With criticism swirling around Facebook for its role in the dissemination of fake news, CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued his third defense of the week late Friday.
In his second Facebook post over the past five days, Zuckerberg went into more detail on the myriad ways his social network is combating the problem.
Referring to fake news repeatedly as “misinformation,” Zuckerberg makes three references to taking the problem “seriously” in a 519-word missive.
“We’ve been working on this problem for a long time and we take this responsibility seriously,” Zuckerberg writes. “We’ve made significant progress, but there is more work to be done.”
The Facebook CEO made his first public comments on Nov. 11, dismissing the notion that fake news on social media could have swayed the election in favor of Donald Trump as a “pretty crazy idea.”
In his latest post, Zuckerberg delves into the many ways Facebook is trying to prevent the spread of fake news, including better technical systems that can automatically flag such material, making it easier for people to report misinformation, and learning more from third-party verification websites such as Snopes.
He also echoed an announcement Facebook made earlier in the week regarding tweaking its ad-network policies.
“A lot of misinformation is driven by financially motivated spam,” Zuckerberg wrote. “We’re looking into disrupting the economics with ads policies like the one we announced earlier this week, and better ad farm detection.”
