Farcebook: A Discussion About Diffusion of Responsibility Through Social Media

        Its surprisingly easy to manipulate people through social media. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter rely on almost incessant exposure to short bursts of news both about your friends’ everyday lives and about the world in general. More often than not, people read a post on Facebook and share it with their friends without a second thought about how accurate the news sources are. These news articles have become so pervasive on Facebook that even those who claim to take them with a grain of salt can’t help but be affected by them subconsciously sometimes. Giving people this degree of influence over others can be very risky, and social media giants like Facebook should be able to keep this power in check to avoid unwanted circumstances. This power can be especially dangerous during important elections, as it can change the tides with news that may or may not be true but that is shared regardless.

About 44% of Americans use Facebook as their primary source of news. This is pretty alarming when you consider what this means: their friends decide what type of information they receive everyday. This includes their views on political issues, ecological concerns, and even morality and human rights. The way Facebook is set right now, users have a huge influence on how their friends think about current events by contributing to the flood of news stories on their feed, and they rarely consider this when sharing one that seems interesting.

Facebook should really restructure the way information spreads on their platform. The average Facebook user cannot possibly be expected to sift through the millions of news stories out there in order to choose the least biased version, or the one that has the most reliable sources. This may seem excessive, but people usually expect this kind of rigorous behavior by professional news outlets, and frankly Facebook is bigger and reaches a wider audience than any one of them. From a certain point of view, everyone that uses Facebook “works” for the largest newspaper in the world, and should be held up to the standards of integrity that such a position requires.

This, of course, is neither feasible nor enforceable. Its unlikely that anyone will ever be fired, arrested or even fined for sharing a fake news story on Facebook. Users are given an immense power with very little responsibility, and this is a structural problem that is completely Facebook’s fault. Regarding this, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that they’ve “made significant progress, but there is more work to be done”, as they are trying to make it easier for users to report fake news and for computers to identify and take them down automatically. While these efforts are certainly a step in the right direction, Facebook is too influential to be allowed to function while issues remain unfixed. Recently, a fake news story about Hillary Clinton’s emails, in which they were revealed to be a plot to assassinate a police officer, received widespread attention. Its feared that, despite the falsehood of the news, many people who read it either believed it or let it influence their voting preference. A seemingly insignificant prank like this could have been the defining factor of this past election. This is simply ridiculous. Facebook’s stance of news propagation has to be extreme, to the point in which they should consider removing the feature altogether. By diverting responsibility among millions of people, the world could get very messy with no one getting they hands dirty. Social media can be a great thing, but as all great things it has to be respected and cannot be taken lightly.

https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/19/zuckerberg-reveals-plans-to-address-misinformation-on-facebook/