Fake News is spam
In the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Elections, I was invited to a television panel hosted by BBC around fake news. It was a wide-ranging deliberation, but my argument was that Facebook (and Mark Zuckerberg) were shying away from what was their responsibility as platform owners. My contention was that fake news was like spam on email platforms, and it was the responsibility of Facebook to fix their platform. This was a technology problem, I argued because the network acts like anabolic steroids when spreading the fake news (and its various variants.) Given the sheer amount of data intelligence and resources at its disposal, to me, that was a dereliction of duty, a problem that has been a feature (not a bug) at Facebook. Continue reading “Fake News is spam”