Facebook and its Continuing Fight with Fake News

Facebook and Its Continuing Fight with Fake News

In the past few years, the concept of fake news floating around has been a big topic. Nowadays, it is hard to trust anything that you might hear or read online. Social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook are big culprits for having fake news on their feeds.

In order to put an end to the distribution of inaccurate facts and fake news stories, Facebook has done many things to block users from being able to change things such as headlines from stories, sharing fake content, and has even changed algorithms and user settings. They also deleted accounts that were contributing to this mess. And how were users getting away with distributing and posting fake news? Through the use of editable link previews.

"Link previews are the embeds that pop up when you post a link on Facebook. They usually contain a large thumbnail, the main URL where the link is from, the title of the post, and a short description of the article. Facebook auto-populates this information from the actual post image, headline, and description on the website being linked. It’s a visually pleasing way to show what would otherwise be a textual link (Mashable)."

After information, mostly revolving around the most recent presidential election, spread rapidly and inaccurately, Facebook got rid of the ability to edit these link previews. Much research has shown that social media users and the average reader does not take the time to click the link and read a full article. Instead they read what they see in the headline and keep scrolling. This made the need to get rid to this ability essential.

However, Facebook apparently forgot to account for link previews in private Facebook groups. According to a user, people are able to do this and still spread fake news stories. The company came out and said that they are working on how to combat this issue but that this group feature is an essential part of the engagement within the platform. Facebook hopefully will find a solution to these problems soon in order to relinquish the fake news that surrounds us each day. I have counted more times than none stories that contain a lot of inaccurate facts. And, although it is hard to filter what millions of people are posting, hopefully a solution will be created to stop this practice.

https://mashable.com/article/facebook-loophole-fake-news-link-preview/