There’s an abundance of fake news spread across social media. What do Facebook and Google plan to do to prevent this? Source: Pixabay
Facebook and Google have felt the urgency to combat fake news after internet users claimed that false stories had a drastic impact on the results of the US election.
Background
Fake news has been rife online for a while but with the ease of spreading information on social media it has become an increasingly commonplace phenomena.
Last year, many believe that the power of false news stories was at its peak. During the US election campaigns, news stories suggested that Hillary Clinton was running an underground paedophile ring inside a Washington pizza house and that polls were rigged to say that Donald Trump won the preceding debates.
Although research has apparently disproved these claims, Buzzfeed has analysed the readership difference between real news and fake news in the run up to the election, with false news having more hits.
There has been much speculation over the influence that false news stories and hoaxes may have had on Trump’s Presidential victory. Source: Wikimedia
Regardless of the effects during the election, which still seems up for debate, the pressure mounted on internet giants such as Facebook and Google to filter fake news or even take steps in preventing it.
Plans
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has said he aims to tackle the abundance of fake news.
Mark Zuckerberg confirmed in November that Facebook are working on seven new proposals to combat fake news. This includes; notifying users if they have accessed fake news, stronger detection and verification of false stories, warning labels to identify fake news. Furthermore, they aim to target the revenue that can be made by fake news groups on the social media site. Through advertising, false news has become largely profitable but by targeting their means of income it is hoped that it’ll stop the output of fabricated nonsense.
Similarly, Google are on board too taking away their AdSense privilege from fake news sites. Again, this aims to remove any potential revenue that these sites could make through advertising. A study showed that over 100 fake news sites originate in Macedonia. With this in mind, it becomes obvious that many fake news sites have no intention of effecting political outcomes and other such important decisions. They are mostly in the ‘business’ to make money.
Effective?
It will take quite some time to see if these actions proposed by Google and Facebook will really have an effect on fake news. Will it become less common on our walls or cease to exist completely? The latter is highly unlikely.
Google AdSense is only one source of advertising. There are other advertising outlets that can be used.
There are plenty of other ways for fake news sites to advertise other than through Google AdSense and there are other methods of disseminating false information to a wide range of people online. It seems that money-making is the main motive behind the vast majority of fake news outputs.
On the other hand, if money was not the main attraction to producing such content then the removal of AdSense and Facebook ad revenue will not prevent creators of this content from doing so. It seems for now that false news will be here for a while yet.
Just don’t believe everything you read on the internet.
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