
Ask HN: Why is “fake news” Facebook's problem? - chirau
We have had this way before Facebook and we will always have it beyond Facebook. Why does Facebook have to carry the burden? I don&#x27;t think they are the ones generating the news. Everyone is free to share what they want, so why put the blame on Facebook? Unless we want them to police everything we share...
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Cozumel
Facebook experimented with a satire tag
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/18/facebook_experiments...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/18/facebook_experiments_with_satire_tag/)

If an article is posted from a known satire site then it's flagged as
'fake/satire', then if that's reblogged by a 'legit' site it'll pick up on the
similarity in the title and flag it again.

I had this functionality on my social site a few years ago (before FB) and the
tech side of it works beautifully but the people side of it, not so much.

I implemented it after seeing people spending hours arguing over posts from
The Onion and similar sites, but it doesn't work because you get accused of
censorship. Who are you to say it's fake? Why are you censoring me? That's
what _they_ want you to believe! etc etc

People are their own worst enemy, and there's no technological fix for that,
people are jumping on the bandwagon and trying to 'fix' it now (
[http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/11/heres-a-browser-
extension...](http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/11/heres-a-browser-extension-
that-will-flag-fake-news-sites.html?mid=fb-share-selectall) ) but they're
ignorant that all this has been tried and failed before.

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Artwick
The problem is not fb "generating" news. Nor of "policing everythung". The
problem is the algorithm of fb, which determines what you see, how often you
see it and how important it appears to you. And this algorithm is
intransparent and manipulative. And for this algorithn the responsibility is
solely with fb.

