Facebook is the world's most widely used online service, connecting billions of people. It's also responsible for the mass spread of false news and information.
The example above, featuring Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, is something that Facebook's team actually made moves to fix.
Kelly was never fired from Fox News — her contract is set to expire soon, and she is negotiating her contract with her employer. Her show, "The Kelly File," is the second-most-popular program on Fox News, behind Bill O'Reilly's "The O'Reilly Factor."
Even worse is that Facebook makes it easy for users to share misinformation, false news stories, hyperbolic memes, and outright conspiracy theory. Some of these sites are intended to look like real publications (there are false versions of major outlets like ABC and MSNBC) but share only fake news; others are straight-up propaganda created by foreign nations (Russia and Macedonia, among others).
This is the kind of stuff you see in your Facebook feed from the likes of "World Politicus" and "InfoWars" — and it's the kind of stuff being shared by millions, almost certainly including some of your friends and family.
Rather than wait on Facebook to fix the problem, users are taking solutions into their own hands.
The solution started with an assistant professor of media studies, Melissa Zimdars, and her attempt to educate her students in media literacy. Zimdars teaches at Merrimack College in Massachusetts, and she created a list named "False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and Satirical 'News' Sources." The list is simple: It contains the names of a few dozen websites Zimdars believes Facebook users should be wary of.
It also supplies a small list of rules of engagement — we're reprinted them in full here, as these are the same kinds of tools we use daily:
The document is being spread across Facebook in the same way that Facebook spreads misinformation: through users sharing on their own page. In this way, Facebook users are pushing back against the service's massive fake news problem by using the very tools that caused the problem in the first place.
Facebook, for its part, maintains that it is serious about fixing the issue. At the same time, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has publicly downplayed the problem, calling the issue of identifying truthful news "complicated."
As people who identify and write truthful news for a living, we can attest — indeed, it is complicated. It's also not impossible, even for a service as large as Facebook.
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