Facebook No. 2 Sheryl Sandberg on Thursday repeated the company line that the social network — which unwittingly distributed truckloads of fake news to its 1.8 billion users — shouldn’t be blamed for swaying the US presidential election.
But Sandberg admitted fake news is a thorn in Facebook’s side and hinted the company is going to take some action against insidious posts.
“There have been claims that it [fake news] swayed the election and we don’t think it swayed the election,” the Facebook chief operating officer said in an interview with NBC’s “Today” show.
Sandberg appeared on the popular morning talk show to discuss a softball topic — Facebook’s most popular content of 2016 — but was asked about the election and the issue of fake news.
While talking down any possible great effect Facebook had on the election, Sandberg said, “We take that responsibility really seriously. And we’re looking at things like working with third parties, helping to label false news, doing the things we can do to make it clearer what’s a hoax on Facebook.”
One of the weapons Facebook is looking to use, sources told The Post, involves having users flag suspicious content or rate news content.
In addition, Facebook has filed a patent for an automated technology that can identify fake news, the tech site Engadget noted this week.
The AI would eliminate hate speech, porn and other material that Facebook has objected to, the site said. “The approach would supplement user-based content flagging with machine learning,” Engadget reported.
Meanwhile, the issue of fake news could end up hurting the valuations of tech players such as Google, Facebook and Twitter. Analyst Michael Nathanson, at independent research firm Moffett Nathanson, warned big tech giants that the dissemination of fake news could scare away users and hurt their value.
“If Google, Facebook, and Twitter are not willing to make the changes required to significantly curtail fake news and lower the priority of hyper-partisan news bordering on fake news, we believe they risk eroding trust in their abilities to deliver high quality and authentic news content which may result in a loss of both users and engagement,” Nathanson wrote in a Dec. 7 note.
Several examples of fake news, including a huge for-profit operation based in Georgia, which borders Russia, have been able to gain a large amount of web traffic — and ad revenue.
News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson called on the advertising community to stop supporting fake news destinations.
“You would like to think now that this debate over fake, over fallacious, over faux, over fraudulent, will lead to advertisers, in particular ad agencies and others, reassessing the value of different platforms because, I mean, the ad market is dysfunctional at the moment.”
Thomson was speaking at a UBS investor event. News Corp. owns The Post.