Facebook’s Fake News
http://arstechnica.com/staff/2016/11/its-time-to-get-rid-of-the-facebook-news-feed-because-its-not-news/
The first page we see on Facebook is the cascading “News Feed”, which contains shared information from friends and family. Your feed is personalized to you, based on the people you are friends with and the interactions you make on Facebook. Facebook allows media outlets to post of the website and some information can be shared with you. Facebook has algorithms that chooses posts for people to see. There are a few issues with this though.
These algorithms do not differentiate between fake news and real credible news. So when fake articles, like libel targeting Trump or Hillary is released, it cascades throughout large networks of people, many of which wouldn’t know if it was true or false. Facebook has also been accused of manipulating what each user sees. So in other words, more conservative people have been seeing a greater deal of conservative articles and posts, and vice versa with more liberal people.
The last issue at hand is that Facebook is protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The fact that they are an intermediary protects them from what people post of their website true or false. The grey area is whether it is legal for them to use algorithms to shape people’s experience in the news feed. So when fake news is put on feeds, and is constantly shared around, it cascades and is hard to put an end to as well as prove whether its true or false. In a way this may have shaped the election in a negative way, but as of right now, Facebook is still protected.