Friday, December 9, 2016

Sheryl Sandberg On Facebook And Fake News

Facebook No. 2 Sheryl Sandberg on Thursday repeated the company line that the social network — which unwittingly distributed truckloads of fake news to its 1.8 billion users — shouldn’t be blamed for swaying the US presidential election.

But, reports The NY Post,  Sandberg admitted fake news is a thorn in Facebook’s side and hinted the company is going to take some action against insidious posts.

“There have been claims that it [fake news] swayed the election and we don’t think it swayed the election,” the Facebook chief operating officer said in an interview with NBC’s “Today” show.

Sandberg appeared on the popular morning talk show to discuss a softball topic — Facebook’s most popular content of 2016 — but was asked about the election and the issue of fake news.

While talking down any possible great effect Facebook had on the election, Sandberg said, “We take that responsibility really seriously. And we’re looking at things like working with third parties, helping to label false news, doing the things we can do to make it clearer what’s a hoax on Facebook.”


One of the weapons Facebook is looking to use, sources told The Post, involves having users flag suspicious content or rate news content.

In addition, Facebook has filed a patent for an automated technology that can identify fake news, the tech site Engadget noted this week.

The AI would eliminate hate speech, porn and other material that Facebook has objected to, the site said. “The approach would supplement user-based content flagging with machine learning,” Engadget reported.

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