In 2012, Barack Obama took the presidential campaign process by storm by heavily promoting his platform on social media.  Eight years later, social media played an alternate role in the 2016 presidential election.  Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump had an immense amount of online coverage during their campaigns, however, not all of the coverage was factual.

Social Media platforms were plagued with Fake News articles and blatantly untruthful information.   Platforms like Facebook, which was extremely helpful during President Obama’s campaign, had an onslaught of illegitimate news stories throughout users’ News Feeds during the 2016 election season.  After the results of the election were broadcasted, Facebook received a number of complaints about how it failed to “protect” users from false new.  Mark Zuckerberg responded on Facebook to a number of these complaints and wrote:

Our goal is to give every person a voice. We believe deeply in people. Assuming that people understand what is important in their lives and that they can express those views has driven not only our community, but democracy overall. Sometimes when people use their voice though, they say things that seem wrong and they support people you disagree with.

After the election, many people are asking whether fake news contributed to the result, and what our responsibility is to prevent fake news from spreading. These are very important questions and I care deeply about getting them right. I want to do my best to explain what we know here.

That said, we don’t want any hoaxes on Facebook. Our goal is to show people the content they will find most meaningful, and people want accurate news. We have already launched work enabling our community to flag hoaxes and fake news, and there is more we can do here. We have made progress, and we will continue to work on this to improve further.

Digital Trends’ Lulu Chang reports that Facebook is adding a “flag” feature that allows users to flag specific articles as fake to alert future readers.  Facebook will be using third party fact checkers to confirm which posts are disputed and will put a specific marker on them to inform readers.  Because of Facebook’s complicated News Feed algorithm, it is difficult to remove fake news stories from surfacing and spreading completely, however, Facebook is making strides towards preventing blind reading of false media by its users.