It’s nor great surprise that Facebook are doing their darndest to halt the spread of fake news. Whether or not you reckon fake news is a problem for The Discourse or not, it’s undeniable that there are a lot of shitty, dubious links that get posted on Facebook. Political stuff, mostly – not just your ‘NEW EXCLUSIVE PHOTOS OF BIGFOOT’ type fake posts. This is an issue on both the left and right.
Back in August, Facebook promised they’d ramp up their efforts to fight misinformation on their platform, and promised to engage with fact-checking organisations to make that a reality.
But some of the ways Facebook has tried to tackle this big, fundamental issue have been… well, they’re head-scratchers. According to the BBC, Facebook has ditched their latest attempt to fight fake news after significant backlash from users.
You might have actually noticed this trial going on – I definitely did on my feeds. Basically, Facebook was automatically boosting comments containing the word ‘fake’ to the top of the comment section on posts from news sources. See the image below for an example:
The test was only visible to some users. But people on social media noticed what was going on, and hounded Facebook for answers:
@facebook why is EVERY single comment preview on my feed about fake stuff?! #facebook #fake pic.twitter.com/k9ttAmoFvC
— joanna mcgovern (@jobrigitte) October 23, 2017
You can kinda see what they were going for here, in a kind of weird way. They clearly wanted to make it easy for readers who were scanning their feeds to get a sense of whether other users were challenging the veracity of the article.
The problem, as anyone who has used Facebook for ten seconds would realise, is that every reasonably trafficked article on Facebook has at least one person in the comments calling it fake. It could be an article about tomorrow’s weather, and there’ll be some guy with SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS in his bio calling it fake.
Facebook clearly picked up on that, at least. In a statement to the BBC, they confirmed that they had been testing this mechanism, but they’d ditched it:
We’re always working on ways to curb the spread of misinformation on our platform, and sometimes run tests to find new ways to do this. This was a small test which has now concluded. We wanted to see if prioritising comments that indicate disbelief would help. We’re going to keep working to find new ways to help our community make more informed decisions about what they read and share.
Ah well. Onto the next bright idea.
