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Saturday, December 17, 2016

Facebookers Tired Of Dealing With Fake News

Facebook has a fake news problem. And some of its users are fed up with it.  According to USAToday, they're not sure if the solution is to let the social network, with its own biases, decide what's true. Or whether they themselves should become better fact-checkers.

"I find myself wasting my day verifying stories," says Kristen Stanley, a 49-year-old homemaker from Morgan City, LA, who used to work in the ship building industry. "I didn't used to do that. It's all new and it's all started with the election."

It turns out that by creating the world's most popular place to share, Facebook also created the world's most efficient delivery system for fake news.

Some 170 million people in North America use Facebook every day. Nearly half of all adults in the U.S. say they get their news from Facebook. Fake news creates significant public confusion about current events, with nearly one-fourth of Americans saying they have shared a fake news story, according to a Pew Research Center survey.

And that ticks off Stanley. She wishes her friends would do some research before sharing "nonsense."

"Some of it makes me wonder if my friends have brains," says Stanley, whose News Feed during the election was rife with "things on both sides that were completely false."

Facebook has taken a lot of heat since the election for not doing enough to remove fake news reports.

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