fake news can not continue

Fake news has been going on for many years now, and at the rate that it is going, will it ever end? Does is needs to end? According to former president Barack Obama,  he has spoken about fake news on Facebook and other media platforms, suggesting that it helped underline the US political process.“If we are not serious about facts and what’s true and what’s not, if we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems,” he said during a press conference in Germany.  Since the surprise election of Donald Trump as president-elect, Facebook has battled accusations that it has failed to stem the flow of misinformation on its network and that its business model leads to users becoming divided into polarized political echo chambers. We live in a world with so much misinformation that is put together very well and at the rate it is going will we very actually figure out what is true or not? "We won’t know what to fight for. And we can lose so much of what we’ve gained in terms of the kind of democratic freedoms and market-based economies and prosperity that we’ve come to take for granted,” Obama said. These comments come after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg rejected the “crazy idea” that fake news on the social network swayed voters in the US presidential election. That’s in spite of analysis by BuzzFeed that showed that fake news on the site outperformed real news in the run-up to polling day. This not the first time that Obama has commented on the problem. At a Democratic party rally on 7 November, he denounced the “crazy conspiracy theorizing” that spreads on Facebook, creating a “dust cloud of nonsense”.

The issue is not unique to Facebook. If you were to believe the top Google result for “final election results” on Monday, you’d think that Trump won the popular vote in the 2016 election. He did not.Earlier this week of November 16, 2016, Google and Facebook announced plans to go after the revenue of fake news sites, kicking the hoaxers off their ad networks in an attempt to prevent misleading the public from being profitable. Although this reduces the financial incentive to generate fake news websites, it doesn’t tackle the distribution of such content on Facebook.