Facebook is still reeling from complaints about its news feed and biases in the Presidential elections. Now a group of Facebook employees has taken it upon themselves to form a task force which they say will fight against fake news reports.
According to a report in BuzzFeed, the task force is unofficial and is related to the fake news stories which circulated everywhere which some say may have helped Donald Trump win the election.
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How many silly so called news reports can you remember seeing posted on people’s Facebook pages in the run up to the election. Lets see, there was the one which quoted Donald Trump calling Republican voters dumb and gullible — false! There were the ones saying that a Hillary Clinton indictment was imminent — false. And there were also all of the ones which claimed that there was top secret information in Hillary Clinton’s deleted e mails and/or statements admitting guilt in one form or another — false.
And this was not limited to what users chose to post on their own timelines. Many people were unhappy with the nature of news reports which came up under Facebook news feeds.
The company was lambasted over the summer when it was revealed that its employees may have manipulated its more than 1 billion users’ news feeds based on their personal political biases.
Renegade Facebook Employees Form Task Force To Battle Fake News https://t.co/ThiFyVeS3i via @sheeraf @buzzfeednews
— Kara Swisher (@karaswisher) November 14, 2016
The initiative comes after Mark Zuckerberg refuted clamis that Facebook had influenced the election as “crazy.”
“It’s not a crazy idea. What’s crazy is for him to come out and dismiss it like that, when he knows, and those of us at the company know, that fake news ran wild on our platform during the entire campaign season, ” a Facebook employee, who works in the social network’s engineering division, told BuzzFeed
Members of the new task force plan to review activities and file reports to Facebook management.
Another Facebook employee told BuzzFeed, “There is a lot more we could be doing using tools already. We do a lot to stop people from posting nudity or violence, from automatically flagging certain sites If someone posts a fake news article, which claims that the Clintons are employing illegal immigrants, and that incites people to violence against illegal immigrants, isn’t that dangerous, doesn’t that also violate our community standards?”
The Facebook employees behind the initiative are remaining anonymous for now.
