Facebook says it's battling fake news, but defends refusal to ban InfoWars
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It took a while for Facebook to own up to the platform’s role in the 2016 election and that willingness to connect with reality is definitely appreciated. Unfortunately, we still have a ways to go for the company to really act like they have a full grasp oFacebook says it's battling fake news, but defends refusal to ban InfoWars
It took a while for Facebook to own up to the platform’s role in the 2016 election and that willingness to connect with reality is definitely appreciated. Unfortunately, we still have a ways to go for the company to really act like they have a full grasp on its “fake news” problem. According to recent reporting in Vanity Fair, Facebook held a small meeting with a few reporters about its “work to prevent the spread of false news.” Unfortunately, the amount of work they seem to be doing appeared hollow very quickly thanks to a question by CNN reporter Oliver Darcy. Darcy asked how Facebook could allow Infowars, which has a Facebook page with more than 900,000 followers, to continue to operate on its platform. In response, Hegeman told Darcy that Facebook doesn’t “take down false news . . . I guess just for being false that doesn’t violate the community standards,” he went on, adding that Infowars has “not violated something that would result in them being taken down.” While Infowars’ conspiracy theories “can be really problematic” and “it bugs me too,” said Su, the organization’s page represents a gray area: Facebook is focused on taking down content that “can be proven beyond a doubt to be demonstrably false,” a criterion that, to Facebook’s mind, rules out Infowars, whose posts claim that both the Sandy Hook shooting and 9/11 were hoaxes, and, more recently, that Democrats were going to start a civil war on the Fourth of July. “ So Facebook wants to battle fake news without ever banning it? Does this mean Facebook is pushing to let itself become the arbiter of what is “proven beyond a doubt” instead of banning harmful agents with a proven pattern of lying from its platform? Sounds scary. InfoWars isn’t the only page that continues to exist on the platform. Other pages that push Alex Jones’s conspiracy theories have been allowed to thrive as well. Nelba Màrquez-Greene, whose daughter Ana was killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in December 2012, had more to add to the story of Facebook’s fake news problem. Read more