Showing posts with label distinguishing between Facebook and newsstands. Show all posts
Showing posts with label distinguishing between Facebook and newsstands. Show all posts

Friday, November 25, 2016

Facebook doesn't need to ban fake news to fight it; Guardian,11/25/16

Alex Hern, Guardian; Facebook doesn't need to ban fake news to fight it:
"Those examples are the obvious extreme of Facebook’s problem: straightforward hoaxes, mendaciously claiming to be sites that they aren’t. Dealing with them should be possible, and may even be something the social network can tackle algorithmically, as it prefers to do.
But they exist at the far end of a sliding scale, and there’s little agreement on where to draw the line. Open questions like this explain why many are wary of pushing Facebook to “take action” against fake news. “Do we really want Facebook exercising this sort of top-down power to determine what is true or false?” asks Politico’s Jack Shafer. “Wouldn’t we be revolted if one company owned all the newsstands and decided what was proper and improper reading fare?”
The thing is, Facebook isn’t like the newsstands. And it’s the differences between the two that are causing many of the problems we see today."