According the news, Tim Cook mentioned that Siri would pop out of the Iphone 8 and do all your household tasks. At least, that is what Facebook displayed on their news feed. Of course, this story is complete nonsense. But how could this pop up as a genuine news story on Facebook? This is not exceptional. The story that Fox News Anchor Megyn Kelly was fired because she supported Hillary Clinton was trending for a few hours, despite any ground of evidence. How is it possible that these fake articles keep emerging occasionally? This is because Facebook uses algorithms instead of human editors to present the news. People can be fooled easily. If somebody posts a fake story, there are always people who believe it. People will like, comment on and share the story. As a result, will pop up on other people’s news feed because the algorithm seems to think that people find this post very interesting. These actions will repeat themselves, which will lead to the fake story entering the trending topic page.
Many of you may think that a few of these accidents is not a big of a deal. Well, I think it is when you take a look at the vision of Facebook. Facebook wants to dominate the internet and introduce “notify”, which is an app that will send you a push notification about the news. This will give Facebook even more control about what news you will see. The least you can expect is the insurance that the stories are correct, right? Google is taking the right steps in this area. Last week, they announced it would launch a fact-checker to validate the news stories. Among others, Google will cooperate with “Full Fact” to validate the stories and mark them as ‘validated’ when the story is reliable.
In my opinion, Facebook has to match this service if it wants to be a big player in the news industry. What do you think about the algorithms of Facebook? Let me know in the comments.
https://www.engadget.com/2016/10/12/facebook-still-trending-fake-news-stories/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/10/14/google-to-fact-check-online-news-stories/
https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/14/google-added-fact-checking-facebook-its-your-move-now/
https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/facebook-wants-to-dominate-your-home-screen-with-notify-app?utm_term=.eivNN0ZxBP#.dyqkk3XZeK