Facebook published a blog post on Monday dealing with the website’s failure to prevent its millions of users from being exposed to a massive amount of fake news and Russian-linked propaganda during the 2016 election.
Samidh Chakrabarti, Facebook’s project manager, wrote about the various ways the social network potentially impacted democracy as a whole and the views of those who consumed false content.
“If there’s one fundamental truth about social media’s impact on democracy it’s that it amplifies human intent — both good and bad,” he wrote. “At its best, it allows us to express ourselves and take action. At its worst, it allows people to spread misinformation and corrode democracy.”
The Facebook team, according to Chakrabarti, is committed to ” to understanding these risks and ensuring the good far overshadows the bad.”
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This effort will include hiring 10,000 people to address the issues of harassment, analyzing why women and other groups tend to participate less in political dialogue on the site despite making up the majority of its users, ranking websites determined to put out fake stories low on the News Feed section.
In November, Facebook announced that it would be letting people know how much fake news put out by Russian-linked accounts — somewhere around 126 million people had somehow interacted with this material during the election.
On Friday, Twitter, which has also been criticized for its lack of action to prevent fake news from spreading, started notifying users who had engaged with this content during the election that they’d done so.
