After the completion of the presidential elections on USA που έφεραν τον Donald Trump στην θέση του Προέδρου της χώρας, άρχισαν μακροσκελείς συζητήσεις για το πόσο μπορούν να επηρεάσουν τα Social Media (Social Networks) and whether fake news contributed to the outcome.
To this end, Google and Facebook have announced that they will prohibit the use of their networks for advertising on bogus pages, thereby significantly reducing their revenue streams.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has hit back at several claims that the social network pushed fake news that affected Results of the election, stating that "more than 99% of the news circulating is authentic."
Even if we take seriously Zuckerberg's claim, (as we have to consider that the view of "fake news that affects election results" on Social Media may come from voters of the opposite party), the 1 percent of all content that circulated on Facebook still includes too many posts and so misinformation is a fact.
Naturally no one can say for sure that the movement of Social Media and search engines will stop the flow of fake news all over the Web. No company is committed and has not stated how it intends to improve its methods of identifying and blocking such content.
However, Gizmodo reported that an updated version of Facebook will be released that will aim to detect and remove all kinds of fake news. The feature is believed to have been frozen as it disproportionately affected right-wing news sites.
Earlier this month, the BuzzFeed News found that teenagers and young adults from the Republic of Macedonia were running websites that falsely published news and supported Hillary Clinton to make money from ads.
So it's likely that Google's and Facebook's move comes will prevent these websites from receiving revenue from their ad networks by limiting their growth.
Let's hope that Social Media will discover more sophisticated ways of sniffing false content because those they are using so far do not seem to pay off.
