Zuckerberg: 99% of Facebook News Reliable, Pledges To Eliminate Hoaxes and Fake News
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg reacted to accusations that "fake news" on Facebook have influenced the result of the United States Presidential Elections which was believed to have helped Donald Trump win.
According to Zuckerberg, as reported by Tech Crunch, 99 percent of the news content posted on Facebook was "authentic." He said that more than 99 percent
of the news Facebook users see on their timelime are reliable and there are only few posts that are fake and hoaxes. "The hoaxes that do exist are not limited to one partisan view, or even to politics," he added. The CEO also stated that the hoaxes found on Facebook have unlikely affected the outcome of the elections.
Meanwhile, Facebook has not yet enumerated the volume of posts that are categorized as news and were distributed throughout the users' news feed during the election period. The company has not yet announced how much of Facebook's revenue come from political advertising or the promotion of the news posts which makes it hard for people to evaluate the impact of the hoax news posts on the election result.
Though only one percent of the news posts on Facebook are believed to be unreliable or hoax, it is still a question whether this one percent have affected the election result since the 2012 Emotion Manipulation Experiment has proven that Facebook has the power to influence emotions.
In line with this, USA Today recently reported that Facebook is now taking steps to eliminate fake news and hoaxes on the platform. Zuckerberg, according to the report, said that their efforts to let Facebook users to flag fake news and hoaxes have begun. The CEO also mentioned that Facebook's goal is to show its users the content which they will find more meaningful and accurate news just like they wanted.
Zuckerberg, however has not yet announced how Facebook will change the News Feed and encouraged Facebook's 1.79 billion users worldwide to follow their updates online.
