Facebook: Are They Really Spreading Fake News?

https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/5/17202886/facebook-fake-news-moderation-ai-challenges

"For Facebook, unwanted content can be anything from mild nudity to serious violence, but what’s proved to be most sensitive and damaging for the company is hoaxes and misinformation — especially when it has a political bent", said by the author, James Vincent. To identify "Fake News", Facebook created a system called "AL" to remove any fake content (mostly about politics and publicity stunts) that their users may post, or fake accounts. Coming to an agreement with Alex, how does "AL" delete content, but can't read? How does it determine what's fake and what's real? In article, it states that Facebook does a "Fake News Challenge" for AL. For example: the content about people eating "Tide Pods" as challenge was actually fake news. The content was very disturbing and outrageous, to a point that child viewers believed that the challenges were true. They started to do the challenges; some children and adults died and some got severely sick because Tide Pods aren't meant to be eaten. After it came to Facebook's attention, all content relating to the "Tide Pod" challenge was permanently removed.

“Fake News” in the Media

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-us-canada-43641675

A few days ago , on April 3, there was a mass shooting at YouTube headquarters, that left 4 people dead at the scene. During the shooting, of course there were devastated family members and friends, but there was also a hacker. A hacker that decides to hack a YouTube employee, Vadim Lavrusik, account during the shooting. Vadim posted a tweet on Twitter to keep his followers up-to-date on what was going on at the time, so I’m guessing that the person who hacked his page thought that it would be funny. The hacker posted misinformation, stating that Vadim lost a friend in the building and also immature slurs about Vadim’s name. 

On social media, people were also going around saying that Sam Hyde was the YouTube mass shooter, which was incorrect, and considered fake news. They have identified the shooter as a female, Nasim Aghdam, which was an employee, shot herself dead, after injuring 3 innocent victims. According to BBC News, “It is not the first time that social media platforms struggled with misinformation and fake images during breaking news events”.