Facebook goes to war against fake news

Facebook is on a mission to stamp out fake news on its news feeds and disrupt the business models that facilitate it. Nick Wrenn, Facebook’s head of news partnerships for Europe, told journalists that while their minds had been focused on the issue during the recent US elections, the social network had been looking at the problem for some time.

Wrenn said: “The whole idea of being able to go on to Facebook knowing you are in a safe environment and you are part of a community that has the values of respect is really important to us.”

“We have been working on a number of these things for a long time, but this one [fake news] clearly has been crystalised by particular events elsewhere.”

Wrenn believes the problem of fake news is driven by profit and not necessarily the desire to influence political movements.

Wrenn said: “I think the goal for us first of all is to eradicate as much as we can of the hugely fake news and a lot of it is done by spammers for profit.

“It may be political in nature because that’s what they think people click on. Really it doesn’t matter what content type that is, whether it’s video, an article or a doctored picture, whatever it may be, we want to stamp that out.

“We feel that if we can disrupt or get rid of the business model that encourages spammers to do these stories and then sell ads off the back of them when their hits get big enough, that will go some way to curbing these problems.

However, Wrenn is under no illusion that Facebook has all the answers in the battle against fake news and said: “It won’t be the solution, but it will go some way.”

Highlighting the problems Facebook faces Wrenn added: “We aren’t gate-keepers, we are a platform and we want to be as open a platform as possible.”