This article is probably based on self-serving statements from Facebook's PR dept. They only made noises about "declaring war" on fake news to pacify complainants. They don't really want to discourage fake news, because anything going viral bumps their ad revenue.
The part about having to rely on user complaints to detect fake news sites is total BS; most of them are so well known that there are even lists of them on Wikipedia. Sure, brand new sites might take a few days to get detected, but more than 99% of the fake news comes from long-running sites.
And the only tactic they used to combat it was to give them low priority for pushing to news feeds. If someone directly posted a link to a group, or directly on a friend's wall, or inside a comment, or any of the other ways that don't go through a priority algorithm, it was treated like any other. And even the news feed ranking tactic probably got weakened over time, as evidenced by the stats about average shares dropping then going back up. (The very fact that they know those stats gives lie to the claim of not knowing which articles qualify for fake news status.)
If they really wanted to *fight* a war, rather than just "declare" it, what they should do is put [SATIRE] at the front of the caption, like they do with [VIDEO]. That would be in your face, everywhere. And it would be easy to do.
When somebody raises the white flag before they bring out the big guns, you know they never wanted to win in the first place. They just want to be able to say "oh well, we tried."
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The war is fake too
This article is probably based on self-serving statements from Facebook's PR dept. They only made noises about "declaring war" on fake news to pacify complainants. They don't really want to discourage fake news, because anything going viral bumps their ad revenue.
The part about having to rely on user complaints to detect fake news sites is total BS; most of them are so well known that there are even lists of them on Wikipedia. Sure, brand new sites might take a few days to get detected, but more than 99% of the fake news comes from long-running sites.
And the only tactic they used to combat it was to give them low priority for pushing to news feeds. If someone directly posted a link to a group, or directly on a friend's wall, or inside a comment, or any of the other ways that don't go through a priority algorithm, it was treated like any other. And even the news feed ranking tactic probably got weakened over time, as evidenced by the stats about average shares dropping then going back up. (The very fact that they know those stats gives lie to the claim of not knowing which articles qualify for fake news status.)
If they really wanted to *fight* a war, rather than just "declare" it, what they should do is put [SATIRE] at the front of the caption, like they do with [VIDEO]. That would be in your face, everywhere. And it would be easy to do.
When somebody raises the white flag before they bring out the big guns, you know they never wanted to win in the first place. They just want to be able to say "oh well, we tried."