Facebook started with a mission to "give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected." This all sounds really great on paper! We all want to connect and stay connected with our friends and families in different cities and countries. We also want to be heard and we want to share what matters to us. It took a little time for a lot of us to be okay with sharing every moment of our life with our "friends" but we all got over it and accepted that in this day and age, we should take pictures, share our locations, or update our status. Anyways, this is how we all got hooked on Facebook back in 2008. Many of us, unknowingly using the platform and liking everything we see, never realized how Facebook can negatively impact our lives, other than just wasting our precious time. This was more or less the case until the presidential election in 2016 that we learned that Facebook is the major disseminator of news produced elsewhere. The key in that last sentence is the word elsewhere.
We know that Facebook does not have journalists to produce its own content so we first started seeing news pop up on our feeds from other known news sources, such as the Economist or The New York Times. That's all fine until in the 2016 election that extreme content and propaganda were shared and the term fake news was created. It took quite a bit of time for Facebook to admit how it is influencing the world, but last week, Facebook announced that it would start prioritizing “trusted” news sources. The relationship between Facebook and news sources has always been a complicated one - so with that, how is Facebook going to do this prioritizing? Facebook plans to gather this data through polling a "diverse and representative sample of people across the US to gauge their familiarity with, and trust in, various different sources of news.” One might wonder if this approach is going to ensure news will come from trusted sources.
Russell Hardin, in his 2002 book Trust and Trustworthiness writes that trust by itself has a messy definition. Trust is what someone feels and it is a three-part relationship: A trusts B to do X. If you have two elements, then that is trustworthiness. By Hardin's definition, trustworthiness is the thing that a person or an institution might possess. When it comes to news, what does Facebook think its users' trust news organization to do? Solving for X is tricky and then according to the definition above, Facebook is asking about trustworthiness and not trust. How are people supposed to assess the trustworthiness of news organization? One view is that people tend to be more trusting of things they are familiar with. Another view is that people typically do not trust media much in general but their level of trust is a function of their political views.
With the above explanation, it is still clear that Facebook is doing very little to limit propaganda and fake news on its site.
Source:
https://www.wired.com/story/you-cant-trust-facebooks-search-for-trusted-news/
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