Social media, especially in the current scenario, acts as the strongest medium to create awareness among people right from any serious social issue to an already trending news. However, due to the easy accessibility and an informal approach there a few pieces of news circulated in the loop which have questionable legitimacy. In this respect, Facebook, being one of the giants of social media and social networking company has already made an announcement in August 2019 to cut down this trend of fake news circulation. It confirmed then, to launch a news tab later this year to provide authentic news to its readers. With respect to that launch, Facebook declared on Monday that is 30th September 2019 that it is planning to pay only a fraction of the publishers whose stories appear in a news ‘tab’ set to launch in the forthcoming weeks.
The company recently approved its plan for this news tab which will be handled and edited by the experienced journalists. This would be done in place of its previous practice of allowing algorithms that otherwise monitored the user’s experience. This will add more room for people than machines if seen superficially clearly indicating that the tab will still rely on algorithms, however, editing will be manually taken care by the veteran editors. As far as the algorithms are concerned, they will predominantly be used to discover the user’s interest (as what it generally does) on the basis of indicators such as liked and followed pages on Facebook; connections with online subscriptions to publications and news interactions. This means the Facebook users will get the perfect combination of human-curated news along with the most precise algorithms.
The goal of the news tab is to provide a tailored and the most relevant experience in the form of news for people as per their searches and interest. The Facebook head of news partnerships Campbell Brown on revealing the forthcoming feature said that the majority of stories seen by people will be determined by the software. It was further clarified in the announcement that a human team will be appointed to choose the reliable, most relevant, and breaking news stories which in itself will provide the best of content to the users. Earlier this year, the co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg said he wanted “to make sure that to the extent that we can, we’re funding as much high-quality journalism as possible”.
It is worth noting that a similar company, WhatsApp (a freeware, cross-platform messaging and Voice over IP service) which is owned by Facebook has already promoted the concept of bursting the fake news bubbles and encouraged masses not to forward such messages or media. It is quite apparent that such news sometimes leads to unusual defaming of certain celebs and VIPs. For instance, as per sources, one of the WordPress hosted sites published a fake news story that stated that Donald Trump had won the popular vote in the 2016 United States presidential election. This fake story rocketed to the top searches for the country’s final election results. There are several other instances where fake news has misled the masses and created an unusual disturbance in society. This becomes quite more disturbing in cases of communal riots and even to spread hate speech for a particular section of the community promoting racism. In such cases, the initiative taken by the company will definitely create a positive awareness regarding dumping the fake news and only spreading the authentic ones.
