TOBY SHAPSHAK: Fixing Facebook won’t be easy
Senior executive says world’s largest social media network allowed fake news to ‘corrode democracy’
Having been manipulated by Russian Internet trolls and the pervasive spread of fake news, Facebook has effectively admitted it can’t cope with news and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has vowed to fix the world’s largest social network. Facebook will deprioritise news and bump up personal updates from family and friends, and start "focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions", Zuckerberg announced to his 101.7m followers. A week later he said Facebook aims "to make sure the news you see, while less overall, is high quality". Unable to do it before the great Brexit and Trump heists of 2016, Zuckerberg says Facebook will "prioritise news that is trustworthy, informative, and local ... [and] from trusted sources".In essence, Facebook — which has resisted being classified as a media organisation despite fulfilling that very role for its 2bn users — is admitting it has failed at news. Samidh Chakrabarti, Facebook’s product manager for civic e...
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