Facebook has tried to filter out what it considers to be “fake news” in many different failed attempts. Now it wants to try again.
In an interview, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that he was interested in building a newsroom for Facebook. The product would be based on a similar model as the Apple Newsroom.
The video, released on Zuckerberg’s Facebook page on April 1, was a conversation surrounding the necessity of curating news, whether a newsroom should be neutral, and whether users should have the ability to choose what they see.
Zuckerberg started off by emphasizing the importance of “high quality and trustworthy information.” The interview was with Mathias Dopfner, CEO of European news aggregate Axel Spinner, who offered suggestions for the product. Dopfner suggested that Facebook pay a licensing fee to news sites and newspapers to use their content, in order to ensure the quality of the news.
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Dopfner argued that Facebook, should it start a newsroom, would need to stay “as broad as possible.” He warned Zuckerberg that Facebook shouldn’t curate the news to fit an audience or an ideology. Dopfner said, “You have to keep a degree of neutrality. I would strongly recommend not to curate. Stick to the legal framework. If something is illegal, you take it out.”
Even though Dopfner advocated for neutrality, he still wanted “untrustworthy” news sites to be screened out. The Neiman Lab has criticized Facebook for “not being great” at this.
But Zuckerberg did not seem interested in listening to Dopfner’s warning about curation. He said, “Of course anything that we do is going to be personalized.” He wondered whether or not Facebook should continue to offer the news from pages that users liked to each user, or if the company should build an algorithm that inserted news from other sites that users hadn’t connected to yet. The requirement for an algorithm to insert a piece from a site would be that it would come from a “broadly trusted source.”
Tech news sites are already wondering if that means that Fox News would be shown alongside The New York Times and Washington Post. In the past, when Facebook had a “trending topics” feature, Gizmodo wrote a piece revealing that Facebook employees were blacklisting news trends that were of interest to conservatives.
According to Recode, the product will be launched at the end of this year.
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