Do you use the largest social network for your daily updates? Facebook has recently been using bots to display articles in the Trending Stories section. It was a decision that met with a lot of backlash when it was discovered that the algorithms displayed a fake news story by Fox News' Megyn Kelly within a few days of its implementation.
Several weeks later, it appears that the problem persists: The Washington Post, monitoring Facebook's Trending Stories from August 31 to September 22, discovered five fake stories, as well as three blatantly inaccurate reports from the social network's automated system.
Are you wondering why Facebook doesn't hire human resources to address this issue? Because the human factor is not objective. The company has already tried it, with a team of editors before installing its bots, but fired them all in May for censoring conservative news and links to Wikileaks that showed DNC emails.
Ultimately, it seems that the social network's algorithms are simply not that reliable. This fact becomes particularly important when you consider how many people get their news from the social network, believing that they are following reliable sources of information.
The problem, as computer scientist Walter Quattrociocchi reported to WP, is that, “When Facebook selectively funnels fake news into these highly personalized feeds, it creates polarization among its users.”
It should be mentioned that false stories create more and more conspiracy theorists by offering them “documentation.”
Thus, "innocent" information from social networks could pose a danger to societies in general.
