No one can deny the power of the Internet, good or bad, and no one knows it better than Facebook creator and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and another Internet giant, Google, for criticisms over fake news that swirled during the recently concluded U.S. presidential election.
The news came out following the controversial win of now U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and Facebook and Google were blamed for not handling fake news that was all over their platforms. Many believe that the fake news that fed on Facebook's timeline during the election had direct impact on the poll results, but Zuckerberg denied such allegations.
In a lengthy Facebook post, Zuckerberg said that fake news on Facebook is "pretty crazy idea" and added that what people see in the social media platform is more than 99% authentic while fake news and hoxes constitute a very small amount. The goal he said is to show the content that people find meaningful and accurate news.
Google, on the other hand, made a mistake after featuring a fake story on Google news, according to a CNET report. Last Monday, a two-day old catchy headline saying Donald Trump won by popular and Electoral College from a "70 News" site came out when searching for the election result.
"The goal of the search is to provide the most relevant and useful results for our users. We clearly didn't get it right, but we are continually working to improve our algorithms," said a Google spokesperson who was quick to comment on the issue.
The truth is, fake stories and biased information have been making rounds on the internet even before Facebook came out. Do Facebook and Google are really promoting those fake stories?
According to The Independent, there are more people probably using Facebook to follow stories deemed interesting to them and thus more likely to click on the articles that are related to it, they may be positive or negative. Not knowing that the action may bring fake news to circulate and the problem is that only a few people understand the impact it may cause.
