Facebook, whether it admits it or not, played a role in the 2016 election, and ever since Donald Trump was elected, Mark Zuckerberg has struggled to address how much Facebook’s propensity to present fake news was a factor.
He’s said people need to work harder, while fake news sites have trolled him with fake stories about himself. Meanwhile, one fake news writer took credit for Trump’s victory, and even Barack Obama weighed in on the Facebook fake news controversy, saying “if everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won’t know what to protect. We won’t know what to fight for.”
With Zuckerberg still under fire, he took another crack at an explanation Friday night, writing in a Facebook post that the company will put in place a plan that will make it easier to report fake news, to install third-party verification, to potentially put warning labels on possible fake news stories, and to disrupt fake-news economies.
Here was Zuckerberg’s entire message.
For more discussion on Facebook’s fake news problem, listen to Layer 8 editor Andrew Couts and Daily Dot staff writer Audra Schroeder talk about it on the Upstream podcast.