Facebook makes money off of fake news, and it’s not always easy to report
From the Daily Caller:
“So, legally, it isn’t wrong for Facebook to profit from fake news on its platform,” Tom Struble, tech policy manager at R Street, told TheDCNF. “Indeed, there are tons of unscrupulous websites and platforms that shamelessly profit from spreading misinformation and fake news (e.g., Holocaust-denying websites that make money by selling ads).”
“Morally, however, it’s at least arguable that Facebook is wrong to profit from misinformation shared on its platform,” he continues.
“Fake news” is certainly not a new problem, but for something as widely used as Facebook, the company seems to agree with critics that it should do more.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently admitted that his company makes “too many errors enforcing our polices and preventing misuse of our tools” and promised to do better in 2018. How genuine his seemingly remorseful pledge is, though, is somewhat dubious considering that many users aren’t easily able to report fraudulent content.
With all of its resources and vast troves of cash on hand, Facebook can surely afford to restructure or fortify its efforts to purge more misinformation from the platform, while still limiting the amount of legitimate content inappropriately taken down. If it doesn’t, the appeal of advertising dollars may be the culprit.
“Perhaps more so than traditional industries, online platforms live or die based on their brand reputation, so I think Facebook has a strong incentive to fix the Fake News problem on its own (just as Google and YouTube had strong incentives to fix their problems),” Struble concludes. “If it doesn’t, it risks losing its users and advertisers to competing platforms (Twitter, Snap, etc.), and/or potentially new legislation from Congress forcing it to implement costly new compliance-monitoring schemes.”
