Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to rank news outlets by trust soliciting user opinions to determine which sources are “broadly trusted.” Zuckerberg was responding to criticism of his company for its negative impact on democracy and said they would spend billions of dollars to fight fake news and hate speech. (Huffington Post, May 1, 2018, by Lydia Polgreen)
Facebook executive Campbell Brown said identifying “trustworthy” news outlets was a “tricky” task that can’t be accomplished unilaterally. Facebook wants to work with both publishers and academics as well as other platforms. The plan is get agreement on 10 to 15 outlets that would have their content boosted. (Columbia Journalism Review, May 3, 2018, by Mathew Ingram)
Mike Masnick 0f techdirt, May 2, 2018, argues that the Facebook plan is “problematic.” He says platforms have not been effective in policing content and that it is not possible to create an objective way for sorting out the “bad stuff.” “One person’s bad stuff is another person’s good stuff,” writes Masnick. “And almost any decision is going to get criticized by someone or another. It’s why suddenly a bunch of foolish people are falsely claiming that these platforms are required by law to be ‘neutral.’ (They’re not).” Masnick also doubts that Facebook can succeed in the trust venture, “And, again, trust is such a subjective concept, that lots of people inherently trust certain sources over others — even when those sources have long histories of being full of crap. And given how much ‘trust’ is actually driven by ‘confirmation bias’ it’s difficult to see how this solution from Facebook will do any good.”
Facebook has already begun promoting “trusted” outlets on the platform, but Zuckerberg did not say whether any trust rankings would be made public. He did say that Facebook would lose money during the midterm elections to hire enough staff to review each ad. (Vice News, May 2, 2018, by David Gilbert)