14 DAY TRIAL // Fighting against fake news isn't easy, and it's not going to be easy to find solutions to weed out all those purposefully erroneous stories across the Internet. Facebook admitted that it has not yet found the answer to the question about how to best remove fake and illegal content from its platform.
Speaking in Berlin, Facebook deputy chief privacy officer Stephen Deadman has said that the company doesn't know yet how it's going to properly tackle the fake news issue, Business Insider reports. The admission comes in spite of Germany's plans to fine social networks up to €50 million for failing to remove slanderous or threatening online posts.
Sure, Facebook has a plan, one which it has expressed in the past. In fact, it has set up a group of trusted news sources and other organizations that will work to sift through links landing on the platform in order to determine whether the information is true or not. This, however, takes a lot of time, time during which that particular link will spread throughout the network like wildfire.
It's certainly a solution to the problem, but it's not going to meet the short deadline authorities hope to impose on social networks to remove such content.
Difficult to oversee a network this big
According to Deadman, Facebook's biggest adversary is the network's size. Given the giant scale Facebook has reached, it's hard to monitor and filter everything that gets published, despite having hundreds of people working on the issue.
"When it comes to managing content, we have almost 1.9 billion people on the platform. It's a pretty unique situation to be in. Managing content is one of our biggest priorities. I don't want to give any impression that it's something that doesn't matter to us: it's absolutely a top priority," he said during the G20 Consumer Summit.
He added that problems brought up by Germany this week are hard to solve because they involve dilemmas. "Take, for example, the issue around illegal content. We want everybody to be safe. We also want open and free Internet with a variety of content. We also don't want companies to become the sensors of the Internet or governments for that matter," he explained.
Finding a solution to the problem isn't going to be easy, but they're working on it, which will have to do for the moment.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the world wide web, recently stated that Facebook and Google need to be at the forefront of the battle against fake news given their role of gateway to the Internet.