The New Tools to Prevent Circulation of Fake News on Facebook Are Ineffective

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The yeah 2018 has been a bad year for Facebook and it has only started.

Facebook has already been criticized about the circulation of fake news on its platform and then the Cambridge Analytics case where user data of over 57 million accounts were misused to manipulate the US elections.

Taking some quick action Facebook has already launched some updates into its new feet to combat the fake news.

Facebook is recently rolling around and update in its newsfeed that will let you see the source of the news, which of your friends are sharing the news and the geographical area where the news is getting shared.

How is this going to work?

By looking at this short video embedded below, every article Shared on Facebook will have an eye button on the bottom right-hand side of the thumbnail where you can type to get more information about who the publisher is.

This will tell you about the source of the news, along with all the related articles being shared by the page, to give you an idea what the page is all about, as well as a map showing where the story is being shared.

This feature was actually being tested by Facebook last year, but the implementation seems a bit half-baked failing to tell us how is this going to help prevent the circulation of fake news.

It seems Facebook believes that people who share the articles that appear in their Newsfeed without fact checking, will automatically become wiser and will start using this new update.

It is highly unlikely that a lot of people are going to click on the (i) button and try to find whether the article is genuine or not.

Several publications have already given a ‘Thumbs Down’ to the Poor Implementation to fight fake news on Facebook.

I will break up, the information given by Facebook by tapping on the (i) button, and will point out why the data is unnecessary, and won’t be of much help in preventing the circulation of fake news on Facebook.

Showing more information about the page.

Facebook thinks people will know if it’s a genuine article by looking at the page that has published the article if the page has a verified button that with me in the article comes from a genuine show.

The problem is if people cannot figure out if the website is an actual news site or not how will this help them figure out the source is genuine.

Showing which of your friends have shared the article

This data also does not help anyone figure out whether the article is genuine or not, friends sharing the same article on their News Feed does not validate an article.

Showing the map where the articles have been shared

The geographical map to doesn’t do much help to the average user, not everyone is a data scientist on Facebook who will spend time on looking at the map and figure out why the news is trending outside of the city or country the news is about.

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