A Facebook executive reiterated Tuesday that the social media company is still moving ahead with combating “fake news.”
The tech conglomerate is “just getting started,” according to Dan Rose, vice president of partnerships at Facebook. “There’s a lot of work we can do,” he said at the Code Media conference, according to TechCrunch.
The social media company has been pressured to help decipher and purge news stories that are false or unsubstantiated. (RELATED: Germany To Consider Fining Facebook If It Doesn’t Purge Fake News)
Rose, though, said Facebook doesn’t want to directly decide what content is misleading or fraudulent–they just want someone else to.
“We are making a very important point of not putting ourselves in a position of deciding what’s fake and not fake. I don’t think people want us to be the arbiters of truth,” Rose said, according to The Verge. “There are third parties out there who do this for a living.”
Facebook announced in December that it was partnering with third party “fact-check” organizations to come up with a system in which a story is flagged as potentially misleading or false. Facebook listed the media outlet Snopes as one its corroborative sources, despite instances showing its dubious “fact-checking” skills and the fact that it employs left-leaning people almost exclusively.
The company also announced in January that it was going to triage posts on users’ News Feeds by adding more markers based on the source of the page.
“At the end of the day, if people want to share stories that been flagged with their friends, that’s ultimately their prerogative,” Rose said at the conference.
Facebook posted a job listing in December for a 20-year media veteran to become its “Head of News Partnerships,” and presumably help sort out the “fake news” dilemma. It later hired a former CNN anchor who isn’t shy about her distaste for President Donald Trump.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressed the same sentiment as Rose in November, saying, “We must be extremely cautious about becoming arbiters of truth ourselves.”
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