Sam Levin, writing for The Guardian:

“A bunch of conservative groups grabbed this and said, ‘Hey, they are trying to silence this blog – share, share share,’” said Winthrop, who published the story that falsely claimed hundreds of thousands of Irish people were brought to the US as slaves. “With Facebook trying to throttle it and say, ‘Don’t share it,’ it actually had the opposite effect.”

Mark Zuckerberg has outlined a new mission statement for Facebook:

This is a time when many of us around the world are reflecting on how we can have the most positive impact. I am reminded of my favorite saying about technology: “We always overestimate what we can do in two years, and we underestimate what we can do in ten years.” We may not have the power to create the world we want immediately, but we can all start working on the long term today. In times like these, the most important thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us.

For the past decade, Facebook has focused on connecting friends and families. With that foundation, our next focus will be developing the social infrastructure for community — for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.

Kara Swisher spoke with Mark over at Recode about the manifesto:

He is particularly concerned about the use of headlines as the only signal to online users. “In most news consumed on paper, the headline is not separate from the content,” he said. “Online the headline is often the only indicator and that is a problem.”

Zuckerberg seems to get how complex it is and how damaging fake news is to the Facebook platform. “Our community wants good information and no one ever said, ‘I want misinformation,’” he said.

Lucas Shaw, writing for Bloomberg:

The world’s largest social network has redoubled its efforts to reach a broad accord with the industry, according to interviews with negotiators at labels, music publishers and trade associations. A deal would govern user-generated videos that include songs and potentially pave the way for Facebook to obtain more professional videos from the labels themselves.

The Washington Post is reporting that Facebook is rolling out some new tools to help tell users when news stories in their feed may be fake:

“We have a responsibility to reduce the spread of fake news on our platform,” said Facebook’s Adam Mosseri, vice president of product development, in an interview with The Post. Mosseri added that Facebook still wants to be a place where people with all kinds of opinions can express themselves. And Facebook has no interest in being the arbiter of what’s true and what isn’t for its billion users, he said.

BuzzFeed News:

However, during the time period analyzed, we found that right-wing pages were more prone to sharing false or misleading information than left-wing pages. Mainstream pages did not share any completely false information, but did publish a small number of posts that included unverified claims. (More on that below.)

We rated 86 out of a total 666 right-wing Facebook posts as mostly false, for a percentage of 13%. Another 167 posts (25%) were rated as a mixture of true and false. Viewed separately or together (38%), this is an alarmingly high percentage.

Left-wing pages did not earn as many “mostly false” or “mixture of true and false” ratings, but they did share false and misleading content. We identified 22 mostly false posts out of a total of 471 from these pages, which means that just under 5% of left-wing posts were untrue. We rated close to 14% of these posts (68) a mixture of true and false. Taken together, nearly a fifth of all left-wing posts we analyzed were either partially or mostly false.

Facebook, what are you doing? This is where a shocking number of people get their “news” and at this rate a huge part of it is literal bullshit.

The Washington Post tracked Facebook’s “Trending Topics” section for three weeks. They found a bunch of fake and inaccurate stories.

Our results shouldn’t be taken as conclusive: Since Facebook personalizes its trends to each user, and we tracked results only during work hours, there’s no guarantee that we caught every hoax. But the observation that Facebook periodically trends fake news still stands — if anything, we’ve underestimated how often it occurs.

Maybe it’s time to re-think this whole thing, yeah?

Facebook got rid of the human curators for their “trending news” section and then, predictably, had the algorithm shit the bed and surface a fake story:

Facebook cut its Trending Topics team on Friday in favor of employing algorithms to surface news stories on the social networking platform.

Then on Sunday a fake story about Megyn Kelly getting fired by Fox for being a secret liberal showed up among the Trending Topics after getting hundreds of thousands of likes.

The company didn’t take the story down until Monday morning.

Facebook will be tweaking its news algorithm to start ranking stories that are seen as “clickbait” much lower than others. From Facebook’s blog, announcing this change:

We are focusing more effort on this, and are updating News Feed by using a system that identifies phrases that are commonly used in clickbait headlines. First, we categorized tens of thousands of headlines as clickbait by considering two key points: (1) if the headline withholds information required to understand what the content of the article is; and (2) if the headline exaggerates the article to create misleading expectations for the reader. For example, the headline “You’ll Never Believe Who Tripped and Fell on the Red Carpet…” withholds information required to understand the article (What happened? Who Tripped?) The headline “Apples Are Actually Bad For You?!” misleads the reader (apples are only bad for you if you eat too many every day). A team at Facebook reviewed thousands of headlines using these criteria, validating each other’s work to identify a large set of clickbait headlines.

Good.