Facebook’s War on Fake News and its Spread
http://www.businessinsider.com/fact-checkers-cast-doubt-on-facebooks-fake-news-fight-2017-11
This article commented on Facebook’s current struggles to tame the harmful effects of Fake News. Fake News, which spreads like wildfire and has the ability to falsely inform countless people in the world, is currently one of the major sources of controversy in our present day world. It has affected major political races and its taming is an absolutely necessity. The tech giant has done a lot of work to try to alleviate this issue, from adding “disputed” tags to certain articles and even making use of third-party fact checkers. However, this has been shown to be very ineffective as fake news can easily spread and once it has caught a large number of followers or listeners, it is quite difficult to use any sort of intelligible technology to dispute it. Because of this wild and fast spread of information, Facebook is consistently losing the money that it makes from advertisers and news companies. If it does not act sharply and swiftly regarding this issue, the power and speed in which false information travels may soon prove to be quite harmful.
This article relates to the ideas of information cascades and network effects that we learned in class. It clearly demonstrates how powerful information cascades are in the real world, as it gives a solid example of how information, even when false, can be believed by many sources if it gains enough credibility initially. Furthermore, it even validates the networks effects equations we learned and proves how some people believing something influences the way in which the rest of the world believes something. Information cascades are a very interesting topic that we learned in class and there is not really a much better example of it than fake news. Fake news validates the importance of information cascades. If we are unable to tame fake news, there will be dreadful consequences in the world.