Facebook's decision to use less newsfeeds in its users' feeds is a direct result of the company's failure to stop fake news and hate speech before European laws and US lawmakers come under pressure.
The move will naturally hurt many small (but also large) news sites, relying on Facebook to display their content.
Representatives of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube (Google) were in a meeting with the Senate Trade Committee in Washington on Wednesday.
US Senators have been criticized for the inadequate progress of technology companies in curbing Russian propaganda, fake news and harmful content. So, in turn, they spoke to the largest technology companies responsible for mass content viewing.
Dave Lee of BBC News he says:
Google, which owns YouTube, has committed to hiring more moderators to add an extra level of protection to this process…
Twitter has said it will implement enough new measures to monitor the talks about manipulation and will open more formal lines of communication with US politicians to correct any problems.
Blocking news is an easy way to implement Facebook to tackle the problem, but it is not a solution. Members of the largest social network will still share information of any type, and interact with pages containing harmful content. Filtering news links and blocking them is not a solution.
And without a solution, Facebook, Google and Twitter, and others, are facing a very uncertain future, as sanctions will soon be made by stricter legislation coming up.
Tens of thousands of top engineers have so far failed to find a solution to this problem, despite their technical training, AI and algorithmic coding. Add access to amazing amounts of computational power, and you will have a major technological failure.
There is a solution;
Facebook, Google, and Twitter are content companies and social networks that display pages and ads. The above online companies will probably have to look at traditional news companies to see how they handle this problem. As it turns out for so many years, they are handling extremely well.
A tried and tested solution…
Every traditional news platform has a solution that works incredibly well and is available to everyone, is an open source solution.
Companies employ editors, journalists and coordinators to ensure that their publishing platforms will not be used by third parties, as vehicles for fake news, and hate speech.
Of course, this solution is not cheap, as it requires recruits that are much more costly than the development of an algorithm.
Facebook, Google and Twitter have no financial problems, and their money comes from all of us. Consumer demand, along with stricter legislation, may impose more drastic solutions to curb fake news beyond the development of algorithms and Ai with small i.
The use of tried-and-tested methods appears to be necessary. The cost should not be of interest, as many traditional news companies have been burdened with it for years now.
Why not online gossips?
ΥΠ .: Fake news are probably points that will characterize the times to come. Censoring or controlling the posts of billions of users is impossible, at least until today. Hiring millions of moderators will probably provide better filtering but no one can guarantee exciting results.
Of course, the control in every respect will be completely objective and will depend on the mood of the coordinator….
Whatever the problem is looking for a solution and it is not easy. Nobody has predicted it because we have never had public globalization platforms (social networks) to date.
Update: Following the publication of this article, Facebook officially announced its plan to fight Fake News. The company, recognizing the strength of its audience, has transferred responsibility for detecting false news to members of the service.
Read it announcement from the company's news room.
