In the recent developments, Facebook in the wake of the constant pressures from its users has eventually decided to address this hovering dilemma of the spread of fake news from their platform.
Facebook has planned to initiate an education campaign, which will teach its users about how to identify and save them from being fooled by fake news.
The education campaign consists of a set of 10 guidelines, which will appear in the pop-up notification center of users. By clicking on that it will direct the users to those important 10 guidelines. Also, the guidelines will appear in the news feed for the duration of three days.
The overarching mission of this campaign is to first share the responsibility due on their behalf and to collaborate with the users to deal with this menace.
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Contrary to the past, where Facebook asked the users to take self-initiative and their mental judgments while discerning the fake news from real. This time they have come up with a better plan.
This step has been welcomed by the users but has also been subject to the criticism.
Where users have complained about the duration of three days as being less and say this will definitely be marred the success rate of this campaign.
According to the general trends, a three-day time would be required for this information to be circulated among its users before it could be fully known and absorbed by its users. Therefore three days time is less and has demanded Facebook to lengthen the time period for this campaign.
According to Adem Mosseri, the Vice President at Facebook said all they hope to achieve from this campaign is make the users more discern readers of news
While others have pointed out that just the release of the guidelines will not be enough to curb the spread of false news unless the Facebook ‘do something” to stop providing them traffic and ad business.
Facebook, however, is working with civil society to fetch the solution to this problem on the table. They have contacted researchers, academicians, scholars and other media agencies to guide in identifying the miscreants so that they can hamper their ad buying activities.
Many have recognized Facebook as the prime agent of change and dissemination of information at a faster rate than traditional media, says it would be a great exercise to fully utilize the potentials of this platform in making people learn about the basic principles of literacy and spreading information.
In the recent past, we have witnessed many incidents of how Facebook has been used deliberately to escalate political tensions, malign one’s personality or create chaos in society by getting the fake news viral.
Last year about more than 50 cases was reported for as being the cases of fake news majority falling in the domain of fake political and crime news, which aroused nothing but chaos, fear, and hatred in few cases.
One such big example was “Pope Francis releasing Press statement claiming for his support and endorsement of Mr. Donald Trump for The Presidency another big fake political news was Hillary being involved in the pedophile case.
According to the statement by Vice President initially, this campaign will be targeted in 14 countries including Germany, France, United Kingdom, Argentina, Canada, Italy, Philippines, Taiwan, Mexico, Indonesia, Myanmar, Colombia, Brazil and the United States.
Before that, Facebook has been already and strictly working on it monitoring and reporting processes and this so far according to their official claim their regulatory steps have brought a reduction in the US with no cases being reported in Europe.
