also.

A year into this policy, however, it seems to have failed.

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