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Mark Zuckerberg's Post


Mark Zuckerberg Verified account

November 18, 2016  · Shared with Public
A lot of you have asked what we're doing about misinformation, so I wanted to give an update.
The bottom line is: we take misinformation seriously. Our goal is to connect people with the stories they find most meaningful, and we know people want accurate information. We've been working on this problem for a long time and we take this responsibility seriously. We've made significant progress, but there is more work to be done.
Historically, we have relied on our community to help us understand what is fake and what is not. Anyone on Facebook can report any link as false, and we use signals from those reports along with a number of others -- like people sharing links to myth-busting sites such as Snopes -- to understand which stories we can confidently classify as misinformation. Similar to clickbait, spam and scams, we penalize this content in News Feed so it's much less likely to spread.
The problems here are complex, both technically and philosophically. We believe in giving people a voice, which means erring on the side of letting people share what they want whenever possible. We need to be careful not to discourage sharing of opinions or to mistakenly restrict accurate content. We do not want to be arbiters of truth ourselves, but instead rely on our community and trusted third parties.
While the percentage of misinformation is relatively small, we have much more work ahead on our roadmap. Normally we wouldn't share specifics about our work in progress, but given the importance of these issues and the amount of interest in this topic, I want to outline some of the projects we already have underway:
- Stronger detection. The most important thing we can do is improve our ability to classify misinformation. This means better technical systems to detect what people will flag as false before they do it themselves.
- Easy reporting. Making it much easier for people to report stories as fake will help us catch more misinformation faster.
- Third party verification. There are many respected fact checking organizations and, while we have reached out to some, we plan to learn from many more.
- Warnings. We are exploring labeling stories that have been flagged as false by third parties or our community, and showing warnings when people read or share them.
- Related articles quality. We are raising the bar for stories that appear in related articles under links in News Feed.
- Disrupting fake news economics. A lot of misinformation is driven by financially motivated spam. We're looking into disrupting the economics with ads policies like the one we announced earlier this week, and better ad farm detection.
- Listening. We will continue to work with journalists and others in the news industry to get their input, in particular, to better understand their fact checking systems and learn from them.
Some of these ideas will work well, and some will not. But I want you to know that we have always taken this seriously, we understand how important the issue is for our community and we are committed to getting this right.
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Mark Zuckerberg
For those asking why I posted this at 9:30pm, that's when I landed and got into in Lima last night. Looking forward to the APEC Summit today.
  • 8y
3.5K
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Becky Markle Dennis
Here's an easy solution:
FB can issue press credentials like the White House does. Those press credentials could be displayed as a symbol with their post. People would be able to recognize what's posted by journalists associated with news organizations…
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  • 7y
Jo Anast
Mark, can't we the Public, the People figure out information for ourselves? Why does Facebook have to start censoring facts or non-facts? Your site shouldn't become a news oulet. Facebook should remain social media and let the users figure out informat…
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  • 8y
4
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Saleem Khan
Perhaps reactions can include logic (true/false, likely/doubtful, trustworthy/suspect, or the like), not just emotions, if crowd-based signals are a part of Facebook's plan,
  • 8y
28
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Jeffrey Becker
Sigh, all Facebook is saying is that they will become the arbiter of truth on their platform, and whoever controls Facebook determines what is truth. Hey, um Facebook... you may have already heard this, but America has already figured that out...
  • 8y
4
Juston Payne
While Zuck talks out of 19 sides of his mouth trying to rationalize how Facebook helped get Trump elected while protecting his stock price, there's a much simpler solution:
Do not use Facebook to get your information. …
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  • 8y
5
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Teresa Simpson
It's sort of an impossible postition, allowing people to share every thought and picture, and yet to monitor that information for accuracy. It's great that Facebook is striving to weed out the misinformation, because there is potential for harm and man…
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  • 8y
6
Shannon Sokol Brown
With doing this, you took money from families that rely on it. I lost many pages, but one was one I owned for 5 year and always followed all the terms and conditions. I never even posted politics or news, I always got positive feedback. Now our sole in…
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  • 8y
6
Teresa Raymond
Thanks for deleting my page Love and Laughter which had sentimental inspirational images. That is sarcasm btw. As a disabled person...this was my outlet and sense of being. Your dog has a page...did it submit any form of ID to get an account? All we as…
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  • 8y
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Dale Raymond
Total bollocks all main steam media are FAKE and biased u know that, the apparent fake news actually shows us the full picture and full videos .. your an embarrassment and boycotting facebook in the near future will happen because unfortunately people …
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  • 8y
3