After the US presidential elections that brought Donald Trump to the post of President of the United States, long talks began on how much social media can affect and whether the false news has 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.
Ο CEO του Facebook Mark Zuckerberg αντέκρουσε διάφορους ισχυρισμούς που ήθελαν το κοινωνικό δίκτυο να προβάλει fake news that influenced the results of the election, stating that "more than 99% of the news in circulation is authentic."
Even if we take Zuckerberg's claim seriously (as we have to consider that the view of "fake news influencing election results" on Social Media may come from voters of the opposite party), 1 percent of all content that circulating on Facebook still includes too many posts and so the misinformation It 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, BuzzFeed News found that several teenagers and young adults from the Republic of Macedonia were running websites that published fake news and supported Hillary Clinton in order to win money from advertisements.
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.
